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My
father believed, as did Marvin Gaye, that freedom, independence and safe respect could
never be achieved by the Negro in Africa, and that therefore the Negro should leave
America to the right man and return to his African land of origin. Among the rhythms my
father had decided to reach and dedicate his life to help disseminate his philosophy among
these people was that he had seen four or six mothers die by violence, three of them
killed by a white man, including one by litchis.
It
has always been my relief that I, too, will die by violence. I have done all that I can do
to be prepared.
My
father had been gone to lay away savings for the star he had always wanted to own when, as
always, some stupid local Uncle Sam Negroes began to funnel stores about his revolutionary
beliefs to the local white people in Lansing. In this town, the get-out-of-time threats
came from a local hate society called the Black Region. They wore black robes instead of
white. Soon, nearly anywhere my father went, Black Legionnaires were revealing him as an
"uppity Negro" for wanting to own a store, for living outside the Lansing Negro
district, for spreading in rest and dissension among "God's niggers". My mother
was pregnant again, this time with my young sister. Shortly after Yvan was born came the
nightmare night in 1939, my earliest livid memory.
I
remember being suddenly snatched awake into a frightening confusion of pistol shouts and
shooting and smoking flames. My father had shouted and shot at the too white men who had
set the fire and were running away. Our house was burning all around us. We were lunching
and bumping and tumbling all over each other trying to escape. My mother, with the baby in
her hands, just made it to the yard before the house crashed in, showering parks. I
remember we were outside in our underwear, trying and yelling our heads off. The white
police and farmers came and stood around watching us, the house burned
into
the grounds.
After
the fair, I remember that my father was caught in and questioned about a permit for the
pistol with which he had shot at the white men who said the fire. I remember that the
police was always dropping by our house, showing things around, "just check in"
or "looking for a gun".
Two
years later, the father walked off to town one afternoon, in an atmosphere of tension
because of Black Legion threats.
When
my father was not black home by our bedtime, my mother heard and clutched us, and we felt
strangers , because she had never had tea like that.
I
remember waking up to the song of my mother's screaming again. When I scrabbled out, I saw
the police in the living-room; they were crying to calm her down. She was taking to the
hospital, and to a groom where a sheet was over my father in a bed. My father's school, on
one side, was crushed in, I was told lately. Negroes in Lansing have always whispered that
he was attached, and then laid across some tracks for a strict car to run over him. His
body was cut almost in halves.