he is a black Chew, you know?”
He bade me farewell. I left the Market Street Synagogue high with expectation, racing home.
Once in my room, I tore apart the thick brown envelope and found a slim, rust-colored volume bound in leather. I opened it, but stopped short in dismay. What was this? There was not one English word within its covers! It was entirely in Hebrew. Tears leapt to my eyes. The search was sure to continue.
III
MY FIRST VISIT to a Catholic church was a visit into a place of contrasts, a place where the visages in stone radiated reverence, but faces of flesh reflected unmitigated hatred.
I remember sitting in Mass, listening to the strange intonations of the priests—Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi . . . miserere nobis—and noticing their turned heads, faces tight with spirals of hatred, aimed at me, a lanky black youth kneeling in the white midst.
“Do they know me?” I wondered. “Why are they angry at me?”
Confusion warred with amazement: how could the House of God so plainly be a house of hatred toward one who sought the divine presence within its walls? Wasn’t this the Church Universal, the Mother Church?
Although barely in my teens, I knew what I saw, and I acknowledged the feelings of the people around me. Matronly heads covered in firmly knotted scarves, these silent, solid, middle-aged Poles, Ukrainians, and Slavs (there were also a few Puerto Ricans) never said a thing, but their faces—their coldly darting eyes, and tight, wrinkled mouths—spoke to me louder than screams:
“Nigger! What are you doing in this church? Our church?”
Day by day, week by week, month by month, I began to ask myself that very question.
Where once the church had offered a quiet place for spiritual reflection on its catechismal mysteries, it now pulsated with resentment at my dark presence.
When I went to catechism I heard of one world; when I walked into church I saw another.
The straw of severance came on April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. I was on my way to catechism, and as I trudged my way to the rectory, my slowing gait seemed to reflect my inner reluctance. A weight hung on my mind like an anvil.
“King believed in nonviolence—and still they killed him!”
“They? Who they?”
“White folks—white folks couldn’t bear to hear him—to see him!”
My conversation with self went point-counter-point . . . By the time I got off the trolley near St. John’s, my legs were leaden. I walked at a snail’s pace.
Sitting down with Father to begin the lesson, he noticed my reticence.
“What’s wrong, young man? You seem distracted.”
“Father . . .”
“Yes, go on.”
“I heard on the news today that Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated . . .”
“I heard it too. Some of the Fathers and brothers are glad.”
“Glad?”
“Yes. They saw him as a troublemaker.”
“Really? Really, Father?”
“Some—not all. Especially not one of our Fathers.”
“Why ‘especially’ not one?”
“Well—how do I put it . . . Well—one of our Fathers is half-Negro.”
“Really, Father?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Do you think I could talk to him?”
“Why?”
“Well, Father—perhaps . . . maybe he can understand how I feel.”
“That may be, but, uh . . . you cannot talk with him.” “Why not, Father?”
“Well . . . it’s a secret. I can’t tell you which Father it is.”
A man, a priest, ashamed of his race? I had come to catechism that night seeking peace for the tempest that raged in my soul. Now, leaving St. John’s, I was more at sea than when I arrived.
All those months! A half-black priest! Ashamed of his race? Priests who were glad that King was killed? Where was I? What was I doing here? I wept bitter tears. Not for King—I felt he was wrong, a soft-hearted non-realist—but for my parents and all others who revered him. King was an educated preacher of nonviolence, yet to these priests he was just another nigger.
What was I doing in this place, a place that hailed his murder? If they thought that way about him, how did they really feel about me?
I cried for the loss my mother and her generation felt—the assassination of their dreams, the scuttling of their barely born hopes. I cried for the loss of a boy’s faith. I cried for a nation on the razor’s edge of chaos.
IV
A BLACK NATIONALIST even in my pre–Black Panther youth, it was perhaps inevitable that my search for meaning would bring me, sooner or later, to test the waters at a local mosque. Little more than a storefront on an out-of-the-way street in South Philly, the building seemed the antithesis of all the religious sites I’d been to before. Christian and Jewish houses of worship were ornate as a rule, especially their cathedrals. This place could not have been plainer: walls painted white, with the front of the room adorned by a chalkboard that faced the assembled. There was also a flag featuring a white star and crescent in a bright field of red, with a letter in each corner: F, J, E, and I—Freedom, Justice, Equality, and Islam.
It was a summer night and midweek, so the gathering was small, yet Brother Minister, a dark-skinned man in navy suit, glasses, and bow tie who went by the name of—was it Benjamin? Benjamin X?—preached passionately. The captive audience punctuated his every sentence: “Uh-huh!” “That’s it!” “Teach, bro minister! Wake ’em up!” His baritone was smooth, colored by that ubiquitous Southern accent I was to find later in almost every mosque I visited, whether north or south of the Mason-Dixon line. His message was not.
“Brotha . . . I say to you here and now, the white man is the devil! Why, when you look at how this man has stolen millions of our people from Africa, sold our mothers and fathers into slavery in the hells of North America for four hundred years; beat us, abused us, lynched us, and tortured us—well, how could any man be anything but a devil?”
“Uh-huh!”
“Preach it, Bro. Minister!”
“Our leader and teacher, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, teaches us, brotha, that the devil’s
