My Heart Laid Bare Read online

  Yet he carries a bone-handled stiletto strapped to his left leg, with which, it is said, he has killed a white man (a white policeman, in some versions of the account); and, when attacked by a crazed fellow prisoner in the Atlanta penitentiary (a Georgian Negro whose brains had fried from chain-gang work in 110-degree heat), he managed to overcome his assailant, and hold him powerless on the ground, without so much as laying a hand to him.

  (Of such feats Elihu says carelessly, that, as the eyes of the cannibal-devils are fixed upon him, he is obliged to be a god, that they not mistake him for a beast.)

  IN PATERSON, NEW Jersey, in March of 1917, while leading a rally to protest the deaths of three young Negroes savagely beaten by police, and to promote the cause of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, Prince Elihu was fired upon suddenly by white-hooded men: yet so fierce were his powers that night, so impenetrable the aura he had cast about himself, the clumsy fusillade of bullets spared him utterly.

  And not long afterward, following his arrest on charges of sedition (“Having incited both by language and conduct actions directly in defiance of the authority of the United States Government . . . ”), Elihu, though making no attempt to resist his captors or to escape, was nonetheless handcuffed by federal agents, and subjected to a beating of many hours in the Manhattan interrogation chamber of the Bureau of Investigation: which beating had not the power of weakening his proud defense, and his disclaiming of all authority of the United States Government over him, at the time of his public indictment.

  And, in the hellish Atlanta penitentiary, amid diseased, mentally deranged, and vicious persons, of his own race no less than the Caucasian, the noble Prince withstood any number of physical assaults upon his body; and soon developed a power of second sight that allowed him to know beforehand if he was in danger . . . nor did this remarkable faculty ebb when Elihu was pardoned by the publicity-seeking Warren G. Harding, but, rather, intensified, as the Negro leader continued fearlessly to travel about the country, even into the deepest South, seeking members for his revolutionary organization, and making investigations into lynchings, rigged trials, rapes and various assaults, etc., directed toward Negroes by their fellow Americans.

  Many a time the Prophet, Regent & Exchequer of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union was fired upon by cowardly white men, in ambush; many a time was a bomb attached to his car, or thrown into a meeting hall or church in which he was speaking. Yet his powers were such, not only he but those standing close to him were spared; in most instances, at least. (For it must be admitted that numerous tragedies have occurred during Prince Elihu’s campaign to awaken his fellow blacks from their delusion of believing themselves American, when in fact they are Negroes: a truth, Elihu tells them, the white man knows, and acts upon covertly or otherwise at all times.)

  ALSO, IT’S WHISPERED that Prince Elihu did indeed succumb to Death, in the palace of the President of Liberia (whose privileged guest he was at the time): being stricken suddenly with a violent malaise that threw him into convulsions, and then into a coma, or a trance, for twenty hours: from which finally, he emerged—by way of his own princely will. And it is said that he alone survived the “accidental” crash of the six-passenger biplane, the Black Eagle (newly purchased for the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union); and the “accidental” sinking, one hundred miles south of Long Island, en route to Miami, of the ocean liner Black Jupiter (newly purchased for the purpose of trade with Negro businesses in the West Indies and Africa) . . . though very little is known of the actual circumstances of these misfortunes. (For they were reported but tersely on an inside page of the Negro Union Times.)

  Yet more sensationally, it is whispered that Prince Elihu overcame a crude attempt on his life in the fall of 1928, at a secret meeting with white leaders (among them Mayor Jimmy Walker, Anglican bishop Henry Rudwick, a scattering of wealthy businessmen, and, not least, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan), when he unknowingly swallowed poison in a glass of wine . . . or a piece of fruit . . . yet managed, by a supreme effort of his noble will, to shake off the effect of the powerful draft.

  And so on, and so forth: for as many persons who have glimpsed Elihu, let alone have had occasion to speak with him, come away with tales about him; which, while being never wholly true, are yet perhaps never wholly false.

  Elihu is not a man but a Destiny, the Prince himself has said—and Destiny must run its course.

  LESS TO HIS liking, however, it is said that, despite his pose of celibacy, he has in fact numberless wives: a virtual harem of dark-skinned women!—many of them sequestered on the topmost floor of his private brick residence on Strivers Row (the most exclusive block in all of Harlem); others scattered through the city. Indeed, in every part of the United States, in every foreign country in which Elihu has had occasion to travel since the formation of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union in 1916—among these, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia, Central America, the West Indies, Brazil and Argentina—Elihu has aroused such desire in women, or by voodoo-telepathy has summoned them to him, that not King Solomon in all his manly glory (possessed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines) is more to be marveled at. How shameless these women, and how desperate!—aflame, as they confess themselves, with love of the mahogany-skinned Prince (most dazzling in his immaculate white caftan and white, white trousers, flaring just perceptibly at the ankles, with, upon certain ceremonial occasions, a bit of gold braid, a bit of crimson velvet, a ruby-studded golden sword carried almost sportily at his side): whom they attempt to approach after his speeches and rallies, crowding about, weeping, nearly hysterical, kept at a discreet distance by Elihu’s guards, though, surely?—the more attractive among them are summoned afterward to meet with Elihu, that their frenzied passion be absolved. For even lust may be counted holy, when in the service of the race. (Indeed, it has been the claim of hundreds of Negro women, during the years of Prince Elihu’s ascendancy, that the “call” comes to them in their dreams: a vision of their Prince appearing to them by night, summoning them to him, that he might get them with child . . . to maintain the purity of the Negro race, much despoiled in the past several centuries by the white devil’s seed.)

  And it surely follows, then, that Prince Elihu has fathered numberless sons and daughters, in these many parts of the world; each marked by his strong bold features, the near-black eyes flecked with micalike glints of hazel, the long broad nose, the haughty upper lip; marked too (as their mothers boast) by his wild spirit.

  For Prince Elihu is no ordinary man; but fired with the zealous virility of an African king, of ancient times.

  The Prince and his most trusted ministers, however, respond with impatience at such tales; for after all Elihu has pledged himself to chastity, celibacy and manly virtue, as have the most devoted of his followers; all passion to be directed toward the triumph of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, and the eventual reclamation of the great lost civilization of Africa. (This to be done within the next decade; for, by Elihu’s calculation, the second of the cannibal-devils’ wars will begin by that time, in Europe.) So when distraught women crowd about the platform following one of Elihu’s rallies, or appear drunken and weeping at his doorstep on 138th Street, pleading to be admitted, his guards are instructed to turn them away courteously yet forcefully; and to discourage them from further such shameless and degrading behavior. It is their sacred duty to wed and to bring forth black progeny with men of their own sphere, that the race maintain its vigor. For, as Elihu has said, the eyes of the cannibal-devils being fixed upon him, he is obliged to be a god, that they not mistake him for a beast.

  2.

  Yet to many observers, his fellow Negroes no less than his adversary whites, Prince Elihu is neither a god nor a beast but a common charlatan: indeed, a common criminal—too wily, at the present time, to trip himself up.

  But Elihu is as swollen with pride as the legendary peacock, isn’t he?—and Pride goeth before a fall.
/>   For, murmur his enemies, only consider: since the formation of his World Union in 1916, he has drawn into his net an estimated eighty thousand to one hundred thousand Negroes in the United States and abroad, each paying dues of 35¢ per month; and contributing a good deal more. (In the official publication of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, Negro Union Times—a brisk new rival to such publications as The Crisis of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and The Guardian of the National Rights League—reports of the Union’s progress and financial state vary from week to week. Sometimes it’s proclaimed that the membership is climbing toward its goal of 1 million members by 1930; sometimes it is lamented that the membership is stalled—the consequence of “old-time Negro cowardice.” Occasionally a news item will proclaim that Prince Elihu’s followers are generous in their contributions; at other times, that they are falling behind in their dues. In general, however, the tone of the Negro Union Times is one of formality and dignity, at least in those editorials written by Elihu himself; for it’s a principle of Elihu that one cannot boast of worldly success without lapsing into vulgarity. When the Negro revolution is complete, and Africa reclaimed by her exiled sons and daughters, then will begin the new age, the Black Age, when human worth will no longer be equated with mere money . . . .)

  But as Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois of The Crisis has charged, Is not one of Prince Elihu’s goals the accumulation of money?—and power, and fame, and the installation of the fraudulent “Prince” as the reigning monarch of the colored world?

  To which crude accusation the Prince himself has declined to reply except obliquely, at his Harlem rallies: “It is not given to one of low propensities and despoiled vision to comprehend the high.”

  AS THE FIERY Elihu, springing, it seemed, virtually out of nowhere—the eruption of a holy volcano, perhaps, in the very midst of Harlem’s streets—drew from the first the active hostility of white adversaries ranging from the New York City police to the Attorney General of the United States, so too, and perhaps not altogether innocently, did he arouse the hostility and deep resentment of other Negroes. For, after all, each Negro who chose to join the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union, and to pay 35 cents per month for the privilege, was very likely choosing not to join such Harlem-based organizations as the NAACP, which had been founded in 1909; or the National Rights League; or the National Urban League; or the Liberty League of Afro-Americans; or even the aggressive Socialists of Harlem. These organizations, closely bound up with Negro churches and businesses, and headed by intellectuals, drew Elihu’s lofty scorn from the very first. Their leaders, he charged, lacked the “tragic eye of History”: they suffered from the blindness of false optimism; the inability to comprehend, as one of noble blood did, that the purity of the Negro race can only be contaminated by association of any kind with the white cannibal-devils . . . who must be delivered from the Christian delusions of certain of their spokesmen, pressing upon them the injunction Love thy neighbor as thyself when such an action, for the white cannibal-devil, is an impossibility.

  “They do not love themselves,” Elihu says scornfully, “—how, then, can they love their neighbor?”

  No: the goal for Negroes cannot be integration with their enemies, still less with a race as debased as the Caucasian; it can only be the establishment of a colony-state on this continent, prior to a mass emigration to the continent of their origin, Africa. Begging former slave-holders for crumbs (stable wages, decent working conditions, a federal lynching law) is unworthy of a noble race; it is demands that must be made—for a sizable portion of land, fronting on the ocean, within the territorial United States; or restitution of $5 billion as indemnity for past abuses. (“Though it is ten billion that is deserved,” as Elihu has said.) To dwell amid a degenerate race, particularly one that in its mental derangement imagines itself superior, is intolerable for all Negroes. Thus the aims of existing Negro “betterment” organizations are null and void from this time hence.

  Little wonder then that Prince Elihu has accumulated countless enemies among his neighbors; and that bookmakers both Negro and Caucasian began as early as 1925 to make book on how long he might live.

  The earnest, well-spoken, proudly Christian and educated gentlemen of the NAACP, for instance, find it intolerable that a transparent charlatan like “Prince” Elihu (avatar of an African king, indeed) has been able to draw the enthusiastic, even ecstatic, support of large masses of Negroes to whom they have made little appeal—they, who are so reasonable, and pious, and patriotic, they might be white men but accidentally trapped in black skin! The much-publicized goal of this organization is equality for the colored in all phases of American life; and where possible integration of the races—the very ideal treated with such contempt by Prince Elihu.

  Then again, the Socialist Party is scandalized by Elihu’s repeated assertions that race, not class, determines destiny; that the Negro worker has very little in common with the white worker, save being the object of his especial hatred, should an economic recession occur. The Socialist publication in Harlem, The Emancipator, stresses the ideal of world unification of all workers against the imperialist class, but Elihu insists that all whites without exception, including Marx and Lenin, constitute an imperialist class—“For it is the very soul of the Caucasian that is degenerate, not merely his rung on the ladder of society,” Elihu says with withering scorn. Those Socialists, Communists and Anarchists who preach a natural brotherhood of man, regardless of skin color, are as deluded as their imperialist adversaries who believe the dark races marked by their Christian God as inferior, and fit solely to be enslaved.

  Also, says Elihu contemptuously, “There can be no classless society—not even in the grave.”

  It’s no surprise that the Christian ministers of Harlem are allied in righteous opposition to Prince Elihu, who ridicules their churches for being childish versions of the white cannibal-devil’s church, and their theology for aping the white cannibal-devil’s theology; and who speaks lightly of the Savior, Jesus Christ (“If he was crucified, then he is bound to have been black—but where are the black Christs?”). The Christian God is never evoked by Elihu in his speeches, though he makes a glancing reference now and then to Allah; his emphasis is primarily upon History, Destiny, Fate; yet the “free volition” of the Negro race to alter its present condition.

  For Heaven, should it exist, is African; Africa itself.

  Black businessmen who want only to make as much money as possible in the interstices of the racist society, and who fear and loathe the poorer Negroes among them, are frightened of Elihu’s aim of a separate state or African colony; those businessmen whose specific trade turns upon Negro self-hatred (their products being skin bleaches, greasy pomades, hot combs, etc.) are frightened that Elihu’s preaching of race pride will injure their sales. (For the Negro race is the origin of mankind, Elihu insists, and the white man is but a fallen, diseased, and doomed specimen: thus it surely follows that white features—skin of a certain pigment, hair of a certain texture, etc.—are hardly to be emulated.)

  Naturally black politicians hate Prince Elihu, in whom they see a dangerous rival for the fickle love of the masses; black “numbers” bosses and bootleggers hate him, for his pose of self-righteous purity, and his frequent admonitions to the people that they give to the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union the money usually wasted on gambling, whiskey and other dissipations. Elihu has also warned that when he and his followers come into power, all Negroes who emulate Caucasians in preying upon their own kind will be “severely punished.”

  More mysterious is the official action of the Republic of Liberia in declaring Prince Elihu persona non grata following his tour of the country in winter 1926, and barring the black revolutionary from returning. The Liberian ambassador to the United States has declared that Elihu, Prophet, Regent & Exchequer of the World Negro Betterment & Liberation Union has tried to interfere with domestic Liberian affairs (daring to suggest econ
omic and land “reforms” while a guest of the President himself); and his intention to make war against other sovereign African states by proclaiming that Black Africa has the “moral obligation” to free those Negro peoples enslaved by the colonial rule of the English, Dutch, Belgians, etc. For these reasons, Prince Elihu will not be permitted to cross the border into Liberia again under pain of death.

  “If I am the declared enemy of criminals and murderers, am I to be ashamed, or rather proud?”—so Prince Elihu has issued his sole public statement on the Liberian affair. He has told his associates at Union headquarters that, on his side, diplomatic ties are henceforth severed between his society and the black African states that have betrayed them. “And when millions of Negroes emigrate from North America to the continent of their origins, it will be to another sort of Africa, I promise—perhaps the southern tip which is said to be so beautiful, and so rich in natural resources—and not the treacherous West Coast.”

  BEYOND THESE BLACK enemies there lies of course, as Elihu makes no secret of declaring, the vast world of white privilege, white censure and white murderous rage: in short, the United States of America. For this cruel white nation, private citizens no less than government officials, is secretly dedicated to the eradication of the black race; and of Prince Elihu in particular.

  So Elihu jokes, “Those persons who don’t wish Elihu dead are simply those who haven’t yet heard his name.”

  3.

  He draws his bone-handled stiletto out of its sheath and, gripping his opponent tight—a muscular forearm slung across the man’s chest, arms pinned against his sides—he saws the razor-sharp blade rapidly back and forth across the naked throat.

  And lo!—how the red blood flows.

  And how, being red, is it white blood? And how being red as his does it differ from his, accursed as black?—this, Elihu’s dying opponent won’t be able to explain, having fallen, with a look of profound astonishment, at Elisha’s booted feet.