Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Nevertheless: black people were still new to my yia yia . She was shocked by various discoveries: “Inside the hands,” she informed her husband, “the mavros are white like us.” Or: “The mavros don’t have scars, only bumps.” Or: “Do you know how the mavro men shave? With a powder! I saw it in the store window.” In the streets of Black Bottom, Desdemona was appalled at the way people lived. “Nobody sweeps up. Garbage on the porches and nobody sweeps it. Terrible.” But at the temple things were different. The men worked hard and didn’t drink. The girls were clean and modest.

“This Mr. Fard is doing something right,” she said at Sunday dinner.

“Please,” Sourmelina dismissed this, “we left veils back in Turkey.”

But Desdemona shook her head. “These American girls could use a veil or two.”

The Prophet himself remained veiled to Desdemona. Fard was like a god: present everywhere and visible nowhere. His glow lingered in the eyes of people leaving a lecture. He expressed himself in the dietary laws, which favored native African foods—the yam, the cassava—and prohibited the consumption of swine. Every so often Desdemona saw Fard’s car—a brand-new Chrysler coupe—parked in front of the temple. It always looked freshly washed and waxed, its chrome grille polished. But she never saw Fard at the wheel.

“How do you expect to see him if he’s God?” Lefty asked with amusement one night as they were going to bed. Desdemona lay smiling, as though tickled by her first week’s pay hidden under the mattress. “I’ll have to have a vision,” she said.

Her first project at Temple No. 1 was to convert the outhouse into a cocoonery. Calling upon the Fruit of Islam, as the military wing of the Nation was known, she stood by while the young men pulled out the wooden commode from the rickety shack. They covered the cesspool with dirt and removed old pinup calendars from the walls, averting their eyes as they threw the offending material in the trash. They installed shelves and perforated the ceiling for ventilation. Despite their efforts, a bad smell lingered. “Just wait,” Desdemona told them. “Compared to silkworms, this is nothing.”

Upstairs, the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class wove feeding trays. Desdemona tried to save the initial batch of silkworms. She kept them warm under electric lightbulbs and sang Greek songs to them, but the silkworms weren’t fooled. Hatching from their black eggs, they detected the dry, indoor air and the false sun of the lightbulbs, and began to shrivel up. “Got more on the way,” Sister Wanda said, brushing off this setback. “Be here directly.”

The days passed. Desdemona became accustomed to the pale palms of Negro hands. She got used to using the back door and to not speaking until spoken to. When she wasn’t teaching the girls, she waited upstairs in the Silk Room.

The Silk Room: a description is in order. (So much happened in that fifteen-by-twenty-foot space: God spoke; my grandmother renounced her race; creation was explained; and that’s just for starters.) It was a small, low-ceilinged room, with a cutting table at one end. Bolts of silk leaned against the walls. The plushness extended floor to ceiling, like the inside of a jewelry box. Fabric was getting harder to come by, but Sister Wanda had stockpiled quite a bit.

Sometimes the silks seemed to be dancing. Stirred by air currents of a mysterious origin, the fabrics flapped up and floated around the room. Desdemona would have to catch the cloth and roll it back up.

And one day, in the middle of a ghostly pas de deux—a green silk leading as Desdemona backpedaled—she heard a voice.

“I WAS BORN IN THE HOLY CITY OF MECCA, ON FEBRUARY 17, 1877.”

At first she thought someone had come into the room. But when she turned, no one was there.

“MY FATHER WAS ALPHONSO, AN EBONY-HUED MAN OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ. MY MOTHER’S NAME WAS BABY GEE. SHE WAS A CAUCASIAN, A DEVIL.”

A what? Desdemona couldn’t quite hear. Or determine the location of the voice. It seemed to be coming from the floor now.“MY FATHER MET HER IN THE HILLS OF EAST ASIA. HE SAW POTENTIAL IN HER. HE LED HER IN THE RIGHTEOUS WAYS UNTIL SHE BECAME A HOLY MUSLIM.”

It wasn’t what the voice was saying that intrigued Desdemona—she didn’t catch what it was saying. It was the sound of the voice, a deep bass that set her breastbone humming. She let go of the dancing silk. She lowered her kerchiefed head to listen. And when the voice started up again, she searched through bolts of silk for its source.“WHY DID MY FATHER MARRY A CAUCASIAN DEVIL? BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT HIS SON WAS DESTINED TO SPREAD THE WORD TO THE LOST PORTION OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ.” Three, four, five bolts, and there it was: a heating grate. And the voice was louder now.“THEREFORE, HE FELT THAT I, HIS SON, SHOULD HAVE A SKIN COLOR THAT WOULD ALLOW ME TO DEAL WITH BOTH WHITE AND BLACK PEOPLE JUSTLY AND RIGHTEOUSLY. SO I AM HERE, A MULATTO, LIKE MUSA BEFORE ME, WHO BROUGHT THE COMMANDMENTS TO THE JEWS.”

From the depths of the building the Prophet’s voice rose. It began in the auditorium three floors below. It filtered down through the trapdoor in the stage out of which, at the old tobacconist conventions, the Rondega girl used to pop, clad in nothing but a cigar ribbon. The voice reverberated in the crawl space that led to the wings, whereupon it entered a heating vent and circulated around the building, growing distorted and echoey, until it rushed hotly out the grate at which Desdemona now crouched.“MY EDUCATION, AS WELL AS THE ROYAL BLOOD THAT RUNS IN MY VEINS, MIGHT HAVE LED ME TO SEEK A POSITION OF POWER. BUT I HEARD MY UNCLE WEEPING, BROTHERS. I HEARD MY UNCLE IN AMERICA WEEPING.”

She could make out a faint accent now. She waited for more, but there was only silence. Furnace smell blew into her face. She bent lower, listening. But the next voice she heard was Sister Wanda’s on the landing: “Yoo-hoo! Des! We ready for you.”

And she tore herself away.

My grandmother was the only white person who ever heard W. D. Fard sermonize, and she understood less than half of what he said. It was a result of the heating vent’s bad acoustics, her own imperfect English, and the fact that she kept lifting her head to hear if anyone was coming. Desdemona knew that it was forbidden for her to listen to Fard’s lectures. The last thing she wanted was to jeopardize her new job. But there was no other place for her to go.

Every day, at one o’clock, the grate began to rumble. At first she heard the noise of people coming into the auditorium. This was followed by chanting. She rolled extra bolts of silk in front of the grate to muffle the sound. She moved her chair to the far corner of the Silk Room. But nothing helped.

“PERHAPS YOU RECALL, IN OUR LAST LECTURE, HOW I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE DEPORTATION OF THE MOON?”

“No, I don’t,” said Desdemona.

“SIXTY TRILLION YEARS AGO A GOD-SCIENTIST DUG A HOLE THROUGH THE EARTH, FILLED IT WITH DYNAMITE AND BLEW THE EARTH IN TWO. THE SMALLER OF THESE TWO PIECES BECAME THE MOON. DO YOU RECALL THAT?”

My grandmother clamped her hands over her ears; on her face was a look of refusal. But through her lips a question slipped out: “Somebody blew up the earth? Who?”

“TODAY I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT ANOTHER GOD-SCIENTIST. AN EVIL SCIENTIST. BY THE NAME OF YACUB.”

And now her fingers spread apart, letting the voice reach her ears . . .

“YACUB LIVED EIGHTY-FOUR HUNDRED YEARS AGO IN THE PRESENT TWENTY-FIVE-THOUSAND-YEAR-CYCLE OF HISTORY. HE WAS POSSESSED, THIS YACUB, OF AN UNUSUALLY LARGE CRANIUM. A SMART MAN. A BRILLIANT MAN. ONE OF THE PREEMINENT SCHOLARS OF THE NATION OF ISLAM. THIS WAS A MAN WHO DISCOVERED THE SECRETS OF MAGNETISM WHEN HE WAS ONLY SIX YEARS OLD. HE WAS PLAYING WITH TWO PIECES OF STEEL AND HE HELD THEM TOGETHER AND DISCOVERED THAT SCIENTIFIC FORMULA: MAGNETISM.”