Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

“So do I,” responds the driver. “But mine make money.” Maurice Plantagenet, his Kodak box camera sitting in the backseat beside Lefty, smiles at Mabel and drives out Jefferson Avenue. Plantagenet has found these pre-WPA years inimical to his artistic inclinations. As they head toward Belle Isle he delivers a disquisition on the history of photography, how Nicéphore Niepce invented it, and how Daguerre got all the credit. He describes the first photograph ever taken of a human being, a Paris street scene done with an exposure so long that none of the fast-moving pedestrians showed up except for a lone figure who had stopped to get his shoes shined. “I want to get in the history books myself. But I don’t think this is the right route, exactly.”

On Belle Isle, Plantagenet pilots the Daimler along Central Avenue. Instead of heading toward The Strand, however, he takes a small turnoff down a dirt road that dead-ends. He parks and they all get out. Plantagenet sets up his camera in favorable light, while Lefty attends to the automobile. With his handkerchief he polishes the spoked hubcaps and the headlamps; he kicks mud off the running board, cleans the windows and windshield. Plantagenet says, “The maestro is ready.”

Mabel Reese takes off her coat. Underneath she is wearing only a corset and garter belt. “Where do you want me?”

“Stretch out over the hood.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Good. Face against the hood. Now spread your legs just a bit.”

“Like this?”

“Yeah. Now turn your head and look back at the camera. Okay, smile. Like I’m your boyfriend.”

That was how it went every week. Plantagenet took the photographs. My grandfather provided the models. The girls weren’t hard to find. They came into the speakeasy every night. They needed money like everybody else. Plantagenet sold the photos to a distributor downtown and gave Lefty a percentage of the take. The formula was straightforward: women in lingerie lounging in cars. The scantily dressed girls curled up in the backseat, or bared breasts in the front, or fixed flat tires, bending way over. Usually there was one girl, but sometimes there were two. Plantagenet teased out all the harmonies, between a buttock’s curve and a fender’s, between corset and upholstery pleats, between garter belts and fan belts. It was my grandfather’s idea. Remembering his father’s old hidden treasure, “Sermin, Girl of the Pleasure Dome,” he’d had a vision for updating an old ideal. The days of the harem were over. Bring on the era of the backseat! Automobiles were the new pleasure domes. They turned the common man into a sultan of the open road. Plantagenet’s photographs suggested picnics in out-of-the-way places. The girls napped on running boards, or dipped to get a tire iron out of the trunk. In the middle of the Depression, when people had no money for food, men found money for Plantagenet’s auto-erotica. The photographs provided Lefty with a steady side income. He began to save money, in fact, which later brought about his next opportunity.

Every now and then at flea markets, or in the occasional photography book, I come across one of Plantagenet’s old pictures, usually erroneously ascribed to the twenties because of the Daimler. Sold during the Depression for a nickel, they now fetch upward of six hundred dollars. Plantagenet’s “artistic” work has all been forgotten, but his erotic studies of women and automobiles remain popular. He got into the history books on his day off, when he thought he was compromising himself. Going through the bins, I look at his women, their engineered hosiery, their uneven smiles. I gaze into those faces my grandfather gazed into, years ago, and I ask myself: Why did Lefty stop searching for his sister’s face and start searching for others, for blondes with thin lips, for gun molls with provocative rumps? Was his interest in these models merely pecuniary? Did the cold wind blowing through the house lead him to seek warmth in other places? Or had guilt begun to infect him, too, so that to distract himself from the thing he’d done he ended up with these Mabels and Lucies and Doloreses?

Unable to answer these questions, I return now to Temple No. 1, where new converts are consulting compasses. Tear-shaped, white with black numbers, the compasses have a drawing of the Kaaba stone at the center. Still hazy about the actual requirements of their new faith, these men pray at no prescribed times. But at least they’ve got these compasses, bought from the same good sister who sells the clothes. The men revolve, one step at a time, until compass needles point to 34, the number coding for Detroit. They consult the rim’s arrow to determine the direction of Mecca.

“LET US MOVE NOW TO CRANIOMETRY. WHAT IS CRANIOMETRY? IT IS THE SCIENTIFIC MEASUREMENT OF THE BRAIN, OF WHAT IS CALLED BY THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY ‘GRAY MATTER.’ THE BRAIN OF THE AVERAGE WHITE MAN WEIGHS SIX OUNCES. THE BRAIN OF THE AVERAGE BLACK MAN WEIGHS SEVEN OUNCES AND ONE HALF.”Fard lacks the fire of a Baptist preacher, the deep-gut oratory, but to his audience of disaffected Christians (and one Orthodox believer) this turns out to be an advantage. They’re tired of the holy-rolling, the shouting and brow-mopping, the raspy breathing. They’re tired of slave religion, by which the White Man convinces the Black that servitude is holy.

“BUT THERE IS ONE THING AT WHICH THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE. BY DESTINY, AND BY THEIR OWN GENETIC PROGRAMMING, THE WHITE RACE EXCELLED AT TRICKNOLOGY. DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS? THIS IS WHAT YOU ALREADY KNOW. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY THE EUROPEANS BROUGHT THE ORIGINAL PEOPLE FROM MECCA AND OTHER PARTS OF EAST ASIA. IN 1555 A SLAVE TRADER NAMED JOHN HAWKINS BROUGHT THE FIRST MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ TO THE SHORES OF THIS COUNTRY. 1555. THE NAME OF THE SHIP? JESUS . THIS IS IN THE HISTORY BOOKS. YOU CAN GO TO THE DETROIT PUBLIC LIBRARY AND LOOK THIS UP.

“WHAT HAPPENED TO THE FIRST GENERATION OF ORIGINAL PEOPLE IN AMERICA? THE WHITE MAN MURDERED THEM. THROUGH TRICKNOLOGY. HE MURDERED THEM SO THAT THEIR CHILDREN WOULD GROW UP WITH NO KNOWLEDGE OF THEIR OWN PEOPLE, OF WHERE THEY CAME FROM. THE DESCENDANTS OF THOSE CHILDREN, THE DESCENDANTS OF THOSE POOR ORPHANS—THAT IS WHO YOU ARE. YOU HERE IN THIS ROOM. AND ALL THE SO-CALLED NEGROES IN THE GHETTOS OF AMERICA. I HAVE COME HERE TO TELL YOU WHO YOU ARE. YOU ARE THE LOST MEMBERS OF THE TRIBE OF SHABAZZ.”

And riding through Black Bottom didn’t help. Desdemona realized now why there was so much trash in the streets: the city didn’t pick it up. White landlords let their apartment buildings fall into disrepair while they continued to raise the rents. One day Desdemona saw a white shop clerk refuse to take change from a Negro customer. “Just leave it on the counter,” she said. Didn’t want to touch the lady’s hand! And in those guilt-ridden days, her mind crammed with Fard’s theories, my grandmother started to see his point. There were blue- eyed devils all over town. The Greeks had an old saying, too: “Red beard and blue eyes portend the Devil.” My grandmother’s eyes were brown, but that didn’t make her feel any better. If anybody was a devil it was her. There was nothing she could do to change the way things were. But she could make sure that it didn’t happen again. She went to see Dr. Philobosian.

“That’s a very extreme measure, Desdemona,” the doctor told her.

“I want to make sure.”

“But you’re still a young woman.”

“No, Dr. Phil, I’m not,” my grandmother said in a weary voice. “I’m eighty-four hundred years old.”

On November 21, 1932, the Detroit Times ran the following headline: “Altar Scene of Human Sacrifice.” The story followed: “One hundred followers of a negro cult leader, who is held for human sacrifice on a crude altar in his home, were being rounded up today by police for questioning. The self-styled king of the Order of Islam is Robert Harris, 44, of 1429 Dubois Ave. The victim, whom he admits bludgeoning with a car axle and stabbing with a silver knife through the heart, was James J. Smith, 40, negro roomer in the Harris home.” This Harris, who came to be known as the “voodoo slayer,” had hung around Temple No. 1. Just possibly, he had read Fard’s “Lost Found Muslim Lessons No. 1 and 2,” including the passage:“ALL MUSLIMS WILL MURDER THE DEVIL BECAUSE THEY KNOW HE IS A SNAKE AND ALSO IF HE BE ALLOWED TO LIVE, HE WOULD STING SOMEONE ELSE.” Harris had then founded his own order. He had gone looking for a (white) devil but, finding one hard to come by in his neighborhood, had settled for a devil closer at hand.