escaped their fate.
There was Cadillac Drake. He was a big jolly, cigar-smoking, fat, black, gaudy-dressing pimp, a
regular afternoon character when I was waiting on tables in Small's Paradise. Well, I recognized
him shuffling toward me on the street. He had gotten hooked on heroin; I'd heard that. He was the
dirtiest, sloppiest bum you ever laid eyes on. I hurried past because we would both have been
embarrassed if he recognized me, the kid he used to toss a dollar tip.
The wire worked to locate West Indian Archie for me. The wire of the streets, when it wants to, is
something like Western Union with the F.B.I. for messengers. At one of my early services at
Temple Seven, an old scavenger hustler, to whom I gave a few dollars, came up when services
were dismissed. He told me that West Indian Archie was sick, living up in a rented room in the
Bronx.
I took a taxi to the address. West Indian Archie opened the door. He stood there in rumpled
pajamas and barefooted, squinting at me.
Have you ever seen someone who seemed a ghost of the person you remembered? It took him a
few seconds to fix me in his memory. He claimed, hoarsely, "Red! I'm so glad to see you!"
I all but hugged the old man. He was sick in that weak way. I helped him back. He sat down on
the edge of his bed. I sat in his one chair, and I told him how his forcing me out of Harlem had
saved my life by turning me in the direction of Islam.
He said, "I always liked you, Red," and he said that he had never really wanted to kill me. I told
him it had made me shudder many times to think how close we had come to killing each other. I
told him I had sincerely thought I had hit that combinated six-way number for the three hundred
dollars he had paid me. Archie said that he had later wondered if he had made some mistake,
since I was so ready to die about it. And then we agreed that it wasn't worth even talking about, it
didn't mean anything anymore. He kept saying, over and over,in between other things, that he
was so glad to see me.
I went into a little of Mr. Muhammad's teaching with Archie. I told him how I had found out that all
of us who had been in the streets were victims of the white man's society I told Archie what I had
thought in prison about him; that his brain, which could tape-record hundreds of number
combinations a day, should have been put at the sendee of mathematics or science. "Red, that
sure is something to think about," I can remember him saying.
But neither of us would say that it was not too late. I have the feeling that he knew, as I could see,
that the end was closing in on Archie. I became too moved about what he had been and what he
had now become to be able to stay much longer. I didn't have much money, and he didn't want to
accept what little I was able to press on him. But I made him take it.
I keep having to remind myself that then, in June 1954, Temple Seven in New York City was a
little storefront. Why, it's almost unbelievable that one bus couldn't have been filled with the
Muslims in New York City! Even among our own black people in the Harlem ghetto, you could
have said "Muslim" to a thousand, and maybe only one would not have asked you "What's that?"
As for white people, except for that relative handful privy to certain police or prison files, not five
hundred white people in all of America knew we existed.
I began firing Mr. Muhammad's teaching at the New York members and the few friends they
managed to bring in. And with each meeting, my discomfort grew that in Harlem, choked with
poor, ignorant black men suffering all of the evils that Islam could cure, every time I lectured my
heart out and then asked those who wanted to follow Mr. Muhammad to stand, only two or three
would. And, I have to admit, sometimes not that many.
I think I was all the angrier with my own ineffectiveness because I knew the streets. I had to get
myself together and think out the problem. And the big trouble, obviously, was that we were only
one among the many voices of black discontent on every busy Harlem corner. The different
Nationalist groups, the "Buy Black!" forces, and others like that; dozens of their step-ladder
orators were trying to increase their followings. I had nothing against anyone trying to promote
independence and unity among black men, but they still were making it tough for Mr.
Muhammad's voice to be heard.