The Hanging and Drawing of Michael X July 2020
“A man who comes to be hanged has the satisfaction of knowing that he has brought society to its last resource. He is a man of such fatal importance that nothing will serve against him but the supreme effort of law. In a way, you know, that is success.“
some white British author, 1891
The Queen of England signed his death warrant. Muhammad Ali pleaded for his life. VS Naipaul condemned him again in The Killings of Trinidad. The man born as Michael de Freitas (1933-75) certainly received an inordinate amount of attention in his short life. Such was his need. Such was the timing too, as well as the magnetic charisma and confidence, that an immigrant street hustler was able to rise to prominence at the height of the Black Power Movement in London, a bastard gangster turned political militant. Malcolm loved him and insisted he attend his final speaking tour, after which Michael converted to Islam and adopted the name Abdul Malik.
Growing up in the poor Belmont section of Port of Spain, beside the squalor of Laventille, Michael led a solitary existence at Catholic school. His Spiritual Baptist mother did not allow him to play with black children, while white children shunned him for his color. She herself was black, but her son had a Portuguese father on St. Kitz, a philandering gambling-hall owner and pimp, and a ticket to a better life. When he was 14, she sent Michael to live with his dad and work in his rum shop, but this ended badly, and the boy soon returned to Trinidad.
“Two of my lady friends were old friends of his,“ recalled Michael.
The young man’s wanderlust did not abate, and when he turned 20 he went looking for a ship. British crews did not allow blacks, so Michael found work on a Norwegian Freighter and went to sea for 6 years, where he discovered the Old World. In Africa he was introduced to liberation politics as well as the ganja trade. He learned that the nexus for all independence movements was London, the heart of the occupier, so he left the sea in 1959 and settled in the racially contentious enclave of Notting Hill. His Obeah-practicing mother joined him there and became a professional conjurer and madam of a brothel.
1960-65 were transformative years, both for society and the man, characterized by intense civic engagement, although Michael’s concept of social work included rent collection for a slumlord, gambling, bookmaking, pimping, and the robbery of a post office. Meanwhile, he achieved local acclaim as an orator and polemicist by delivering stirring eulogies at the funerals of riot victims. He attracted enough community support that he opened a social club and bookstore. Soon after, celebrities began arriving in search of that radical chic which Michael seemed to embody. He called it the Racial Adjustment Action Society, RAAS. As Dylan would say, “There was music in the cafes at night and revolution in the air.“
Michael leveraged his emerging fame by establishing a publication, Black Eagle, “an attempt to transcend the barrier from oral to written tradition.“ Bill Levy, editor of International Times, knew him well during this period: “Immediately I saw what he was saying about race and class in Britain. But more, his writing was drawing pictures of sound. And sound is tactile. I could actually hear, feel, his writing based on oral culture. It had a dulcet calypso resonance.“ It was the musicality of the West Indian tongue that captured the likes of Dick Gregory and Angela Davis, William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, Leonard Cohen and Eric Clapton, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Society liberals ingratiated themselves for reassurance, while the Trini immigrant community sought favors from the native son. All eyes and ears were on young Michael, including those of the British surveillance state.
He created national outrage at a 1965 press gathering when he suggested that Queen Elizabeth would do herself a favor if she conceived a black baby. The journalist who tried to strike Michael at the event claimed that the activist volunteered his own sperm. Even his close friends were alarmed by the provocation, some worrying that LSD and ganja was feeding their hero’s recklessness and growing paranoia, which ultimately proved warranted. In 1967, after referring to another writer as “a white monkey,“ he was summarily sentenced to a year in prison, for “inciting violence“ under the Racial Relations Act. Michael was the first man of color sentenced under this law. Fleet Street referred to him as “the archbishop of violence.“
After his release from jail, Michael returned to Trinidad with his wife Desiree, in vain pursuit of his unformulated revolution. In 1971, he rented a plot of land from the Indo-Trini Mootoo family in Arima, where he established a commune for his Black Liberation Army. Despite great fanfare, including the blessings of John and Yoko, the jungle enterprise quickly descended into disarray and madness. The Mootoo’s filed an eviction notice, to which Michael allegedly vowed violent revenge. He and his family abruptly resettled in neighboring Guyana, after which the deserted commune mysteriously burned to the ground. Three bodies were discovered in shallow graves, hacked to pieces, including that of Gale Benson, the estranged daughter of a UK parliament minister. To avoid extradition, Michael fled Guyana to Brazil but was captured and returned to Port of Spain in 1972. His trial for murder lasted 3 years, and he received the maximum penalty, not just death but conspicuous ignominy, as he was drawn, his hanging body left swinging at the old Royal Jail.
Naipaul immortalized Michael as a tragic literary figure of certain infamy, a player of truthful fiction, “a doppelgänger, a secret-sharer, a failed version of himself. Malik had no skills as a novelist, not even an elementary gift of language. When he transferred his fantasy to real life, he went to work like the kind of novelist he would have liked to be. Such plotting, such symbolism! The blood of the calf at Christmas time, the blood of Gale Benson in the new year. And then, at the end of the sacrificial day, the cleansing in the river, with Benson’s surrogate pyre on the bank.“