Middlesex

Again Desdemona hesitated. She thought about her children. She imagined coming home to them without any food. And then she swallowed hard. “Everybody mixed. Turks, Greeks, same same.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear.” Sister Wanda smiled broadly. “Minister Fard, he mixed, too. Let me show you what we need.”

She led Desdemona down a long, wainscoted corridor, through a telephone operator’s office, and into another darker hallway. At the far end heavy drapes blocked off the main lobby. Two young guards stood at attention. “You come to work for us, few things you should know. Never, ever, go through them curtains. Main temple in there, where Minister Fard deliver his sermons. You stay back here in the women’s quarters. Best cover your hair, too. That hat shows your ears, which be an enticement.”

Desdemona instinctively touched her ears, looking back at the guards. Their expressions remained impassive. She turned back, following the Supreme Captain.

“Let me show you the operation we got going,” Sister Wanda said. “We got everything. All we need is a little, you know, know- how.” She started up the stairs and Desdemona followed.

(It’s a long stairway, three flights up, and Sister Wanda has bad knees, so it will take some time for them to reach the top. Leave them there, climbing, while I explain what my grandmother had gotten herself into.)

“Sometime in the summer of 1930, an amiable but faintly mysterious peddler suddenly appeared in the black ghetto of Detroit.” (I’m quoting from C. Eric Lincoln’s The Black Muslims of America. ) “He was thought to be an Arab, although his racial and national identity remain undocumented. He was welcomed into homes of culture-hungry African-Americans who were eager to purchase his silks and artifacts, which he claimed were those worn by black people in their homeland across the sea . . . His customers were so anxious to learn of their own past and the country from which they came that the peddler soon began holding meetings from house to house throughout the community.

“At first, the ‘prophet,’ as he came to be known, confined his teachings to a recitation of his experiences in foreign lands, admonitions against certain foods, and suggestions for improving listeners’ physical health. He was kind, friendly, unassuming and patient.”

“Having aroused the interests of his host” (we move now to An Original Man by Claude Andrew Clegg II), “[the peddler] would then deliver his sales pitch on the history and future of African-Americans. The tactic worked well, and eventually he honed it to the point that meetings of curious blacks were held in private homes. Later, public halls were rented for his orations, and an organizational structure for his ‘Nation of Islam’ began to take shape in the midst of poverty-stricken Detroit.”

The peddler had many names. Sometimes he called himself Mr. Farrad Mohammad, or Mr. F. Mohammad Ali. Other times he referred to himself as Fred Dodd, Professor Ford, Wallace Ford, W. D. Ford, Wali Farrad, Wardell Fard, or W. D. Fard. He had just as many origins. People claimed he was a black Jamaican whose father was a Syrian Muslim. One rumor maintained that he was a Palestinian Arab who had fomented racial unrest in India, South Africa, and London before moving to Detroit. There was a story that he was the son of rich parents from the tribe of Koreish, the Prophet Muhammad’s own tribe, while FBI records stated that Fard was born in either New Zealand or Portland, Oregon, to either Hawaiian or British and Polynesian parents.

One thing is clear: by 1932, Fard had established Temple No. 1 in Detroit. It was the back stairs of this temple that Desdemona found herself climbing.

“We sell the silks right from the temple,” Sister Wanda explained above. “Make the clothes ourself according to Minister Fard’s own designs. From clothes our forefathers wore in Africa. Used to be we just ordered the fabric and sewed up the clothes ourself. But with this Depression, fabric getting harder and harder to come by. So Minister Fard he had one of his revelations. Come to me one morning and said, ‘We must own the means and ends of sericulture itself.’ That how he talk. Eloquent? Man could talk a dog off a meat truck.”

Climbing, Desdemona was beginning to make sense of things. The fancy suits of the men outside. The redecoration within. Sister Wanda reached the landing—“In here our training class”—and threw open the door. Desdemona stepped up and saw them.