Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary by Walter Dean Myers

Author:Walter Dean Myers [Myers, Walter Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Young Adult Nonfiction, Politics, People & Places, United States, History, Social Activists, Biography & Autobiography, African American, Biography
ISBN: 9780590662215
Google: 1NdmPwAACAAJ
Goodreads: 31069
Publisher: Polaris
Published: 1993-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

HAUNTED

It ’ s easier to see the big picture, the full extent of the hatred and violence and damage, when you ’ re outside of it. When you ’ re in the middle of it, it ’ s too crazy. There ’ s too much noise and chaos and misinformation. The pure adrenaline coursing through your body prevents you from being an objective observer. You ’ re stuck somewhere between fight and flight. Those lucky enough to make it out, sometimes they stay stuck there in their minds, forever on the brink of fight or flight. They keep reliving the violence and the trauma. It ’ s up to the rest of us to validate their experiences. To help them understand what really happened. To remind them they survived.

A month after President Habyarimana ’ s plane was shot down, I went back to Ngozi. I had to be close to the border, to see the refugees flooding across with my own eyes. By and large they were hollow people, ghosts of their former selves. They were missing limbs. They were missing children. Some of them, it seemed, were missing souls. These were the zombies I ’ d been afraid of becoming. These were the haunted bodies I nevertheless hoped to find my own family among. Because if I saw my mother and my father, it would mean they had survived. If I saw just one of them, or one of my brothers or sisters, at least they might know what had happened to the others. And then I could stop wondering. Even if they were definitely dead, I could quit fearing the worst, which is always larger in our imaginations than it is in reality.

The chance that anyone in my family had survived, I figured, was less than one percent. My parents were wealthy. They were well-known. Those facts alone made Antoine and Theresia Tutsi targets. By the same token, however, they were well-known for the right reasons. I mentioned my father volunteered with Caritas, a Catholic charity. Through them, he ’ d been distributing blankets and baskets of food to the needy for years. “ Loving our neighbors,” he used to call it—as in, “ Let ’ s go love our neighbors.” Some of those neighbors were Hutu. Maybe they ’ d remember his generosity and show mercy. Maybe they ’ d protect my family like we had protected them. Maybe my family lived close enough to the Burundi border that they ’ d make it out anyway, like I had. Like Gatali and Francoise and Uwimana had.

When I left Bujumbura for Ngozi in May 1994, my girl cousins chose to remain behind with Uncle Jeff. I didn ’ t blame them. I was glad they would be safe. But I was inexorably pulled to the border. There I became an unwitting relief worker while I waited to see my family ’ s faces again.

My daily routine went like this. Wake up at first light. Breakfast with the host family who ’ d graciously taken me in.

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