Free Yaccub's Curse by Wrath James White Page A

Huey and I would have never become friends. If I had found it Huey and Tank would have never become anything but dust and stench.
    Grandma rushed upstairs when she heard me dismantling Mom’s room. She found me sitting in Mom’s closet with tears streaming down my face and blood and saliva drooling from my mouth, which hung carelessly open. My cheeks were swollen up like two puss-filled blisters about to rupture. She screamed and hugged me, and prayed, and dragged me to the hospital begging and praying to God all the way.
    They wired my jaw shut and I adamantly refused to go back to school looking like some freak whose braces had been welded together. I stayed home reading Elijah Muhammed’s book and thinking about what I’d seen that white boy do to that Jamaican dealer. The more I thought about it the more amazing it seemed. I’d never even heard about white boys that hard. Except maybe the mafia but I didn’t think this guy was Italian. He looked too pale. And I’d never heard of anyone from the mafia eating anyone’s brains. It just didn’t add up. It didn’t make sense.
    Why would someone eat a niggas brains? Was he trying to claim that Rasta’s spirit or his power like those African tribes or was he just trying to establish some kind of weird-ass rep?
    It didn’t add up at all unless of course he really was some kind of demon. I kept thinking about the way his face had looked after he’d peeled that Jamaican’s cap back and scooped out Jah Warrior’s brains, all covered in blood with flesh and brain matter coating his gold teeth. His eyes had filled with something like ecstasy. There was definitely something not right about that white boy. He looked like he was possessed or something. But Elijah Muhhamed had said that all white people were demons. Did all of them do shit like that? I wasn’t sure. I just didn’t know enough about them.
    I started making it a point to question every Muslim I saw about white people and that whole devil thing.
    “No, brother. You got it all wrong. There ain’t no one white man walking around who’s the devil like they portray him in the white man’s bible. He ain’t got horns and tail or nothing like that. All white men are the devil. Every last one of them collectively make up that fork-tongued cloven-hoofed fiend. He is an amalgamation of evil and the white man is that evil.”
    His name was Jihad Ali and he was selling bean pies by the side of the road, dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and red bow-tie. His head was clean-shaven and his face was serious but friendly. He’d been only too eager to talk to me when I walked up to him with my mouth still full of wires and started asking him about white people.
    “See, the white man is the original trickster, the deceiver. He was created by an evil scientist named Dr. Yaccub in order to bring down the Black man from his throne of power and enslave him. That’s why we have to separate ourselves from these devils in order for our people to rise again. As long as we are living among them we are corrupted by their evil.”
    “Do they all eat niggas brains?”
    “No, they don’t eat your brain literally. They are parasites that eat your soul. They eat away at you every day by making you feel like less of a human being. They keep us poor and pump our neighborhoods full of drugs and alcohol and fried foods and pork to eat away at our spirits.”
    Jihad’s eyes sparkled when he talked, the way my grandma’s did when she talked about Jesus.
    “Then what about what I saw?”
    “Maybe it was a hallucination or maybe you had a psychic premonition or something. Maybe you had a vision of what all white people are really like underneath.”
    But it wasn’t all white people. That drug dealer wasn’t the first white person I’d ever seen but he was the first one I’d ever seen who killed niggas like that and ate their brains. I’d heard about the KKK and the Nazis and those White folks who’d brought my ancestors over