Free I'm Your Man by Sylvie Simmons Page B

little empire of music clubs and hookers. But Michael X, the man Bacal lived with, was a civil rights activist, an articulate man and a bridge between London’s black underground and the white proto-hippie community. Together, Michael and Nancy founded the London Black Power Movement. They “churned out pamphlets on Xerox machines aimed to change the world for the better.” On this and subsequent trips to London, Leonard got to know Michael “very well.” He, Nancy, Michael and Robert Hershorn, when he was in London, would spend evenings in Indian restaurants, deep in discussions about art and politics.
    â€œMichael said to me he was completely against arming the blacks in America,” Leonard told a journalist in 1974. “He said it was crazy, they would never be able to resist that machine. They own the bullets and the armaments factories and the guns. So you give the blacks a few guns and have them against armies? He was even against knives. He said we should use our teeth, something everybody has. That was his view of the thing. It was a different kind of subversion. The subversion of real life to implant black fear.” 14 Leonard recalled going to Michael’s house and complimenting him on a drink he’d given him. “God, how do you make this?” Leonard asked. Michael replied, “You don’t expect me to tell you. If you know the secrets of our food, you know the secrets of our race and the secrets of our strength.”
    As Bacal says, “These were very outrageous times. It was as if everything was and wasn’t political. You never knew how far it would go or how dangerous it would get or how effective it would be or if it was just another flower [power] episode. Michael was one of these people who might say something as a joke but you never really knew what was truth and what wasn’t—which made him fascinating, because we don’t really know in life what is truth and what is fabrication or a dream. He just lived like that, openly. It was very lively.” *
    Rather too lively as it turned out. In 1967, when things started getting too dark, Bacal left Michael. That same year, her former partner became the first black person to be imprisoned under Britain’s Race Relations Act—a statute originally passed to protect immigrants from racism—after calling for the shooting of any black woman seen with a white man; Bacal is white. On his release from prison, now using the name Michael Abdul Malik, he founded a Black Power commune run from a storefront in North London, supported and funded by wealthy, often celebrated white people. John Lennon and Yoko Ono donated a bag of their hair to auction. Lennon also paid Michael’s bail when he was arrested for murder. The killing took place in Trinidad, Michael’s home country, where he had returned to start another revolutionary commune. Two of the commune’s members, one the daughter of a British politician, were found hacked to death, reportedly for disobeying Michael’s orders to attack a police station.
    In London Michael X had told Leonard—perhaps in jest, perhaps not—that he planned to take over the government of Trinidad. When he did, he said, he would appoint Leonard minister of tourism. An odd office, you might think, to choose for Leonard; he might have made a better minister of arts. “I thought it was rather odd too,” said Bacal, “but for some reason Leonard thought it was marvelous.” In some ways Michael X had him nailed; from Michael’s point of view, as a black man in London involved in revolutionary politics, Leonard was a tourist, just as he had been in Havana. “I remember them shaking hands on it,” said Bacal. “Leonard was very, very pleased and happy, and that was the end of that story.” The end of De Freitas/X/Malik’s story came in 1975, when he was hanged for murder. The Trinidad government ignored pleas for