This entire episode took me from fear to a rage that burned in me then, animates me now, and will likely leave me on fire for the rest of my days. I still had my journalism. My response was, in this moment, to write. I was lucky I had even that. Most of us are forced to drink our travesties straight and smile about it. I wrote about the history of the Prince George’s County police. Nothing had ever felt so essential to me.

That’s why I said to myself, “I have to be very original and clear myself from shit.” I was still hustling. Hustling to make bread. “I must clear myself from this mess. I must identify myself with Africa. Then I will have an identity.” That’s what I was thinking to myself.

I wanted to be like Malcolm X! Fuck it! Shit! I wanted to be Malcolm X, you know. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Then one day I sat down at the piano in Sandra’s house. I said to Sandra: “Do you know what? I’ve just been fooling around. I haven’t been playing AFRICAN music. So now I want to write African music … for the first time. I want to try.” Then I started to write and write. In my mind I put a bass here … a piano there. … Then I started humming, then singing. I said to myself, “How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-la-la-laaa. …

It was the first time I ever see prison in my life-o! I use to think prisoners were criminals until that day. Inside there I found guys who were also looking for a better life.

Who are these “world leaders”? Destroyers, man. Not builders. Not creators. But destroyers. You see, I can’t accept that my fate be in the hands of such fucked-up people. Does that seem normal to you? Do you accept the idea that your fate, your last hour on this earth, might depend on some motherfucker sitting up in the White House in Washington or up in the Kremlin in Moscow? Should the fate of the whole world depend on whether or not one of those bastards’ pricks couldn’t get hard one night? Is that normal? Not to me, man! You see what I’m getting at? A handful of unnatural, unbalanced people are ruling this world. That’s why when I hear that the non-aligned bloc is trying to be a third solution, I can only shake my head. ‘Cause those people who call themselves non-aligned are unbalanced. Do you know what something which is non-aligned means? It means something which ain’t straight, man. Something crooked, unbalanced, an out-of-line people, you know!

I also told them that Africans have to start by feeling that we belong to any part of the continent. We should not limit our area of belonging to that small enclave cut out for us at the Berlin Conference of 1884–5. Africa has to open her doors to every Black man in the world. Until Africa sees it that way, she won’t have made it yet, man.