Part VIII: The Landscape of Memory

37: The Curious & Embattled Life of Charles Kenyatta

In the last and eighth episode, it's Lou who drops the ball, and in the business of life, he neglects Kenyatta over in Harlem, whose health has gone into decline. After making an unconventional visit to Kenyatta, and despite his evident decline, distractions and demands prevail and Lou all but abandons his friend. By the time Lou and Michele move into Manhattan--not far from where Malcolm X used to lead "Temple No. 7" in Harlem, Kenyatta has gone south with his daughter, and then dies in Maryland. Grieved by his failure, Lou is surprised by Kenyatta's funeral, and the story closes with a view of Harlem by night, a view as much of memory as sight.
Thank you all for sharing this story and these memories with me.
"There is a remembrance of the dead, to which we turn even from the charms of the living. These we would not exchange for the song of pleasure or the bursts of revelry."
Washington Irving
Louis DeCaro Jr. is a biographer of abolitionist John Brown, but entered his life of scholarship in the late 1980s and early '90s as a student of Malcolm X, and ultimately produced a doctoral dissertation and two books on the Muslim activist, On the Side of My People: A Religious Life of Malcolm X (1995) and Malcolm and the Cross: Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and Malcolm X (1997).

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