Black Battle, White Knight. Michael Battle

2009.

       CHAPTER ONE

      Running with the Horses

      If you have raced with foot-runners

       and they have wearied you,

       how will you compete with horses?

       (Jeremiah 12:5)

      In light of the title of this book, Malcolm’s life reimagines the four horsemen of the Apocalypse described in the Bible. In the book of Revelation, chapter 6, ride the four horsemen of Pestilence, War, Famine, and Death. The image of the four horsemen gives shape to the chapters of this biography. After the glowing accolades of Malcolm already mentioned in the foreword and introduction, why this dark tone and chapter structure to describe Malcolm’s life? Simply put, the four riders of the Apocalypse help me to connect the dots of Malcolm’s deeply textured and nuanced life. Malcolm’s life seems symmetrically organized around the continuing apocalyptic threats that still wreak havoc on planet earth. Before we look at the four horsemen and how they correspond to Malcolm’s life, a short story is in order. The primary imagery and metaphor of the four horsemen invites the reader into the apocalyptic presence that Malcolm often brought to his audience.

      The questioner was a girl, about twenty, with somber brown hair, big droopy eyes, and a thin-line quivering mouth. She was sitting, straightbacked and intent, in the Dwight Hall Common Room at Yale University beneath the tapestries and heavy architecture which make the room seem smaller than it is.

      She was pleading with Malcolm, who was sipping coffee as the week’s guest sermonizer must at the coffee hour. What she wanted, and what everyone wants out of Malcolm, was an answer—something solid, a bedrock to refer to when everything else is crumbling. She wanted a bright light, a quick conversion, a truth.

      She was looking earnestly to Malcolm probably because she had read his “prayer book”—Are You Running with Me, Jesus?—and knew his struggle was hers. She asked the short, almost bullet-shaped priest what were his “absolutes.”

      Malcolm’s answer was simple and misleading.“God, I guess, and community, and probably Jesus.” One might think he meant heavenly father, sacred church, and holy son, if one didn’t hear what followed.

      “But I can’t believe love and justice are absolutes, although I once did. This morning I read about Orange-burg, South Carolina. The Orangeburg massacre occurred on February 8, 1968, when nine South Carolina Highway Patrol officers fired into a crowd protesting local segregation. Three men were killed and twenty-eight more were injured (mostly shots in their backs). After the massacre, two others were injured by police. And a pregnant woman later had a miscarriage due to being beaten. The Orangeburg massacre predates other major civil rights revolts such as the Kent State shootings and the Jackson State deaths.”

      Because of these violent contexts, Malcolm’s jolting candor bars him from handing out easy answers to the hung-up. He can’t talk about heavenly father or sacred church because he doesn’t understand them in terms of “crisis ” or “napalm.” He didn’t even want to climb the Battell pulpit in Yale’s chapel earlier that morning, because he couldn’t see the reason why he should be up there. He’s too impatient to cope with boring liturgy, unheard music, and velvet-laden gowns.

      Two weeks earlier in New York, Readers’ Digest, of all groups, sponsored a discussion of “religion in a world of change,” whatever that means, and Malcolm was one of the panelists.

      The questioner this time was a Kent-smoker, fiftyish, with no lemon juice in his yellowy-white hair. Frankly troubled, like any normal vestry-man, his normally sedate nervous system was jumpy and he could sit no longer. A kindly woman had asked Yale chaplain William Sloan Coffin, another panelist, what he would tell a young man who wanted to become a minister. Coffin answered by saying he could not tell anyone what to do, he could only ask questions the young man might not have already answered. The Kent-smoker’s normally pink face was reddening. He had to interrupt.

      “If you church leaders don’t attempt to lead, then who… ?” This was Malcolm’s cue.

      “We’re not leaders, man. How could we be? Readers’ Digest just got us together to talk some things over.”

      Malcolm is irony. He is a “leader” of the “alienated,” but he refuses the onus of leadership. He is a priest, but he hasn’t the concrete faith of a Coffin. He is the only campus lecturer who is likely to say “I don’t know” a half-dozen times every night.

      “Boyd’s a sensationalist,” says one Yale student. Another adds, “Boyd’s an ass. I just can’t handle an Episcopalian minister who says ‘bitch.’”

      Malcolm is masterful in front of an audience, born and trained. When he was concluding his talk in Battell, he had even the easy doubters and cool sophisticates moving to his beat. He uses the shock effect because it keeps the audience with him and because that is often the only way to communicate. He is seldom at one campus for more than two days and never at one university more than twice a year. He must be bluntly honest, because there is no time to cajole and persuade.¹ Because of how Malcolm affects his audiences, I perceive Malcolm’s life in the framework of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

      The beginning of the book of Revelation tells of a scroll in God’s right hand that is sealed with seven seals. Jesus opens the first four of the seven seals, which summons forth the four beasts that ride on white, red, black, and pale-green horses symbolizing conquest, war, famine, and death, respectively. For some, the interpretation of the Christian apocalyptic vision is for the four horsemen to wreak havoc upon the world as harbingers of the end of the world. Such interpretations are dangerous among those who may not fully understand the complexity of power revealed in this surreal book of Revelation. For example, the influence of this Armageddon theology is reflected in a Federal Bureau of Investigation report that certain individuals have acquired weapons, stored food and clothing, raised funds, procured safe houses, prepared compounds, and recruited converts to their cause, all in preparation for foreign attacks. Many believe in the militia movement in the United States that the Antichrist will attempt to take over the world in the near future. There were over 100 extremist militias that the Southern Poverty Law Center has identified as active in the United States in 2009. In March 2010, one of these militia units, called the Hutaree, had several members arrested for planning an attack on the police.²

      So, interpretation of the book of Revelation must be entered into care-fully. Each of the four riders is summoned onto human history by one of the heavenly living creatures. The opening of the first four seals reveal the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. Each one of the four living creatures reveals a horseman, the first three horsemen are summed up by the fourth horsemen, “They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.” But remember, power in heaven is strange, if not seemingly unstable.

      Although the four horsemen of the Apocalypse are described in just eight verses of the book of Revelation (chapter 6:1–8), which is the last book in the Bible, they are also eerily foretold in the same chapter and verses of the Hebrew Bible, from Zechariah (6:1–8) in which there are four chariots pulled by variously colored horses, conveying the four spirits of heaven proceeding from God to the world. The four horses also travel in four directions, that is, they affect the whole earth. For Zechariah, the horses appear in the following order, red, black, white, and finally the pale horse. Zechariah’s horses differ from Revelation’s not only in their order but also they do not indicate anything about their characters since they are more like sentries than like agents of destruction or judgment.

      In Revelation, the four horsemen appear when the Lamb (Jesus) opens the first four seals of a scroll. A seal was a security measure used when a letter was dispatched from a royal office. Often this seal was made using a signet ring, hence