"In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the public hecatomb of battle.
"In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socrates drank down one evening.
"In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life." —“In Memoriam JFK” by Jorge Luis Borges
Malcolm X was assassinated 50 years ago today in New York City, and there’s a particular slab of granite on Stone Mountain with the name “Shabazz” carved into it from 1981 which makes me think of Malcolm X. I imagine the watch that 20 year-old Malcolm Little stole from a wealthy family in Boston back in January 1946 still keeping time in a drawer somewhere, maybe a cesium atomic clock ticking in a Deist’s dream that set everything and more in motion. The fateful watch that landed Malcolm X in prison for 10 years, where he joined the Nation of Islam and started going by El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (but later disavowed it in favor of Sunni Islam not long after he was paroled, which many believe led to his killing by multiple gunshots at the hands of Nation of Islam members). Would Malcolm X be turning 90 this May if he had not stolen that watch? Could these be yet the same old Borgean bullets from the above poem “In Memoriam JFK?”
“Shabazz is the name of a black scientist whose tribe founded the populations of Africa, according to the doctrine of the Nation of Islam,” according to Wikipedia. Culturally, the name “Shabazz” has usually been an homage to Malcolm X, insomuch as many supporters, particularly rappers, took the Shabazz name in solidarity with him or the teachings of Elijah Muhammad (e.g. Shabazz Palaces, Shabazz the Disciple, and Lakim Shabazz, and drummer Keith LeBlanc using the stage name Malcolm X, famous for 1983's single "No Sell Out," which was “the first sample-based composition in popular music to use Malcolm X's voice for artistic and political reasons (Wikipedia).” Sadly, there are the right-wing conspiracists (looking at you Giuliani and Trump) that claim that Obama is really Malcolm X’s lovechild whose real name is Bari M. Shabazz.
I like to think this particular stone is a symbol of someone’s Black Pride on a mountain once so synonymous with the KKK. Just as I am equally heartened whenever I pass the lone carving in Hebrew about halfway up the walk-up trail that translates into “Genesis.” After all, anti-Semitism was rampant 100 years ago when a group of men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan lynched Leo Frank. Many of these same men gathered a few months later at Stone Mountain on November 25, 1915, declaring themselves the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
