The still eyes of Malcolm X, stilled by an f-stop and shutter.Winter, 1965. Malcolm is leaving a car, gelatin-silver print,portrait of a tenant of fire. He stares into the cameralike a performer breaking scene, the sureness of his deaththe missive I read this morning after another chapterfrom Marable’s best-selling biography, bookendedby Malcolm’s Pan-Africanism and the firebombingof his East Elmhurst home. I don’t have to read further;I know of the week to come—the flight to Detroit,the Ford Auditorium, the interview where he’ll name his timea time for martyrs. I know of the Audubon and the smellof smoke, folding chairs littered like leaflets across the ballroomfloor. I’ve heard who and why as you’ve heard who and why,and that if it wasn’t them it was surely someone else,so I’ve left the book open to the insert, Malcolm in a blackfez, dark suit, Malcolm getting out of an Oldsmobile.The image is editorial, a day after the fire, but the compositionis classical: The Deposition, Christ’s descent from the cross.Two policemen flank the stoop like the Virgin and St. John,framing the martyr in motion. Or like guards at a national gallery,security for the fire. Malcolm’s body is bent; he can riseor collapse, taut as a spring. His hawk-man’s eyes seemhollowed out; the horn-rimmed glasses like the lip of a wellat the center of an emptying town where the townspeoplehave left behind furniture in the street, an end tableand lampshade, a wingchair no longer worth its weight.An upturned couch at the foot of an elm. And besidethe wintering tree, in gradations of gray but for the blacked-out windows and an awning nearly paper white, the single-family house bought by the Nation of Islam in 1959.Fire as eviction. Fire as the shape of history.23-11 97th Street. I was twelve when I first saw it,the iconic brick long obscured by aluminum siding the colorof public swimming pools. It was summer. A shy kid,I could go days without lifting my eyes, but on the courtI burned like a blockbuster, crowding you from baselineto baseline. So after a game at Elmcor—a loss, I think—our coach, a grave man with a voice that always thinnedby the fourth quarter, gathered us on the boulevardand took us all to Brother Malcolm’s house. That’s howhe said it, in a low rasp, Brother Malcolm, as ifon speaking terms, as if family. I didn’t know what for.To me the name alone was dangerous, a markon someone else’s map. A past and a threat. I couldn’t knowin a few years we’d sweat Olaf’s, Xs grown ubiquitousas Starter jackets, Denzel playing hero to the menon 42nd Street who called out white devil when my fatherpassed; the threat turning profit, packaged and sold.I was three trains from home, Coach walking usthrough the side streets of Corona. The neighborhoodbuilt this airport, he said, pointing to a control towerfrom the corner of Malcolm’s block. Grandfathers. Great uncles.Not mine. My grandfather came here from Belfast,the youngest of five boys, and built a life in Brooklyn,two daughters, a son, and carried with him a thirstthat sent him out of the house, through a series of odd jobs—midnight security at the Navy yard, singing waiterat The Welcome Inn—to a second family,until he found himself washing the hardwood floorsat Blessed Sacrament Elementary. All around himbook reports pinned to bulletins framed in lacquered oak—The Clue of the Leaning Chimney, The Secret of the WoodenLady—and math tests stamped Great Work! Outside,it was fall; the noon shadows slowly folding backinto themselves. He held a mop above the wringer.He was still. And the more I write the more stillhe becomes, another Daphne, transformed from fleshto idea, forever rooted in the same place.That’s the problem. I can’t conjure him out of that hallway.I can’t find a place for him here. Not in Corona in 1989.Or East Elmhurst in 2017, where my wife and I crouchto greet a pair of tabbies parading the tree-lined street.No monument marks the home of Malcolm X,but People would come here all the time, Mrs. Mack tells us,hurrying the cats, Biggie and Petite, into her front yardwith a broom. Muslims. White people. But it’s different now,she says. The neighborhood’s changed. Farrakhan used to comeall the time. He’d block the street; his men taking pictures.Those boys would brush his suit when he got out of the car.Give me a break! she adds with a wry smile. A yellow cabidles in front of a neighbor’s house.The cats idle, too.Last week my girlfriend said to me, “You never told meyou lived across from Malcolm’s house,” and I said to her,“I thought you already knew.”