During a decades-long career, noted black revolutionary Lucius X traveled the American South and was proudest of his service as correspondent for the Monitor in a pisspot town upriver from McAllen, if you know where that is, on the Mexican border called Rio Grande City. It was an experience that X later described as frustrating at the time, only because the locals thought that he was a narc, who was sent there to report back to pigs in D.C. on the flourishing U.S.-Mexico drug trade. To set the scene.
“Rio was a major trans-shipment point, money going one way and drugs the other, I was actually trying to score some weed for myself most of the time I was there,” he reminisced years later of his time on Texas' big river. "I asked a trafficker I knew to just let me sweep up the barn after the next load, you know? I knew the mother lode was in reach but no one would sell to me. That's turned out to be a metaphor for my life.”
The only really newsworthy event during his stay in Rio was a shipment of white powder that arrived on the Mexican side of the river and traffickers paid $100 to every man, woman and child in the village, to carry product from trucks to boats, so that no one could go to the federales later and tell tales. Even abuelita was a mule that day, X recalled fondly. The intrepid young Lucius wrote a human interest story about how people planned to spend the $100 they had earned. He was 67 at the time of his passing, in Puerto Angel, Oaxaca. He is survived by daughter China Bates of Salvador da Bahia, and Florianopolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil. His lone offspring was the result of a brief hook-up in Porto Alegre during the period of X's world travels. Genetically-unique from birth Lucius X was tri-testone positive, a rare autosomal-dominant condition in which a Black man-child is born with three large testicles and inordinate courage. Only six in 14 billion male babies have three big ones. Of those six, only two will live to mate. Lucius X was one of those Negroes.
This extraordinary medical condition has been associated thruout history with African kings. Hannibal, Ramses II, Shaka Zulu as well as African-American revolutionaries Nat Turner—Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey. All were tri-testonia positive. “I was born with three and I’ll die with three,” Lucius X told his doctors as a teenager, when the medicos wanted to surgically remove one nut in order to bring him to heel for the White Race.
This was Lucius X's first refusal to be de-masculated. It would not be his last.
Without the extra virility accompanied by a third nut, Lucius X would never have dared to question the status quo, commentators and doctors agree. Efforts by this X-Man to bring race to the forefront of international dialogue translated into various literary endeavors by X as well. His one-act play The Pool Man Cometh, about a black family entering the middle class, just celebrated its 1,000th performance, in Stockholm after being shunned at home, where X was blacklisted by The Man and The Man's media. If one looks thru a race-critical lens. On the scientific front Lucius X predicted the end of skin color as a social distinction within decades, as optimists have hoped, but its quick replacement by DNA. “There are two things a black man can’t allow anybody else to do for him,” he wrote to his unborn child in the New Yorker, “his fucking and his fighting.” The classic X essay “Dick Don’t Lie” explores the Black Man’s spiritual relationship with his bone and includes his famous warning for black men to avoid Caucasian women, as much as possible, if there is other puddy available, because, “White pussy has killed more niggers than gunfire.”
His “Electric Negro” speaks to the African-American and technology and was first published in the U.K. as “The Black Man and the Internet,” in which the prominent social theorist Lucius X predicted the Fall of the White Race through the unfiltered protest of the unchained African-American male. He said he wasn't a sexist, "just a realist." Lucius X believed that, historically, most oppressors have created the means of their own destruction—in the case of The White Man, Lucius X believed that Achilles heel is the World Wide Web.
“Hills Like Black Elephants,” one of his most beloved stories, chronicles 48 hours in the life of a young brother being asked to deny paternity of his girlfriend’s baby, and is a soliloquy by this would-be young father. The story appears in most credible anthologies of World Fiction. He liked to read women’s magazines, X famously said, “to know what the enemy is planning.” He saw women fundamentally as competitors. Unless she's really really fine. “The fundamental conflict is not racial,” he wrote in the Times, “it’s sexual and I’m not at all sanguine about men’s chances. My sense is that women are plotting all the time.” The series of works that best illustrate X's theme was completed late in his life, during his so-called Black Period, and is called by critics and historians, “The Fall of Man.” The scene of the narrative is deep space where unfolds X's most controversial work, the post-Modernist science fiction trilogy, Planet of the Hos.
The three-book narrative, unfinished at the time of his death, POH recounts the struggle of a Black Admiral in command of a Federation Fleet chasing pirates in an outer nebula, who are raiding robot vessels in deep space. To set the scene. The Black Admiral follows stolen cargo to the far outskirts of the Federation itself—to a planet called Ho, run by women, where men are merely reproductive and used like bee drones, only in service to an all-powerful Black Queen.
The Times of London has called Planet of the Hos, “the ultimate work on race and gender in Deep Space.”
X's oeuvre includes the black man's account of his Final Confrontation with white women who want to de-masculinate him, by draining his seed. “The medium is the message but more importantly,” Lucius X wrote in his autobiographic Electric Negro Plus, “the writer is the story.”
Throughout his career, Lucius X tried to create an authentic Portrait of the Black Male, “etched in charcoal,” as he described his vision, “and painted Black.” In terms of his literary oeuvre, Lucius X is probably best known as author of what many critics consider the greatest single work of Black Literature—a unique story of human redemption that has served to light a fuse for an entire generation's struggle. Nigger on the Run is the story of the small-town thug Flood, the mythic Every Nigger, a petty gangbanger who escapes arrest in Mississippi where he’s been robbing supermarkets after parole, and goes to West Africa and discovers his own Promised Land.
To set the scene. Like the author, Flood has three balls. But unlike the real Lucius X, the antihero #43 Flood lacks the discipline to deal with the waves of sudden masculinity that eventually destroy him. Only his African experience allows Flood to rise above baser instincts that he was born with and the sociopathic urges caused by having three big ones.
Only when he returns to the source of his dysfunction, Mississippi, is Flood doomed. In this short work Lucius X portrays a brother “who achieves Black Liberation not in America but from America,” according to the Times. Denzel Washington, who has portrayed Flood on stage, describes Nigger on the Run as the most difficult role in the Black Oeuvre. “Like Hamlet but deeper,” Washington told BBC last year, after a performance at the Old Vic.
Lucius X was always attentive to stagecraft.
His one-man show Black Rage features a Negro male alone 0n stage, sitting in a chair with a bright light in his eyes, like during a police interrogation. The White Interrogator remains in the shadows. Instead of turning rat and accepting the plea deal Flood begins rapping to the unseen pigs about his experience as a Black Man in America. The Negro turns the chair around, to sit astride it, still discoursing about Black Masculinity to the white puercos.
Rejecting the historical role of the Negro as “victim” of the nefarious White Man, and White Woman, instead this revolutionary Negro chose to be a Black Avenger. Thus was the Black Circle closed. The X-Man claimed to believe in so-called “reparations-on-the-go” in which black people take from white society, in small chunks, compensation for past wrongs. Often when no one is looking, like on the Bulk Aisle at Whole Foods.
In an interview last year when asked to sum up his own life Lucius X said that he attempted to “reach the other side,” he called it, in which he could express his Black Manhood not without fear of retaliation by the so-called “white bitches,” male and female, black and white. That was something that he doubted would be possible during his lifetime. But, instead, without the retaliation having any effect. That was the goal of his life, he said, not Fame nor Fortune, not the most pussy or to only smoke the best herb, “but the coherence of my rap,” he told the Post three weeks before he put a gun to his own damn head. To set the scene one last time.
While in an inner tube a quarter mile offshore from Zipolite, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, in order to feed the damn fishes and renew the circle once more, that is what he planned to do, he told the Black Press by email before he pulled the trigger.
The frequent criticism leveled against X's work, that he turned whites into “stick figures,” was never true, Lucius X said.
“We know white people. How could we not, working in their homes and kitchens and driving them around? Taking care of their spoiled little fuckhead kids? But they don’t know us because when they go to the hood they’re always just tourists, you dig? We are in white homes,” he lamented wistfully, “in order to clean up messes they’ve made.”
In lieu of flowers X asked everyone to fire up a fat one and put on some funk.
He suggested, “You Dropped a Bomb on Me”
by the Gap Band.
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