Black Ghost
By Naji Mujahid
Chapter 3
Sliding the sleeve of my black spandex muscle shirt, I glance at my Iron Man watch. The indigo light illuminates. Its three o’clock in the morning. The city is engulfed in a low lying fog bank that limits visibility to twenty or thirty feet. Perfect! Dew blankets everything in a thin phosphorous film that glows in the moonlight. The smell of honey suckle rides the early morning breeze thick and sweet. Creeping through this suburban neighborhood with their two car garages and manicured lawns, I feel like I’ve stepped into some corny ass fairytale! Each home I pass I notice curtains drawn back, advertising the intimacy of the dwellings, as if saying “We have nothing to hide.” Such a fucking facade! White people piss me off sometimes! Knowing the evil history of European Americans, I trip off the blatant hypocrisy! Even though what I do is wrong, I don’t attempt to cover it up under the façade of respectability. I immediately realize the incredible contradiction. My thoughts shift and I wonder if the people who live in this neighborhood had some type of meeting with the criminal element of the city where it was agreed upon that that their property was off limits. If so I never received the memo! Lucky for them, tonight, they’re not the target.
I squat down beside a row of hedges. My mind races through the details of my escape plan in case things go astray.
The absence of traffic and pedestrians made this night perfect. Only the occasional acknowledgment from the dogs in the area marked my presence. The storefront of the yacht shop consisted of a large, plain glass window sporting the name of the business in three-dimensional white and blue lettering. Previous recon told me that there was no alarm system. I squat down beside a row of hedges. My mind races through the details of my escape plan in case things go astray. I search for the appropriate tool to enter the building. Finding it I ready myself. My senses become keen. Every sound is accounted for. Everything moving is picked up on radar and meticulously tracked. The next minute and a half I will be as efficient and stealthy as NORAD. The wind shifts and my canine friends lose my scent. The sporadic barking stops completely. To them, I simply disappeared.
Standing up, I quickly throw the chrome ball bearing with considerable force. It strikes the middle of the glass with an almost imperceptible TTTTWACK! That blends in with the rustling of the trees. The sound even escapes the sensitive hearing of the nearby sentinels. They remain quiet. The window shatters in a million pieces but retains its shape and form. All that is needed is for me to pluck out a space large enough for me to enter. Flawless. High on adrenaline I become the ghost.
Like so many childhood ambitions my dreams of becoming a fighter pilot had long since been crushed under the oppressive weight of my warped reality. My core self—loving, kind, thoughtful, sincere, compassionate—was buried deep beneath a legacy of cultural ignorance and social indifference. So here I am the proficient illusionist. This is where I find mastery, constantly redefining myself like a virus that seeks to be more, wanting that part of itself that is missing.
My self perception is severely fractured like the shattered window I’m climbing through. I can’t be detected, defined or circumscribed: I fit no multicultural niche. I have no political affiliation. I am the Black Ghost: cunning, illusive, deadly. I possess an insatiable appetite to prove to myself and to the world that I am more than the victim of the Judgments of Daylight. In blackness I am the master. I am whole, complete. I revel in the freedom of my destructive self expression. Here the possibilities of becoming are endless. I’m not judged but embraced by the comforting neutrality of night. The possibility of profiting from this insane misadventure is secondary to this momentary intoxication. I live for the transformation, the freedom of becoming, without doubt or contradiction. The repercussions will leave a bitter taste in my mouth if I’m discovered, but I gladly risk it to be alive in this moment knowing who and what I am.
About Naji
He hid the pain of never knowing his father, while he suffered with the impossible contradictions of color. Jet black, he drew attention from his white friend’s mother, who shouted him out of the house one day with “nigger.” But when at age four he discovered his mother dead in her bed, the normal sting of racism gave way to a much deeper wound. He was adopted by unwilling grandparents who beat him roughly and consistently for the slightest infractions.
Rejected at home and lost in a world of lighter-toned blacks who also teased him, Naji’s self-esteem and anger shot to all-time lows and highs. He learned to deaden the pain with alcohol and pot. Then he took his first hit of cocaine through a syringe from an erotic dancer at a house party, and all the pain he knew simply vanished. To feed his habit he learned to move through the night like a “black ghost,” breaking and entering, fearless and defiant.
Naji Mujahid was recently released from Indian Creek Correctional Center in Chesapeake and is living in Arizona with his wife and the grandmother who terrorized him as a child. She is bed-ridden, suffering from Alzheimer’s and cancer. He is studying to become a substance abuse counselor.
