Volume 22, Number 20 · December 11, 1975
In Scorn and Pity
By Karl Miller
Guerrillas
by V.S. Naipaul
Knopf, 248 pp., $7.95
Early in 1972, two corpses were found in graves dug in the garden of a house near Port of Spain, Trinidad. The house belonged to a hustler called Michael de Freitas, latterly known by his Black Muslim names, Michael X and Michael Abdul Malik. In London, where he spent a number of years, he had gained a reputation as a crook and as a threatener of whites and defender of the colored-immigrant population. One of the corpses was that of a local youth, the other that of an English girl, Gail Benson, who had come to the West Indies as the slavish lover of an American Negro, Hakim Jamal, 'God' to his friends, who was eventually to be shot dead in Boston. It turned out that Gail Benson had been stabbed and buried alive. De Freitas was tried, with others, for the Trinidad killings. Kate Millet and William Kunstler went about the world protesting against the trial on the grounds that it was 'political,' but very little attention was paid to them. In May this year, De Freitas was executed.
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