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Florence Hamlish Levinson, author of the brand new and pretty darn good[1]Looking for Farrakhan (Ivan R. Dee, 305 pp.; $25), is perplexed. "How," she asks, given her subject's obvious intelligence, shrewdness, and force of character, "could it have happened that he was seduced by some of the most hare-brained theories of his or any time, theories that allegedly explain most of the ideas we live with?" That's a good question, though Levinson never gets to the bottom of it. Farrakhan refused to speak with her as she prepared her book, as did most of his associates (the few who did speak with her were unhelpful). Even most of those who know Farrakhan but have no current connections to him declined to be interviewed. Hence Levinson's title, and hence the feeling one has at the end of her book that, for all her trying, she never really got close to "finding" him at all—which is a shame. For there are a few of us who, for some strange reason, are almost obsessed with this guy.

Louis Farrakhan (formerly Louis Eugene Walcott, Louis X, and Abdul Farrakhan) and I have a few things in common. We both grew up in lower-class black neighborhoods; we both ran track and excelled at it; we both aspired to be professional musicians; and we both have spent chunks of our lives in the Episcopal church. (It didn't occur to Levinson that Farrakhan's early involvement in an Episcopal church might have something to do with his conversion to the bizarre theology of the Nation of Islam. I went to the Episcopal church for the first time as an adult, after having Christian orthodoxy thoroughly instilled in me by the Southern Baptists. I am thus opposed to children being raised in the Episcopal church. Just look at what happened to Farrakhan.)

Of course, Farrakhan and I are dissimilar in many ways as well. For one thing, I like white folks (which makes sense, since I am one); he considers them "devils." He plays the violin, and quite well; I play the bass guitar. He goes for colors like mauve; I like dark blue. So the differences between us are, one might say, profound. Which gives me all the more reason to want to figure him out. And it was because I wanted to figure him out that I subscribed to his newspaper, The Final Call, in November 1995.

While newspapers and magazines across this continent are struggling to stay afloat, the Final Call is expanding. Just after the Million Man March in October 1995 it was transformed from a bimonthly into a weekly; it is getting thicker; members of the Nation have appeared on the streets of Canada's capital selling it only in the past year (they share sidewalk space with Pentecostal street preachers and Communists).

The Nation says that the Final Call's circulation is about 500,000, which at first sounds like a wild exaggeration. But then how has Farrakhan managed to attract ever-larger crowds to his events when the only real press he gets is his own? And how is it that the Final Call shows up in my mailbox week after week some 18 months after my subscription to it lapsed? I'd be willing to bet that someone in Chicago looked at my address in small-city Quebec, decided that I was a missionary case, and ordered that the newspaper be sent to me whether I pay for it or not. (My guess is that it will stop coming after this little essay is published.)

So why is the Final Call expanding; why are good-looking African immigrants peddling it on the streets of Ottawa (Ont.); and why, really, did the white guy who is writing these words subscribe to it in the first place? Is the situation in places like my old neighborhood, where my parents still live, so bad that Farrakhan seems to be the only black leader able to do something about it? Well (gulp), it does sometimes seem like it.

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