Blood Brothers (7 page)

As Goodman pondered the question, an assistant minister named Brother Henry walked to the front of the room and welcomed the congregation in Arabic: “
As-Salaam-Alaikum
”—“Peace be unto you.” The visitors replied in unison, “
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam
”—“Peace also be unto you.” Only during the greetings did the Nation's Muslims use Arabic. Not even Elijah Muhammad—the Messenger himself—spoke or wrote the language.

While Brother Henry lectured, a tall, rail-thin, bespectacled man wearing a dark blue suit, white shirt, and red tie sat at a small table studying three-by-five index cards. Occasionally he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose while he penned notations. When Brother Henry introduced him, Malcolm X unfolded his body like a three-part extension ladder, rising from the chair. He gathered his index cards, the Bible, and the Koran, and walked toward the podium.
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Malcolm surveyed the packed auditorium, grinning. Then he began, “
As-Salaam-Alaikum
.”

“
Wa-Alaikum-Salaam
.”

Malcolm lectured on a variety of topics that day: the history of slavery, “Negro” ministers who preached the “white man's religion,” the Bible—that “book of poison”—and the evils of consuming pork. He did not say
much about the Johnson Hinton case, but he promised that if the police ever attacked another Muslim brother or sister, then they would “be dealing with Malcolm X.” Goodman had never heard a black man speak with such unbridled confidence and authority. Malcolm talked plainly in a language that everyone in the audience understood, with a directness that bordered on open rebellion.
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At the end of the meeting, visitors were invited to join the Nation. Malcolm asked them to raise their hands if they believed what he said was true. Goodman raised his hand. If a visitor could not commit to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm asserted, the Muslims would not persecute him. “You are among the deaf, dumb, and blind,” he explained in a friendly voice. Returning to the temple for further study about “the teaching of the devil,” he said, would reveal hidden truths.
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After visiting the temple twice more, Goodman penned an initiation letter—the same letter that every convert wrote. After reading the letter, the applicant copied it verbatim by hand:

Date

Mr. W. F. Muhammad

4847 So. Woodlawn Avenue

Chicago 15, Illinois

Dear Savior Allah, Our Deliverer:

I have been attending the teachings of Islam by one of your Ministers, two or three times. I believe in It, and I bear witness that there is no God but Thee, and that Muhammad is Thy Servant and Apostle. I desire to reclaim my own. My slave name is as follows:

Name

Address

City and State

In Chicago, Muhammad's lieutenants carefully examined the applicants' letters. If the letter was written without errors, then the truth-seeker received a questionnaire regarding his or her marital status, dependents, and employment. Upon completing the application process, new members immersed themselves in the world of the Nation, submitting completely to the teachings of Muhammad. Every follower
was supposed to give up dope, tobacco, alcohol, profanity, and vice of all kinds. In return, the believer was no longer a wandering “Negro,” ashamed of his or her skin color, weakened by Christianity. After initiation, new disciples proclaimed their loyalty to the Supreme Minister. In exchange for their devotion, the true believer received a new life, a new identity, and a new name.
¹⁷

All true believers retained their first name and accepted an
X
in place of their surname—their
slave name
. For example, in the New York temple, Joseph Gravitt, the FOI captain, became Joseph X. Benjamin Goodman, the second man named Benjamin to join Temple No. 7, became Benjamin 2X. Black people, Muhammad taught, did not know their true last name; it remained a mystery. The
X
was a temporary replacement until the Messenger gave the follower an Arabic name, their “original name,” such as Ali, Muhammad, Sharrieff, or Shabazz, though many of his disciples went years without replacing the
X
. In rejecting one's slave name, the
X
signified crossing over and erasing the past, the legacy of slavery, and the life of self-loathing. It meant that a black man denounced what he was before he became a Muslim: an “ex-slave.”
¹⁸

In two years, Benjamin 2X became one of Malcolm's assistant ministers. During a weekly seminar, Malcolm quizzed his assistants about religion, history, geography, politics, philosophy, economics, and current events. For every class, he required that each student bring a notebook, dictionary, thesaurus, and library card. When Benjamin and the other ministers were not working at their day jobs, they diligently studied the Bible and the Koran; they read the
New York Times
, the
London Times
, and a variety of news magazines; and they prepared for debates. Wasting time on television, movies, parties, and sports was unacceptable. Once his assistants convinced Malcolm that they were ready to do God's work, he took them out fishing on the streets of New York.
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Standing on congested street corners and stepladders, outside churches and drugstores, Malcolm courted lost souls, inviting them to hear the truth at Temple No. 7. Armed with a Bible and handbills, he worked the streets, talking to men who reminded him of a younger version of himself: hustlers, gamblers, and bottom-feeders, men searching for a way out of the ghetto. He understood these men, their frustrations, their anger, and their language. He spoke directly, never wasting a word, appealing to their experiences—experiences that he had lived.
And anyone who listened to Malcolm was invariably transfixed by his stories of his own reinvention.

The path that led Malcolm to the Nation of Islam was a tortuous one. After bouncing around predominantly white reform schools and foster homes, Malcolm, three months shy of his sixteenth birthday, with only an eighth-grade education, eagerly boarded a Greyhound bus in Lansing and traveled to Boston. There, under the care of his twenty-six-year-old sister Ella, Malcolm gravitated toward the “hip” swindlers standing on the street corners, the gangsters and bookies, dope dealers and pimps. These men educated him on the life of a “hustler.” An older man who called Malcolm “homeboy” taught him the importance of performance when he was shining the white man's shoes. Kneeling at a foot stand, Malcolm mastered the art of polishing, brushing, and shining shoes, snapping the rag across the leather, making it “pop like a firecracker.” That popping sound was pure “jive noise,” worth two extra bits.
²⁰

Whether he was shining shoes, cleaning dishes, or serving diners on Pullman cars, Malcolm hustled. He earned generous tips from white men by shucking with a sly smile, ingratiating customers with compliments. When Malcolm finished work he rushed to the nightclubs, where he danced and drank the night away, gambling his tips while he dreamed of hitting the jackpot.

Eventually he settled into the underworld of Harlem, where he came of age as “Detroit Red,” a small-time hustler sporting conked red hair and brightly colored zoot suits. His burglary spree ended in 1946 when the police nabbed him and his partner, Shorty Jarvis, and their white girlfriends. The judge gave the twenty-one-year-old offender concurrent eight- to ten-year sentences. He wound up serving his seventy-seven-month incarceration at three Massachusetts penitentiaries. At the Charlestown State Prison, a dank, century-old fortress without running water, Malcolm festered in a dirty, cramped cell, lying on his cot, staring at the ceiling. In his misery, he yearned for the pleasures of the past: the rush of a robbery, the high from snorting cocaine. “Big Red” bragged about his criminal exploits and offered to acquire whatever the other prisoners needed: reefer, tobacco, liquor. He would later claim that he was an obstinate prisoner, a devout atheist nicknamed “Satan” for his mutinous behavior.
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After Malcolm transferred to Concord Prison, he received a startling letter from his brother Philbert, who explained that he and other members of the family had converted to “the natural religion for the black man”: Islam. Soon, he read more letters from his brothers and sisters, educating him about the movement “designed to help black people.” In 1948, after Malcolm transferred to the Norfolk Prison Colony, his younger brother Reginald, a former hustler, visited him. He told Malcolm that there was a man who knew everything. “Who's that?” Malcolm asked. “God is a man,” he answered, and “His real name is Allah.” Reginald explained that Allah had come to America and taught everything he knew to his disciple, Elijah, “a black man just like us.” Allah had instructed Elijah that the devil was also a man—the white man.
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Malcolm thought about all the white people who had hurt him and his family: the white supremacists who killed his father; the white doctor who diagnosed his mother as “crazy”; the white social workers who broke up his family; the white kids who called him “nigger” on the playground; the white schoolteacher who told him that he was foolish for thinking that a “nigger” could ever become a lawyer; the white judge who took
ten years
of his life away; and all the other white folks who had done him wrong.
²³

His siblings continued to educate him through correspondence and their visits. They urged him to trust the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, the “Messenger of Allah,” a “small, gentle man” who possessed “the true knowledge of the black man.” Reginald advised him to purify his body and avoid cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, and pork. Malcolm followed his instructions, accepting Muhammad's strict rules of morality.
²⁴

Like many of Muhammad's prison converts, he idolized the Nation's patriarch. After sending Muhammad a letter he'd revised twenty-five times, they enjoyed a regular correspondence. Malcolm could not wait to meet Allah's prophet and serve his cause. On August 7, 1952, about a month after the Massachusetts Department of Corrections transferred his parole to the State of Michigan, he walked out of prison a new man, wearing a cheap suit and shedding the cloak of Big Red.
²⁵

Shortly after his release, Malcolm rode a bus to Detroit. Canvassing the neighborhoods of Black Bottom, he shared his story of self-emancipation, crediting Elijah Muhammad for his liberation from a life of destitution and delinquency. “Before hearing of [Muhammad],” he admitted, “I
had nothing, knew nothing, and was nothing. I was addicted to and enslaved by all the evils and vices of this white civilization—dope, alcohol, adultery, thievery, and,” he added hyperbolically, “
even murder
.” Without Muhammad's grace, he had “very little hope, desire, or intention of amounting to anything.”
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After Malcolm served as an assistant minister for the Detroit temple and proved himself an effective organizer, in late 1953 Muhammad rewarded his protégé with his own ministry in Boston, where Malcolm established Temple No. 11. Shortly thereafter, Muhammad sent him to Philadelphia to further build the movement's membership along the East Coast. In just three months, Muhammad promoted his charismatic disciple once again, naming him minister of Temple No. 7 in New York. Muhammad recognized that no one could relate to the “bottom-of-the-pile Negroes” the way that Malcolm did. Those beaten-down, dead-end blacks trusted Malcolm because he also knew life in worn-out shotgun houses and rancid tenements.
²⁷

In the tenement neighborhoods of Harlem, Malcolm persuaded many blacks to hear him preach at the temple. But not everyone was easily convinced that Islam was the path to righteousness. When people heard him talk about the Nation's theology, many just shook their heads in disbelief. One man yelled, “You niggers are crazy!” and marched right past him. On another occasion, when Malcolm tried to convince a Baptist into converting to Islam, the man asked, “What are the rules of your organization?” Malcolm replied, “Well, my brother, you'll have to stop drinking, stop swearing, stop gambling, stop using dope, and stop cheating on your wife.” The man thought for a moment. “Hell,” he quipped, “I think I better remain a Christian.”
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I
N THE MID
-1950
S
, during the Nation's ascendance in the impoverished black neighborhoods of northern cities, Malcolm was fast becoming the most important symbol of the movement. The New York minister served as living proof that through the Messenger, anything was possible. If Muhammad's message could cleanse a depraved, atheist criminal and transform him into a minister of God, a man who respected himself and his people, then Muhammad could save the most immoral degenerate. “Malcolm redeemed,” observed literature professor Michael
Thelwell, “was the word incarnate, the message made flesh, the living metaphor and exemplar of the redemption of an entire race.”
²⁹

As Muhammad's most prized minister and one of his closest confidants, the minister's presence was felt everywhere: Atlanta, Atlantic City, Buffalo, Jersey City, Newark, Pittsburgh, and Washington, DC. In the seven years after he left prison, the number of temples increased from ten to thirty. “I thank Allah for my Brother Minister Malcolm,” Muhammad proudly declared.
³⁰

They became like father and son. Some of the Messenger's aides believed that he cared more for Malcolm than for his own children. They forged a familial bond, speaking on the phone nearly every day, Muhammad advising him on all matters, professional and personal. “Anywhere you will find me,” Muhammad said, “you will find him.” In Malcolm's devotion to Elijah, he offered blind obedience. There was no one he trusted more.
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