Malcolm X (10 page)

The formal entry of the United States into World War II on December 9, 1941, prompted several million American boys and men to volunteer for service. Harlem had a long history of sending its sons to war. The Harlem Hellfighters, the all-black 369th U.S. Infantry, had fought with distinction alongside the French army during World War I. In June 1945, the 369th fought again at Okinawa, and by the end of hostilities about sixty thousand blacks from New York City had served their country.

The immediate impact of the war mobilization was that almost overnight hundreds of thousands of white men’s jobs became vacant. Many employers were forced to hire blacks and women. In critical industries such as the railroads—in the 1940s, the principal means of national transportation—the demand for workers became acute. It wasn’t difficult for sixteen-year-old Malcolm, despite his abysmal employment record, to secure a job on a railroad line as a fourth-class cook.

His first assignment was on the
Colonial
, which ran from Boston to Washington, D.C., and provided him with the chance to visit big cities he had longed to see for years. During the
Colonial
’s routine layover in Washington, Malcolm, dressed in a zoot suit, would tour the city’s sprawling black neighborhoods. He was not impressed. “I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury.” One source of the terrible poverty, he suspected, was the backwardness of the city’s Negro middle class, which he felt possessed the intelligence and education to have reached a better station in life than what it had settled for. Malcolm later claimed that veteran black employees on the
Colonial
talked disparagingly about Washington’s “‘middle-class’ Negroes with Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, guards, taxi-drivers and the like.”

For the first time in his young life, Malcolm made an effort to retain a job beyond a few months. He loved traveling, and railroad work made this possible and affordable, though it often meant playing demeaning service roles. Reassigned to the
Yankee Clipper
, the train traveling the New York- Boston route, he was expected to lug a box of sandwiches, candy, and ice cream along with a heavy, five-gallon aluminum coffeepot up and down the aisles of the train, soliciting sales. As they had done when he was a shoeshine boy, customers frequently gave larger tips to workers who displayed enthusiasm and a happy face, and Malcolm was soon mimicking the jovial dining car waiters to obtain tips. He became so proficient that his coworkers began to call him “Sandwich Red.”

His frequent stops in New York meant that he could finally visit that fabled black Mecca, Harlem. Louise and Earl had regaled their children with stories about the shining city’s legendary institutions, its broad boulevards, its vibrant political and cultural life. Yet nothing, not even Boston’s glamour and excitement, prepared the teenager for his first encounter with the neighborhood with which he would one day become identified. “New York was heaven to me,” he remembered. “And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!”

Like a frantic tourist on a tight schedule, he rushed from site to celebrated site. His first stop was the popular bar and nightclub Small’s Paradise. Opened in October 1925 at the height of Prohibition, Small’s was racially integrated from the outset. With seating accommodations for up to fifteen hundred, it quickly became a hot spot for the jazz era’s greatest entertainers, one of Harlem’s “big three” venues along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. “No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much,” Malcolm recalled of his first time there. “Around the big, luxuriouslooking, circular bar were thirty or forty Negroes, mostly men, drinking and talking.”

Next on his itinerary was the grand Apollo Theater on West 125th Street. Built some thirty years before as a whites-only burlesque house, it had become nationally known as an entertainment center featuring black performers. A few blocks east was the celebrated Hotel Theresa. Designed in a neo-Renaissance style, the hotel first opened in 1913. Until the late 1930s it had accepted only white guests, but with new management African Americans began staying there. A host of black celebrities, including Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson, Josephine Baker, and Lena Horne, made the Hotel Theresa their headquarters in the city. Since New York’s major hotels in midtown refused Negro guests throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s, the Theresa became the center for all black elites—in entertainment, business, civic associations, and politics. When Malcolm first saw the hotel in early 1942, it may have already been known to him for hosting boxer Joe Louis’s celebration with thousands of Negroes after he won the heavyweight championship. By that evening, Malcolm made what would be a fateful decision: “I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.”

In most respects, he had already left. Most nights he spent in transit, either working or sleeping on the train, and when he was in New York he sometimes stayed at the Harlem YMCA on West 135th Street. He took to visiting Small’s on a regular basis, as he did the nearby bar at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street, a hangout for the Apollo’s entertainers. Before long, he was living a double life. At work, on the
Yankee Clipper
, he excelled as Sandwich Red, entertaining white patrons with his harmless clowning. In Harlem, he was simply “Red,” a wild, cocky kid, learning the language of the streets. He began supplementing his income by peddling marijuana, casually at first, then more aggressively. Bea frequently came down from Boston to visit, and Malcolm showed her off at his favorite nightspots. For a boy who on May 19, 1942, had reached only his seventeenth birthday, barely more than a year after settling in the Northeast, his reinvention was remarkable.

For an irresponsible, headstrong young man, trying to compartmentalize these two wildly different personas would prove impossible. Malcolm’s behavior on the
Yankee Clipper
soon grew erratic and confrontational, aggravated all the more by his frequent pot smoking. He provoked arguments with customers, and especially with servicemen. In October 1942, he was fired, but the shortage of experienced workers on the railroads was so severe that he was hired again on two further occasions, and he used these shortterm jobs to transport and sell marijuana across the country. Malcolm would return from long hauls “with two of the biggest suitcases you ever saw, full of that stuff . . . marijuana pressed into bricks, you know . . . but they would pay him a thousand dollars a trip,” his brother Wilfred claimed. It is highly unlikely that the trafficking was that substantial or lucrative, but the barrier between legal and illegal activity no longer mattered, and Malcolm was more than willing to jeopardize his job to profit from an illegal hustle. His career in drugs was relatively penny ante—literally selling reefers stuffed in his socks or shirt—but it still took him over a line.

Life on the railroads influenced Malcolm in other ways. The sounds of the trains have been woven into the fabric of jazz, blues, and even rhythm and blues. As the writer Albert Murray has observed, railroads have long been a central metaphor in African-American folklore because of the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ Underground Railroad that spirited thousands of enslaved blacks to freedom. Malcolm’s Harlem style helped him meet and learn from the jazz musicians who were his marijuana customers. More important, the experiences on the railroad began Malcolm’s love affair with travel itself, the excitement and adventure of encountering new cities and different people. These trips provided an essential education about the physical vastness and tremendous diversity of the country; they also provided lessons in the conditions in which blacks lived and worked. He saw some cut off from any hope, and others squandering their privileges, opportunities, and gifts. As he looked around Washington, Boston, and New York, the seeds of his later antibourgeois attitudes were sown.

His siblings continued writing to him, but his replies became sporadic. Reginald and Hilda both sent letters asking for money, although they knew that Malcolm was hardly making enough money to support himself. Bea’s occasional gifts of cash augmented his meager wages, but went only so far. Several tailoring establishments sent him bills for clothing he had obtained on credit, but he had no intention of paying. One or more creditors turned over their claims to the Boyle Brothers collection agency, which threatened legal action. Before he was fired, Malcolm was even behind in his dues to the Dining Car Employees Union.

In late 1942, he returned to Lansing to show off his new appearance, and had the satisfactory effect of shocking his family. “My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars,” he recalled. Attending a neighborhood hop at Lincoln High School, he showed off his dance steps before admiring crowds, a true celebrity. Without a hint of embarrassment, he even signed autographs for admiring teenagers with the bold signature “Harlem Red.”

Malcolm’s autobiography implies that his trip home was brief—Harlem, after all, had become the center of his new life—but he actually stayed in Lansing for at least two months. His evenings were spent pursuing a number of different women. During the day he was scrambling to find money—for himself and his family, which had continued to struggle financially in his absence. For a few weeks he worked at Shaw’s jewelry store, then at nearby Flint’s A/C spark plug company. But his return home was also about receiving family validation and support. Still a teenager, Malcolm depended on the love of his siblings. He didn’t expect them to understand Harlem’s jazz culture or his zoot suit costumes, but he needed them to recognize that he had become successful. He finally returned to Harlem in late February 1943. Once again he was hired by the New Haven Railroad, only to be fired seventeen days later for insubordination.

Malcolm wrote in his autobiography that he’d stopped seriously looking for work after 1942 and had instead devoted himself to increasingly violent crime. He dated his employment at Small’s Paradise from sometime in mid-1942, just after he had turned seventeen, till early 1943. Yet either his memory was faulty or he was at work on his legend, because he was still in Lansing at that time. His job at Small’s actually began in late March 1943 and was terminated less than two months later, when he asked an undercover military detective posing as a Small’s patron “if he wanted a woman”—prompting arrest for solicitation, and another firing.

From 1942 to 1944, he worked sporadically at a much less glamorous site, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a late-night Harlem hot spot for black artists and entertainers. Even washing dishes, he was in esteemed company: Charlie Parker had done the same in the thirties when Art Tatum held court at the piano. Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s close friend at that time, recalled that Malcolm was “flunking for Jimmy . . . doing anything, like washing dishes, mopping floors, or whatever . . . because he could eat, and Jimmy had a place upstairs, over the place where he could sleep.” One of his fellow employees was a black dishwasher, John Elroy Sanford, who had aspirations to be a professional comedian. Both Malcolm and Sanford had red hair, and to distinguish the two Sanford was called “Chicago Red,” referring to his original hometown. Since no one had even heard of Lansing, Malcolm was eager to be known as “Detroit Red.” Years later, Sanford would become famous as the comedian Redd Foxx.

The Detroit Red of the
Autobiography
is a young black man almost completely uninterested in, even alienated from, politics. Yet the childhood lessons of black pride and self-sufficiency had not been entirely abandoned. Malcolm spoke frequently about black nationalist ideas at Jimmy’s Chicken Shack. “He would talk often,” Atkins explained, “about how his father used to get brutalized and beat up on the corner selling Marcus Garvey’s paper, and he would talk a lot about Garvey’s concepts in terms of how they could benefit us as a people.”

During his time in Harlem, Malcolm was not directly involved in activities that could be described as political—rent strikes, picketing stores that refused to hire Negroes, registering black voters, and so forth. Yet to his credit, even at this stage in his life he was an extraordinary observer of people. In his description of one of his early forays into Harlem, he mentions the presence of communist organizers: “Negro and white canvassers sidled up alongside you, talking fast as they tried to get you to buy a copy of the
Daily Worker
: ‘This paper's trying to keep your rent controlled. . . . Make that greedy landlord kill them rats in your apartment. . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?’” Longtime Harlem residents had schooled Detroit Red about the neighborhood’s racial demography, an urban transformation that he later characterized as the “immigrant musical chairs game.” His own telling of that shift captured both the directness and the broad strokes of his style. New York’s earliest black neighborhoods, he explained, had been confined in lower Manhattan. “Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews fled from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran . . . until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today—virtually all black.”