Malcolm X (13 page)

One major lesson Malcolm absorbed from the jazz artists’ performances in the forties was the power of black art to convey celebrity status. Young Malcolm wistfully dreamt about the adoration of the crowd. In Harlem, he would escort Reginald backstage to join the artists and the musicians at the Roxy or the Paramount, intimating that they knew who he was. “After selling reefers with the bands as they traveled, I was known to almost every popular Negro musician around New York in 1944-45,” he would boast. In July 1944, he even found work at the Lobster Pond nightclub on Fortysecond Street. The proprietor, Abe Goldstein, is identified as “Hymie” in the
Autobiography
:

What the
Autobiography
fails to reveal is that Detroit Red, under the stage name Jack Carlton, was allowed to perform as a bar entertainer. At last, on a lighted nightclub stage, Malcolm could display his dancing ability; he even sometimes played the drums. The stage name was his way of honoring his late half brother, Earl, Jr., who had performed as Jimmy Carlton. It isn’t clear whether Goldstein paid Malcolm primarily to entertain or to transport illegal alcohol (if his account is true). But in October 1944, Malcolm was fired. A few years later, on the occasion of another arrest, Goldstein described his former employee as “a bit unstable and neurotic but under proper guidance, a good boy.”

Unemployed and desperate, and probably nursing a drug habit, Malcolm soon drifted back to Boston, and to Ella. He may have reasoned that, given her own continuing illegal activities, she could hardly turn her back on him, and he tried to convince her that he would turn over a new leaf and return to the upright upwardly mobile life she still thought to be her own destiny. To demonstrate his sobriety, in late October he obtained a menial job at a Sears Roebuck warehouse. The wages were a paltry twenty dollars a week, and the work strenuous. Malcolm had never been physically strong; years of alcohol addiction and cocaine use could not have helped. Over a six-week period, he failed to get to work six times. By Thanksgiving, he had had enough, and quit. In desperation, he stole a fur coat from Ella’s home, pawning it for five dollars. The coat belonged to Ella’s sister, Grace; Ella was so outraged that she summoned the police. Malcolm was duly arrested and taken to jail. The Roxbury court gave him a three-month suspended sentence, with probation to last one full year. This was Detroit Red’s first offense to result in arrest and conviction. He was nineteen years old.

The Christmas season was only weeks away, and Goldstein consented to let Red work for him in New York City for a few weeks. In January 1945, with several hundred dollars in his pocket, Malcolm set off for Lansing. He had sent home small sums of money since 1941 and figured that his family owed him. Through Ella or Reginald, the Little siblings undoubtedly knew about their brother's downward slide, and his drug dependency. He anticipated resistance, especially from Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert, so he arrived wearing a conservative-looking suit. His days of crime, he claimed, were long gone. For several weeks, seemingly true to his word, he worked at East Lansing’s Coral Gables bar, then as a busboy at the city’s Mayfair Ballroom. But he used these jobs as opportunities for petty theft. Traveling into Detroit, he brazenly robbed an acquaintance, a black man named Douglas Haynes, at gunpoint. Haynes filed a complaint with the Detroit police, who contacted the Lansing police. On March 17, 1945, Malcolm was arrested and turned over to the Detroit Police Department, charged with grand larceny. Wilfred posted a bond of a thousand dollars, and for a short time Malcolm found menial jobs at a Lansing mattress maker and then a truck factory. When his trial was postponed, he decided that his best move was to get out of town. Sometime in August 1945, he fled the jurisdiction; a warrant was issued for his arrest.

The
Autobiography
is completely silent about these events. Undoubtedly, Malcolm was profoundly ashamed about this phase of his past. He likely felt that the deepest violation he had committed was the humiliation he inflicted on his family through his career as a petty criminal. But he may have also dropped these incidents from his history as part of the attempt to shape his legend. His amateurish efforts at gangsterism in Boston and Lansing—the clumsy theft of his aunt’s coat, the ridiculous armed robbery of an acquaintance—undermined the credibility of his supposed criminal exploits in New York, and even he must have realized that the Michigan arrest warrant, combined with his parole violation from Massachusetts, would follow him across the country. If he was ever arrested again for even a minor crime, these other violations would be brought against him.

He first returned to New York City and subsequently to Boston, desperately trying to survive through a variety of hustles. It was during this time that Malcolm encountered a man named William Paul Lennon, and the uncertain particulars of their intimate relationship would generate much controversy and speculation in the years following Malcolm’s death.

Lennon was born on March 25, 1888, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Bernard and Nellie F. Lennon. His father was a successful merchant and newspaper publisher and active in local Democratic Party politics. The eldest son of eight children, Lennon enrolled in Brown University in 1906 as a “special student,” described in the school’s catalog as a category for “mature persons of good character who desire to pursue some special subject and who have had the requisite preliminary training.” After attending Brown for several years, Lennon drifted, seeking to establish himself in some suitable profession. During World War I, he served as chief petty officer in the navy, stationed out of Newport, Rhode Island, and upon his discharge he lived briefly with his parents before getting hired as a hotel manager in Pawtucket. Within five years he had become manager of Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue in midtown. Apparently he embarked on a successful career in hotel management, but—contrary to Malcolm’s later assertions that his patron was a multimillionaire—there is no record indicating that Lennon ever became truly wealthy. Sometime during the 1930s or early 1940s, Lennon had relocated to Boston, where he began to employ male secretaries in his home.

Malcolm’s initial contact with Lennon may have come through classified advertisements placed in New York newspapers. What is certain is that sometime in 1944 Malcolm had begun working for Lennon as a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s Boston home, on an affluent stretch of Arlington Street overlooking the Public Garden. Soon something deeper than an employer–employee relationship developed. (After Malcolm’s later arrest, in 1946, he would give the police Lennon’s name and address as a previous employer, convinced that Lennon would use his financial resources and other contacts to help him during his time in prison.) The
Autobiography
describes sexual contacts with Lennon, except that Malcolm falsely attributed them to a character named Rudy:

Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon. The revelation of his involvement with Lennon produced much speculation about Malcolm’s sexual orientation, but the experience appears to have been limited. There is no evidence from his prison record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after 1952 that he was actively homosexual. More credible, perhaps, is Rodnell Collins’s insight about his uncle: “Malcolm basically lived two lives.” When he was around Ella, “he enthusiastically participated in family picnics and family dinners. . . . He saved some of his money to send to his brothers and sisters in Lansing.” But in his Detroit Red life, he participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters. Keeping the two lives separate from each other was never easy, due to his unstable material circumstances. But Malcolm had the intelligence and ingenuity to mask his most illegal and potentially upsetting activities from his family and friends.

Well-to-do white men were one thing, white women another. During the war, his old paramour Bea Caragulian had married a white man, Mehan Bazarian, but he was serving in the military and was largely away. Malcolm’s sexual relationship with Bea had continued after her marriage, although it eventually grew chaotic and frequently abusive. By early December 1945, he was back in Boston, with no place to go except Ella’s. Once again, his disgusted half sister had no choice but to allow him to stay; after all, blood was blood. Malcolm quickly ran down Shorty Jarvis, who complained to him about his wife and their money problems. Within several days, Malcolm organized a gang, with the intention of robbing homes in Boston’s affluent neighborhoods. His motley crew consisted of another African American, Francis E. “Sonny” Brown; Bea; her younger sister, Joyce Caragulian; a third Armenian woman, Kora Marderosian; and Shorty. Early in the evening of December 14, 1945, Malcolm and Brown robbed a Brookline home, absconding with $2,400 worth of fur coats, silverware, jewelry, and other items. The next night, they struck a second Brookline house, stealing several rugs and silverware valued at nearly $400, in addition to liquor, jewelry, and linen. For these break-ins, the gang followed a general pattern. Sonny would jimmy the home’s rear door, then open the front door for Malcolm and Shorty. The premises was quickly looted, with a focus on items that could easily be sold on the black market. The women stayed in the automobile, acting as lookouts. On December 16 they drove to New York City to sell part of their merchandise. Some items that failed to find a buyer were dumped, but most of the loot was distributed among gang members, a mistake no veteran burglar would ever have made.

One of the gang’s most lucrative hauls took place the day after their trip to New York. Entering a home in Newton, Massachusetts, the young criminals managed to grab jewelry, a watch, a vacuum cleaner, bed linen, silver candlesticks, earrings, a gold pendant and chain, and additional merchandise, with a total value estimated by police at $6,275. Over a period of one month, they robbed about eight homes. When they were finally caught, Malcolm was primarily responsible for tipping their hand. He gave a watch to a relative as a Christmas gift; the relative sold it on to a Boston jeweler, who, suspecting it had been stolen, contacted the police. The authorities bided their time. In early January 1946, Malcolm took another stolen watch to a repair shop. When he returned for it, local police were on hand to arrest him. Malcolm was carrying a loaded .32 caliber pistol at the time. During his interrogation, detectives disingenuously promised not to prosecute him on the gun charge if he agreed to give up his accomplices. He readily complied, naming his whole crew. With the exception of Sonny Brown, who managed to elude authorities, everyone in the gang was promptly arrested.

Malcolm was charged with the illegal possession of a firearm in Roxbury court on January 15. The next day, at the Quincy court, charges of larceny and breaking and entering were added. The court set a bail of ten thousand dollars. Because the burglaries had taken place in two Massachusetts counties, Norfolk and Middlesex, two trials were held. Shorty Jarvis’s account provides a vivid description of his and Malcolm’s ordeal: “We were urged by the district attorney and our white lawyers to plead guilty as charged; we were also told that if we did, things would go real easy and well in our favor (meaning the sentence).” Both men had been “damn fools” not to have anticipated a legal double cross. Bea was subpoenaed and turned the state’s evidence against Malcolm, largely reading the script the prosecutors wrote for her. Jarvis claimed that the district attorney had even attempted unsuccessfully “to get the girls to testify that we had raped them; this was so he could ask the judge for a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence or life in prison.” To Malcolm and Shorty, as well as to Ella, it seemed that the prime motivation for their prosecution was racial. “As long as I live,” Shorty reflected, “I will never forget how the judge told me I had had no business associating with white women.” Ella’s son, Rodnell, observed: “In court [Ella] said, the men were described by one lawyer as ‘schvartze bastards’ and by another as ‘minor Al Capones.’ The arresting officer meanwhile referred to [the women] as ‘poor, unfortunate, friendless, scared lost girls.’”

Both Malcolm Little and Shorty Jarvis pled guilty and were sentenced in a Middlesex County court to four concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, to be served in prison. While this was read out, they were confined behind bars in a steel cage in the courtroom. Shorty snapped, shaking the bars and screaming at the presiding judge, “Why don’t you kill me? Why don’t you kill me? I would rather be dead than do ten years.” In Norfolk County Superior Court eight weeks later, Malcolm received three concurrent six-to-eight-year sentences. The court could hardly have imposed more. When Malcolm remarked to a defense attorney that “we seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls,” the lawyer replied angrily, “You had no business with white girls!” Bea pleaded to the courts that she and the other white women were innocent victims of Malcolm’s vicious criminal enterprise. He had coerced them. “We lived in constant fear,” she told the court with emotion. She ultimately served only seven months of a five-year sentence.