Malcolm X (7 page)

Wilfred recalled attending the funeral and viewing his father's corpse. “While my mother was talking, I slipped into the back where they had the body on the table,” he remembered. “The streetcar had cut him just below the torso and it had cut his left leg completely off and had crushed the right leg, because the streetcar. . . had just run right over him. He ended up bleeding to death.” Malcolm’s most vivid memory of his father's funeral was his mother's hysteria, and later her difficulty in coping with what had happened. He believed that he and his siblings “adjusted” to the challenging reality of Early Little’s death better than Louise did. Nevertheless, the children were deeply disturbed by swirling rumors about their father’s violent death. Philbert, then eight years old, was told that “somebody had hit my father from behind with a car and knocked him under the streetcar. Then I learned later that somebody had shoved him under that car.”

A forensic reconstruction of Earl Little’s death suggests that the story Philbert had heard may have been true. Before leaving home on the night of his death, Earl had told his wife that he was traveling to North Lansing. However, according to a local newspaper, his body was discovered at the intersection of Detroit Street and East Michigan Avenue, one block east of the town’s boundary line. Few blacks lived in the area. The odd location of the body suggests the possibility that Earl was struck by a car or perhaps bludgeoned in one location, and then moved under a streetcar at another site, making it appear to have been a terrible accident. Earl Little’s possible murder may have served the same purpose that lynchings did in the South—to terrorize local blacks and to suppress their acts of resistance.

Louise harbored no doubts that her husband had been murdered, possibly by the Black Legion. Although she identified Earl’s body, she does not appear to have challenged the police report or otherwise tried to search out the truth. Malcolm remained throughout his life both haunted by his father's tragic end and ambivalent about how it occurred. In 1963, while visiting Michigan State University, he described Earl’s death as accidental, yet the following year cast his father as a martyr for black liberation.

With their patriarch’s sudden death, the Little family was plunged into an abyss of poverty. Earl held a one-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, which was now paid to Louise, but she was not allowed to keep the money for long. The news of her husband’s death brought a host of irate petitioners to the probate court, demanding payment for past services. Local physician U. S. Bagley, for one, came asking for ninety-nine dollars, claiming he had assisted at the births of Louise and Earl’s youngest children, Yvonne and Wesley, in addition to his household visits to treat Philbert for pneumonia. Dentist bills, rental fees, roof repairs—all of these added up; even the funeral company was still owed close to four hundred dollars, including burial expenses in Georgia. Almost none of the petitioners received anything, because the estate was worth only a thousand dollars—the equivalent of about $15,000 in 2010. Louise had petitioned the court for a “widow’s allowance,” requesting eighteen dollars per month “for the maintenance of myself and the family.” Nearly $750 from the insurance payment went to cover the widow’s allowance. After paying the court fees and the probate administrator, the policy payout was almost exhausted.

At first, Louise fought desperately to maintain stability. “My mother had a lot of pride,” Yvonne Little Woodward, Malcolm’s younger sister, would recall. “She crocheted gloves for people. . . . She rented out garden space, she sharecropped with the man that would come and rent garden space. We had a dump behind our house—she rented that out.” Hilda, almost ten years old, became the surrogate mother, taking care of her younger siblings while finding occasional employment as a babysitter. Wilfred used his father's rifle to hunt game for the family’s suppers. The only children who apparently failed to rally were Philbert and Malcolm, who took no part in the household obligations. After school, at Lansing’s Pleasant Grove Elementary, the two boys would hang out with local whites “to create mischief,” as Philbert later admitted. On one such occasion, they deliberately moved the outhouse of a neighbor who routinely “used to give them a bad time,” one of Malcolm’s childhood friends, Cyril McGuine, recalled. “When he came out to chase them, all of a sudden he just dropped out of sight with a scream and fell into the hole that they had prepared.”

Even at seven, Malcolm had a knack for avoiding hard work. Yvonne recalled her mother sending a group of the children out to work in the garden. Almost immediately, “Malcolm would start talking, and we would start working. . . . I can remember Malcolm lying under a tree with a straw in his mouth. [He] was telling these stories, but we were so happy to be around him that we worked.” Wilfred noticed that his younger brother already possessed an unusual self-confidence. “When a group [of children] would start playing, [Malcolm] would end up being the one that was leading.” When the local white children played in the woods behind the Littles’ property, “Malcolm would say, ‘Let’s go play Robin Hood.’ Well, we’d go back there, and Robin Hood was Malcolm. And these white kids would go along with it—a Black Robin Hood!”

Already difficult, things grew more frustrating when Louise was forced to contend with Michigan’s bedeviling welfare bureaucracy. The state had passed its first comprehensive pension law in 1913, providing financial support for poor children whose mothers were judged suitable guardians. This established a statewide standard of three dollars per week per child, but in reality—the result of a 1931 state law that separated “poor relief” from the administration of “mothers’ pensions”—the average weekly payment was no more than $1.75. In some cases, women who headed households with six or more children received payments covering only three. Recipients had few rights. Unlike those on poor relief, who were required to live in a particular county for a full year before they could become eligible, mothers could move throughout the state without surrendering benefits. However, because the pensions were administered by counties, local administrators and probate judges exercised considerable discretion. Although state law required equal access for African-American mothers, discrimination based on marital status, race, and other factors was widespread. Louise’s pension payments never covered even basic needs. “The checks helped,” Malcolm admitted, “but they weren’t enough, as many as there were.”

The year 1934 was especially trying. Michigan’s welfare department was constantly investigating the Little household, and Louise just as constantly faced down its officers, protesting at the “meddling in our lives.” Hunger was the family’s constant companion, and occasionally Malcolm and his siblings became dizzy from malnourishment. By the fall, a subtle psychological shift had taken place; the Garveyite sense of pride and self-sufficiency began to fade. The Littles started to see themselves as victims of the state’s bureaucracy.

Louise desperately continued to seek ways to keep her family afloat. She was careful to maintain a household routine that would nurture order and a sense of family. At the end of the day, they “would all gather around the stove,” said Wilfred, “and my mother would tell us stories. Or we would sing our alphabets, or we would sing our math, and then she taught us French. . . . And then she would tell us stories about our ancestry.” For Louise, the family increasingly became her only enduring source of support. The small network of Garveyites with whom she and her husband had worked had unraveled during the Great Depression. She solicited help from members of a nearby Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but their assistance came with the price of assimilation. With Wilfred, she read through the Adventists’ many pamphlets, modifying the family’s food intake to conform to what the church taught. This included a ban on pork and rabbit, two staples of their diet.

At school, Malcolm’s stigmatization as a child on relief affected him deeply; Michigan’s schools were integrated, and it was difficult enough to be black, much less black and on welfare. Before long he began stealing food from local stores, both as a way of acting out and to satisfy his hunger. It was still far from enough. For days at a time, when the Littles had no food, Malcolm started showing up around suppertime at the home of their neighbors Thornton and Mabel Gohanna. The Gohannas “were nice, older people, and great churchgoers. I had watched them lead the jumping and shouting when my father preached,” Malcolm recalled. Their household always included a number of interesting drifters and the indigent who needed care. The Gohannas were soon lavishing attention on the growing boy. After Malcolm had been caught stealing several times, his petty thievery became a contentious issue for county welfare workers, who approached the Gohanna family to see if they were willing to take him in as a foster child. The Gohannas consented. “My mother threw a fit, though,” Malcolm related.

The fabric of life seemed to be worn increasingly threadbare by daily events, large and small. Yvonne recalled an incident when her mother had managed to scrape enough together to buy some new bedroom furniture. One day soon afterward, a truck pulled up in front of her home, and the driver explained that he had been ordered to return the purchases to the store. “My mother kept saying, ‘I have paid this. I have the receipt,’” but the driver refused to listen. The next day, Louise went downtown to rectify the problem, and the furniture was returned to her. Still, the incident rattled her, as it compounded the stress of poverty by challenging her efforts to keep up appearances in front of her white neighbors. “How many of them saw [the furniture] come back?” Yvonne questioned. “They didn’t know that [it] was paid for. The store apologized, but look what they put my mother through.” In another incident, someone killed the family’s dog. Wilfred explained, “They shot [it] just for the purpose of seeing to it that you don’t have a dog. I guess, just to give you a hard time.” Local whites, with few exceptions, treated Louise and her children with contempt. “When they would come to the house,” Wilfred recalled, “they would speak to my mother in a way where they were trying to get her to kneel . . . because she was independent.”

Louise was not yet forty and, despite these hardships, remained an extremely attractive woman. Sometime in 1935 or 1936, she began dating a local African American. Malcolm described the man’s physical appearance as similar to his father's, noting that Louise would brighten whenever her suitor came by. The man—never identified in Malcolm’s account—was selfemployed and possessed modest resources. His presence in their lives offered a glimpse of promise: only the security of marriage could guarantee that welfare officers would keep out of the Little family’s lives. For a time a proposal seemed likely; then, in late 1937, Louise became pregnant with the man’s child. Once he discovered she was pregnant, Malcolm recalled, he “jilted my mother suddenly.”

It was either just before or during the pregnancy, when Malcolm was eleven or twelve, that welfare workers placed him in the Gohannas’ home. He resisted the move, but Louise could no longer look after the whole household. “We children,” Malcolm reflected, “watched our anchor giving way.” He was unhappy at first, but put on a good face when his transfer to his foster neighbors was made official: the new arrangement eased the financial burden on his mother, and he was close enough to visit frequently. The Gohanna family, out of its religious convictions, was also known for welcoming ex-convicts into their home. Perhaps it was here that the genesis of Malcolm’s later strategy of “fishing” for religious converts among the homeless and former prisoners was born.

As the winter of 1938 turned into spring, the Littles’ slender hopes disintegrated. Physically and psychologically, Louise grew weaker. That summer, she gave birth to her eighth child, Robert. Several weeks later, in the fall, Malcolm was enrolled in West Grove Junior High School in Lansing. By all indications, he performed well academically and easily established friendships with other children, black and white. At home, though, the new baby had pushed Louise beyond her breaking point. Days before Christmas, police officers found her trudging barefoot along a snow-covered road, her new child clutched to her chest. She appeared traumatized and did not know who or where she was. In early January 1939, a physician certified that she was “an insane person and her condition is such as to require care and treatment in an institution.” On January 31, 1939, Louise was received at Kalamazoo State Hospital, accompanied by Sheriff Frank Clone, Deputy Sheriff Ray Pinchet, and Wilfred Little. She would be confined to the state hospital’s grounds for the next twenty-four years.

Michigan’s mental health facilities were primitive by the era’s standards, in some cases no better than old-fashioned asylums where the mentally ill were warehoused. Their wards were frequently overcrowded, and recovery rates remained low. Kalamazoo State Hospital had been established in 1859 as the Michigan Asylum for the Insane, and by the time Louise arrived, it wore its age plainly; throughout the 1930s, its administrators complained of chronic understaffing, which contributed to neglect and improper diagnoses. A 1903 Michigan law on insanity had mandated that asylums “use every proper means to furnish employment to such patients as may be benefited by regular labor suited to their capacity and strength.” Beginning in the 1920s, female patients were routinely assigned to weave rugs and construct mattresses in the asylum’s industrial building. Elsewhere, women patients cooked, ironed and mended clothing, and kept house. Louise was expected to carry out such tasks. Given her diagnosis of severe depression, her treatment at the time seems likely to have included electroconvulsive therapy. Whatever the treatment, it offered her little relief, and she drifted in and out of a dazed state for years.

Malcolm would rarely visit his mother, and seldom spoke of her: he was deeply ashamed of her illness. The experience etched into him the conviction that all women were, by nature, weak and unreliable. He may also have believed that his mother's love affair and subsequent out-of-wedlock pregnancy were, in some way, a betrayal of his father.