The autobiography of Malcolm X (14 page)

All of it was Lansing's West Side or Roxbury's South End magnified a thousand times. Little basement dance halls with “For Rent” signs on them. People offering you little cards advertising “rent-raising parties.” I went to one of these-thirty or forty Negroes sweating, eating, drinking, dancing, and gamblingin a jammed, beat-up apartment, the record player going full blast, the fried chicken or chitlins with potato salad and collard greens for a dollar a plate, and cans of beer or shots of liquor for fifty cents. 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 . . . This paper represents the only political party that ever ran a black man for the Vice Presidency of the United States . . . Just want you to read, won't take but a little of your time . . . Who do you think fought the hardest to help free those Scottsboro boys?” Things I overheard among Negroes when the salesmen were around let me know that the paper somehow was tied in with the Russians, but to my sterile mind in those early days, it didn't mean much; the radio broadcasts and the newspapers were then full of our-ally-Russia, a strong, muscular people, peasants, with their backs to the wall helping America to fight Hitler and Mussolini.

But New York was heaven to me. And Harlem was Seventh Heaven! I hung around in Small's and the Braddock bar so much that the bartenders began to pour a shot of bourbon, my favorite brand of it, when they saw me walk in the door. And the steady customers in both places, the hustlers in Small's and the entertainers in the Braddock, began to call me “Red,” a natural enough nickname in view of my bright red conk. I now had my conk done in Boston at the shop of Abbott and Fogey; it was the best conk shop on the East Coast, according to the musical greats who had recommended it to me.

My friends now included musicians like Duke Ellington's great drummer, Sonny Greer, and that great personality with the violin, Ray Nance. He's the one who used to stag in that wild “scat” style: “Blip-blip-de-blop-de-blam-blam-” And people like Cootie Williams, and Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson, who'd kid me about his conk-he had nothing up there but skin. He was hitting the heights then with his song, “Hey, PrettyMama, Chunk Me In Your Big Brass Bed.” I also knew Sy Oliver; he was married to a red-complexioned girl, and they lived up on Sugar Hill; Sy did a lot of arranging for Tommy Dorsey in those days. His most famous tune, I believe, was “Yes, Indeed!”

The regular “Yankee Clipper” sandwich man, when he came back, was put on another train. He complained about seniority, but my sales record made them placate him some other way. The waiters and cooks had begun to call me “Sandwich Red.”

By that time, they had a laughing bet going that I wasn't going to last, sales or not, because I had so rapidly become such an uncouth, wild young Negro. Profanity had become my language. I'd even curse customers, especially servicemen; I couldn't stand them. I remember that once, when some passenger complaints had gotten me a warning, and I wanted to be careful, I was working down the aisle and a big, beefy, red-faced cracker soldier got up in front of me, so drunk he was weaving, and announced loud enough that everybody in the car heard him, “I'm going to fight you, nigger.” I remember the tension. I laughed and told him, “Sure, I'll fight, but you've got too many clothes on.” He had on a big Army overcoat. He took that off, and I kept laughing and said he still had on too many. I was able to keep that cracker stripping off clothes until he stood there drunk with nothing on from his pants up, and the whole car was laughing at him, and some other soldiers got him out of the way. I went on. I never would forget that-that I couldn't have whipped that white man as badly with a club as I had with my mind.

Many of the New Haven Line's cooks and waiters still in railroad service today will remember old Pappy Cousins. He was the “Yankee Clipper” steward, a white man, of course, from Maine. (Negroes had been in dining car service as much as thirty and forty years, but in those days there were no Negro stewardson the New Haven Line.) Anyway, Pappy Cousins loved whisky, and he liked everybody, even me. A lot of passenger complaints about me, Pappy had let slide. He'd ask some of the old Negroes working with me to try and calm me down.

“Man, you can't tell him nothing!” they'd exclaim. And they couldn't. At home in Roxbury, they would see me parading with Sophia, dressed in my wild zoot suits. Then I'd come to work, loud and wild and half-high on liquor or reefers, and I'd stay that way, jamming sandwiches at people until we got to New York. Off the train, I'd go through that Grand Central Station afternoon rush- hour crowd, and many white people simply stopped in their tracks to watch me pass. The drape and the cut of a zoot suit showed to the best advantage if you were tall-and I was over six feet. My conk was fire-red. I was really a clown, but my ignorance made me think I was “sharp.” My knob-toed, orange-colored “kick-up” shoes were nothing but Florsheims, the ghetto's Cadillac of shoes in those days. (Some shoe companies made these ridiculous styles for sale only in the black ghettoes where ignorant Negroes like me would pay the big-name price for something that we associated with being rich.) And then, between Small's Paradise, the Braddock Hotel, and other places-as much as my twenty-or twenty-five-dollar pay would allow, I drank liquor, smoked marijuana, painted the Big Apple red with increasing numbers of friends, and finally in Mrs. Fisher's rooming house I got a few hours of sleep before the “Yankee Clipper” rolled again.

***

It was inevitable that I was going to be fired sooner or later. What finally finished me was an angry letter from a passenger. The conductors added their-bit, telling how many verbal complaints they'd had, and how many warnings I'd been given.

But I didn't care, because in those wartime days such jobs as I could aspire to were going begging. When the New Haven Line paid me off, I decided it would be nice to make a trip to visit my brothers and sisters in Lansing. I had accumulated some railroad free-travel privileges.

None of them back in Michigan could believe it was me. Only my oldest brother, Wilfred, wasn't there; he was away at Wilberforce University in Ohio studying a trade. But Philbert and Hilda were working in Lansing. Reginald, the one who had always looked up to me, had gotten big enough to fake his age, and he was planning soon to enter the merchant marine. Yvonne, Wesley and Robert were in school.

My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars. I caused a minor automobile collision; one driver stopped to gape at me, and the driver behind bumped into him. My appearance staggered the older boys I had once envied; I'd stick out my hand, saying “Skin me, daddy-o!” My stories about the Big Apple, my reefers keeping me sky- high-wherever I went, I was the life of the party. “My man! . . . Gimme some skin!”

The only thing that brought me down to earth was the visit to the state hospital in Kalamazoo. My mother sort of half-sensed who I was.

And I looked up Shorty's mother. I knew he'd be touched by my doing that. She was an old lady, and she was glad to hear from Shorty through me. I told her that Shorty was doing fine and one day was going to be a great leader of his own band. She asked me to tell Shorty that she wished he'd write her, and send her something.

And I dropped over to Mason to see Mrs. Swerlin, the woman at the detention home who had kept me those couple of years. Her mouth flew open when shecame to the door. My sharkskin gray “Cab Calloway” zoot suit, the long, narrow, knob-toed shoes, and the four-inch-brimmed pearl-gray hat over my conked fire-red hair; it was just about too much for Mrs. Swerlin. She just managed to pull herself together enough to invite me in. Between the way I looked and my style of talk, I made her so nervous and uncomfortable that we were both glad when I left.

The night before I left, a dance was given in the Lincoln School gymnasium. (I've since learned that in a strange city, to find the Negroes without asking where, you just check in the phone book for a “Lincoln School.” It's always located in the segregated black ghetto-at least it was, in those days.) I'd left Lansing unable to dance, but now I went around the gymnasium floor flinging little girls over my shoulders and hips, showing my most startling steps. Several times, the little band nearly stopped, and nearly everybody left the floor, watching with their eyes like saucers. That night, I even signed autographs-“Harlem Red”-and I left Lansing shocked and rocked.

Back in New York, stone broke and without any means of support, I realized that the railroad was all that I actually knew anything about. So I went over to the Seaboard Line's hiring office. The railroads needed men so badly that all I had to do was tell them I had worked on the New Haven, and two days later I was on the “Silver Meteor” to St. Petersburg and Miami. Renting pillows and keeping the coaches clean and the white passengers happy, I made about as much as I had with sandwiches.

I soon ran afoul of the Florida cracker who was assistant conductor. Back in New York, they told me to find another job. But that afternoon, when I walked into Small's Paradise, one of the bartenders, knowing how much I loved New York, called me aside and said that if I were wilting to quit the railroad, I might be able to replace a day waiter who was about to go into the Army.

The owner of the bar was Ed Small. He and his brother Charlie were inseparable, and I guess Harlem didn't have two more popular and respected people. They knew I was a railroad man, which, for a waiter, was the best kind of recommendation. Charlie Small was the one I actually talked with in their office. I was afraid he'd want to wait to ask some of his old-timer railroad friends for their opinion. Charlie wouldn't have gone for anybody he heard was wild. But he decided on the basis of his own impression, having seen me in his place so many times, sitting quietly, almost in awe, observing the hustling set. I told him, when he asked, that I'd never been in trouble with the police-and up to then, that was the truth. Charlie told me their rules for employees: no lateness, no laziness, no stealing, no kind of hustling off any customers, especially men in uniform. And I was hired.

This was in 1942.I had just turned seventeen. ***

With Small's practically in the center of everything, waiting tables there was Seventh Heaven seven times over. Charlie Small had no need to caution me against being late; I was so anxious to be there, I'd arrive an hour early. I relieved the morning waiter. As far as he was concerned, mine was the slowest, most no-tips time of day, and sometimes he'd stick around most of that hour teaching me things, for he didn't want to see me fired.

Thanks to him, I learned very quickly dozens of little things that could really ingratiate a new

waiter with the cooks and bartenders. Both of these, depending on how they liked the waiter, could make his job miserable or pleasant-and I meant to become indispensable. Inside of a week, I had succeeded with both. And the customers who had seen me among them around the bar, recognizing me now in the waiter's jacket, were pleased and surprised; and they couldn't have been more friendly. And I couldn't have been more solicitous. “Another drink? . . . Right away, sir . . . Would you like dinner? . . . It's very good . . . Could I get you a menu, sir? . . . Well, maybe a sandwich?”

Not only the bartenders and cooks, who knew everything about everything, it seemed to me, but even the customers, also began to school me, in little conversations by the bar when I wasn't busy. Sometimes a customer would talk to me as he ate. Sometimes I'd have long talks- absorbing everything-with the real old-timers, who had been around Harlem since Negroes first came there.

That, in fact, was one of my biggest surprises: that Harlem hadn't always been a community of Negroes.

It first had been a Dutch settlement, I learned. Then began the massive waves of poor and half- starved and ragged immigrants from Europe, arriving with everything they owned in the world in bags and sacks on their backs. The Germans came first; the Dutch edged away from them, and Harlem became all German.

Then came the Irish, running from the potato famine. The Germans ran, looking down their noses at the Irish, who took over Harlem. Next, the Italians; same thing-the Irish ran from them. The Italians had Harlem when the Jews came down the gangplanks-and then the Italians left.

Today, all these same immigrants' descendants are running as hard as they can to escape the descendants of the Negroes who helped to unload the immigrant ships.

I was staggered when old-timer Harlemites told me that while this immigrant musical chairs game had been going on, Negroes had been in New York City since 1683, before any of them came, and had been ghettoed all over the city.They had first been in the Wall Street area; then they were pushed into Greenwich Village. The next shove was up to the Pennsylvania Station area. And men, the last stop before Harlem, the black ghetto was concentrated around 52nd Street, which is how 52nd Street got the Swing Street name and reputation that lasted long after the Negroes were gone.

Then, in 1910, a Negro real estate man somehow got two or three Negro families into one Jewish Harlem apartment house. The Jews flew from that house, then from that block, and more Negroes came in to fill their apartments. Then whole blocks of Jews ran, and still more Negroes came uptown, until in a short time, Harlem was like it still is today-virtually all black.

Then, early in the 1920's music and entertainment sprang up as an industry in Harlem, supported by downtown whites who poured uptown every night. It all started about the time a tough young New Orleans cornet man named Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong climbed off a train in New York wearing clodhopper policemen's shoes, and started playing with Fletcher Henderson. In 1925, Small's Paradise had opened with crowds all across Seventh Avenue; in 1926, the great Cotton Club, where Duke Ellington's band would play for five years; also in 1926 the Savoy Ballroom opened, a whole block front on Lenox Avenue, with a two-hundred-foot dance floor under spotlights before two bandstands and a disappearing rear stage.