The autobiography of Malcolm X (29 page)

He told us, and showed us, how his teachings of the true knowledge of ourselves would lift up the black man from the bottom of the white man's societyand place the black man where he had begun, at the top of civilization.

Concluding, pausing for breath, he called my name. It was like an electrical shock. Not looking at me directly, he asked me to stand.

He told them that I was just out of prison. He said how “strong” I had been while in prison. “Every day,” he said, “for years, Brother Malcolm has written a letter from prison to me. And I have written to him as often as I could.”

Standing there, feeling the eyes of the two hundred Muslims upon me, I heard him make a parable about me.

When God bragged about how faithful Job was, said Elijah Muhammad, the devil said only God's hedge around Job kept Job so faithful. “Remove that protective hedge,” the devil told God, “and I will make Job curse you to your face.”

The devil could claim that, hedged in prison, I had just used Islam, Mr. Muhammad said. But the devil would say that now, out of prison, I would return to my drinking, smoking, dope, and life of crime.

“Well, now, our good brother Malcolm's hedge is removed and we will see how he does,” Mr. Muhammad said. “I believe that he is going to remain faithful.”

And Allah blessed me to remain true, firm and strong in my faith in Islam, despite many severe trials to my faith. And even when events produced a crisis between Elijah Muhammad and me, I told him at the beginning of the crisis, with all the sincerity I had in me, that I still believed in him more strongly than he believed in himself.

Mr. Muhammad and I are not together today only because of envy and jealousy. I had more faith in Elijah Muhammad than I could ever have in any other man upon this earth.

You will remember my having said that, when I was in prison, Mr. Muhammad would be my brother Wilfred's house guest whenever he visited Detroit Temple Number One. Every Muslim said that never could you do as much for Mr. Muhammad as he would do for you in return. That Sunday, after the meeting, he invited our entire family group and Minister Lemuel Hassan to be his guests for dinner that evening, at his new home.

Mr. Muhammad said that his children and his followers had insisted that he move into this larger, better eighteen-room house in Chicago at 4847 Woodlawn Avenue. They had just moved in that week, I believe. When we arrived, Mr. Muhammad showed us where he had just been painting. I had to restrain my impulse to run and bring a chair for the Messenger of Allah. Instead, as I had heard he would do, he was worrying about my comfort.

We had hoped to hear his wisdom during the dinner, but instead he encouraged us to talk. I sat thinking of how our Detroit Temple more or less just sat and awaited Allah to bring converts-and, beyond that, of the millions of black people all over America, who never had heard of the teachings that could stir and wake and resurrect the black man. . . and there at Mr. Muhammad's table, I found my tongue. I have always been one to speak my mind.

During a conversational lull, I asked Mr. Muhammad how many Muslims were supposed to be in our Temple Number One in Detroit.

He said, “There are supposed to be thousands.” “Yes, sir,” I said. “Sir, what is your opinion of the best way of getting thousands there?”

“Go after the young people,” he said. “Once you get them, the older ones will follow through shame.”

I made up my mind that we were going to follow that advice.

Back in Detroit, I talked with my brother Wilfred. I offered my services to our Temple's Minister, Lemuel Hassan. He shared my determination that we should apply Mr. Muhammad's formula in a recruitment drive. Beginning that day, every evening, straight from work at the furniture store, I went doing what we Muslims later came to call “fishing.” I knew the thinking and the language of ghetto streets: “My man, let me pull your coat to something-”

My application had, of course, been made and during this time I received from Chicago my “X.” The Muslim's “X” symbolized the true African family name that he never could know. For me, my

“X” replaced the white slavemaster name of “Little” which some blue-eyed devil named Little had imposed upon my paternal forebears. The receipt of my “X” meant that forever after in the nation of Islam, I would be known as Malcolm X. Mr. Muhammad taught that we would keep this “X” until God Himself returned and gave us a Holy Name from His own mouth.

Recruit as I would in the Detroit ghetto bars, in the poolrooms, and on the corners, I found my poor, ignorant, brainwashed black brothers mostly too deaf, dumb, and blind, mentally, morally, and spiritually, to respond. It angered me that only now and then would one display even a little curiosity about the teachings that would resurrect the black man.

These few I would almost beg to visit Temple Number One at our next meeting. But then not half of those who agreed to come would actually show up.

Gradually, enough were made interested, though, that each month, a few more automobiles lengthened our caravans to Temple Two in Chicago. But even after seeing and hearing Elijah Muhammad in person, only a few of the interested visitors would apply by formal letter to Mr. Muhammad to be accepted for Nation of Islam membership.

With a few months of plugging away, however, our storefront Temple One about tripled its membership. And that so deeply pleased Mr. Muhammad that he paid us the honor of a personal visit.

Mr. Muhammad gave me warm praise when Minister Lemuel Hassan told how hard I had labored in the cause of Islam.

Our caravans grew. I remember with what pride we led twenty-five automobiles to Chicago. And each time we went, we were honored with dinner at the home of Elijah Muhammad. He was interested in my potential, I could tell from things he would say.

And I worshiped him.

In early 1953, 1 left the furniture store. I earned a little better weekly pay check working at the Gar Wood factory in Detroit, where big garbage truck bodies were made. I cleaned up behind the welders each time they finished another truck body.

Mr. Muhammad was saying at his dining table by this time that one of his worst needs was more young men willing to work as hard as they would have to in order to bear the responsibilities of his ministers. He was saying that the teachings should be spreading further than they had, and temples needed to be established in other cities.

It simply had never occurred to me that / might be a minister. I had never felt remotely qualified to directly represent Mr. Muhammad. If someone had asked me about becoming a minister, I would have been astonished, and told them I was happy and willing to serve Mr. Muhammad in the lowliest capacity.

I don't know if Mr. Muhammad suggested it or if our Temple One Minister Lemuel Hassan on his own decision encouraged me to address our assembled brothers and sisters. I know that I testified to what Mr. Muhammad's teachings had done for me: “If I told you the life I have lived, you would find it hard to believe me. . . . When I say something about the white man, I am not talking about someone I don't know. . . .”

Soon after that, Minister Lemuel Hassan urged me to address the brothers and sisters with an extemporaneous lecture. I was uncertain, and hesitant-but at least I had debated in prison, and I tried my best. (Of course, I can't remember exactly what I said, but I do know that in my beginning efforts my favorite subject was Christianity and the horrors of slavery, where I felt well-equipped from so much reading in prison. )

“My brothers and sisters, our white slavemaster's Christian religion has taught us black people here in the wilderness of North America that we will sprout wings when we die and fly up into the sky where God will have for us a special place called heaven. This is white man's Christian religion used to _brainwash_ us black people! We have _accepted_ it! We have _embraced_ it! We have _believed_ it! We have _practiced_ it! And while we are doing all of that, for himself, this blue-eyed devil has _twisted_ his Christianity, to keep his _foot_ on our backs. . . to keep our eyes fixed on the pie in the sky andheaven in the hereafter. . . while _he_ enjoys _his_ heaven right _here_ . . . on _this earth_ . . . in _this life_.”

Today when thousands of Muslims and others have been audiences out before me, when audiences of millions have been beyond radio and television microphones, I'm sure I rarely feel as much electricity as was then generated in me by the upturned faces of those seventy-five or a hundred Muslims, plus other curious visitors, sitting there in our storefront temple with the squealing of pigs filtering in from the slaughterhouse just outside.

In the summer of 1953-all praise is due to Allah-I was named Detroit Temple Number One's Assistant Minister.

Every day after work, I walked, “fishing” for potential converts in the Detroit black ghetto. I saw the African features of my black brothers and sisters whom the devilish white man had brainwashed. I saw the hair as mine had been for years, conked by cooking it with lye until it lay limp, looking straight like the white man's hair. Time and again Mr. Muhammad's teachings were rebuffed and even ridiculed . . . .“Aw, man, get out of my face, you niggers are crazy!” My head would reel sometimes, with mingled anger and pity for my poor blind black brothers. I couldn't wait for the next time our Minister Lemuel Hassan would let me speak:

“We didn't land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters-Plymouth Rock landed on _us!_” . . . "Give _all_ you can to help Messenger Elijah Muhammad's independence program for the black man! . . . This white man always has controlled us black people by keeping us running to him begging, 'Please, lawdy, please, Mr. White Man, boss, would you push me off another crumb down from your table that's sagging with riches . . . .'

". . . my _beautiful_, black brothers and sisters! And when we say 'black,' wemean everything not white, brothers and sisters! Because _look_ at your skins! We're all black to the white man, but we're a thousand and one different colors. Turn around, _look_ at each other! What shade of black African polluted by devil white man are you? You see me-well, in the streets they used to call me Detroit Red. Yes! Yes, that raping, red-headed devil was my _grandfather_! That close, yes! My _mother's_ father! She didn't like to speak of it, can you blame her? She said she never laid eyes on him! She was _glad_ for that! I'm _glad_ for her! If I could drain away _his_ blood that pollutes _my_ body, and pollutes my complexion, I'd do it! Because I hate every drop of the rapist's blood that's in me!

"And it's not just me, it's _all_ of us! During slavery, _think_ of it, it was a _rare_ one of our black grandmothers, our great-grandmothers and our great-great-grandmothers who escaped the white rapist slavemaster. That rapist slavemaster who emasculated the black man . . . with threats, with fear . . . until even today the black man lives with fear of the white man in his heart! Lives even today still under the heel of the white man!

"_Think_ of it-think of that black slave man filled with fear and dread, hearing the screams of his wife, his mother, his daughter being _taken_-in the barn, the kitchen, in the bushes! _Think_ of it, my dear brothers and sisters! _Think_ of hearing wives, mothers, daughters, being _raped_! And you were too filled with _fear_ of the rapist to do anything about it! And his vicious, animal attacks' offspring, this white man named things like 'mulatto' and 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' and all those other things that he has called us-you and me-when he is not calling us '_nigger_'!

“Turn around and look at each other, brothers and sisters, and _think_ of this! You and me, polluted all these colors-and this devil has the arrogance and the gall to think we, his victims, should _love_ him!”

I would become so choked up that sometimes I would walk in the streets until late into the night. Sometimes I would speak to no one for hours, thinking to myself about what the white man had done to our poor people here in America.

***

At the Gar Wood factory where I worked, one day the supervisor came, looking nervous. He said that a man in the office was waiting to see me.

The white man standing in there said, “I'm from the F.B.I.” He flipped open-that way they do, to shock you-his little folded black leather case containing his identification. He told me to come with him. He didn't say for what, or why.

I went with him. They wanted to know, at their office, why hadn't I registered for the Korean War draft?

“I just got out of prison,” I said. “I didn't know you took anybody with prison records.”

They really believed I thought ex-convicts weren't supposed to register. They asked a lot of questions. I was glad they didn't ask if I intended to put on the white man's uniform, because I didn't. They just took it for granted that I would. They told me they weren't going to send me to jail for failing to register, that they were going to give me a break, but that I would have to register immediately.

So I went straight from there to the draft board. When they gave me a form to fill out, I wrote in the appropriate places that I was a Muslim, and that I was a conscientious objector. I turned in the form. This middle-aged, bored-acting devil who scanned it looked out from under his eyes at me. He got up and went into another office, obviously to consult someone over him. After a while, he came out and motioned for me to go in there.