The autobiography of Malcolm X (57 page)

It was he who introduced me to two of my friends today, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln who was at the time writing the book _The Black Muslims in America_, and Louis Lomax who was then writing various articles about the Muslims. Malcolm X deeply respected the care and depth which Dr. Lincoln was putting into his research. Lomax, he admired for his ferreting ear and eye for hot news. “If I see that rascal Lomax running somewhere, I'll grab my hat and get behind him,” Malcolm X said once, “because I know he's onto something.” Author James Baldwin Malcolm X also admired. “He's so brilliant he confuses the white man with words on paper.” And another time, “He's upset the white man more than anybody except The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.”

Malcolm X had very little good to say of Negro ministers, very possibly because most of them had attacked the Black Muslims. Excepting reluctant admiration of Dr. Martin Luther

King, I heard him speak well of only one other, The Reverend Eugene L. Callender of Harlem's large Presbyterian Church of the Master. “He's a preacher, but he's a fighter for the black man,” said Malcolm X. I later learned that somewhere the direct, forthright Reverend Callender had privately cornered Malcolm X and had read him the riot act about his general attacks upon the Negro clergy. Malcolm X also admired The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, in hisCongressman political role: “I'd think about retiring if the black man had ten like him in Washington.” He had similar feelings about the N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, now a New York State Assemblyman, Percy Sutton, and later Sutton was retained as his personal attorney. Among Negro educators, of whom Malcolm X met many in his college and university lecturing, I never heard him speak well of any but one, Dr. Kenneth B. Clark. “There's a black man with brains gone to bed,” Malcolm X told me once, briefly lapsing into his old vernacular. He had very distinct reservations about Negro professional intelligentsia as a category. They were the source from which most of the Black Muslims' attackers came. It was for this reason that some of his most bristling counter-attacks against “these so-called educated Uncle Thomases, Ph.D.” were flung out at his audiences at Negro institutions of higher learning.

Where I witnessed the Malcolm X who was happiest and most at ease among members of our own race was when sometimes I chanced to accompany him on what he liked to call “my little daily rounds” around the streets of Harlem, among the Negroes that he said the “so-called black leaders” spoke of “as black masses statistics.” On these tours, Malcolm X generally avoided the arterial 125th Street in Harlem; he plied the side streets, especially in those areas which were thickest with what he described as “the black man down in the gutter where I came from,” the poverty-ridden with a high incidence of dope addicts and winos.

Malcolm X here indeed was a hero. Striding along the sidewalks, he bathed all whom he met in the boyish grin, and his conversation with any who came up was quiet and pleasant. “It's just what the white devil wants you to do, brother,” he might tell a wino, “he wants you to get drunk so he will have an excuse to put a club up beside your head.” Or I remember once he halted at a stoop to greet several older women: “Sisters, let me ask you something,” he said conversationally, “have you ever known _one_ white man who either didn't do something to you, or take something from you?” One among that audienceexclaimed after a moment, “I sure _ain't_!” whereupon all of them joined in laughter and we walked on with Malcolm X waving back to cries of “He's _right_!”

I remember that once in the early evening we rounded a corner to hear a man, shabbily dressed, haranguing a small crowd around his speaking platform of an upturned oblong wooden box with an American flag alongside. “I don't respect or believe in this damn flag, it's there because I can't hold a public meeting without it unless I want the white man to put me in jail. And that's what I'm up here to talk about-these crackers getting rich off the blood and bones of your and my people!” Said Malcolm X, grinning, “He's _working_!”

Malcolm X rarely exchanged any words with those Negro men with shiny, “processed” hair without giving them a nudge. Very genially: “Ahhhh, brother, the white devil has taught you to hate yourself so much that you put hot lye in your hair to make it look more like his hair.”

I remember another stoopful of women alongside the door of a small grocery store where I had gone for something, leaving Malcolm X talking across the street. As I came out of the store, one woman was excitedly describing for the rest a Malcolm X lecture she had heard in Mosque Number 7 one Sunday. “Oooooh, he _burnt_ that white man, burnt him _up_, chile . . . chile, he told us we descendin' from black kings an' queens-Lawd, I didn't know it!” Another woman asked, “You believe that?” and the first vehemently responded, “Yes, I _do_!”

And I remember a lone, almost ragged guitarist huddled on a side street playing and singing just for himself when he glanced up and instantly recognized the oncoming, striding figure. “Huh- _ho_!” the guitarist exclaimed, and jumping up, he snapped into a mock salute. “My _man_!”

Malcolm X loved it. And they loved him. There was no question about it: whether he was standing tall beside a street lamp chatting with winos, or whether he was firing his radio and television broadsides to unseen millions of people, or whether he was titillating small audiences of sophisticated whites with his small-talk such as, “My hobby is stirring up Negroes, that's spelled _knee_-grows the way you liberals pronounce it”-the man had charisma, and he had _power_. And I was not the only one who at various tunes marveled at how he could continue to receive such an awesome amount of international personal publicity and still season liberally practically everything he said, both in public and privately, with credit and hosannas to “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Often I made side notes to myself about this. I kept, in effect, a double-entry set of notebooks. Once, noting me switching from one to the other, Malcolm X curiously asked me what for? I told him some reason, but not that one notebook was things he said for his book and the other was for my various personal observations about him; very likely he would have become self-conscious. “You must have written a million words by now,” said Malcolm X. “Probably,” I said. “This white man's crazy,” he mused. “I'll prove it to you. Do you think I'd publicize somebody knocking me like I do him?”

***

“Look, tell me the truth,” Malcolm X said to me one evening, “you travel around. Have you heard anything?”

Truthfully, I told him I didn't know what he had reference to. He dropped it and talked of something else.

From Malcolm X himself, I had seen, or heard, a few unusual things which had caused me some little private wonder and speculation, and then, with nothing to hang them onto, I had dismissed them. One day in his car, we had stopped for the red light at an intersection; another car with a white man driving hadstopped alongside, and when this white man saw Malcolm X, he instantly called across to him, “I don't blame your people for turning to you. If I were a Negro I'd follow you, too. Keep up the fight!” Malcolm X said to the man very sincerely, “I wish I could have a white chapter of the people I meet like you.” The light changed, and as both cars drove on, Malcolm X quickly said to me, firmly, “Not only don't write that, never repeat it. Mr. Muhammad would have a fit.” The significant thing about the incident, I later reflected, was that it was the first time I had ever heard him speak of Elijah Muhammad with anything less than reverence.

About the same time, one of the scribblings of Malcolm X's that I had retrieved had read, enigmatically, “My life has always been one of changes.” Another time, this was in September,

1963, Malcolm X had been highly upset about something during an entire session, and when I read the _Amsterdam News_ for that week, I guessed that he had been upset about an item in Jimmy Booker's column that Booker had heard that Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X were feuding. (Booker was later to reveal that after his column was written, he had gone on vacation, and on his return he learned that Malcolm X “stormed into the _Amsterdam News_ with three followers . . . 'I want to see Jimmy Booker. I don't like what he wrote. There is no fight between me and Elijah Muhammad. I believe in Mr. Muhammad and will lay down my life for him.' ”)

Also, now and then, when I chanced to meet a few other key Muslims, mainly when I was with Malcolm X, but when he was not immediately present, I thought I detected either in subtle phrasing, or in manner, something less than total admiration of their famous colleague-and then I would tell myself I had misinterpreted. And during these days, Dr. C. Eric Lincoln and I would talk on the phone fairly often. We rarely would fail to mention how it seemed almost certain that seeds of trouble lay in the fact that however much Malcolm Xpraised Elijah Muhammad, it was upon dramatic, articulate Malcolm X that the communications media and hence the general public focused the great bulk of their attention. I never dreamed, though, what Malcolm X was actually going through. He never breathed a word, at least not to me, until the actual rift became public.

When Malcolm X left me at around two A.M. on that occasion, he asked me to call him at nine A.M. The telephone in the home in East Elmhurst rang considerably longer than usual, and Sister Betty, when she answered, sounded strained, choked up. When Malcolm X came on, he, too, sounded different. He asked me, “Have you heard the radio or seen the newspapers?” I said I hadn't. He said, “Well, do!” and that he would call me later.

I went and got the papers. I read with astonishment that Malcolm X had been suspended by Elijah Muhammad-the stated reason being the “chickens coming home to roost” remark that Malcolm X recently had made as a comment upon the assassination of President Kennedy.

Malcolm X did telephone, after about an hour, and I met him at the Black Muslims' newspaper office in Harlem, a couple of blocks further up Lenox Avenue from their mosque and restaurant. He was seated behind his light-brown metal desk and his brown hat lay before him on the green blotter. He wore a dark suit with a vest, a white shirt, the inevitable leaping-sailfish clip held his narrow tie, and the big feet in the shined black shoes pushed the swivel chair pendulously back and forth as he talked into the telephone.

“I'm always hurt over any act of disobedience on my part concerning Mr. Muhammad. . . . Yes, sir- anything The Honorable Elijah Muhammad does is all right with me. I believe absolutely in his wisdom and authority.” The telephone would ring again instantly every time he put it down. “Mr. Peter Goldman! I haven't heard your voice in a good while! Well, sir, I just should havekept my big mouth shut.” To the _New York Times_: “Sir? Yes-he suspended me from making public appearances for the tune being, which I fully understand. I say the same thing to you that I have told others, I'm in complete submission to Mr. Muhammad's judgment, because I have always found his judgment to be based on sound thinking.” To C.B.S.: “I think that anybody who is in a position to discipline others should first learn to accept discipline himself.”

He brought it off, the image of contriteness, the best be could-throughout the harshly trying next several weeks. But the back of his neck was reddish every time I saw him. He did not yet put into words his obvious fury at the public humiliation. We did very little interviewing now, he was so busy on telephones elsewhere; but it did not matter too much because by now I had the bulk of the needed life story material in hand. When he did find some time to visit me, he was very preoccupied, and I could _feel_ him rankling with anger and with inactivity, but he tried hard to hide it.

He scribbled one night, “You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. John Viscount Morley.” And the same night, almost illegibly, “I was going downhill until he picked me up, but the more I think of it, we picked each other up.”

When I did not see him for several days, a letter came. “I have cancelled all public appearances and speaking engagements for a number of weeks. So within that period it should be possible to finish this book. With the fast pace of newly developing incidents today, it is easy for something that is done or said tomorrow to be outdated even by sunset on the same day. Malcolm X.”

I pressed to get the first chapter, “Nightmare,” into a shape that he could review. When it was ready in a readable rough draft, I telephoned him. He came as quickly as he could drive from his home-which made me see how grinding an ordeal it was to him to just be sitting at home, inactive, and knowing his temperament, my sympathies went out to Sister Betty.

He pored over the manuscript pages, raptly the first time, then drawing out his red-ink ball-point pen he read through the chapter again, with the pen occasionally stabbing at something. “You can't bless Allah!” he exclaimed, changing “bless” to “praise.” In a place that referred to himself and his brothers and sisters, he scratched red through “we kids.” “Kids are goats!” he exclaimed sharply.

Soon, Malcolm X and his family flew to Miami. Cassius Clay had extended the invitation as a sixth wedding anniversary present to Malcolm X and Sister Betty, and they had accepted most gratefully. It was Sister Betty's first vacation in the six years of the taut regimen as a Black Muslim wife, and it was for Malcolm X both a saving of face and something to _do_.

Very soon after his arrival, he telegraphed me his phone number at a motel. I called him and he told me, “I just want to tell you something. I'm not a betting man anymore, but if you are, you bet on Cassius to beat Listen, and you will win.” I laughed and said he was prejudiced. He said, “Remember what I told you when the fight's over.” I received later a picture postcard, the picture in vivid colors being of a chimpanzee at the Monkey Jungle in Miami. Malcolm X had written on the reverse side, “One hundred years after the Civil War, and these _chimpanzees_ get more recognition, respect and freedom in America than our people do. Bro. Malcolm X.” Another time, an envelope came, and inside it was a clipping of an Irv Kupcinet column in the Chicago _Sun- Times_. Malcolm X's red pen had encircled an item which read, “Insiders are predicting a split in the Black Muslims. Malcolm X, ousted as No. 2 man in the organization, may form a splinter group to oppose Elijah Muhammad.” Alongside the item, Malcolm X had scribbled “Imagine this!!!”