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It’s all I can do to get up, to get up and face the next round. There’s always another round. I’m not dead yet.

The old man is well away now, back at his bunk. “How could you leave like that?” I shout after him. “How could you leave me nothing but lies?” I could chase him, but I don’t. Because that’s the shit of it, isn’t it? I’m already knee-deep in this fight, yet it can’t be had. Can’t ever be had.

He’s not here to fight me. He’s never been here, and yet he’s always here. Him not being here is here. His absence is a gaping, aching hole in me.

The circle of men disperses, muttering disappointment; they were promised a fight. I’m too stunned to consider ways to salvage any cell-block pride out of my misstep. I find myself on my knees. I stare in the only direction that makes any sense — at the dark old man reclining in his cell. He gazes back at me over the lip of his Bible, open in his hands once more.

I don’t look away, although I badly want to. For the first time ever, I force myself to face the truth. Papa’s gone, and he took with him my belief in everything he promised.

It’s no wonder I can’t win a fistfight. When I was six years old, I took the biggest punch of my life and I haven’t figured out how to get up yet.

There’s so much to be angry about. Why does it keep coming back to Papa?

I’m angry at the white guards who beat us; at the white cops who put us here; at the white slaveholders who tied our ancestors down in the guts of great ships — they caused this cascade of terrible things that have led me here.

They want to write a story about me that ends behind bars. They’ll say I was no good, that I always belonged here — it just took a while for it all to catch up to me.

Papa would tell a different story. Why is it I’m remembering now all the things he used to tell me? I can hear his voice so clearly, a voice that I thought I had pounded out of my head. And hearing it, I know that what I’m being told is possible is too limiting. But I am stuck here. Stuck in it. Why is he not here to help me, now that I want to try it his way?

In desperation, I write a letter to Elijah Muhammad. If there is another way, a better way, I have to find it. My family has found wisdom in Elijah Muhammad, much of which makes him sound very much like Papa. Facing the old man — in my mind at least — has made me realize something. I don’t want to fight Papa any longer, to forget him. I want to remember. I want to come home.

I think it was a dream. I think it was. It must have been a dream. It’s been so long since I’ve seen my father. In a photo. In my mind’s eye. Anywhere.

He comes up to me, real graceful. His hands, so large, reach for my shoulders. They cup me, cover me, cure me of some long-held ache.

“Papa?” I whisper.

The words flow forth from him, unending. Not a sound to be heard, only the feeling of words, warm and soft like a blanket. Rough as wool at the same time. Scolding and healing. Scalding and holy. Like the touch of the brothers’ distant God.

I’ve gone wrong.

I’ve done wrong.

“Papa,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

There’s no punishment in dreams, maybe. I wake, sweat-cold and starving. A soul-deep hunger that I’ve never known how to fill.

A line of powder.

A line in the sand.

A line between the things I know and the things I can’t begin to understand. The things that threaten to consume me.

I receive a return letter, signed by the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. The words pour into me, begin to fill me in a way unlike any of the words before them.

I feel new, but his words don’t. They thrum inside me at a comfortable pitch, plucking strings of my soul in places I haven’t tried to reach in a long time.

Up, up, you mighty race.
It’s not what he writes, but it’s what I hear. Black is strong. Black is holy. We must rise up again. Be proud. Be wise.

After I hear from the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Reginald’s promise of escape begins to make more sense. It begins to seem that the world is not finished with me.
It does not matter who you think you have been up until now. Go forth as a child of Allah.

It does not matter who you have been up until now.
I roll these words around in my head. I have been so many things.

Son.

Brother.

Negro.

Malcolm.

Nigger.

Red.

Homeboy.

Detroit Red.

22843.

Look what has become of me. A number is all I am now. The number erases all that has gone before, stamps it null and void. In the end, I’ve become a nameless thing. And what this letter seems to be saying is that I can put aside the number now, too. I can rise out of this prison hole to become a man of my own choosing.

I keep my head down as the guards walk past us, shouting. But I no longer hear them. They think it’s enough to make me stand in this row with the others. Think it’s enough to bind us in the same coarse cloth. My body obeys. My mind rebels.

This place. These walls. They don’t contain me. That is Elijah Muhammad’s message to me. My mind, my soul, is greater than anything that can bind me. I was right all along: I cannot be contained.

I don’t have to be 22843 anymore. I can see it now. I can look into a proper mirror, here on the wall, and see a man, a new man, clean before Allah and ready to serve. What should I call myself? My impulse is to start fresh. Be someone completely brand-new, but it isn’t quite right that way. Everything before this moment matters; it all adds up to now.

“Malcolm” was my name as a child. I am no longer a child.

“Little” was once a slaveholder’s name. I am no longer a slave.

I was Shorty’s “homeboy” and Sammy’s “Detroit Red,” but now I belong to Allah. It is his voice with which I wish to be renamed now.

I listen and listen. Until I know.

I am my father’s son. My way through the world has been paved by him. His challenges, his choices. All bequeathed to me.

These things are hard to hold.

But I see my life more clearly now.

I’m not meant to be part of the things that are wrong with the world, but neither am I meant to run from them. I’m meant to fight against them. I can’t hold my own in the ring, but out in the world, I do know how to fight. With words. With truth.

Everything that I’ve lived through has been part of my fight.

My father’s God. My mother’s God. My brothers’ Allah. They are one. They are in me.

I am my father’s son. Still, and always. He named me, and I will carry that name, just as I carry a part of him.

What I don’t want is the stamp of the white world on me. That I must fight against. Throw off the shackles of past ugliness. Buck myself free. For that, too, is Papa’s legacy, and something I must carry.

I bend down and sign the letter to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad:

Malcolm X.

The guards may come for me. The devil may come. The chains and the darkness. All the wrongs of the world may come. The noose. Every force that thirsts for the destruction of the black man in America.

I am my father’s son. They will always come for me. But I will never succumb.

I am my father’s child. I consider it an honor and a privilege to tell the story of his life and work, and I proudly accept responsibility for doing so, not because he is my father but because I believe that accurate information about him and his life’s journey will empower others — especially those fatherless children searching for their purpose and their identity — to achieve their highest potential. When world-renowned and eventually martyred human-rights activist El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz — Malcolm X — came walking through the front door of our home in the evenings, he was simply Daddy. I imagine that as a child, Malcolm felt the same about his dad, my grandfather, Earl Little. At the age of six, young Malcolm could not have fully understood the broader significance of his father’s life and death. He knew that Papa Earl went away, and although he heard the whispers about the Ku Klux Klan’s Black Legion, years would pass before all the pieces came together as a meaningful understanding of his father’s martyrdom — that he was killed while serving his people. Malcolm would endure years of turmoil and discontent before understanding that Papa Earl lived and died committed to the cause of securing freedom, justice, and equality for disenfranchised African Americans.

Those were long and difficult years for Malcolm. Grief, pain, and confusion prevented him from seeing his father’s footsteps, which were paved for him to follow. Had Papa Earl lived longer, Malcolm might have found a more direct path to becoming the human-rights advocate his father wanted him to be — but in that case, Malcolm almost certainly would not have become the icon the world remembers today.

This book is a work of fiction, but it is based on real people and events. You may be wondering, How much of the story is true? As a well-known public figure, my father made speeches, kept diaries, and published his autobiography, and many other books have been written about him as well. Nevertheless, not as much is widely known about Malcolm’s life “before the X.” I am fortunate to have inside knowledge about my father’s young life, because people who knew him longer than I did — like my mother, my aunts and uncles, and my father’s childhood neighbors and friends — told me wonderful stories about him.

The story contained in this novel has lived in my heart for a long time. With Kekla’s help, I am very happy and proud to have brought it to life for you. Indeed, Malcolm lived in all of the places, worked all of the jobs, and engaged in most of the activities described. All but a few minor characters are based on real people Malcolm knew, though, of course, we couldn’t go back in time and capture everyone’s precise dialogue and actions. We have taken a few artistic liberties for the sake of cohesion, but the overall story you have read represents the true journey of Malcolm Little, the adolescent, on the road to becoming Malcolm X.

History has recorded what came next for Malcolm. He would exit prison reconciled with his parents, their teachings, and his own individual identity. He would ultimately challenge racial injustice, defending African Americans brutalized by discrimination, fighting for human rights as well as civil rights, and working to unite the black community around the world in a single struggle for freedom and independence.

The Nation of Islam (NOI) would prove to be the platform for Malcolm to grow into the extraordinary gifts that would bring him national and international acclaim. Very often discussion of Malcolm’s conversion to Islam in prison omits the fact that his so-called conversion was actually a return to his roots and a reconciliation with his family’s long-standing commitment to human-rights activism. Accepting Islam meant being reunited with the father he had privately resented for abandoning him, meaning that he had had to enter manhood and resolve the many challenges he confronted alone. Grounded in his faith, Malcolm emerged from Norfolk Prison Colony eager to embrace whatever service to humanity God would ask of him, as had his father and mother before him. Malcolm Little became Malcolm X because members of the Nation of Islam were encouraged to drop the names of their forebears’ slaveholders.

In 1952, at age twenty-six, Malcolm X became the Nation of Islam’s chief spokesman. Within seven years, he helped the NOI expand from four temples to fifty temples, increasing membership from several hundred to hundreds of thousands. Under Malcolm’s tutelage regarding self-help, self-determination, and cooperative economics, the NOI owned businesses around the United States, including the largest black-owned businesses in the country, and the NOI’s children attended separate schools owned and operated by the organization.

Malcolm endured a painful split from the Nation of Islam in 1964 and began preaching and organizing independently. He retained many of his followers and formed the Muslim Mosque, Incorporated, in Harlem. Malcolm made the Islamic pilgrimage, known as hajj, to the Muslim holy land of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. There he worshipped alongside people of all ethnic groups and decided to expand his ministry beyond the black community by preaching interracial cooperation and human rights for all. He embraced the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.