The autobiography of Malcolm X (55 page)

“BM dealing with WM who put our eyes out, now he condemns us because we cannot see.”

“Only persons really changed history those who changed men's thinking about themselves. Hitler as well as Jesus, Stalin as well as Buddha . . . Hon. Elijah Muhammad. . . .”

It was through a clue from one of the scribblings that finally I cast a bait that Malcolm X took. “Woman who cries all the time is only because she knows she can get away with it,” he had scribbled. I somehow raised the subject ofwomen. Suddenly, between sips of coffee and further scribbling and doodling, he vented his criticisms and skepticisms of women. “You never can fully trust any woman,” he said. “I've got the only one I ever met whom I would trust seventy-five per cent. I've told her that,” he said. "I've told her like I tell you I've seen too many men destroyed by their wives, or their women.

“I don't _completely_ trust anyone,” he went on, “not even myself. I have seen too many men destroy themselves. Other people I trust from not at all to highly, like The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Malcolm X looked squarely at me. “You I trust about twenty-five per cent.”

Trying to keep Malcolm X talking, I mined the woman theme for all it was worth. Triumphantly, he exclaimed, “Do you know why Benedict Arnold turned traitor-a woman!” He said, “Whatever else a woman is, I don't care who the woman is, it starts with her being vain. I'll prove it, something you can do anytime you want, and I know what I'm talking about, I've done it. You think of the hardest-looking, meanest-acting woman you know, one of those women who never smiles. Well, every day you see that woman you look her right in the eyes and tell her 'I think you're beautiful,' and you watch what happens. The first day she may curse you out, the second day, too-but you watch, you keep on, after a while one day she's going to start smiling just as soon as you come in sight.”

When Malcolm X left that night, I retrieved napkin scribblings that further documented how he could be talking about one thing and thinking of something else:

“Negroes have too much righteousness. WM says, 'I want this piece of land, how do I get those couple of thousand BM on it off?'”

“I have wife who understands, or even if she doesn't she at least pretends.”

“BM struggle never gets open support from abroad it needs unless BM first forms own united front.”

“Sit down, talk with people with brains I respect, all of us want same thing, do some brainstorming.”

“Would be shocking to reveal names of the BM leaders who have secretly met with THEM.” (The capitalized letters stood for The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.)

Then one night, Malcolm X arrived nearly out on his feet from fatigue. For two hours, he paced the floor delivering a tirade against Negro leaders who were attacking Elijah Muhammad and himself. I don't know what gave me the inspiration to say once when he paused for breath, “I wonder if you'd tell me something about your mother?”

Abruptly he quit pacing, and the look he shot at me made me sense that somehow the chance question had hit him. When I look back at it now, I believe I must have caught him so physically weak that his defenses were vulnerable.

Slowly, Malcolm X began to talk, now walking in a tight circle. “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat. We stayed so hungry that we were dizzy. I remember the color of dresses she used to wear-they were a kind of faded-out gray. . . .” And he kept on talking until dawn, so tired that the big feet would often almost stumble in their pacing. From this stream-of-consciousness reminiscing I finally got out of him the foundation for this book's beginning chapters, “Nightmare” and “Mascot.” After that night, he never again hesitated to tell me even the most intimate details of his personal life, over the next two years. His talking about his mother triggered something.

Malcolm X's mood ranged from somber to grim as he recalled his childhood. I remember his making a great point of how he learned what had been a cardinal awareness of his ever since: “It's the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease.” When his narration reached his moving to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella, Malcolm X began to laugh about how “square” he had been in the ghetto streets. “Why, I'm telling you things I haven't thought about since then!” he would exclaim. Then it was during recalling the early Harlem days that Malcolm X really got carried away. One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, “re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam-” and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly grumpy. Later on in the Harlem narrative, he grew somber again. “The only thing I considered wrong was what I got caught doing wrong. I had a jungle mind, I was living in a jungle, and everything I did was done by instinct to survive.” But he stressed that he had no regrets about his crimes, “because it was all a result of what happens to thousands upon thousands of black men in the white man's Christian world.”

His enjoyment resumed when the narrative entered his prison days. “Let me tell you how I'd get those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I'd whisper to them, 'If you don't, I'll start a rumor that you're really a light Negro just passing as white.' That shows you what the white devil thinks about the black man. He'd rather die than be thought a Negro!” He told me about the reading he had been able to do in prison: “I didn't know what I was doing, but just by instinct I liked the books with intellectual vitamins.” And another time: “In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to gooduse. I'd put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he's _motivated_, in prison he can change his life.”

Yet another time, Malcolm X reflected, "Once a man has been to prison, he never looks at himself or at other people the same again. The 'squares' out here whose boat has been in smooth waters all the time turn up their noses at an ex-con. But an ex-con can keep his head up when the

'squares' sink."

He scribbled that night (I kept both my notebooks and the paper napkins dated): “This WM created and dropped A-bomb on non-whites; WM now calls 'Red' and lives in fear of other WM he knows may bomb us.”

Also: “Learn wisdom from the pupil of the eye that looks upon all things and yet to self is blind. Persian poet.”

At intervals, Malcolm X would make a great point of stressing to me, “Now, I don't want anything in this book to make it sound that I think I'm somebody important.” I would assure him that I would try not to, and that in any event he would be checking the manuscript page by page, and ultimately the galley proofs. At other times, he would end an attack upon the white man and, watching me take the notes, exclaim. “That devil's not going to print that, I don't care what he says!” I would point out that the publishers had made a binding contract and had paid a sizable sum in advance. Malcolm X would say, “You trust them, and I don't. You studied what he wanted you to learn about him in schools, I studied him in the streets and in prison, where you see the truth.”

Experiences which Malcolm X had had during a day could flavor his interview mood. The most wistful, tender anecdotes generally were told on days when some incident had touched him. Once, for instance, he told me that he had learned that a Harlem couple, not Black Muslims, had named their newbornson “Malcolm” after him. “What do you know about _that_?” he kept exclaiming. And that was the night he went back to his own boyhood again and this time recalled how he used to lie on his back on Hector's Hill and think. That night, too: “I'll never forget the day they elected me the class president. A girl named Audrey Slaugh, whose father owned a car repair shop, nominated me. And a boy named James Cotton seconded the nomination. The teacher asked me to leave the room while the class voted. When I returned I was the class president. I couldn't believe it.”

Any interesting book which Malcolm X had read could get him going about his love of books. “People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by _one_ book.” He came back again and again to the books that he had studied when in prison. “Did you ever read _The Loom of Language_?” he asked me and I said I hadn't. “You should. Philology, it's a tough science-all about how words can be recognized, no matter where you find them. Now, you take 'Caesar,' it's Latin, in Latin it's pronounced like 'Kaiser,' with a hard C. But we anglicize it by pronouncing a soft C. The Russians say 'Czar' and mean the same thing. Another Russian dialect says 'Tsar.' Jakob Grimm was one of the foremost philologists, I studied his 'Grimm's Law' in prison-all about consonants. Philology is related to the science of etymology, dealing in root words. I dabbled in both of them.”

When I turn that page in my notebook, the next bears a note that Malcolm X had telephoned me saying “I'm going to be out of town for a few days.” I assumed that as had frequently been the case before, he had speaking engagements or other Muslim business to attend somewhere and I was glad for the respite in which to get my notes separated under the chapter headings they would fit. But when Malcolm X returned this time, he reported triumphantly, “I have something to tell you that will surprise you. Ever since we discussed my mother, I've been thinking about her. I realized that I had blocked her out of my mind-it was just unpleasant to think about her having been twenty-someyears in that mental hospital.” He said, "I don't want to take the credit. It was really my sister Yvonne who thought it might be possible to get her out. Yvonne got my brothers Wilfred, Wesley and Philbert together, and I went out there, too. It was Philbert who really handled it.

“It made me face something about myself,” Malcolm X said. "My mind had closed about our mother. I simply didn't feel the problem could be solved, so I had shut it out. I had built up subconscious defenses. The white man does this. He shuts out of his mind, and he builds up

subconscious defenses against anything he doesn't want to face up to. I've just become aware how closed my mind was now that I've opened it up again.

That's one of the characteristics I don't like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can't solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn't exist. But it exists."

It was my turn to be deeply touched. Not long afterward, he was again away for a few days. When he returned this time, he said that at his brother Philbert's home, “we had dinner with our mother for the first time in all those years!” He said, “She's sixty-six, and her memory is better than mine and she looks young and healthy. She has more of her teeth than those who were instrumental in sending her to the institution.”

***

When something had angered Malcolm X during the day, his face would be flushed redder when he visited me, and he generally would spend much of the session lashing out bitterly. When some Muslims were shot by Los Angeles policemen, one of them being killed, Malcolm X, upon his return from a trip he made there, was fairly apoplectic for a week. It had been in this mood that he had made, in Los Angeles, the statement which caused him to be heavily censured by members of both races. “I've just heard some good news!”-referringto a plane crash at Orly Field in Paris in which thirty-odd white Americans, mostly from Atlanta, Georgia, had been killed instantly. (Malcolm X never publicly recanted this statement, to my knowledge, but much later he said to me simply, “That's one of the things I wish I had never said.”)

Anytime the name of the present Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall was raised, Malcolm X still practically spat fire in memory of what the judge had said years before when he was the N.A.A.C.P. chief attorney: “The Muslims are run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by some Arab group.” The only time that I have ever heard Malcolm X use what might be construed as a curse word, it was a “hell” used in response to a statement that Dr. Martin Luther King made that Malcolm X's talk brought “misery upon Negroes.” Malcolm X exploded to me, “How in the hell can my talk do this? It's always a Negro responsible, not what the white man does!” The “extremist” or “demagogue” accusation invariably would burn Malcolm X. “Yes, I'm an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”

Once when he said, “Aristotle shocked people. Charles Darwin outraged people. Aldous Huxley scandalized millions!” Malcolm X immediately followed the statement with “Don't print that, people would think I'm trying to link myself with them.” Another time, when something provoked him to exclaim, “These Uncle Toms make me think about how the Prophet Jesus was criticized in his own country!” Malcolm X promptly got up and silently took my notebook, tore out that page and crumpled it and put it into his pocket, and he was considerably subdued during the remainder of that session.

I remember one time we talked and he showed me a newspaper clipping reporting where a Negro baby had been bitten by a rat. Malcolm X said, “Now, just read that, just think of that a minute! Suppose it was _your_ child!Where's that slumlord-on some beach in Miami!” He continued fuming throughout our interview. I did not go with him when later that day he addressed a Negro audience in Harlem and an incident occurred which Helen Dudar reported in the _New York Post_.