The autobiography of Malcolm X (56 page)

"Malcolm speaking in Harlem stared down at one of the white reporters present, the only whites admitted to the meeting, and went on, 'Now, there's a reporter who hasn't taken a note in half an hour, but as soon as I start talking about the Jews, he's busy taking notes to prove that I'm anti- Semitic.'

“Behind the reporter, a male voice spoke up, 'Kill the bastard, kill them all.' The young man, in his unease, smiled nervously and Malcolm jeered, 'Look at him laugh. He's really not laughing, he's just laughing with his teeth.' An ugly tension curled the edges of the atmosphere. Then Malcolm went on: 'The white man doesn't know how to laugh. He just shows his teeth. But _we_ know how to laugh. We laugh deep down, from the bottom up.' The audience laughed, deep down, from the bottom up and, as suddenly as Malcolm had stirred it, so, skillfully and swiftly, he deflected it. It had been at once a masterful and shabby performance.”

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only

Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, “I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd want to stop one.” It was the kind of statement he relished making.

*** Over the months, I had gradually come to establish something of a telephone acquaintance with Malcolm X's wife, whom I addressed as “Sister Betty,” as I had heard the Muslims do. I admired how she ran a home, with, then, three small daughters, and still managed to take all of the calls which came for Malcolm X, surely as many calls as would provide a job for an average switchboard operator. Sometimes when he was with me, he would telephone home and spend as much as five minutes rapidly jotting on a pad the various messages which had been left for him.

Sister Betty, generally friendly enough on the phone with me, sometimes would exclaim in spontaneous indignation, “The man never gets any _sleep_!” Malcolm X rarely put in less than an 18-hour workday. Often when he had left my studio at four A.M. and a 40-minute drive lay between him and home in East Elmhurst, Long Island, he had asked me to telephone him there at nine A.M. Usually this would be when he wanted me to accompany him somewhere, and he was going to tell me, after reviewing his commitments, when and where he wanted me to meet him. (There were times when I didn't get an awful lot of sleep, myself.) He was always accompanied, either by some of his Muslim colleagues like James 67X (the 67th man named “James” who had joined Harlem's Mosque Number 7), or Charles 37X, or by me, but he never asked me to be with him when they were. I went with him to college and university lectures, to radio and television stations for his broadcasts, and to public appearances in a variety of situations and locations.

If we were driving somewhere, motorists along the highway would wave to Malcolm X, the faces of both whites and Negroes spontaneously aglow with the wonderment that I had seen evoked by other “celebrities.” No few airline hostesses had come to know him, because he flew so much; they smiled prettily at him, he was in turn the essence of courtly gentlemanliness, and inevitably the word spread and soon an unusual flow of bathroom traffic would develop,passing where he sat. Whenever we arrived at our destination, it became familiar to hear “There's Malcolm X!” “_Where_?” “The tall one.” Passers-by of both races stared at him. A few of both races, more Negroes than whites, would speak or nod to him in greeting. A high percentage of white people were visibly uncomfortable in his presence, especially within the confines of small areas, such as in elevators. “I'm the only black man they've ever been close to who they know speaks the _truth_ to them,” Malcolm X once explained to me. “It's their guilt that upsets them, not me.” He said another time, “The white man is afraid of truth. The truth takes the white man's breath and drains his strength-you just watch his face get red anytime you tell him a little truth.”

There was something about this man when he was in a room with people. He commanded the room, whoever else was present. Even out of doors; once I remember in Harlem he sat on a speaker's stand between Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and the former Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack, and when the street rally was over the crowd focus was chiefly on Malcolm X. I remember another time that we had gone by railway from New York City to Philadelphia

where he appeared in the Philadelphia Convention Hall on the radio station WCAU program of Ed Harvey. “You are the man who has said 'All Negroes are angry and I am the angriest of all'; is that correct?” asked Harvey, on the air, introducing Malcolm X, and as Malcolm X said crisply, “That quote is correct!” the gathering crowd of bystanders stared at him, riveted.

We had ridden to Philadelphia in reserved parlor car seats. “I can't get caught on a coach, I could get into trouble on a coach,” Malcolm X had said. Walking to board the parlor car, we had passed a dining car toward which he jerked his head, “I used to work on that thing.” Riding to our destination, he conversationally told me that the F.B.I. had tried to bribe him for information about Elijah Muhammad; that he wanted me to be sure and read a new book, _Crisis in Black and White_ by Charles Silberman-“one of the very few white writers I know with the courage to tell his kind the truth”; and he asked me to make anote to please telephone the _New York Post's_ feature writer Helen Dudar and tell her he thought very highly of her recent series-he did not want to commend her directly.

After the Ed Harvey Show was concluded, we took the train to return to New York City. The parlor car, packed with businessmen behind their newspapers, commuting homeward after their workdays, was electric with Malcolm X's presence. After the white-jacketed Negro porter had made several trips up and down the aisle, he was in the middle of another trip when Malcolm X _sotto-voced_ in my ear, “He used to work with me, I forget his name, we worked right on this very train together. He knows it's me. He's trying to make up his mind what to do.” The porter went on past us, poker-faced. But when he came through again, Malcolm X suddenly leaned forward from his seat, smiling at the porter. “Why, sure, I know who you are!” the porter suddenly said, loudly. “You washed dishes right on this train! I was just telling some of the fellows you were in my car here. We all follow you!”

The tension on the car could have been cut with a knife. Then, soon, the porter returned to Malcolm X, his voice expansive. “One of our guests would like to meet you.” Now a young, clean- cut white man rose and came up, his hand extended, and Malcolm X rose and shook the proffered hand firmly. Newspapers dropped just below eye-level the length of the car. The young white man explained distinctly, loudly, that he had been in the Orient for a while, and now was studying at Columbia. “I don't agree with everything you say,” he told Malcolm X, “but I have to admire your presentation.”

Malcolm's voice in reply was cordiality itself. “I don't think you could search America, sir, and find two men who agree on everything.” Subsequently, to another white man, an older businessman, who came up and shook hands, he said evenly, “Sir, I know how you feel. It's a hard thing to speak out against mewhen you are agreeing with so much that I say.” And we rode on into New York under, now, a general open gazing.

In Washington, D.C., Malcolm X slashed at the government's reluctance to take positive steps in the Negro's behalf. I gather that even the White House took notice, for not long afterward I left off interviewing Malcolm X for a few days and went to the White House to do a _Playboy_ interview of the then White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, who grimaced spontaneously when I said I was writing the life story of Malcolm X. Another time I left Malcolm X to interview the U.S.

Nazi Party Commander George Lincoln Rockwell, who frankly stated that he admired the courage of Malcolm X, and he felt that the two of them should speak together across the United States, and they could thus begin a real solution to the race problem-one of voluntary separation of the white and black races, with Negroes returning to Africa. I reported this to Malcolm X, who snorted, “He must think I'm nuts! What am _I_ going to look like going speaking with a _devil_!” Yet another time, I went off to Atlanta and interviewed for _Playboy_ Dr. Martin Luther King. He was privately intrigued to hear little-known things about Malcolm X that I told him; for publication, he discussed him with reserve, and he did say that he would sometime like to have an opportunity to talk with him. Hearing this, Malcolm X said drily, “You think I ought to send him a telegram with my telephone number?” (But from other things that Malcolm X said to me at various times, I deduced

that he actually had a reluctant admiration for Dr. King.)

Malcolm X and I reached the point, ultimately, where we shared a mutual camaraderie that, although it was never verbally expressed, was a warm one. He was for me unquestionably one of the most engaging personalities I had ever met, and for his part, I gathered, I was someone he had learned he could express himself to, with candor, without the likelihood of hearing it repeated, and likeany person who lived amid tension, he enjoyed being around someone, another man, with whom he could psychically relax. When I made trips now, he always asked me to telephone him when I would be returning to New York, and generally, if he could squeeze it into his schedule, he met me at the airport. I would see him coming along with his long, gangling strides, and wearing the wide, toothy, good-natured grin, and as he drove me into New York City he would bring me up to date on things of interest that had happened since I left. I remember one incident within the airport that showed me how Malcolm X never lost his racial perspective. Waiting for my baggage, we witnessed a touching family reunion scene as part of which several cherubic little children romped and played, exclaiming in another language. “By tomorrow night, they'll know how to say their first English word-_nigger_,” observed Malcolm X.

When Malcolm X made long trips, such as to San Francisco or Los Angeles, I did not go along, but frequently, usually very late at night, he would telephone me, and ask how the book was coming along, and he might set up the time for our next interview upon his return. One call that I never will forget came at close to four A.M., waking me; he must have just gotten up in Los Angeles. His voice said, “Alex Haley?” I said, sleepily, “Yes? Oh, _hey_, Malcolm!” His voice said, “I trust you seventy per cent”-and then he hung up. I lay a short time thinking about him and I went back to sleep feeling warmed by that call, as I still am warmed to remember it. Neither of us ever mentioned it.

Malcolm X's growing respect for individual whites seemed to be reserved for those who ignored on a personal basis the things he said about whites and who jousted with him as a _man_. He, moreover, was convinced that he could tell a lot about any person by listening. “There's an art to listening well,” he told me. “I listen closely to the sound of a man's voice when he's speaking. I can hear sincerity.” The newspaper person whom he ultimately came to admire probably more than any other was the _New York Times_' M. S. Handler. (I was veryhappy when I learned that Handler had agreed to write this book's Introduction; I know that Malcolm X would have liked that.) The first time I ever heard Malcolm X speak of Handler, whom he had recently met, he began, “I was talking with this devil-” and abruptly he cut himself off in obvious embarrassment. “It's a reporter named Handler, from the _Times_-” he resumed. Malcolm X's respect for the man steadily increased, and Handler, for his part, was an influence upon the inner Malcolm X. “He's the most genuinely unprejudiced white man I ever met,” Malcolm X said to me, speaking of Handler months later. “I have asked him things and tested him. I have listened to him talk, closely.”

I saw Malcolm X too many times exhilarated in after-lecture give-and-take with predominantly white student bodies at colleges and universities to ever believe that he nurtured at his core any blanket white-hatred. “The young whites, and blacks, too, are the only hope that America has,” he said to me once. “The rest of us have always been living in a lie.”

Several Negroes come to mind now who I know, in one way or another, had vastly impressed Malcolm X. (Some others come to mind whom I know he has vastly abhorred, but these I will not mention.) Particularly high in his esteem, I know, was the great photographer, usually associated with _Life_ magazine, Gordon Parks. It was Malcolm X's direct influence with Elijah Muhammad which got Parks permitted to enter and photograph for publication in _Life_ the highly secret self- defense training program of the Black Muslim Fruit of Islam, making Parks, as far as I know, the only non-Muslim who ever has witnessed this, except for policemen and other agency representatives who had feigned “joining” the Black Muslims to infiltrate them. “His success among the white man never has made him lose touch with black reality,” Malcolm X said of Parks once.

Another person toward whom Malcolm X felt similarly was the actor OssieDavis. Once in the middle of one of our interviews, when we had been talking about something else, Malcolm X suddenly asked me, “Do you know Ossie Davis?” I said I didn't. He said, “I ought to introduce you sometime, that's one of the finest black men.” In Malcolm X's long dealings with the staff of the Harlem weekly newspaper _Amsterdam News_, he had come to admire Executive Editor James Hicks and the star feature writer James Booker. He said that Hicks had “an open mind, and he never panics for the white man.” He thought that Booker was an outstanding reporter; he also was highly impressed with Mrs. Booker when he met her.