The autobiography of Malcolm X (59 page)

As I resumed writing upstate, periodic notes came from Malcolm X. “I hope the book is proceeding rapidly, for events concerning my life happen so swiftly, much of what has already been written can easily be outdated from month to month. In life, nothing is permanent; not even life itself (smile). So I would advise you to rush it on out as fast as possible.” Another note, special delivery, had a tone of irritation with me: he had received from the publisher a letter which indicated that he had received a $2500 check when the book contract was signed, “and therefore I will be expected to pay _personal_ income tax on this. As you know, it was my repeated specification that this entire transaction was to be made at that time directly with and to the Mosque. In fact, I have never seen that check to this very day.”

The matter was straightened out, and I sent Malcolm X some rough chapters to read. I was appalled when they were soon returned, red-inked in many places where he had told of his almost father-and-son relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decision, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what would lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama. Malcolm X said, gruffly, “Whose book is this?” I told him “yours, of course,” and that I only made the objection in my position as a writer. He said that he would have to think about it. I was heart-sick at the prospect that he might want to re-edit the entire book into apolemic against Elijah Muhammad. But late that night, Malcolm X telephoned. “I'm sorry. You're right. I was upset about something. Forget what I wanted changed, let what you already had stand.” I never again gave him chapters to review unless I was with him. Several times I would covertly watch him frown and wince as he read, but he never again asked for any change in what he had originally said. And the only thing that he ever indicated that he wished had been different in his life came when he was reading the chapter “Laura.” He said, “That was a smart girl, a _good_ girl. She tried her best to make something out of me, and look what I started her into- dope and prostitution. I wrecked that girl.”

***

Malcolm X was busy, busy, busy; he could not visit my hotel room often, and when he did, it shortly would get the feeling of Grand Central Station. It seemed that when the telephone was not ringing for him, he was calling someone else, consulting the jotted numbers in his ever-ready memorandum book. Now he had begun to talk a great deal with various people from the Middle East or Africa who were in New York. Some of these came to see him at the hotel room. At first, I would sit by the window engrossed in reading while they talked by the room's door in low tones. He was very apologetic when this occurred, and I told him I felt no sensitivity about it; then, afterwards, I would generally step out into the hallway, or perhaps take the elevator down to the lobby, then watch the elevators until I saw the visitor leave. One day, I remember, the phone had rung steadily with such callers as C.B.S., A.B.C., N.B.C., every New York City paper, the London _Daily Express_, and numerous individuals-he and I had gotten no work at all accomplished; then a television camera crew arrived and filled the room to tape an interview with Malcolm X by A.B.C.'s commentator Bill Beutel. As the crew was setting up its floodlights on tripods, a Dayton, Ohio, radio station called, wishing to interview Malcolm X by telephone. He asked me to ask them to call him the following day at his sister Ella's home in Boston. Then the Ghana Ministry of Information called. I turned with a note to Malcolm X to whom the commentator Beutel had just said, “I won't take much of your time, I just have a few probably stupid questions.” Glancing at my note, Malcolm X said to Beutel, “Only the unasked question is stupid,” and then to me, “Tell them I'll call them back, please.” Then just as the television cameras began rolling, with Beutel and Malcolm X talking, the telephone rang again and it was _Life_ magazine reporter Marc Crawford to whom I whispered what was happening. Crawford, undaunted, asked if the open receiver could be placed where he could hear the interview, and I complied, relieved that it was one way to let the interview proceed without interruption.

The manuscript copy which Malcolm X was given to review was in better shape now, and he

pored through page by page, intently, and now and then his head would raise with some comment. “You know,” he said once, “why I have been able to have some effect is because I make a study of the weaknesses of this country and because the more the white man yelps, the more I know I have struck a nerve.” Another time, he put down upon the bed the manuscript he was reading, and he got up from his chair and walked back and forth, stroking his chin, then he looked at me. “You know this place here in this chapter where I told you how I put the pistol up to my head and kept pulling the trigger and scared them so when I was starting the burglary ring- well,” he paused, “I don't know if I ought to tell you this or not, but I want to tell the truth.” He eyed me, speculatively. “I palmed the bullet.” We laughed together. I said, “Okay, give that page here, I'll fix it.” Then he considered, “No, leave it that way. Too many people would be so quick to say that's what I'm doing today, bluffing.”

Again when reading about the period when he had discovered the prison library, Malcolm X's head jerked up. “Boy! I never will forget that old aardvark!” The next evening, he came into the room and told me that he had beento the Museum of Natural History and learned something about the aardvark. “Now, aardvark actually means 'earth hog.' That's a good example of root words, as I was telling you. When you study the science of philology, you learn the laws governing how a consonant can lose its shape, but it keeps its identity from language to language.” What astonished me here was that I knew that on that day, Malcolm X's schedule had been crushing, involving both a television and radio appearance and a live speech, yet he had gone to find out something about the aardvark.

Before long, Malcolm X called a press conference, and announced, “My new Organization of Afro-American Unity is a non-religious and non-sectarian group organized to unite Afro- Americans for a constructive program toward attainment of human rights.” The new OAAU's tone appeared to be one of militant black nationalism. He said to the questions of various reporters in subsequent interviews that the OAAU would seek to convert the Negro population from non- violence to active self-defense against white supremacists across America. On the subject of politics he offered an enigma, “Whether you use bullets or ballots, you've got to aim well; don't strike at the puppet, strike at the puppeteer.” Did he envision any special area of activity? “I'm going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” What about alliance with other Negro organizations? He said that he would consider forming some united front with certain selected Negro leaders. He conceded under questioning that the N.A.A.C.P. was “doing some good.” Could any whites join his OAAU? “If John Brown were alive, maybe him.” And he answered his critics with such statements as that he would send “armed guerrillas” into Mississippi. “I am dead serious. We will send them not only to Mississippi, but to any place where black people's lives are threatened by white bigots. As far as I am concerned, Mississippi is anywhere south of the Canadian border.” At another time, when Evelyn Cunningham of the _Pittsburgh Courier_ asked Malcolm X in a kidding way, “Say something startling for my column,” he told her, “Anyone who wants to follow me and my movement has got to be ready to goto jail, to the hospital, and to the cemetery before he can be truly free.” Evelyn Cunningham, printing the item, commented, “He smiled and chuckled, but he was in dead earnest.”

His fourth child, yet another daughter, was born and he and Sister Betty named the baby Gamilah Lumumbah. A young waitress named Helen Lanier, at Harlem's Twenty Two Club where Malcolm X now often asked people to meet him, gave him a layette for the new baby. He was very deeply touched by the gesture. “Why, I hardly know that girl!”

He was clearly irked when a _New York Times_ poll among New York City Negroes reflected that three-fourths had named Dr. Martin Luther King as “doing the best work for Negroes,” and another one-fifth had voted for the N.A.A.C.P.'s Roy Wilkins, while only six per cent had voted for Malcolm X. “Brother,” he said to me, “do you realize that some of history's greatest leaders never were recognized until they were safely in the ground!”

One morning in mid-summer 1964, Malcolm X telephoned me and said that he would be leaving “within the next two or three days” for a planned six weeks abroad. I heard from him first in Cairo,

about as the predicted “long, hot summer” began in earnest, with riots and other uprisings of Negroes occurring in suburban Philadelphia, in Rochester, in Brooklyn, in Harlem, and other cities. The _New York Times_ reported that a meeting of Negro intellectuals had agreed that Dr. Martin Luther King could secure the allegiance of the middle and upper classes of Negroes, but Malcolm X alone could secure the allegiance of Negroes at the bottom. “The Negroes respect Dr. King and Malcolm X because they sense in these men absolute integrity and know they will never sell them out. Malcolm X cannot be corrupted and the Negroes know this and therefore respect him. They also know that he comes from the lower depths, as they do, and regard him as one of their own. Malcolm X is going to play a formidable role, because the racial struggle has now shifted to the urban North . . .if Dr. King is convinced that he has sacrificed ten years of brilliant leadership, he will be forced to revise his concepts. There is only one direction in which he can move, and that is in the direction of Malcolm X.” I sent a clipping of that story to Malcolm X in Cairo.

In Washington, D.C. and New York City, at least, powerful civic, private, and governmental agencies and individuals were keenly interested in what Malcolm X was saying abroad, and were speculating upon what would he say, and possibly do, when he returned to America. In upstate New York, I received a telephone call from a close friend who said he had been asked to ask me if I would come to New York City on an appointed day to meet with “a very high government official” who was interested in Malcolm X. I did fly down to the city. My friend accompanied me to the offices of a large private foundation well known for its activities and donations in the civil- rights area. I met the foundation's president and he introduced me to the Justice Department Civil Rights Section head, Burke Marshall. Marshall was chiefly interested in Malcolm X's finances, particularly how his extensive traveling since his Black Muslim ouster had been paid for. I told him that to the best of my knowledge the several payments from the publisher had financed Malcolm X, along with fees he received for some speeches, and possible donations that his organization received, and that Malcolm X had told me of borrowing money from his Sister Ella for the current trip, and that recently the _Saturday Evening Post_ had bought the condensation rights of the book for a substantial sum that was soon to be received. Marshall listened quietly, intently, and asked a few questions concerning other aspects of

Malcolm X's life, then thanked me. I wrote to Malcolm X in Cairo that night about the interview. He never mentioned it.

The _Saturday Evening Post_ flew photographer John Launois to Cairo to locate Malcolm X and photograph him in color. The magazine's September 12issue appeared, and I sent a copy by airmail to Malcolm X. Within a few days, I received a stinging note, expressing his anger at the magazine's editorial regarding his life story. (The editorial's opening sentence read, “If Malcolm X were not a Negro, his autobiography would be little more than a journal of abnormal psychology, the story of a burglar, dope pusher, addict and jailbird-with a family history of insanity-who acquires messianic delusions and sets forth to preach an upside-down religion of 'brotherly' hatred.”) I wrote to Malcolm X that he could not fairly hold me responsible for what the magazine had written in a separate editorial opinion. He wrote an apology, “but the greatest care must be exercised in the future.”

His return from Africa was even more auspicious than when he had returned from the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. A large group of Negroes, his followers and well-wishers, kept gathering in the Overseas Arrival Building at Kennedy Airport. When I entered, white men with cameras were positioned on the second level, taking pictures of all the Negroes who entered, and almost as obvious were Negro plain-clothesmen moving about. Malcolm's greeters had draped across the glass overlooking the U.S. Customs Inspection line some large cloth banners on which were painted in bold letters, “Welcome Home, Malcolm.”

He came in sight, stepping into one of the Customs Inspection lines; he heard the cheering and he looked up, smiling his pleasure.

***

Malcolm X wanted to “huddle” with me to fill me in on details from his trip that he wanted in the book. He said that he was giving me only the highlights, because he felt that his carefully kept diary might be turned into another book. We had intensive sessions in my hotel room, where he read what he selected from the diary, and I took notes. “What I want to stress is that I was trying to internationalize our problem,” he said to me, “to make the Africans feel their_kinship_ with us Afro-Americans. I made them _think_ about it, that they are our blood brothers, and we all came from the same foreparents. That's why the Africans loved me, the same way the Asians loved me because I was religious.”

Within a few days, he had no more time to see me. He would call and apologize; he was beset by a host of problems, some of which he mentioned, and some of which I heard from other people. Most immediately, there was discontent within his organization, the OAAU. His having stayed away almost three times as long as he had said he would be gone had sorely tested the morale of even his key members, and there was a general feeling that his interest was insufficient to expect his followers' interest to stay high. I heard from one member that “a growing disillusion” could be sensed throughout the organization.