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.