long as the Messenger himself didn't deviate from the path of truth. We were taught that Allah
turned the minds of any defectors into a turmoil. I thought truly that it was Allah doing this to my
brother.
One letter, I think from my brother Philbert, told me that Reginald was with them in Detroit. I heard
no more about Reginald until one day, weeks later, Ella visited me; she told me that Reginald was
at her home in Roxbury, sleeping. Ella said she had heard a knock, she had gone to the door, and
there was Reginald, looking terrible. Ella said she had asked, "Where did you come from?" And
Reginald had told her he came from Detroit. She said she asked him, "How did you get here?"
And he had told her, "I walked."
I believed he had walked. I believed in Elijah Muhammad, and he had convinced us that Allah's
chastisement upon Reginald's mind had taken away Reginald's ability to gauge distance and
time. There is a dimension of time with which we are not familiar here in the West. Elijah
Muhammad said that under Allah's chastisement, the five senses of a man can be so deranged
by thosewhose mental powers are greater than his that in five minutes his hair can turn snow
white. Or he will walk nine hundred miles as he might walk five blocks.
In prison, since I had become a Muslim, I had grown a beard. When Reginald visited me, he
nervously moved about in his chair; he told me that each hair on my beard was a snake.
Everywhere, he saw snakes.
He next began to believe that he was the "Messenger of Allah." Reginald went around in the
streets of Roxbury, Ella reported to me, telling people that he had some divine power. He
graduated from this to saying that he was Allah.
He finally began saying he was greater than Allah.
Authorities picked up Reginald, and he was put into an institution. They couldn't find what was
wrong. They had no way to understand Allah's chastisement. Reginald was released. Then he
was picked up again, and was put into another institution.
Reginald is in an institution now. I know where, but I won't say. I would not want to cause him any
more trouble than he has already had.
I believe, today, that it was written, it was meant, for Reginald to be used for one purpose only: as
a bait, as a minnow to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was, to save me.
I cannot understand it any other way.
After Elijah Muhammad himself was later accused as a very immoral man, I came to believe that
it wasn't a divine chastisement upon Reginald, but the pain he felt when his own family totally
rejected him for Elijah Muhammad, and this hurt made Reginald turn insanely upon Elijah
Muhammad.
It's impossible to dream, or to see, or to have a vision of someone whom you never have seen
before-and to see him exactly as he is. To see someone, and to see him exactly as he looks, is to
have a pre-vision.
I would later come to believe that my pre-vision was of Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah, the one
whom Elijah Muhammad said had appointed him-Elijah Muhammad-as His Last Messenger to the
black people of North America.
My last year in prison was spent back in the Charlestown Prison. Even among the white inmates,
the word had filtered around. Some of those brainwashed black convicts talked too much. And I
know that the censors had reported on my mail. The Norfolk Prison Colony officials had become
upset. They used as a reason for my transfer that I refused to take some kind of shots, an
inoculation or something.
The only thing that worried me was that I hadn't much time left before I would be eligible for
parole-board consideration. But I reasoned that they might look at my representing and spreading
Islam in another way: instead of keeping me in they might want to get me out.
I had come to prison with 20/20 vision. But when I got sent back to Charlestown, I had read so
much by the lights-out glow in my room at the Norfolk Prison Colony that I had astigmatism and
the first pair of the eyeglasses that I have worn ever since.
I had less maneuverability back in the much stricter Charles-town Prison. But I found that a lot of