the old street talk, I quickly put him at his ease, and we had a great reunion. We laughed until we
cried at Shorty's dramatization of his reactions when he heard that judge keep saying "Count one,
ten years... count two, ten years -" We talked about how having those white girls with us had
gotten as tea years where we had seen in prison plenty of worse offenders with far less time to
serve.
Shorty still had a little band, and he was doing fairly well. He was rightfully very proud that in
prison he had studied music. I told him enough about Islam to see from his reactions that he
didn't really want to hear it. In prison, he had misheard about our religion. He got me off the
subject by making a joke. He said that he hadn't had enough pork chops and white women. I
don't know if he has yet, or not. I know that he's married to a white woman now... and he's fat as
a hog from eating hog.
I also saw John Hughes, the gambling-house owner, and some others I had known who were still
around Roxbury. The wire about me had made them all uncomfortable, but my "What you know,
Daddy?" approach at least enabled us to have some conversations. I never mentioned Islam to
most of them. I knew,from what I had been when I was with them, how brainwashed they were.
As Temple Eleven's minister, I served only briefly, because as soon as I got it organized, by
March 1954, I left it in charge of Minister Ulysses X, and the Messenger moved me on to
Philadelphia.
The City of Brotherly Love black people reacted even faster to the truth about the white man than
the Bostonians had. And Philadelphia's Temple Twelve was established by the end of May. It had
taken a little under three months.
The next month, because of those Boston and Philadelphia successes, Mr. Muhammad
appointed me to be the minister of Temple Seven-in vital New York City.
I can't start to describe for you my welter of emotions. For Mr. Muhammad's teachings really to
resurrect American black people, Islam obviously had to grow, to grow very big. And nowhere in
America was such a single temple potential available as in New York's five boroughs.
They contained over a million black people.
It was nine years since West Indian Archie and I had been stalking the streets, momentarily
expecting to try and shoot each other down like dogs.
"Red!".. ."My man!".. ."Red, this can't be you-With my natural kinky red hair now closecropped,
in place of the old long-haired, lye-cooked conk they had always known on my head, I
know I looked much different.
"Gim'me some skin, man! A drink here, bartender-what? You quit! Aw, man, come off it!"
It was so good seeing so many whom I had known so well. You can understand how that was.
But it was West Indian Archie and Sammy the Pimp for whom I was primarily looking. And the first
nasty shock came quickly, about Sammy. He had quit pimping, he had gotten pretty high up in the
numbers business, and was doing well. Sammy even had married. Some fast young girl. But then
shortly after his wedding one morning he was found lying dead across his bed-they said with
twenty-five thousand dollars in his pockets. (People don't want to believe the sums that even the
minor underworld handles. Why, listen: in March 1964, a Chicago nickel-and-dime bets Wheel of
Fortune man, Lawrence Wakefield, died, and over $760, 000 in cash was in his apartment, in
sacks and bags... all taken from poor Negroes... and we wonder why we stay so poor. )
Sick about Sammy, I queried from bar to bar among old-timers for West Indian Archie. The wire
hadn't reported him dead, or living somewhere else, but none seemed to know where he was. I
heard the usual hustler fates of so many others. Bullets, knives, prison, dope, diseases, insanity,
alcoholism. I imagine it was about in that order. And so many of the survivors whom I knew as
tough hyenas and wolves of the streets in the old days now were so pitiful. They had known all
the angles, but beneath that surface they were poor, ignorant, untrained black men; life had
eased up on them and hyped them. I ran across close to twenty-five of these old-timers I had
known pretty well, who in the space of nine years had been reduced to the ghetto's minor,
scavenger hustles to scratch up room rent and food money. Some now worked downtown,
messengers, janitors, things like that. I was thankful to Allah that I had become a Muslim and