Then one night, Malcolm X arrived nearly out on his feet from fatigue. For two hours, he paced
the floor delivering a tirade against Negro leaders who were attacking Elijah Muhammad and
himself. I don't know what gave me the inspiration to say once when he paused for breath, "I
wonder if you'd tell me something about your mother?"
Abruptly he quit pacing, and the look he shot at me made me sense that somehow the chance
question had hit him. When I look back at it now, I believe I must have caught him so physically
weak that his defenses were vulnerable.
Slowly, Malcolm X began to talk, now walking in a tight circle. "She was always standing over the
stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat. We stayed so hungry that we were dizzy. I
remember the color of dresses she used to wear-they were a kind of faded-out gray... ." And he
kept on talking until dawn, so tired that the big feet would often almost stumble in their pacing.
From this stream-of-consciousness reminiscing I finally got out of him the foundation for this
book's beginning chapters, "Nightmare" and "Mascot." After that night, he never again hesitated
to tell me even the most intimate details of his personal life, over the next two years. His talking
about his mother triggered something.
Malcolm X's mood ranged from somber to grim as he recalled his childhood. I remember his
making a great point of how he learned what had been a cardinal awareness of his ever since:
"It's the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease." When his narration reached his moving to
Boston to live with his half-sister Ella, Malcolm X began to laugh about how "square" he had been
in the ghetto streets. "Why, I'm telling you things I haven't thought about since then!" he would
exclaim. Then it was during recalling the early Harlem days that Malcolm X really got carried
away. One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black
demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, "re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam-" and then
grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping
around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days.
And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of
that session he was decidedly grumpy. Later on in the Harlem narrative, he grew somber again.
"The only thing I considered wrong was what I got caught doing wrong. I had a jungle mind, I was
living in a jungle, and everything I did was done by instinct to survive." But he stressed that he
had no regrets about his crimes, "because it was all a result of what happens to thousands upon
thousands of black men in the white man's Christian world."
His enjoyment resumed when the narrative entered his prison days. "Let me tell you how I'd get
those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I'd whisper to them, 'If you
don't, I'll start a rumor that you're really a light Negro just passing as white.' That shows you what
the white devil thinks about the black man. He'd rather die than be thought a Negro!" He told me
about the reading he had been able to do in prison: "I didn't know what I was doing, but just by
instinct I liked the books with intellectual vitamins." And another time: "In the hectic pace of the
world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can
put to gooduse. I'd put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to
do some thinking. If he's motivated, in prison he can change his life."
Yet another time, Malcolm X reflected, "Once a man has been to prison, he never looks at himself
or at other people the same again. The 'squares' out here whose boat has been in smooth waters
all the time turn up their noses at an ex-con. But an ex-con can keep his head up when the
'squares' sink."
He scribbled that night (I kept both my notebooks and the paper napkins dated): "This WM
created and dropped A-bomb on non-whites; WM now calls 'Red' and lives in fear of other WM he
knows may bomb us."
Also: "Learn wisdom from the pupil of the eye that looks upon all things and yet to self is blind.
Persian poet."
At intervals, Malcolm X would make a great point of stressing to me, "Now, I don't want anything
in this book to make it sound that I think I'm somebody important." I would assure him that I would
try not to, and that in any event he would be checking the manuscript page by page, and
ultimately the galley proofs. At other times, he would end an attack upon the white man and,
darsice
(darsice)
#1