once, briefly lapsing into his old vernacular. He had very distinct reservations about Negro
professional intelligentsia as a category. They were the source from which most of the Black
Muslims' attackers came. It was for this reason that some of his most bristling counter-attacks
against "these so-called educated Uncle Thomases, Ph.D." were flung out at his audiences at
Negro institutions of higher learning.
Where I witnessed the Malcolm X who was happiest and most at ease among members of our
own race was when sometimes I chanced to accompany him on what he liked to call "my little
daily rounds" around the streets of Harlem, among the Negroes that he said the "so-called black
leaders" spoke of "as black masses statistics." On these tours, Malcolm X generally avoided the
arterial 125th Street in Harlem; he plied the side streets, especially in those areas which were
thickest with what he described as "the black man down in the gutter where I came from," the
poverty-ridden with a high incidence of dope addicts and winos.
Malcolm X here indeed was a hero. Striding along the sidewalks, he bathed all whom he met in
the boyish grin, and his conversation with any who came up was quiet and pleasant. "It's just
what the white devil wants you to do, brother," he might tell a wino, "he wants you to get drunk so
he will have an excuse to put a club up beside your head." Or I remember once he halted at a
stoop to greet several older women: "Sisters, let me ask you something," he said
conversationally, "have you ever known one white man who either didn't do something to you,
or take something from you?" One among that audienceexclaimed after a moment, "I sure
ain't!" whereupon all of them joined in laughter and we walked on with Malcolm X waving back
to cries of "He's right!"
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
darsice
(darsice)
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