been powerful and influential enough a minister that eventually he would split the mosque
membership into two hostile camps, and that in New York City at least, Elijah Muhammad's
unquestioned rule would be ended.
Malcolm X returned. He said that he had been in Boston and Philadelphia. He spent ample time
with me, now during the day, in Room 1936 in the HotelAmericana. His old total ease was no
longer with him. As if it was the most natural thing in the world to do, at sudden intervals he would
stride to the door; pulling it open, he would look up and down the corridor, then shut the door
again. "If I'm alive when this book comes out, it will be a miracle," he said by way of explanation.
"I'm not saying it distressingly-" He leaned forward and touched the buff gold bedspread. "I'm
saying it like I say that's a bedspread."
For the first time he talked with me in some detail about what had happened. He said that his
statement about President Kennedy's assassination was not why he had been ousted from the
Muslims. "It wasn't the reason at all. Nobody said anything when I made stronger statements
before." The real reason, he said, was "jealousy in Chicago, and I had objected to the immorality
of the man who professed to be more moral than anybody."
Malcolm X said that he had increased the Nation of Islam membership from about 400 when he
had joined to around 40,000. "I don't think there were more than 400 in the country when I joined,
I really don't. They were mostly older people, and many of them couldn't even pronounce Mr.
Muhammad's name, and he stayed mostly in the background."
Malcolm X worked hard not to show it, but he was upset. "There is nothing more frightful than
ignorance in action. Goethe," he scribbled one day. He hinted about Cassius Clay a couple of
times, and when I responded only with anecdotes about my interview with Clay, he finally asked
what Clay had said of him. I dug out the index card on which the question was typed in advance
and Clay's response was beneath in longhand. Malcolm X stared at the card, then out of the
window, and he got up and walked around; one of the few times I ever heard his voice betray his
hurt was when he said, "I felt like a blood big-brother to him." He paused. "I'm not against him
now. He's a fine young man. Smart. He's just let himself be used, led astray."
And at another time there in the hotel room he came the nearest to tears that I ever saw him, and
also the only time I ever heard him use, for his race, one word. He had been talking about how
hard he had worked building up the Muslim organization in the early days when he was first
moved to New York City, when abruptly he exclaimed hoarsely, "We had the best organization
the black man's ever had-niggers ruined it!"
A few days later, however, he wrote in one of his memo books this, which he let me read,
"Children have a lesson adults should learn, to not be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try
again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so 'safe,' and therefore so shrinking and rigid
and afraid that it is why so many humans fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves
to failure."
Telephone calls came frequently for Malcolm X when he was in the room with me, or he would
make calls; he would talk in a covert, guarded manner, clearly not wishing me to be able to follow
the discussion. I took to going into the bathroom at these times, and closing the door, emerging
when the murmuring of his voice had stopped-hoping that made him more comfortable. Later, he
would tell me that he was hearing from some Muslims who were still ostensibly Elijah
Muhammad's followers. "I'm a marked man," he said one day, after such a call. "I've had highly
placed people tell me to be very careful every move I make." He thought about it. "Just as long as
my family doesn't get hurt, I'm not frightened for myself." I have the impression that Malcolm X
heard in advance that the Muslim organization was going to sue to make him vacate the home he
and his family lived in.
I had become worried that Malcolm X, bitter, would want to go back through the chapters in which
he had told of his Black Muslim days and re-edit them in some way. The day before I left New
York City to return upstate, I raised my concern to Malcolm X. "I have thought about that," he
said. "There are a lot ofthings I could say that passed through my mind at times even then, things
I saw and heard, but I threw them out of my mind. I'm going to let it stand the way I've told it. I
want the book to be the way it was."
darsice
(darsice)
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