standing in the hallway, he told Sister Betty, "We'll all be together. I want my family with me.
Families shouldn't be separated. I'll never make another long trip without you. We'll get somebody
to keep the children. I'll never leave you so long again."
"I couldn't help but just break out grinning," Sister Betty would later tell me.
She figured that he must have stopped at a nearby drugstore to use the telephone booth when I
later told her that Malcolm X had telephoned me upstate at about 3:30 that afternoon.
For the first time in nearly two years, I did not recognize immediately that the voice on the other
end of the phone belonged to Malcolm X. He sounded as if he had a heavy, deep cold. He told
me that in the middle of the night he and some friends had helped a moving company's men take
out of the other house all of the family's furniture and other belongings salvageable after the firebombing-
before a sheriff's eviction party would set the things out on the sidewalk. "Betty and I
have been looking at a house we want to buy"-he tried a chuckle-"you know nobody's going to
rent, not to me, these days! "He said, "All I've got is about $150," and that he needed a
$3000 down-payment plus $1000 moving costs; he asked if I thought the publisher would
advance him $4000 against the projected profits from the book. I said that when our agent's
offices opened on Monday morning, I would telephone and I knew thathe would query the
publisher to see if it couldn't be arranged, then Monday night I would call him back and let him
know.
He said that he and Sister Betty had decided that although they were going to pay for the house,
to avoid possible trouble they had gotten the agreement of his sister Ella who lived in Boston to
let the house be bought in her name. He said that he still owed $1500 to his sister Ella which she
had loaned him to make one trip abroad. Eventually they would change the house's title into
Sister Betty's name, he said, or maybe into the name of their oldest daughter, Attallah.
He digressed on the dangers he faced. "But, you know, I'm going to tell you something, brotherthe
more I keep thinking about this thing, the things that have been happening lately, I'm not all
that sure it's the Muslims. I know what they can do, and what they can't, and they can't do some
of the stuff recently going on. Now, I'm going to tell you, the more I keep thinking about what
happened to me in France, I think I'm going to quit saying it's the Muslims."
Then-it seemed to me such an odd, abrupt change of subject: "You know, I'm glad I've been the
first to establish official ties between Afro-Americans and our blood brothers in Africa." And saying
good-bye, he hung up.
After that telephone call, Malcolm X drove on into Manhattan and to the New York Hilton Hotel
between 53rd and 54th Streets at Rockefeller Center. He checked the blue Oldsmobile into the
hotel garage and then, in the lobby, he checked himself in and was assigned a twelfth-floor room,
to which a bellman accompanied him.
Soon some Negro men entered the giant hotel's busy lobby. They began asking various bellmen
what room Malcolm X was in. The bellmen, of course, never would answer that question
concerning any guest-and considering that it wasMalcolm X whom practically everyone who read
New York City newspapers knew was receiving constant death threats, the bellmen quickly
notified the hotel's security chief. From then until Malcolm X checked out the next day, extra
security vigilance was continuously maintained on the twelfth floor. During that time, Malcolm X
left the room only once, to have dinner in the hotel's lobby-level, dimly lit Bourbon Room.
Sunday morning at nine o'clock, Sister Betty in Long Island was surprised when her husband
telephoned her and asked if she felt it would be too much trouble for her to get all of the four
children dressed and bring them to the two o'clock meeting that afternoon at the Audubon
Ballroom in Harlem. She said, "Of course it won't!" On Saturday he had told her that she couldn't
come to the meeting. He said to her, "You know what happened an hour ago? Exactly at eight
o'clock, the phone woke me up. Some man said, 'Wake up, brother' and hung up." Malcolm X
said good-bye to Sister Betty.
And four hours later, Malcolm X left his room and took an elevator down to the lobby, where he
checked out. He got his car and in the clear, warm midday of Sunday, February 21, he drove
uptown to the Audubon Ballroom.
darsice
(darsice)
#1