a bait, as a minnow to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was, to save me.
I cannot understand it any other way.
After Elijah Muhammad himself was later accused as a very immoral man, I came to believe that
it wasn't a divine chastisement upon Reginald, but the pain he felt when his own family totally
rejected him for Elijah Muhammad, and this hurt made Reginald turn insanely upon Elijah
Muhammad.
It's impossible to dream, or to see, or to have a vision of someone whom you never have seen
before-and to see him exactly as he is. To see someone, and to see him exactly as he looks, is to
have a pre-vision.
I would later come to believe that my pre-vision was of Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah, the one
whom Elijah Muhammad said had appointed him-Elijah Muhammad-as His Last Messenger to the
black people of North America.
My last year in prison was spent back in the Charlestown Prison. Even among the white inmates,
the word had filtered around. Some of those brainwashed black convicts talked too much. And I
know that the censors had reported on my mail. The Norfolk Prison Colony officials had become
upset. They used as a reason for my transfer that I refused to take some kind of shots, an
inoculation or something.
The only thing that worried me was that I hadn't much time left before I would be eligible for
parole-board consideration. But I reasoned that they might look at my representing and spreading
Islam in another way: instead of keeping me in they might want to get me out.
I had come to prison with 20/20 vision. But when I got sent back to Charlestown, I had read so
much by the lights-out glow in my room at the Norfolk Prison Colony that I had astigmatism and
the first pair of the eyeglasses that I have worn ever since.
I had less maneuverability back in the much stricter Charles-town Prison. But I found that a lot of
Negroes attended a Bible class, and I went there.
Conducting the class was a tall, blond, blue-eyed (a perfect "devil") Harvard Seminary student.
He lectured, and then he started in a question-and-answer session. I don't know which of us had
read the Bible more, he or I, but I had to give him credit; he really was heavy on his religion. I
puzzled and puzzled for a way to upset him, and to give those Negroes present something to
think and talk about and circulate.
Finally, I put up my hand; he nodded. He had talked about Paul.
I stood up and asked, "What color was Paul?" And I kept talking, with pauses, "He had to be
black... because he was a Hebrew... and the original Hebrews were black... weren't they?"
He had started flushing red. You know the way white people do. He said "Yes."
I wasn't through yet. "What color was Jesus... he was Hebrew, too... wasn't he?"
Both the Negro and the white convicts had sat bolt upright. I don't care how tough the convict, be
he brainwashed black Christian, or a "devil" white Christian, neither of them is ready to hear
anybody saying Jesus wasn't white. The instructor walked around. He shouldn't have felt bad. In
all of the years since, I never have met any intelligent white man who would try to insist that
Jesus was white. How could they? He said, "Jesus was brown."
I let him get away with that compromise.