subconscious defenses against anything he doesn't want to face up to. I've just become aware
how closed my mind was now that I've opened it up again.
That's one of the characteristics I don't like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can't solve, I
shut it out. I make believe that it doesn't exist. But it exists."
It was my turn to be deeply touched. Not long afterward, he was again away for a few days.
When he returned this time, he said that at his brother Philbert's home, "we had dinner with our
mother for the first time in all those years!" He said, "She's sixty-six, and her memory is better
than mine and she looks young and healthy. She has more of her teeth than those who were
instrumental in sending her to the institution."
When something had angered Malcolm X during the day, his face would be flushed redder when
he visited me, and he generally would spend much of the session lashing out bitterly. When some
Muslims were shot by Los Angeles policemen, one of them being killed, Malcolm X, upon his
return from a trip he made there, was fairly apoplectic for a week. It had been in this mood that he
had made, in Los Angeles, the statement which caused him to be heavily censured by members
of both races. "I've just heard some good news!"-referringto a plane crash at Orly Field in Paris in
which thirty-odd white Americans, mostly from Atlanta, Georgia, had been killed instantly.
(Malcolm X never publicly recanted this statement, to my knowledge, but much later he said to
me simply, "That's one of the things I wish I had never said.")
Anytime the name of the present Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall was raised, Malcolm X still
practically spat fire in memory of what the judge had said years before when he was the
N.A.A.C.P. chief attorney: "The Muslims are run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and
jails and financed, I am sure, by some Arab group." The only time that I have ever heard Malcolm
X use what might be construed as a curse word, it was a "hell" used in response to a statement
that Dr. Martin Luther King made that Malcolm X's talk brought "misery upon Negroes." Malcolm
X exploded to me, "How in the hell can my talk do this? It's always a Negro responsible, not what
the white man does!" The "extremist" or "demagogue" accusation invariably would burn Malcolm
X. "Yes, I'm an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You
show me a black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric
attention!"
Once when he said, "Aristotle shocked people. Charles Darwin outraged people. Aldous Huxley
scandalized millions!" Malcolm X immediately followed the statement with "Don't print that, people
would think I'm trying to link myself with them." Another time, when something provoked him to
exclaim, "These Uncle Toms make me think about how the Prophet Jesus was criticized in his
own country!" Malcolm X promptly got up and silently took my notebook, tore out that page and
crumpled it and put it into his pocket, and he was considerably subdued during the remainder of
that session.
I remember one time we talked and he showed me a newspaper clipping reporting where a Negro
baby had been bitten by a rat. Malcolm X said, "Now, just read that, just think of that a minute!
Suppose it was your child!Where's that slumlord-on some beach in Miami!" He continued
fuming throughout our interview. I did not go with him when later that day he addressed a Negro
audience in Harlem and an incident occurred which Helen Dudar reported in the New York
Post.
"Malcolm speaking in Harlem stared down at one of the white reporters present, the only whites
admitted to the meeting, and went on, 'Now, there's a reporter who hasn't taken a note in half an
hour, but as soon as I start talking about the Jews, he's busy taking notes to prove that I'm anti-
Semitic.'