"Behind the reporter, a male voice spoke up, 'Kill the bastard, kill them all.' The young man, in his
unease, smiled nervously and Malcolm jeered, 'Look at him laugh. He's really not laughing, he's
just laughing with his teeth.' An ugly tension curled the edges of the atmosphere. Then Malcolm
went on: 'The white man doesn't know how to laugh. He just shows his teeth. But we know how
to laugh. We laugh deep down, from the bottom up.' The audience laughed, deep down, from the
bottom up and, as suddenly as Malcolm had stirred it, so, skillfully and swiftly, he deflected it. It
had been at once a masterful and shabby performance."
I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this
was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to
declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only
Negro in America who could either start a race riot-or stop one. When I once quoted this to him,
tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, "I don't know if I could start one. I don't know if I'd
want to stop one." It was the kind of statement he relished making.
Over the months, I had gradually come to establish something of a telephone acquaintance with
Malcolm X's wife, whom I addressed as "Sister Betty," as I had heard the Muslims do. I admired
how she ran a home, with, then, three small daughters, and still managed to take all of the calls
which came for Malcolm X, surely as many calls as would provide a job for an average
switchboard operator. Sometimes when he was with me, he would telephone home and spend as
much as five minutes rapidly jotting on a pad the various messages which had been left for him.
Sister Betty, generally friendly enough on the phone with me, sometimes would exclaim in
spontaneous indignation, "The man never gets any sleep!" Malcolm X rarely put in less than an
18-hour workday. Often when he had left my studio at four A.M. and a 40-minute drive lay
between him and home in East Elmhurst, Long Island, he had asked me to telephone him there
at nine A.M. Usually this would be when he wanted me to accompany him somewhere, and he
was going to tell me, after reviewing his commitments, when and where he wanted me to meet
him. (There were times when I didn't get an awful lot of sleep, myself.) He was always
accompanied, either by some of his Muslim colleagues like James 67X (the 67th man named
"James" who had joined Harlem's Mosque Number 7), or Charles 37X, or by me, but he never
asked me to be with him when they were. I went with him to college and university lectures, to
radio and television stations for his broadcasts, and to public appearances in a variety of
situations and locations.
If we were driving somewhere, motorists along the highway would wave to Malcolm X, the faces
of both whites and Negroes spontaneously aglow with the wonderment that I had seen evoked by
other "celebrities." No few airline hostesses had come to know him, because he flew so much;
they smiled prettily at him, he was in turn the essence of courtly gentlemanliness, and inevitably
the word spread and soon an unusual flow of bathroom traffic would develop,passing where he
sat. Whenever we arrived at our destination, it became familiar to hear "There's Malcolm X!"
"Where?" "The tall one." Passers-by of both races stared at him. A few of both races, more
Negroes than whites, would speak or nod to him in greeting. A high percentage of white people
were visibly uncomfortable in his presence, especially within the confines of small areas, such as
in elevators. "I'm the only black man they've ever been close to who they know speaks the truth
to them," Malcolm X once explained to me. "It's their guilt that upsets them, not me." He said
another time, "The white man is afraid of truth. The truth takes the white man's breath and drains
his strength-you just watch his face get red anytime you tell him a little truth."
There was something about this man when he was in a room with people. He commanded the
room, whoever else was present. Even out of doors; once I remember in Harlem he sat on a
speaker's stand between Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and the former Manhattan Borough
President Hulan Jack, and when the street rally was over the crowd focus was chiefly on Malcolm
X. I remember another time that we had gone by railway from New York City to Philadelphia