by Alex Haley
When I did not see him for several days, a letter came. “I have cancelled all public appearances and speaking engagements for a number of weeks. So within that period it should be possible to finish this book. With the fast pace of newly developing incidents today, it is easy for something that is done or said tomorrow to be outdated even by sunset on the same day. Malcolm X.”
I pressed to get the first chapter, “Nightmare,” into a shape that he could review. When it was ready in a readable rough draft, I telephoned him. He came as quickly as he could drive from his home—which made me see how grinding an ordeal it was to him to just be sitting at home, inactive, and knowing his temperament, my sympathies went out to Sister Betty.
He pored over the manuscript pages, raptly the first time, then drawing out his red-ink ball-point pen he read through the chapter again, with the pen occasionally stabbing at something. “You can’t bless Allah!” he exclaimed, changing “bless” to “praise.” In a place that referred to himself and his brothers and sisters, he scratched red through “we kids.” “Kids are goats!” he exclaimed sharply.
Soon, Malcolm X and his family flew to Miami. Cassius Clay had extended the invitation as a sixth wedding anniversary present to Malcolm X and Sister Betty, and they had accepted most gratefully. It was Sister Betty’s first vacation in the six years of the taut regimen as a Black Muslim wife, and it was for Malcolm X both a saving of face and something to do.
Very soon after his arrival, he telegraphed me his phone number at a motel. I called him and he told me, “I just want to tell you something. I’m not a betting man anymore, but if you are, you bet on Cassius to beat Liston, and you will win.” I laughed and said he was prejudiced. He said, “Remember what I told you when the fight’s over.” I received later a picture postcard, the picture in vivid colors being of a chimpanzee at the Monkey Jungle in Miami. Malcolm X had written on the reverse side, “One hundred years after the Civil War, and these chimpanzees get more recognition, respect and freedom in America than our people do. Bro. Malcolm X.” Another time, an envelope came, and inside it was a clipping of an Irv Kupcinet column in the Chicago Sun-Times. Malcolm X’s red pen had encircled an item which read, “Insiders are predicting a split in the Black Muslims. Malcolm X, ousted as No. 2 man in the organization, may form a splinter group to oppose Elijah Muhammad.” Alongside the item, Malcolm X had scribbled “Imagine this!!!”
The night of the phenomenal upset, when Clay did beat Liston, Malcolm X telephoned me, and sounds of excitement were in the background. The victory party was in his motel suite, Malcolm X told me. He described what was happening, mentioned some of those who were present, and that the new heavyweight king was “in the next room, my bedroom here” taking a nap. After reminding me of the fight prediction he had made, Malcolm X said that I should look forward now to Clay’s “quick development into a major world figure. I don’t know if you really realize the world significance that this is the first Muslim champion.”
It was the following morning when Cassius Clay gave the press interview which resulted in national headlines that he was actually a “Black Muslim,” and soon after, the newspapers were carrying pictures of Malcolm X introducing the heavyweight champion to various African diplomats in the lobbies of the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Malcolm X toured Clay about in Harlem, and in other places, functioning, he said, as Clay’s “friend and religious advisor.”
I had now moved upstate to finish my work on the book, and we talked on the telephone every three or four days. He said things suggesting that he might never be returned to his former Black Muslim post, and he now began to say things quietly critical of Elijah Muhammad. Playboy magazine asked me to do an interview for them with the new champion Cassius Clay, and when I confidently asked Malcolm X to arrange for me the needed introduction to Clay, Malcolm X hesitantly said, “I think you had better ask somebody else to do that.” I was highly surprised at the reply, but I had learned never to press him for information. And then, very soon after, I received a letter. “Dear Alex Haley: A quick note. Would you prepare a properly worded letter that would enable me to change the reading of the contract so that all remaining proceeds now would go to the Muslim Mosque, Inc., or in the case of my death then to go directly to my wife, Mrs. Betty X Little? The sooner this letter or contract is changed, the more easily I will rest.” Under the signature of Malcolm X, there was a P.S.: “How is it possible to write one’s autobiography in a world so fast-changing as this?”
Soon I read in the various newspapers that rumors were being heard of threats on Malcolm X’s life. Then there was an article in the Amsterdam News: The caption was “Malcolm X Tells Of Death Threat,” and the story reported that he had said that former close associates of his in the New York mosque had sent out “a special squad” to “try to kill me in cold blood. Thanks to Allah, I learned of the plot from the very same brothers who had been sent out to murder me. These brothers had heard me represent and defend Mr. Muhammad for too long for them to swallow the lies about me without first asking me some questions for their own clarification.”
I telephoned Malcolm X, and expressed my personal concern for him. His voice sounded weary. He said that his “uppermost interest” was that any money which might come due him in the future would go directly to his new organization, or to his wife, as the letter he had signed and mailed had specified. He told me, “I know I’ve got to get a will made for myself, I never did because I never have had anything to will to anybody, but if I don’t have one and something happened to me, there could be a mess.” I expressed concern for him, and he told me that he had a loaded rifle in his home, and “I can take care of myself.”
The “Muslim Mosque, Inc.” to which Malcolm X had referred was a new organization which he had formed, which at that time consisted of perhaps forty or fifty Muslims who had left the leadership of Elijah Muhammad.
Through a close associate of Cassius Clay, whom Malcolm X had finally suggested to me, my interview appointment was arranged with the heavyweight champion, and I flew down to New York City to do the interview for Playboy. Malcolm X was “away briefly,” Sister Betty said on the phone—and she spoke brusquely. I talked with one Black Muslim lady whom I had known before she had joined, and who had been an admirer of Malcolm X. She had elected to remain in the original fold, “but I’ll tell you, brother, what a lot in the mosque are saying, you know, it’s like if you divorced your husband, you’d still like to see him once in a while.” During my interviews with Cassius Clay in his three-room suite at Harlem’s Theresa Hotel, inevitably the questions got around to Clay’s Muslim membership, then to a query about what had happened to his formerly very close relationship with Malcolm X. Evenly, Clay said, “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it. I don’t want to talk about him no more.”
Elijah Muhammad at his headquarters in Chicago grew “emotionally affected” whenever the name of Malcolm X had to be raised in his presence, one of the Muslims in Clay’s entourage told me. Mr. Muhammad reportedly had said, “Brother Malcolm got to be a big man. I made him big. I was about to make him a great man.” The faithful Black Muslims predicted that soon Malcolm X would be turned upon by the defectors from Mosque Number 7 who had joined him: “They will feel betrayed.” Said others, “A great chastisement of Allah will fall upon a hypocrite.” Mr. Muhammad reportedly had said at another time, “Malcolm is destroying himself,” and that he had no wish whatever to see Malcolm X die, that he “would rather see him live and suffer his treachery.”
The general feeling among Harlemites, non-Muslims, with whom I talked was that Malcolm X had 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 Hotel Americana. His old total ease wa
s 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 of things 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.”
Then—March 26, 1964—a note came from Malcolm X: “There is a chance that I may make a quick trip to several very important countries in Africa, including a pilgrimage to the Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, beginning about April 13th. Keep this to yourself.”
While abroad, Malcolm X wrote letters and postcards to almost everyone he knew well. His letters now were signed “El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.”
Then, in mid-May, Sister Betty telephoned me, her voice jubilant: Malcolm X was returning. I flew to New York City. On May 21, the phone rang in my hotel room and Sister Betty said, “Just a minute, please—,” then the deep voice said, “How are you?”
“Well! El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz! How are you?”
He said, “Just a little bit tired.” He had arrived on a Pan-American Airlines flight at 4:30. He was going to have a press conference at seven P.M. at the Hotel Theresa. “I’ll pick you up at 6:30 at 135th and Lenox, on the uptown side—all right?”
When the blue Oldsmobile stopped, and I got in, El Hajj Malcolm, broadly beaming, wore a seersucker suit, the red hair needed a barber’s attention, and he had grown a beard. Also in the car was Sister Betty. It was the first time we had ever seen each other after more than a year of talking several times a week on the telephone. We smiled at each other. She wore dark glasses, a blue maternity suit, and she was pregnant with what would be her fourth child.
There must have been fifty still and television photographers and reporters jockeying for position, up front, and the rest of the Skyline Ballroom was filling with Negro followers of Malcolm X, or his well-wishers, and the curious. The room lit up with flickering and flooding lights as he came in the door squiring Sister Betty, holding her arm tenderly, and she was smiling broadly in her pride that this man was her man. I recognized the Times’ M. S. Handler and introduced myself; we warmly shook hands and commandeered a little two-chair table. The reporters in a thick semicircle before Malcolm X seated on the podium fired questions at him, and he gave the impression that all of his twelve years’ oratorical practice had prepared him for this new image.
“Do we correctly understand that you now do not think that all whites are evil?”
“True, sir! My trip to Mecca has opened my eyes. I no longer subscribe to racism. I have adjusted my thinking to the point where I believe that whites are human beings”—a significant pause—“as long as this is borne out by their humane attitude toward Negroes.”
They picked at his “racist” image. “I’m not a racist. I’m not condemning whites for being whites, but for their deeds. I condemn what whites collectively have done to our people collectively.”
He almost continually flashed about the room the ingratiating boyish smile. He would pick at the new reddish beard. They asked him about that, did he plan to keep it? He said he hadn’t decided yet, he would have to see if he could get used to it or not. Was he maneuvering to now join the major civil-rights leaders whom he had previously bitterly attacked? He answered that one sideways: “I’ll explain it this way, sir. If some men are in a car, driving with a destination in mind, and you know they are going the wrong way, but they are convinced they are going the right way, then you get into the car with them, and ride with them, talking—and finally when they see they are on the wrong road, not getting where they were intending, then you tell them, and they will listen to you then, what road to take.” He had never been in better form, weighing, parrying, answering the questions.
The Times’ Handler, beside me, was taking notes and muttering under his breath, “Incredible! Incredible!” I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking, some of the time, that if a pebble were dropped from the window behind Malcolm X, it would have struck on a sidewalk eight floors below where years before he had skulked, selling dope.
As I resumed writing upstate, periodic notes came from Malcolm X. “I hope the book is proceeding rapidly, for events concerning my life happen so swiftly, much of what has already been written can easily be outdated from month to month. In life, nothing is permanent; not even life itself (smile). So I would advi
se you to rush it on out as fast as possible.” Another note, special delivery, had a tone of irritation with me: he had received from the publisher a letter which indicated that he had received a $2500 check when the book contract was signed, “and therefore I will be expected to pay personal income tax on this. As you know, it was my repeated specification that this entire transaction was to be made at that time directly with and to the Mosque. In fact, I have never seen that check to this very day.”
The matter was straightened out, and I sent Malcolm X some rough chapters to read. I was appalled when they were soon returned, red-inked in many places where he had told of his almost father-and-son relationship with Elijah Muhammad. Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decision, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what would lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama. Malcolm X said, gruffly, “Whose book is this?” I told him “yours, of course,” and that I only made the objection in my position as a writer. He said that he would have to think about it. I was heartsick at the prospect that he might want to re-edit the entire book into a polemic against Elijah Muhammad But late that night, Malcolm X telephoned. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I was upset about something. Forget what I wanted changed, let what you already had stand.” I never again gave him chapters to review unless I was with him. Several times I would covertly watch him frown and wince as he read, but he never again asked for any change in what he had originally said. And the only thing that he ever indicated that he wished had been different in his life came when he was reading the chapter “Laura.” He said, “That was a smart girl, a good girl. She tried her best to make something out of me, and look what I started her into—dope and prostitution. I wrecked that girl.”
—
Malcolm X was busy, busy, busy; he could not visit my hotel room often, and when he did, it shortly would get the feeling of Grand Central Station. It seemed that when the telephone was not ringing for him, he was calling someone else, consulting the jotted numbers in his ever-ready memorandum book. Now he had begun to talk a great deal with various people from the Middle East or Africa who were in New York. Some of these came to see him at the hotel room. At first, I would sit by the window engrossed in reading while they talked by the room’s door in low tones. He was very apologetic when this occurred, and I told him I felt no sensitivity about it; then, afterwards, I would generally step out into the hallway, or perhaps take the elevator down to the lobby, then watch the elevators until I saw the visitor leave. One day, I remember, the phone had rung steadily with such callers as C.B.S., A.B.C., N.B.C., every New York City paper, the London Daily Express, and numerous individuals—he and I had gotten no work at all accomplished; then a television camera crew arrived and filled the room to tape an interview with Malcolm X by A.B.C.’s commentator Bill Beutel. As the crew was setting up its floodlights on tripods, a Dayton, Ohio, radio station called, wishing to interview Malcolm X by telephone. He asked me to ask them to call him the following day at his sister Ella’s home in Boston. Then the Ghana Ministry of Information called. I turned with a note to Malcolm X to whom the commentator Beutel had just said, “I won’t take much of your time, I just have a few probably stupid questions.” Glancing at my note, Malcolm X said to Beutel, “Only the unasked question is stupid,” and then to me, “Tell them I’ll call them back, please.” Then just as the television cameras began rolling, with Beutel and Malcolm X talking, the telephone rang again and it was Life magazine reporter Marc Crawford to whom I whispered what was happening. Crawford, undaunted, asked if the open receiver could be placed where he could hear the interview, and I complied, relieved that it was one way to let the interview proceed without interruption.
