Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  This was Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis, who would soon become, as Rodnell Collins described it, “Malcolm’s guide and companion in the Boston street life and nightclub scene.” Two years older than his redheaded friend (though Malcolm would put it at ten in the Autobiography), Shorty was already a minor figure in Boston’s black nightlife. An accomplished trumpet player despite his youth, he regularly sat in at one-nighters for big bands, including Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s. At home in the flashy world of bars and clubs, Shorty took great pleasure in sexual adventures, and gave his young friend a tour of the city’s nightlife, equally well informed whether pointing out gamblers or pimps.

  Malcolm proved a quick study. He soon learned all about smoking “reefer”—marijuana cigarettes—hustling, petty thievery, and seducing fast women. Soon he had even mastered the economic fundamentals of the numbers racket. Every day, thousands of habitual bettors would place wagers on numbers, usually between 001 and 999. Numbers “runners,” in turn, would collect “policies”—bets on slips of paper—and take them to a central collection “bank.” The racketeers who ran the scam generally took at least 40 percent of the gross revenue, redistributing the remainder as daily winnings.

  Malcolm’s obvious attraction to the ghetto’s underworld caused tensions back at his new home, and partially to placate Ella he found part-time employment as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland Ballroom. It was at the Roseland that he began to develop his lifelong fascination with black celebrities—men and women of talent and ability who had overcome the barrier of race to achieve public recognition. As at its more famous counterpart, Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, at the Roseland black and white mingled, danced, and drank, showing the teenager that there was also a celebratory side to success. At the humble shoeshine stand, he solicited praise and tips from African Americans playing gigs at the ballroom. Decades later he recalled the jazz legends whose shoes he had once proudly buffed: “Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Cootie Williams, Jimmie Lunceford were just a few.” To make a favorable impression, the spunky teenager soon learned to make “my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers.” During his breaks, he would gawk, openmouthed, listen to the rocking rhythms of the music, and, most especially, admire the brilliance and athleticism of the ballroom dancers doing the Lindy Hop, the standard dance performed to syncopated big band jazz. Occasionally Malcolm would sneak away from his job just to watch the dancers go through their paces.

  An impressionable young black man in search of roles and images in the movies and media, however, would have found a sorry set of models. In the forties, the dominant representation of the African American was the comic minstrel, typified by the national radio show Amos ’n’ Andy. (Ironically, of course, the original actors in the series were white, mimicking black dialect.) In films, blacks were generally presented as clowns or mental incompetents. Gone With the Wind, Hollywood’s 1939 extravaganza celebrating the prewar slave South, offered up the servant Mammy, docile yet loyal, obese and hardworking. One of the few Hollywood movies of the period that departed slightly from crude stereotypes was Warner Brothers’ Bullets or Ballots, featuring black actress Louise Beavers as the notorious Nellie LaFleur, the numbers queen. It is likely that Malcolm saw this film as well as dozens of others that addressed racial themes; decades later he would recall Hollywood’s distortions of black people as part of his general indictment of white racism. Even the title of the Warner Brothers’ film may have been recycled in Malcolm’s 1964 address “The Ballot or the Bullet.”

  Off-screen, however, there were ample models of militancy and resistance. Some of the figures who would lead the postwar civil rights movement were rising to prominence by focusing on the war and the opportunities and obstacles it presented to African Americans. One of Garvey’s former critics on the socialist left, labor union leader A. Philip Randolph, was pushing the Roosevelt administration to adopt reforms that would increase black employment and undermine Jim Crow segregation. Randolph boldly urged thousands of blacks to launch a civil disobedience campaign in what was called the Negro March on Washington Movement. One of his demands included the desegregation of the U.S. military. To stop the march, Roosevelt agreed to sign Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941; his directive outlawed racially discriminatory hiring policies in defense industries and also created the Fair Employment Practices Committee. Three decades later, Order 8802 would become the legal foundation for equal opportunity and affirmative action laws, but both Randolph’s campaigning and Roosevelt’s response would have profound consequences even for the life of young Malcolm Little.

  Though he posed to the outside world as an urban sophisticate, the anxious teen mailed a constant stream of letters to his family, as well as occasional ones to school friends. A lively correspondence continued throughout 1941 and early 1942. One old classmate brought Malcolm up to speed on the latest gossip at Mason High School. Another sketched in Mason’s basketball season, and some former sweethearts also kept in touch. For his part, he had dutifully written home within days of arriving in Boston, but his sloppy handwriting provoked Philbert to urge him to write more clearly in the future. Reginald, the brother to whom he was closest, asked whether he had yet enrolled at a high school—and also detailed his budding relationships with several Lansing girls. Malcolm kept quiet about his decision to give up his formal education.

  He was determined to transform his outward appearance to fit into his cool new world. Although not naturally athletic, he patiently learned to dance by watching others at neighborhood house parties and then trying out his techniques on the Roseland’s fabled dance floor. At Shorty’s insistence, he purchased his first colorful “zoot suit” on credit. Shorty administered a cultural rite of passage by “conking” his hair, using a “jellylike, starchy-looking glop” produced from lye, several potatoes, and two eggs. The mixture burned intensely, but the final product, viewed from a mirror, more than satisfied. “I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head,” Malcolm wrote, “the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.”

  Hair styles in the African-American community then, as now, carried a certain weight or meaning, and whether or not to straighten one’s hair—conking it with various chemicals—was a contentious issue. Until he went to prison five years later, Malcolm would continue to conk his hair, though he eventually came to disdain the practice. As an NOI leader, he would routinely recite this episode from his early life as the ultimate act of selfdebasement. Yet the 1940s aesthetic of the conk was far more complicated than the mature Malcolm could admit. Most middle-class black males, as well as many popular jazz artists, rarely tortured their hair in this way, preferring a short, natural style. The conk was the emblem of the hippest, street-savvy black, the choice of hustlers, pimps, professional gamblers, and criminals. It was directly influenced by wavy-haired Latinos, whom blacks sought to emulate.

  Similarly, the zoot suit uniform was an act of defiance against white standards of behavior. In the wave of national patriotism following Pearl Harbor and the United States’ going to war, zoot-suiters were widely identified with draft-dodging. For this reason, in 1942 the War Production Board banned their production and sale. In 1943, hundreds of Mexican Americans and blacks wearing the suits were beaten up by uniformed sailors in Los Angeles’s streets, prompting the city council to declare the wearing of a zoot suit a misdemeanor. Similar smaller riots took place in Baltimore, Detroit, San Diego, and New York City. Malcolm’s obsession with jazz, Lindy Hopping, zoot suits, and illegal hustling encompassed the various symbols of the cultural war waged between oppressed urban black youth and the black bourgeoisie.

  By the fall of 1941 Malcolm, who was now generally known as “Red,” had gained confidence and skill as a dancer. He had also begun romancing a black Roxbury girl, Gloria Strother. Since she was from a middle-class family, the aspiring Ella approved of the relationship, perhaps hoping it might curb her charge’s fascination with the underworl
d. But he had many other girls on his mind, and despite beseeching letters from a more than willing Gloria, refused to commit himself. The girl’s grandmother and guardian soon grew frustrated enough to write him, inquiring about his intentions, but to no avail. Gloria, too, continued writing, even after Malcolm had moved to Harlem in early 1942, but he does not appear to have responded.

  Of the many women who diverted Malcolm’s attention from Gloria, none enchanted him quite so much as a blonde Armenian named Bea Caragulian. Surprisingly little is known about this ethnic white woman who, with the exception of Betty Shabazz, maintained the longest intimate relationship with Malcolm. Several years his senior, Bea had been a professional dancer at small-time clubs. She was pleasant looking, but not stunning. It is difficult to know her motives for having an open sexual relationship with a black teenager, and Malcolm himself did little to illuminate them; in his Autobiography , he devoted far more attention to the plight of Gloria than to any discussion of Bea, who is referred to as “Sophia.” He placed their initial meeting at the Roseland, culminating in sex mere hours later, but this story, like Bea’s pseudonym, was a fabrication—the two actually met at the far less glamorous Tick Tock Club. Within several weeks, Bea was showering Malcolm with gifts and small amounts of money, while he proudly paraded his blonde conquest at nightclubs throughout black Boston, to the envy of his friends. Their sexual relationship was yet another violated taboo in a society still defined by race and class, but Bea’s obvious desire created, for Malcolm, a sense of masculine authority and power. To the world of hustlers, he had arrived as a serious player.

  The liaison infuriated Ella, who was incensed at the thought of her brother dating a white woman. According to Rodnell Collins, she saw Bea as “a thrill[-seeker] for whom young black men like Malcolm are just another wild adventure.” Late one night, Malcolm attempted to sneak Bea up into his second-floor bedroom. Ella heard the couple and, in comic-opera style, pushed a bookcase down the stairs right on top of them. Malcolm was not yet legally an adult, however, and lacked the resources to maintain his own living quarters elsewhere. For the time being he had to stay put.

  He next found work as a soda fountain clerk at Roxbury’s Townsend Drugstore, but with the new job came fresh frustrations. Forced to serve his middle-class betters, he was yet again irritated by “those penny-ante squares who came in there putting on their millionaires’ airs, the young ones and the old ones both.” He did not last long; with his ghetto persona enhanced by his very public liaison with Caragulian, the job of lowly soda clerk quickly lost its appeal. With Bea’s financial help, he finally left Ella’s home for Shorty’s apartment. Over four months he drifted through a series of menial jobs: at a South Boston wallpaper company warehouse; washing dishes at a restaurant; then briefly in Boston’s elite hotel, the Parker House, working in the dining room as a waiter.

  Although Bea was now his regular girlfriend, Malcolm continued to see other women. In late 1941 through mid-1942, he maintained a lively correspondence with several who lived in either Boston or Michigan, and nurtured intimate relationships with a number of them. In a November 1941 letter to Zolma Holman of Jackson, Michigan, for instance, Malcolm bragged that he had already traveled through twenty-three different states. Apparently writing from a train, he noted that he was heading toward Florida, and that he hoped to travel to California soon. Then there were Roberta Jo of Kalamazoo, Edyth Robertson of Boston, a Charlotte from Jackson, and Catherine Haines, dashing off a one-page letter from her summer resort at Martha’s Vineyard, describing her boredom. These diverse contacts may have reinforced Malcolm’s growing belief that most women were dishonest and could not be trusted. He later bluntly warned: “Never ask a woman about other men. Either she’ll tell you a lie, and you still won’t know, or if she tells you the truth, you might not have wanted to hear it in the first place.”

  The formal entry of the United States into World War II on December 9, 1941, prompted several million American boys and men to volunteer for service. Harlem had a long history of sending its sons to war. The Harlem Hellfighters, the all-black 369th U.S. Infantry, had fought with distinction alongside the French army during World War I. In June 1945, the 369th fought again at Okinawa, and by the end of hostilities about sixty thousand blacks from New York City had served their country.

  The immediate impact of the war mobilization was that almost overnight hundreds of thousands of white men’s jobs became vacant. Many employers were forced to hire blacks and women. In critical industries such as the railroads—in the 1940s, the principal means of national transportation—the demand for workers became acute. It wasn’t difficult for sixteen-year-old Malcolm, despite his abysmal employment record, to secure a job on a railroad line as a fourth-class cook.

  His first assignment was on the Colonial, which ran from Boston to Washington, D.C., and provided him with the chance to visit big cities he had longed to see for years. During the Colonial’s routine layover in Washington, Malcolm, dressed in a zoot suit, would tour the city’s sprawling black neighborhoods. He was not impressed. “I was astounded to find in the nation’s capital, just a few blocks from Capitol Hill, thousands of Negroes living worse than any I’d ever seen in the poorest sections of Roxbury.” One source of the terrible poverty, he suspected, was the backwardness of the city’s Negro middle class, which he felt possessed the intelligence and education to have reached a better station in life than what it had settled for. Malcolm later claimed that veteran black employees on the Colonial talked disparagingly about Washington’s “‘middle-class’ Negroes with Howard University degrees, who were working as laborers, janitors, guards, taxi-drivers and the like.”

  For the first time in his young life, Malcolm made an effort to retain a job beyond a few months. He loved traveling, and railroad work made this possible and affordable, though it often meant playing demeaning service roles. Reassigned to the Yankee Clipper, the train traveling the New York- Boston route, he was expected to lug a box of sandwiches, candy, and ice cream along with a heavy, five-gallon aluminum coffeepot up and down the aisles of the train, soliciting sales. As they had done when he was a shoeshine boy, customers frequently gave larger tips to workers who displayed enthusiasm and a happy face, and Malcolm was soon mimicking the jovial dining car waiters to obtain tips. He became so proficient that his coworkers began to call him “Sandwich Red.”

  His frequent stops in New York meant that he could finally visit that fabled black Mecca, Harlem. Louise and Earl had regaled their children with stories about the shining city’s legendary institutions, its broad boulevards, its vibrant political and cultural life. Yet nothing, not even Boston’s glamour and excitement, prepared the teenager for his first encounter with the neighborhood with which he would one day become identified. “New York was heaven to me,” he remembered. “And Harlem was Seventh Heaven!”

  Like a frantic tourist on a tight schedule, he rushed from site to celebrated site. His first stop was the popular bar and nightclub Small’s Paradise. Opened in October 1925 at the height of Prohibition, Small’s was racially integrated from the outset. With seating accommodations for up to fifteen hundred, it quickly became a hot spot for the jazz era’s greatest entertainers, one of Harlem’s “big three” venues along with the Cotton Club and Connie’s Inn. “No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much,” Malcolm recalled of his first time there. “Around the big, luxuriouslooking, circular bar were thirty or forty Negroes, mostly men, drinking and talking.”

  Next on his itinerary was the grand Apollo Theater on West 125th Street. Built some thirty years before as a whites-only burlesque house, it had become nationally known as an entertainment center featuring black performers. A few blocks east was the celebrated Hotel Theresa. Designed in a neo-Renaissance style, the hotel first opened in 1913. Until the late 1930s it had accepted only white guests, but with new management African Americans began staying there. A host of black celebrities, including Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson, Josephine Bak
er, and Lena Horne, made the Hotel Theresa their headquarters in the city. Since New York’s major hotels in midtown refused Negro guests throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s, the Theresa became the center for all black elites—in entertainment, business, civic associations, and politics. When Malcolm first saw the hotel in early 1942, it may have already been known to him for hosting boxer Joe Louis’s celebration with thousands of Negroes after he won the heavyweight championship. By that evening, Malcolm made what would be a fateful decision: “I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.”

  In most respects, he had already left. Most nights he spent in transit, either working or sleeping on the train, and when he was in New York he sometimes stayed at the Harlem YMCA on West 135th Street. He took to visiting Small’s on a regular basis, as he did the nearby bar at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street, a hangout for the Apollo’s entertainers. Before long, he was living a double life. At work, on the Yankee Clipper, he excelled as Sandwich Red, entertaining white patrons with his harmless clowning. In Harlem, he was simply “Red,” a wild, cocky kid, learning the language of the streets. He began supplementing his income by peddling marijuana, casually at first, then more aggressively. Bea frequently came down from Boston to visit, and Malcolm showed her off at his favorite nightspots. For a boy who on May 19, 1942, had reached only his seventeenth birthday, barely more than a year after settling in the Northeast, his reinvention was remarkable.

  For an irresponsible, headstrong young man, trying to compartmentalize these two wildly different personas would prove impossible. Malcolm’s behavior on the Yankee Clipper soon grew erratic and confrontational, aggravated all the more by his frequent pot smoking. He provoked arguments with customers, and especially with servicemen. In October 1942, he was fired, but the shortage of experienced workers on the railroads was so severe that he was hired again on two further occasions, and he used these shortterm jobs to transport and sell marijuana across the country. Malcolm would return from long hauls “with two of the biggest suitcases you ever saw, full of that stuff . . . marijuana pressed into bricks, you know . . . but they would pay him a thousand dollars a trip,” his brother Wilfred claimed. It is highly unlikely that the trafficking was that substantial or lucrative, but the barrier between legal and illegal activity no longer mattered, and Malcolm was more than willing to jeopardize his job to profit from an illegal hustle. His career in drugs was relatively penny ante—literally selling reefers stuffed in his socks or shirt—but it still took him over a line.