Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  The Christmas season was only weeks away, and Goldstein consented to let Red work for him in New York City for a few weeks. In January 1945, with several hundred dollars in his pocket, Malcolm set off for Lansing. He had sent home small sums of money since 1941 and figured that his family owed him. Through Ella or Reginald, the Little siblings undoubtedly knew about their brother's downward slide, and his drug dependency. He anticipated resistance, especially from Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert, so he arrived wearing a conservative-looking suit. His days of crime, he claimed, were long gone. For several weeks, seemingly true to his word, he worked at East Lansing’s Coral Gables bar, then as a busboy at the city’s Mayfair Ballroom. But he used these jobs as opportunities for petty theft. Traveling into Detroit, he brazenly robbed an acquaintance, a black man named Douglas Haynes, at gunpoint. Haynes filed a complaint with the Detroit police, who contacted the Lansing police. On March 17, 1945, Malcolm was arrested and turned over to the Detroit Police Department, charged with grand larceny. Wilfred posted a bond of a thousand dollars, and for a short time Malcolm found menial jobs at a Lansing mattress maker and then a truck factory. When his trial was postponed, he decided that his best move was to get out of town. Sometime in August 1945, he fled the jurisdiction; a warrant was issued for his arrest.

  The Autobiography is completely silent about these events. Undoubtedly, Malcolm was profoundly ashamed about this phase of his past. He likely felt that the deepest violation he had committed was the humiliation he inflicted on his family through his career as a petty criminal. But he may have also dropped these incidents from his history as part of the attempt to shape his legend. His amateurish efforts at gangsterism in Boston and Lansing—the clumsy theft of his aunt’s coat, the ridiculous armed robbery of an acquaintance—undermined the credibility of his supposed criminal exploits in New York, and even he must have realized that the Michigan arrest warrant, combined with his parole violation from Massachusetts, would follow him across the country. If he was ever arrested again for even a minor crime, these other violations would be brought against him.

  He first returned to New York City and subsequently to Boston, desperately trying to survive through a variety of hustles. It was during this time that Malcolm encountered a man named William Paul Lennon, and the uncertain particulars of their intimate relationship would generate much controversy and speculation in the years following Malcolm’s death.

  Lennon was born on March 25, 1888, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to Bernard and Nellie F. Lennon. His father was a successful merchant and newspaper publisher and active in local Democratic Party politics. The eldest son of eight children, Lennon enrolled in Brown University in 1906 as a “special student,” described in the school’s catalog as a category for “mature persons of good character who desire to pursue some special subject and who have had the requisite preliminary training.” After attending Brown for several years, Lennon drifted, seeking to establish himself in some suitable profession. During World War I, he served as chief petty officer in the navy, stationed out of Newport, Rhode Island, and upon his discharge he lived briefly with his parents before getting hired as a hotel manager in Pawtucket. Within five years he had become manager of Manhattan’s Dorset Hotel, just off Fifth Avenue in midtown. Apparently he embarked on a successful career in hotel management, but—contrary to Malcolm’s later assertions that his patron was a multimillionaire—there is no record indicating that Lennon ever became truly wealthy. Sometime during the 1930s or early 1940s, Lennon had relocated to Boston, where he began to employ male secretaries in his home.

  Malcolm’s initial contact with Lennon may have come through classified advertisements placed in New York newspapers. What is certain is that sometime in 1944 Malcolm had begun working for Lennon as a “butler and occasional house worker” at Lennon’s Boston home, on an affluent stretch of Arlington Street overlooking the Public Garden. Soon something deeper than an employer–employee relationship developed. (After Malcolm’s later arrest, in 1946, he would give the police Lennon’s name and address as a previous employer, convinced that Lennon would use his financial resources and other contacts to help him during his time in prison.) The Autobiography describes sexual contacts with Lennon, except that Malcolm falsely attributed them to a character named Rudy: [Rudy] had a side deal going, a hustle that took me right back to the old steering days in Harlem. Once a week, Rudy went to the home of this old, rich Boston blueblood, pillar-of-society aristocrat. He paid Rudy to undress them both, then pick up the old man like a baby, lay him on his bed, then stand over him and sprinkle him all over with talcum powder. Rudy said the old man would actually reach his climax from that.

  Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon. The revelation of his involvement with Lennon produced much speculation about Malcolm’s sexual orientation, but the experience appears to have been limited. There is no evidence from his prison record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after 1952 that he was actively homosexual. More credible, perhaps, is Rodnell Collins’s insight about his uncle: “Malcolm basically lived two lives.” When he was around Ella, “he enthusiastically participated in family picnics and family dinners. . . . He saved some of his money to send to his brothers and sisters in Lansing.” But in his Detroit Red life, he participated in prostitution, marijuana sales, cocaine sessions, numbers running, the occasional robbery, and, apparently, paid homosexual encounters. Keeping the two lives separate from each other was never easy, due to his unstable material circumstances. But Malcolm had the intelligence and ingenuity to mask his most illegal and potentially upsetting activities from his family and friends.

  Well-to-do white men were one thing, white women another. During the war, his old paramour Bea Caragulian had married a white man, Mehan Bazarian, but he was serving in the military and was largely away. Malcolm’s sexual relationship with Bea had continued after her marriage, although it eventually grew chaotic and frequently abusive. By early December 1945, he was back in Boston, with no place to go except Ella’s. Once again, his disgusted half sister had no choice but to allow him to stay; after all, blood was blood. Malcolm quickly ran down Shorty Jarvis, who complained to him about his wife and their money problems. Within several days, Malcolm organized a gang, with the intention of robbing homes in Boston’s affluent neighborhoods. His motley crew consisted of another African American, Francis E. “Sonny” Brown; Bea; her younger sister, Joyce Caragulian; a third Armenian woman, Kora Marderosian; and Shorty. Early in the evening of December 14, 1945, Malcolm and Brown robbed a Brookline home, absconding with $2,400 worth of fur coats, silverware, jewelry, and other items. The next night, they struck a second Brookline house, stealing several rugs and silverware valued at nearly $400, in addition to liquor, jewelry, and linen. For these break-ins, the gang followed a general pattern. Sonny would jimmy the home’s rear door, then open the front door for Malcolm and Shorty. The premises was quickly looted, with a focus on items that could easily be sold on the black market. The women stayed in the automobile, acting as lookouts. On December 16 they drove to New York City to sell part of their merchandise. Some items that failed to find a buyer were dumped, but most of the loot was distributed among gang members, a mistake no veteran burglar would ever have made.

  One of the gang’s most lucrative hauls took place the day after their trip to New York. Entering a home in Newton, Massachusetts, the young criminals managed to grab jewelry, a watch, a vacuum cleaner, bed linen, silver candlesticks, earrings, a gold pendant and chain, and additional merchandise, with a total value estimated by police at $6,275. Over a period of one month, they robbed about eight homes. When they were finally caught, Malcolm was primarily responsible for tipping their hand. He gave a watch to a relative as a Christmas gift; the relative sold it on to a Boston jeweler, who, suspecting it had been stolen, contacted the police. The authorities bided their time. In early January 1946, Malcolm took another stolen watch to a repair
shop. When he returned for it, local police were on hand to arrest him. Malcolm was carrying a loaded .32 caliber pistol at the time. During his interrogation, detectives disingenuously promised not to prosecute him on the gun charge if he agreed to give up his accomplices. He readily complied, naming his whole crew. With the exception of Sonny Brown, who managed to elude authorities, everyone in the gang was promptly arrested.

  Malcolm was charged with the illegal possession of a firearm in Roxbury court on January 15. The next day, at the Quincy court, charges of larceny and breaking and entering were added. The court set a bail of ten thousand dollars. Because the burglaries had taken place in two Massachusetts counties, Norfolk and Middlesex, two trials were held. Shorty Jarvis’s account provides a vivid description of his and Malcolm’s ordeal: “We were urged by the district attorney and our white lawyers to plead guilty as charged; we were also told that if we did, things would go real easy and well in our favor (meaning the sentence).” Both men had been “damn fools” not to have anticipated a legal double cross. Bea was subpoenaed and turned the state’s evidence against Malcolm, largely reading the script the prosecutors wrote for her. Jarvis claimed that the district attorney had even attempted unsuccessfully “to get the girls to testify that we had raped them; this was so he could ask the judge for a fifteen-to-twenty-year sentence or life in prison.” To Malcolm and Shorty, as well as to Ella, it seemed that the prime motivation for their prosecution was racial. “As long as I live,” Shorty reflected, “I will never forget how the judge told me I had had no business associating with white women.” Ella’s son, Rodnell, observed: “In court [Ella] said, the men were described by one lawyer as ‘schvartze bastards’ and by another as ‘minor Al Capones.’ The arresting officer meanwhile referred to [the women] as ‘poor, unfortunate, friendless, scared lost girls.’”

  Both Malcolm Little and Shorty Jarvis pled guilty and were sentenced in a Middlesex County court to four concurrent eight-to-ten-year sentences, to be served in prison. While this was read out, they were confined behind bars in a steel cage in the courtroom. Shorty snapped, shaking the bars and screaming at the presiding judge, “Why don’t you kill me? Why don’t you kill me? I would rather be dead than do ten years.” In Norfolk County Superior Court eight weeks later, Malcolm received three concurrent six-to-eight-year sentences. The court could hardly have imposed more. When Malcolm remarked to a defense attorney that “we seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls,” the lawyer replied angrily, “You had no business with white girls!” Bea pleaded to the courts that she and the other white women were innocent victims of Malcolm’s vicious criminal enterprise. He had coerced them. “We lived in constant fear,” she told the court with emotion. She ultimately served only seven months of a five-year sentence.

  Bea’s self-serving actions left a profound impression on Malcolm. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak,” he observed. “They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.” His misogyny had been reinforced during his time as a steerer for Harlem prostitutes. Reflecting on his experiences, Malcolm wrote, “I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women.” Bea’s actions underlined what he perceived as women’s deceptive, opportunistic tendencies. Malcolm rarely examined his own behavior—his broken relationship with Gloria Strother, his physical abuse of Bea Caragulian—let alone his betrayal of his partners.

  CHAPTER 3

  Becoming “X”

  January 1946–August 1952

  On March 8, 1946, a Massachusetts state psychiatrist interviewed prisoner number 22843. “He got called every filthy name I could think of,” Malcolm remembered. He described himself as being “physically miserable and as evil-tempered as a snake.” The “Psychometric Report,” written nearly two months later, however, described him as attentive and apparently cooperative. Malcolm blithely informed his interviewer that his parents had been missionaries and his mother a “white Scot” whose marriage to a black man had led to Malcolm’s being taunted by racial abuse throughout his childhood. Other misinformation followed. The psychiatrist, apparently troubled by all he had heard, observed that the prisoner “has fatalistic views, is moody, cynical, and has a sardonic smile which seems to be affected because of his sensitiveness to color.”

  His defense lawyer had prevented his speaking on his own behalf during the trials, and Malcolm was convinced that his lengthy sentence was due solely to his involvement with Bea and the other white women. He also dreaded, being not yet twenty-one years old, the challenges of prison life, a dangerous world about which he knew only horror stories. During the weeks he was held in county jails prior to his transfer to the state penitentiary, Malcolm decided he had to exaggerate his criminal experiences, making himself appear tougher and more violent than he really was. He would also present a made-up history of his own family, making it almost impossible for the authorities to know his true background. He already felt outraged by how corrections officers recognized only a convict’s number, rather than his name. In prison, “you never heard your name, only your number,” he would recall years later. “On all of your clothing, every item was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain.”

  Two months later, another caseworker filed a report on Malcolm. “Subject is a tall light-complexioned negro,” it ran in part, “unmarried, a child of a broken home, who has grown up indifferently into a pattern of life he liked, colorful, cynical, a-moral, fatalistic.” The report indicated that the prison authorities viewed him as the ringleader of the burglary ring. Perhaps Malcolm once again launched into a string of profanities, for the caseworker judged his prognosis as “poor. His present ‘hard’ attitude will no doubt increase in bitterness. . . . Subject may prove an intermediate security risk as he will find it hard to adjust from the accelerated tempo of night spots to the slow pace of institution life at Charlestown [prison].”

  Both Malcolm and Shorty Jarvis had been assigned to Charlestown State Prison, at that time the oldest penal facility in continuous use in the world. It had been constructed in 1804–5 on the west banks of the Charlestown peninsula along the Boston Harbor, and its physical conditions were wretched: its mice-infested cells were tiny—seven feet by eight—and devoid of plumbing and running water. Prisoners relieved themselves in buckets that were emptied only once in twenty-four hours. There was no common dining room, so prisoners were forced to eat in their cells. The atmosphere was hardly improved by the prison’s grotesque history of executions, the most notorious being the 1927 electrocution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had previously been unfairly convicted for a 1920 robbery and double homicide. The place was so beastly that in May 1952, shortly before Malcolm’s release, state governor Paul A. Dever described it as “a Bastille that eclipses in infamy any current prison in the United States.”

  At first Malcolm had great difficulty accepting his sentence, and especially what he perceived as Bea’s betrayal in the trial. His fits of outrage and alienation were plain. Shorty, still upset with Malcolm for turning him in, began calling him the “Green-Eyed Monster.” During his first months, Malcolm routinely insulted guards and prisoners alike. He had never been particularly religious, but he now concentrated his profanities against God and religion in general. Other prisoners, listening to Malcolm’s tirades, came up with a further nickname for him: “Satan.” In the Middlesex jail during his trial, Malcolm had been forced to get clean, but once in Charlestown he soon resumed his old drug habit, first getting high on ground nutmeg. In small amounts—roughly four to eight teaspoons—nutmeg is a mild hallucinogen, creating euphoria and visual distortions; when taken in large amounts, as Malcolm may have done, it has similar effects to those of ecstasy. Nutmeg users can achieve highs lasting as long as seventy-two hours, but can also suffer mental breakdown. Some of the symptoms Malcolm described during his early months at Charlestown sound like the effects of nutmeg poisoning, especially the episodes of depression
and paranoia. When Ella started sending small amounts of money, he used it to purchase drugs from corrupt guards who were happy to conduct business. Prisoners could obtain almost any drugs they wanted, from hash to heroin.

  Malcolm had lived for years in a close web of family and stayed in relatively constant touch through mail and visits wherever he moved, but now, in his anger and shame about what had happened to him, he was reluctant to contact his siblings, especially Ella. During his first year in prison, he wrote only a few letters, including one or more to William Paul Lennon. The first one he received was from Philbert, to say that he had become a member of an evangelical church in Detroit. Philbert’s assurance that the entire congregation was praying for the soul of his younger brother enraged Malcolm. “I scrawled him a reply I’m ashamed to think of today,” he later admitted. Things went no better when Ella visited. On one occasion, about fifty prisoners and visitors were crowded into the small visitation center, all of them surrounded by armed guards. Ella attempted to exchange pleasantries, but was so upset that it was almost impossible for her to talk. Malcolm became so defensive that he “wished she hadn’t come at all.”

  His attitude soon left him isolated, but he was not without visitors entirely. Malcolm’s most regular, and perhaps most sympathetic, visitor was a teenager, Evelyn Lorene Williams. Evelyn’s foster mother, Dorothy Young, was a close friend of Ella’s. Indeed, the two women were such good friends that Ella’s son, Rodnell, referred to Young as Aunt Dot. Malcolm had occasionally dated Evelyn during his years in Boston, and Ella had strongly encouraged the relationship. Malcolm had little sexual interest in Evelyn—compared, say, with the chemistry he had with Bea. Evelyn, however, seems to have fallen deeply in love with Malcolm.