Malcolm X

by Manning Marable

  Another frequent visitor was Jackie Mason, a Boston woman who had been sexually involved with Malcolm before his incarceration. Ella sharply disapproved of Mason, describing her as a “common street woman” unfit for her brother. Her attitude, according to Rodnell Collins, was that she “was well aware of how much havoc [an] older, experienced predatory woman could wreak on a teenaged, adventurous, highly impressionable” boy.

  When Ella did go to see him, she was not happy with what she found— that he was not reflecting in any serious way on why he had wound up in prison or what its consequences might be for him. She was upset about his continuing contact with Paul Lennon, and was scandalized by his resumption of drug use. After several disappointing visits, Ella decided not to see her brother again. When Malcolm learned about this, he appeared contrite. In a plaintive letter dated September 10, he thanked Ella for mailing photos of family members, and for small amounts of cash. But then he incensed her again by trying to get her to contact Paul Lennon on his behalf. “The person that you said called me is a very good friend of mine,” Malcolm explained. “He’s only worth some fourteen million dollars. If you read the society pages you’d know who he is. He knows where I am now because I’ve written and told him, but I didn’t say what for.” Without mentioning Lennon’s name, he appealed to Ella to be cordial. “He may call and ask you. Whatever answer you give him will have to do with my entire future but I still depend on you.” Apparently Malcolm was convinced that Lennon could use his wealth and political contacts to reduce his prison term. According to Collins, Lennon never contacted Ella. In her words, though, she was “outraged” that her half brother had given her phone number to Lennon and that he had asked her to act as a go-between. Lennon, she thought, was obviously “one of those decadent whites whom he had been hustling.”

  In the end Malcolm was forced to confront the challenges of prison life by himself. And it didn’t help matters that his attitude toward prison work detail was noncooperative. During his first seven months at Charlestown, he was assigned to the prison auto shop; then, that October, to work as a laborer in the yard. The month following, he was moved again, this time to sew in the underwear shop. Here he immediately ran into problems, being charged with shirking his duties; for this he was given three days’ detention. His work performance improved somewhat when he was reassigned to the foundry, where he was considered “cooperative, poor in skill, and average to poor in effort.” It was also here that he met a tall, light-complexioned former burglar named John Elton Bembry: the man who would change his life.

  Bembry, who was about twenty years older than Malcolm, dazzled the young man with his mind. He was the first black man Malcolm would meet in prison (and possibly outside of prison as well) who seemed knowledgeable about virtually every subject and had the verbal skills to command nearly every conversation. Intellectually, Bembry had an astonishing range of interests, able to address the works of Thoreau at one moment, and then the institutional history of Massachusetts’s Concord prison at another. Malcolm was especially attracted to Bembry’s ability to “put the atheist philosophy in a framework.”

  Malcolm’s brain came alive under Bembry’s tutelage. Here, finally, was an older man with both intellectual curiosity and a sense of discipline to impart to his young follower. Both men were assigned to the license plate shop, where after work inmates and even a few guards would cluster around to listen to Bembry’s wide-ranging discourses on any number of topics. For weeks, Bembry carefully noted the wild behavior of his young workmate. Finally, taking Malcolm aside, he challenged him to employ his intellect to improve his situation. Bembry urged him to enroll in correspondence courses and to use the library, Malcolm recalled. Hilda had already offered similar advice, imploring her brother to “study English and penmanship.” Malcolm consented: “So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did.”

  It is possible that the details Bembry (“Bimbi” in the Autobiography) related to other convicts about his successful history of thefts found their way into Malcolm’s tales about his own burglary exploits, but above all Malcolm envied Bembry’s reputation as an intellectual. There was also a strong motive of self-interest: his own newfound enthusiasm for study and self-improvement might get him recommended for a transfer to the system’s most lenient facility, Massachusetts’s Norfolk Prison Colony. The bait of increased freedom was enough to instill discipline within Malcolm, such that he finally chose to pursue a self-directed course of formal study. During 1946–47, he devoted himself to a rigorous program, fulfilling the requirements for university extension courses that included English and elementary Latin and German. He devoured books from Charlestown’s small library, particularly those on linguistics and etymology. Following Bembry’s advice, he began studying a dictionary, memorizing the definitions of both commonly used and obscure words. Education now had a clear, practical goal: it offered a way out, to a prison with better conditions, and maybe even a reduction in prison time. Ironically, it also had the side benefit of making him a more persuasive con man. Refining his oratorical skills, he found new success in hustles of various kinds, including betting on baseball.

  Malcolm was duly transferred in January 1947—but to the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord, only a slight improvement over Charlestown. Concord maintained a so-called mark system of discipline, which set a confusing schedule of penalties and the loss of prisoners’ freedoms for acts of misconduct. No inmate council existed to negotiate the conditions of work and supervision. The new regulations and the lack of prisoners’ rights probably contributed to Malcolm’s continued acts of noncompliance.

  During his incarceration at Concord he received a total of thirty-four visits. Among them were five from Ella, three from Reginald, and nineteen from “friends” (according to the redacted files)—undoubtedly Jackie Mason and Evelyn Williams, and possibly William Paul Lennon.

  His hard work and professions about wanting to become a better man seem to have convinced Ella that he was finally committed to transforming his life, and she launched a letter-writing campaign to officials urging that he be relocated to the Norfolk Prison Colony. She encouraged Malcolm to write directly to the administrator in charge of transfers there. On July 28, in just such a letter, Malcolm employed his enhanced language skills to good effect: “Since my confinement I’ve already received a diploma in Elementary English through the State Correspondence Courses. I’m very much dissatisfied, though. There are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom.” Still, he undermined his efforts by continuing to cause trouble. Throughout 1947, he was assigned to the prison’s furniture shop, where he was evaluated as a “poor and uncooperative worker.” In April, he had been suspected of possessing “contraband”—in this case, a knife. In September he would be charged with disruptive behavior, and on two more occasions penalized for poor work. But Malcolm was as adept as Ella in skirting penalties. After each infraction he improved his job performance sufficiently so as to avoid severe discipline.

  In early 1948, a curious letter arrived from his brother Philbert, one that would have enormous consequences. Philbert explained that he and other family members had all converted to Islam. Malcolm was not surprised by the sudden enthusiasm, and did not take this particular turn very seriously. Philbert “was forever joining something,” he recalled. Philbert now asked his brother to “pray to Allah for deliverance.” Malcolm was not impressed. His reply, written in proper English, was completely dismissive.

  Philbert’s letter was in fact the opening salvo in a family campaign to convert Malcolm to a nascent movement called the Nation of Islam. As Wilfred later explained, “It was a program designed to help black people. And they had the best program going.” They were determined to get Malcolm on board. After Philbert’s letter had no effect, the family decided that an overture from Reginald might be more effective. Reginald wrote a “newsy” missive that contained no overt references to the Nation of Islam, but concluded with a cryptic promise: �
�Don’t eat any more pork, and don’t smoke any more cigarettes. I’ll show you how to get out of prison.” For days, Malcolm was puzzled. Was this some new way to hustle? He still had many doubts, but decided to follow the advice and stopped smoking. His new refusal to eat pork provoked surprise among inmates at the dining hall.

  Meanwhile, Ella’s appeals and letter writing finally won out: in late March 1948, Malcolm was transferred to the Norfolk Prison Colony. Established in 1927 as a model of correctional reform, the facility was located twenty-three miles from Boston, near Walpole, on a thirty-five-acre, ovalshaped property that looked more like a college campus than a traditional prison. However, it did possess strong escape deterrents, most prominently a five-thousand-foot-long, nineteen-foot-high wall surrounding the entire grounds, topped by three inches of electrified barbed wire. The philosophy behind the prison was rehabilitation and reentry into society. Prisoners lived in compounds of twenty-four houses, with individual and group rooms, all with windows and doors.

  Compared to Charlestown, Malcolm had a life as eased of restrictions as one might find in a state penitentiary. First and foremost, he was treated like a human being. He was not locked into a room at night. He had two lockers, one in his room for personal clothes and toiletries, the other in his housing unit’s basement, for his work uniform. Two inmates in each house were responsible for serving meals, cleaning the dining and common rooms, and minor repairs. There were meetings every Saturday night, at which inmates’ concerns were addressed. Prisoners could elect their own representatives to house committees, and an inmate chairman was responsible for running them. Norfolk encouraged the prisoners to participate in all sorts of educational activities, such as the debating club and the prison newspaper, the Colony. Entertainment, which consisted of both outside groups and inmate-initiated shows, was organized on Sunday evenings. Religious services were held weekly for Roman Catholics, Protestants, Christian Scientists, and Theosophists, while monthly group meetings and religious holiday observances were permitted for “Hebrews.”

  This new life suited the newly disciplined Malcolm well, and he continued his plan to educate himself broadly. He eagerly participated in the facility’s activities, and extended his reading agenda to include works on Buddhism. Unfortunately, his new commitment to self-improvement did not extend to improved work habits. In the prison laundry and on kitchen duty, his work performance was once again rated as substandard, his supervisors describing him as “lazy, detested work in any form, and accepted and performed given work seemingly in silent disgust.” He was careful, however, to work just enough to avoid any major infraction, which would have jeopardized his place at Norfolk. He also stopped cursing the guards and fellow prisoners.

  Reginald was the first relative to visit Malcolm in the new place. First he filled him in on family gossip and told him about a recent visit to Harlem he’d made, but eventually he turned the conversation to a new subject: Islam, or the “no pork and cigarettes riddle,” as described in the Autobiography.

  “If a man knew every imaginable thing that there is to know, who would he be?” Reginald asked.

  “Some kind of a god,” replied Malcolm.

  Reginald explained that such a man did exist—“his real name is Allah”—and had made himself known years before to an African American named Elijah—“a black man, just like us.” Allah had identified all whites, without exception, as devils. At first, Malcolm found this extremely difficult to accept. Not even Garveyism had prepared him for such an extreme antiwhite message. But afterward, when he had carefully cataloged each significant relationship he had ever developed with a white person, he concluded that every white he had ever known had held a deep animus toward blacks.

  The seed was sown. Not long after this conversation, Hilda paid a visit and filled in the backdrop to the family’s conversion. It had begun quietly and casually. Sometime in 1947, while waiting at a bus stop, Wilfred had struck up a conversation with a young, well-dressed black man, who began discussing religion and black nationalism and invited him to visit the Nation of Islam’s Temple No. 1 in Detroit. When Wilfred went, he found a modest storefront church. It was a rental property with a hall that could probably accommodate about two hundred people, though there seemed to be fewer than a hundred actual members. What Wilfred heard there sounded comfortingly familiar: a message of black separatism, selfreliance, and a black deity that reminded him instantly of Earl Little’s Garveyite sermons.

  It took only a few months for Hilda, Philbert, Wesley, and Reginald to also become members. Wilfred would later explain, “We already had been indoctrinated with Marcus Garvey’s philosophy, so that was just a good place for us. They didn’t have to convince us we were black and should be proud or anything like that.” There were personal connections to the NOI's first family, Clara and Elijah Poole, that made the family’s attraction to the Nation of Islam natural. When Earl had been living in Georgia, he had occasionally preached in the town of Perry, the home of Clara Poole’s parents. Ella had grown to adulthood in Georgia before moving to the North, and she had met both Clara and Elijah Poole years before they were linked to the Nation.

  During her visit, Hilda also explained to Malcolm the central tenet of Nation of Islam theology, Yacub’s History, which told how an evil black scientist named Yacub had genetically engineered the creation of the entire white race. Allah, in the person of an Asiatic black man, had come into the world to reveal this extraordinary story, and to explain the legacies of the white race’s monstrous crimes against blacks. Only through complete racial separation, Hilda explained, could blacks survive. She urged Malcolm to write directly to the Nation of Islam’s supreme leader, Elijah Muhammad—as Elijah Poole had renamed himself—who was based in Chicago. He would satisfy any doubts Malcolm might have. Malcolm was amazed by his sister's obvious devotion, and afterward wrote, “I don’t know if I was able to open my mouth and say goodbye.”

  Over the next few weeks, he grappled with what he had been told. The black nationalist message of racial pride, a rejection of integration, and self-sufficiency rekindled strong connections with the driving faith of his parents. The NOI's condemnation of all-white institutions, especially Christianity, also fitted with his experiences. Yet the bitter young nonbeliever had never shown the least interest in organized religion or the spiritual life. For Malcolm, the lure was more secular: Nation of Islam held out the possibility of finding self-respect and even dignity as a black man. This was a faith that said blacks had nothing for which to be ashamed or apologetic.

  But above any spiritual or political goals was one important personal one: conversion was a way to keep the Little family together. As all the Little children had reached adulthood, the possibility of the family’s disintegration had again become a problem. By 1948, both Wilfred and Philbert had been married for several years. In 1949, Yvonne Little married Robert Jones, and the couple relocated to Grand Rapids. As the family grew and spread across new communities, the Nation of Islam would provide a common ground. Malcolm was the last to join, but his commitment was complete, and he embraced this opportunity to enact a wholesale change in his future life. Malcolm—Detroit Red, Satan, hustler, onetime pimp, drug addict and drug dealer, homosexual lover, ladies’ man, numbers racketeer, burglar Jack Carlton, and convicted thief—had convinced himself that a total revolution in his identity and beliefs was called for. After redrafting a one-page letter to Elijah Muhammad “at least twenty-five times,” he mailed it off. It wasn’t long before he received Muhammad’s reply, together with a five-dollar bill. He had taken his first decisive step toward Allah.

  Although Malcolm did not realize it, by becoming members of the Nation of Islam, his brothers and sisters had entered into the richly heterodox community of global Islam. Extremely sectarian by the standards of orthodox Islam, the Nation of Islam nevertheless became the starting point for a spiritual journey that would consume Malcolm’s life.

  Islam was established in what is today Saudi Arabia in the ear
ly seventh century CE by a man known as the Prophet Muhammad. Over the course of more than two decades, from roughly 610 CE to 632 CE, hundreds of beautiful verses were revealed to Muhammad and passed on by poetic recitations, just like Homer's stories or the love songs of the troubadours. These verses became known as the Qur’an, and Islam’s enduring power as a religion rests, in part, on its elegance and simplicity. At its core is the metaphor of the five pillars. The first pillar is the profession of faith, or shahada : “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” The other four are acts a devout Muslim must perform: daily prayers (salat); tithing, or alms to those less fortunate (zakat); fasting during the month of Ramadan; and making a pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj). Many Muslims characterize jihad, meaning “striving” or “struggle,” as a sixth pillar, separating it into two types: the “greater jihad” that refers to a believer’s internal struggle to adhere to Islam’s creed, and the “lesser jihad,” the struggle against those who oppose Muhammad’s message.

  In the Prophet’s day, Islam was an embracing, not excluding, religion that drew on the practices of other contemporaries. Muhammad had taught that both Jews and Christians were ahl al-Kitab (People of the Book), and that the Torah, the Gospels, and the Holy Qur'an were all a single divine scripture. Early Islamic rituals drew directly upon Jewish traditions. At first, Muslims prayed in the direction of Jerusalem, not Mecca. The Prophet’s mandatory fast was initiated each year on the tenth day (Ashura) of the first month of the Jewish calendar, the day more commonly known as Yom Kippur. Muhammad also adopted many Jewish dietary laws and purity requirements, and encouraged his followers to marry Jews, as he himself did. Second only to the Qur'an, and also central to Islam, is the Sunna, the collective traditions associated with Muhammad, which include thousands of stories, or hadith, all roughly based on the actions or words of the Prophet or those of his closest disciples.