The Awakening of Malcolm X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  Your Brother,

  Philbert

  * * *

  That night, I lie awake, arguing with God.

  Is this it? Is this the life you have for me? Ha, some plan, homeboy. Why’d you let them take Lightning? He was good to the bone. You don’t give a shit about us!

  You ain’t supposed to cuss and say the Lord’s name in the same breath, but who cares.

  These people. These officers. They haunt me. I’m terrified to sleep, afraid of what I might see in my dreams—Mom, the hole, Lightning … Shorty.

  I sob into my pillow. There’s only so much nutmeg available to kill this kind of fear.

  What would Papa think of me? What about Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert? What does Reginald think of me—his big brother? How could I let Wesley, Yvonne, and Robert down? Does Mom even know I’m here? Before, I never really cared what they thought of me. But now … all I know is that this life is not for me. I am not this person. And if I am not this person, then who am I?

  Snap out of it. I want to feel something more than crushing guilt, more than the rush of rage that keeps my jaw clenched and my mind awake at night. Where is Papa?

  God, you put me in this shit. How I’m supposed to get out?

  Just keep busy, a voice inside me screams.

  But that translates into the only word I can really understand: hustle.

  * * *

  Whenever they carry out an execution in Charlestown, the lights in the shop flicker and buzz. Cats take off their caps and bow their heads; Big Lee makes a sign of the cross over his chest.

  Lightning had no business being killed. Just wasn’t right. If an eye for an eye was the reason, we’d have a lot less people with two eyes in this country. Just doesn’t seem like anyone has the right to take a man’s life. And yet the law allows for execution.

  With work done for the day, our unit is allowed outside in the yard for an hour, enough time to stretch our bones, breathe in air not mixed with death, and feel a little bit of the sun on our faces.

  The heat is stifling. Summertime, an’ the livin’ is easy. I envision myself at the Cotton Club with Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong crooning something pretty. Seems we’re all singing about the same thing. There’s nothing easy about the life we live, in here or out there.

  “That Lightning was a decent man,” Bembry says as cats gather around him the way you would flock to a preacher. “Strong-willed and kind. Shame, nothing but bad luck had him wind up in this place. Breaking a rule you’d never think existed.”

  “What he do?” Walter asks.

  Bembry replies, “Got arrested for walking.”

  Someone whistles through their teeth, others shake their heads.

  “Walking?” I ask. “That’s it?”

  “Yep. Walking in the wrong neighborhood one night. Lost trying to find his way back to the bus. They pinned some other mess on him. That’s all it takes, one wrong turn.”

  The men mumble to themselves, and a few look over their shoulders at the guards, surrounding us with rifles.

  Norm argues, “Well, that’s what he gets for thinking he’s better than everybody. You gotta pay the price when you do wrong. Everybody knows that. Some Negroes think they special and can walk wherever they want. There are rules in life. He knew he had to follow the rules.”

  “Hard to follow rules made up as you go along,” Bembry corrects him. “That’s like trying to play baseball with no rules. No chance of winning.”

  “Folks know you can’t just walk around neighborhoods you ain’t from,” Norm snaps back. “That don’t make no sense.”

  Bembry remains calm while cats talk over one another. Norm says the type of stuff that could get a man shot in the wrong places. But Bembry just measures Norm with indifference, like a man would regard a child, unmoved. When everyone settles down, Bembry takes his time to speak.

  “Tell you this, Lightning been asking me to help him with his transfer papers. He thought if he could just get from up under their heel, he’d have a fighting chance at life.”

  “Transfer? We can ask for that?” I ask. I’ve been here almost six months. Why am I just hearing about this now?

  Bembry regards me with a soft nod. “Yeah, they can transfer you to a new unit or to a whole different prison if you ask.”

  He is always patient when he answers my questions. Thoughtful. Never snaps or loses his temper. Reminds me of … someone.

  “And if you do ask, you need to ask for this place called Norfolk,” Big Lee adds. “That’s where my big brother Osbourn is. Says it’s like heaven, letting Negroes walk around free. That’s where Bembry came from.”

  There’s a longing in Bembry’s eyes before he sighs. “But nothing’s guaranteed and you can end up at a place worse than here. This cat I knew talked big about getting a transfer, only to end up on a chain gang breaking rocks for the railroad till he died.”

  Big Lee suddenly stands straighter. “Hey, who’s that?”

  I follow the stares, peering across the yard. On the opposite end, a man emerges out of a shadowed door, strolling with a cool cat strut as if he was entering the Roseland. But his eyes are dark and don’t keep still like regular ones do. They twitch and jiggle in their sockets, the way he looks at everything in his periphery. The same look a brother has when he’s about to hustle someone. I recognize the type.

  “Oh yeah. That’s Chucky,” Bembry says. “Just out of intake.”

  “You met him already?” Walter asks. “What you make of him?”

  Bembry takes a long, silent moment. “Hard to say. They put him on my cellblock yesterday, but I ain’t seen or heard much of him. Time will tell, always does.”

  As Bembry and the rest of the brothers continue chatting, I lean on a fence and close my eyes, trying to organize my thoughts. A transfer may be my ticket out of here. But I could risk winding up someplace worse or far from Boston and Ella. What if I transferred to wherever Shorty is? What if he doesn’t want anything to do with me? Man, I’d give just about anything to hear his laugh again.

  “You the one everyone been calling Satan, right?”

  My eyes fly open at the sound of a bellowing voice. Chucky leans against the fence a few feet away from me. He slides a loosie out of his shirt pocket and lights it up. Chucky is tall, stocky, with tight brown curly hair and fair skin like Mom.

  My shoulders tense but I keep my voice hard. “What’s it to you?”

  He sizes me up and chuckles. “Why, you ain’t nothing but a baby.”

  Never show your full hand, Shorty would say. So I keep my expression smooth. Calm. If he wants a challenge, he got it.

  “Can I help you with something?” I ask.

  Cats are watching us, pretending they’re still listening to Bembry, but their ears are tilting in our direction.

  Chucky crosses his arms. “You still taking bets?”

  The fight. Almost forgot about it.

  Work. Hustle. Always, the voice inside reminds me.

  “Yeah.”

  He sniffs and spits in the dirt. “What it cost?”

  I measure him up, just the way Shorty did when he first laid eyes on me, glancing at Chucky’s pockets, knowing he has a few more loosies than the one hanging from his lip.

  “It cost what you got.”

  Chucky leans on the fence a little longer and walks off. He didn’t have to say anything, but I knew it wouldn’t be our last talk.

  * * *

  Ella keeps her coat, scarf, and gloves on as she sits down at the meeting table, yet her teeth still clatter.

  Another visit. Another reminder of my failure.

  Ella glances around the visitors’ center. Eyes dart to the corner where a guard stands close by, the same one that yelled at us before. Watching. It’s only us today but the room still feels tight and tense.

  “And you’re positive you haven’t gotten a letter from Shorty yet?”

  “Not that I’ve seen.” She shakes her head. “Malcolm, you don’t look well.”

&
nbsp; My hair has grown out of its conk and I’m stick thin, but I don’t think it’s my appearance she’s referring to. Ella is perceptive, just like Papa was. Whenever Mom was upset about anything, Papa could just sense it like a coming storm. It made him good with people, able to calm their fears of change, of doing what seemed unnatural—wanting better for themselves than what the white man allowed.

  “Oh, I’m doing just fine,” I say with an uneasy smile. Don’t want her worrying about me. If I pretend everything is okay, maybe she’ll report back to my sisters and brothers, so they won’t worry about me either.

  Ella peers at me. “You are far from okay. What’s going on?”

  My mind is heavy with thoughts that I can’t put into words. How do I tell her what it’s like being in the hole? About the way Norm acts like all Negroes are criminals? The way God has forgotten us? I want her to stop coming here, to stay far away. I don’t want anyone to see me like this. But at the same time, I don’t want to lose her either. She’s the only family close enough to remind me that outside these walls people care about me.

  I place my hands on the table, noticing the paint under my nails. If Mom saw me now, she’d lay into me good. She hated dirty fingernails and teeth, always inspecting our hands and mouths before dinner. No matter if we were just walking down the road and back, she made sure we were clean. She made sure we were loved.

  I think of her, stuck helpless behind those institution walls. The way I’m stuck behind these walls. Trapped, unable to scream the way we want. Tears fight to come to my eyes and I hold them back.

  “Ella, I can’t … I don’t know if I can do this much longer,” I admit, my throat dry and hoarse. “I know I did wrong, but nothing I did … deserves this.”

  She flinches. Her instinct is to touch, to console, but she knows better. She has seen the way families have been torn apart in this very room.

  Ella leans in and whispers, “What do you mean, Malcolm?”

  In the corner, the guard moves closer, eyeing us, waiting for one of us to make a wrong move. What if he overhears me talking? What would he do? It’s not that I would be lying; everything I’d say would be the truth. But the truth sounds uglier than fiction. These white people in here hate mirrors that show the side of them that the rest of us see.

  I shake my head. Can’t risk it.

  “We have to get you out of here,” she says, her voice resolved.

  “There’s no going home for me, Ella. I’m stuck in this jam.”

  Ella thinks real hard. “Well, if you can’t come home, Malcolm, maybe another place would be better than this.”

  “Another place?”

  She reaches out her hand and grabs mine.

  “We’ll find a way to get you out of here,” she says. “You’re not alone. You have family that loves you.”

  “HEY! YOU!”

  Ella steels herself before turning to the guard, stuttering in a make-believe high-pitched voice. “W-we were just saying goodbye, sir.”

  “Time’s up,” he spits back, and yanks me by the neck from my seat, throwing me against the wall. Ella looks on, tears streaming down her face.

  CHAPTER 4

  The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.

  —MALCOLM X

  A buzz of excitement envelops Charlestown. All thanks to Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to enter Major League Baseball in America. All anyone can talk about in the shop, the mess hall, common areas, even the chapel is that a Negro is playing baseball.

  “They got that boy playing against them white boys now!” someone had laughed when the news broke: April 10, 1947. It was announced over the radio, and the paper even showed his photograph. Had to wait so long for my turn to catch a glimpse of him in black and white that by the time it reached my hands, the newspaper was nearly torn to pieces. I stopped on his picture to catch a good look at him. Wearing a crisp pinstripe uniform, gripping a baseball, Jackie is a tall, dark-skinned man, with determination in his eyes and a bright smile, like Papa.

  Crowds pack the colored sections of the stadiums. Folks dress in their church best just to watch him play. Men in their suits and hats. Women in their Sunday dresses and fancy gloves. Can’t believe our eyes. And not just Negroes. The white people, too. Kids sitting up in trees outside the fields, concession stands selling out of salted peanuts and soda pop before the fourth inning. White folk never allowed Negroes to play in any major league games.

  Up, up, you mighty race!

  On April 15, Jackie played his first game. Dodgers versus the Braves. All of Charlestown huddled by the old beat-up radio in the mess hall. Felt like the whole world was listening.

  Of course, Norm had something to say about it. “Can’t believe some Negro wants to play against white folk. He might get himself killed!”

  For once, we agreed on something. Couldn’t imagine why any white team would let a Negro on their roster to play against other white folk. What would they get out of it? Had to be some type of hustle, which gave me an idea.

  After Jackie’s first game, I had started making my rounds and taking bets. A few nickels, some loosies, an occasional matchbook of nutmeg. Baseball season has more games, which means more opportunities for bets. So I don’t have to rely on the occasional fight.

  “Game be on in thirty minutes,” someone hollers into the common room.

  Back in Lansing, we used to play baseball in our backyard. Philbert would say I couldn’t hit a ball if it was tossed a foot from my face, that all the white boys in Lansing were better than me. But he was wrong. I hit a few home runs and even stole a base or two. Or at least I remember doing that. Wonder what Philbert thinks of Jackie. Is he keeping his stats, tuning into every game like the rest of us? I’ll have to ask him about it in my next letter.

  Today’s game should be a good one. Pirates versus Dodgers.

  There are three small radios in Charlestown. One in the command center for the guards and one in the larger common area that all the units stack into. But with everyone talking over one another, you can’t hear a word the announcer is saying. Plus, all those bodies in one room during the June heat makes it feel like we are inside a funky oven.

  So, I convince the kitchen crew to set the last radio by the window and keep it secret, invitation only. Even gave one of the guards a nickel just to let us be for a spell.

  “Come on, man,” Walter shouts. “What’s taking so long?”

  Big Lee jiggles the antenna, adjusting a few loose wires in the back of the set.

  “Hold on, now! I’m working on it. It took the Lord seven days to create the heavens and earth, and you expect me to fix this thing in just a few minutes.”

  Walter pushes through the small crowd, pointing in Big Lee’s face.

  “You keep playing around, we gonna end up missing the game.”

  As the small party gathers, I play host, selling a few loosies, keeping track of all bets laid over the last few days. Reminds me of working at Smalls’ back in Harlem during big fights, and I feel like I’m normal again. Wish we could sneak some whiskey, hooch, or moonshine in here. Make this a real party.

  Norm, still on kitchen duty, stops mopping up a spill on the floor.

  “Why, they really gonna let him play again? Bunch of fools. What’s next? Football?”

  “Norm, don’t you start with no mess,” Walter warns, pointing at him. “Ain’t about to have you ruining the game with all that talk!”

  Norm shakes his head. “Don’t know if he’s crazy or just a plain fool.”

  “Man, if you don’t take your ass back to your cell…”

  Norm grumbles, leaning on his mop. “I’m just saying what y’all should be thinking. They about to send that Negro to an early
grave.”

  The signal snaps in as the announcer for Ebbets Field swims through the static. A collective sigh of relief calms the room.

  Big Lee shuffles his cards. “You know, that boy, Jackie, he used to play for my team back in Kansas City. The Monarchs. Well, in the Negro league, that is.”

  “And he didn’t want to stay there? Where it’s safe?” Norm asks.

  “Safe?” a big booming voice says behind us and we all turn.

  Mack sits in the corner, a newspaper held up to his ears.

  “Safe.” He repeats the word again with a chuckle. “Boy, ain’t nowhere safe. For us.”

  Everyone grumbles, eyes rolling.

  “Man, don’t listen to all that mumbo-jumbo talk. He worse than Norm,” someone says.

  Mack peers at us with his one good eye and goes back to his paper. I barely see him in his cell except for lights-out.

  “All right now, y’all, hush. The game’s starting,” Walter says.

  Everyone huddles, shoulder to shoulder, around the radio as the announcer comes on. A few fellas squat on overturned buckets, holding mini pencils and scraps of paper, taking note of stats.

  “Man, you know they gonna lose,” someone chuckles. Pretty sure it’s one of the few guys who bet against Jackie.

  “You foolin! That boy Jackie is good! He’s saving them Dodgers. That’s why they got him, see. He’s gonna be rookie of the year, just you wait!”

  “That’s if they don’t run him off the field.”

  “Making some Negro rookie of the year,” Norm spits, standing closer to the door. “You out of your head.”

  “We’ll see. I’m willing to bet on it,” someone says.