The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley

by Alex Haley

  Abruptly he quit pacing, and the look he shot at me made me sense that somehow the chance question had hit him. When I look back at it now, I believe I must have caught him so physically weak that his defenses were vulnerable.

  Slowly, Malcolm X began to talk, now walking in a tight circle. “She was always standing over the stove, trying to stretch whatever we had to eat. We stayed so hungry that we were dizzy. I remember the color of dresses she used to wear—they were a kind of faded-out gray….” And he kept on talking until dawn, so tired that the big feet would often almost stumble in their pacing. From this stream-of-consciousness reminiscing I finally got out of him the foundation for this book’s beginning chapters, “Nightmare” and “Mascot.” After that night, he never again hesitated to tell me even the most intimate details of his personal life, over the next two years. His talking about his mother triggered something.

  Malcolm X’s mood ranged from somber to grim as he recalled his childhood. I remember his making a great point of how he learned what had been a cardinal awareness of his ever since: “It’s the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease.” When his narration reached his moving to Boston to live with his half-sister Ella, Malcolm X began to laugh about how “square” he had been in the ghetto streets. “Why, I’m telling you things I haven’t thought about since then!” he would exclaim. Then it was during recalling the early Harlem days that Malcolm X really got carried away. One night, suddenly, wildly, he jumped up from his chair and, incredibly, the fearsome black demagogue was scat-singing and popping his fingers, “re-bop-de-bop-blap-blam—” and then grabbing a vertical pipe with one hand (as the girl partner) he went jubilantly lindy-hopping around, his coattail and the long legs and the big feet flying as they had in those Harlem days. And then almost as suddenly, Malcolm X caught himself and sat back down, and for the rest of that session he was decidedly grumpy. Later on in the Harlem narrative, he grew somber again. “The only thing I considered wrong was what I got caught doing wrong. I had a jungle mind, I was living in a jungle, and everything I did was done by instinct to survive.” But he stressed that he had no regrets about his crimes, “because it was all a result of what happens to thousands upon thousands of black men in the white man’s Christian world.”

  His enjoyment resumed when the narrative entered his prison days. “Let me tell you how I’d get those white devil convicts and the guards, too, to do anything I wanted. I’d whisper to them, ‘If you don’t, I’ll start a rumor that you’re really a light Negro just passing as white.’ That shows you what the white devil thinks about the black man. He’d rather die than be thought a Negro!” He told me about the reading he had been able to do in prison: “I didn’t know what I was doing, but just by instinct I liked the books with intellectual vitamins.” And another time: “In the hectic pace of the world today, there is no time for meditation, or for deep thought. A prisoner has time that he can put to good use. I’d put prison second to college as the best place for a man to go if he needs to do some thinking. If he’s motivated, in prison he can change his life.”

  Yet another time, Malcolm X reflected, “Once a man has been to prison, he never looks at himself or at other people the same again. The ‘squares’ out here whose boat has been in smooth waters all the time turn up their noses at an ex-con. But an ex-con can keep his head up when the ‘squares’ sink.”

  He scribbled that night (I kept both my notebooks and the paper napkins dated): “This WM created and dropped A-bomb on non-whites; WM now calls ‘Red’ and lives in fear of other WM he knows may bomb us.”

  Also: “Learn wisdom from the pupil of the eye that looks upon all things and yet to self is blind. Persian poet.”

  At intervals, Malcolm X would make a great point of stressing to me, “Now, I don’t want anything in this book to make it sound that I think I’m somebody important.” I would assure him that I would try not to, and that in any event he would be checking the manuscript page by page, and ultimately the galley proofs. At other times, he would end an attack upon the white man and, watching me take the notes, exclaim, “that devil’s not going to print that, I don’t care what he says!” I would point out that the publishers had made a binding contract and had paid a sizable sum in advance. Malcolm X would say, “You trust them, and I don’t. You studied what he wanted you to learn about him in schools, I studied him in the streets and in prison, where you see the truth.”

  Experiences which Malcolm X had had during a day could flavor his interview mood. The most wistful, tender anecdotes generally were told on days when some incident had touched him. Once, for instance, he told me that he had learned that a Harlem couple, not Black Muslims, had named their newborn son “Malcolm” after him. “What do you know about that?” he kept exclaiming. And that was the night he went back to his own boyhood again and this time recalled how he used to lie on his back on Hector’s Hill and think. That night, too: “I’ll never forget the day they elected me the class president. A girl named Audrey Slaugh, whose father owned a car repair shop, nominated me. And a boy named James Cotton seconded the nomination. The teacher asked me to leave the room while the class voted. When I returned I was the class president. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Any interesting book which Malcolm X had read could get him going about his love of books. “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book.” He came back again and again to the books that he had studied when in prison. “Did you ever read The Loom of Language?” he asked me and I said I hadn’t. “You should. Philology, it’s a tough science—all about how words can be recognized, no matter where you find them. Now, you take ‘Caesar,’ it’s Latin, in Latin it’s pronounced like ‘Kaiser,’ with a hard C. But we anglicize it by pronouncing a soft C. The Russians say ‘Czar’ and mean the same thing. Another Russian dialect says ‘Tsar.’ Jakob Grimm was one of the foremost philologists, I studied his ‘Grimm’s Law’ in prison—all about consonants. Philology is related to the science of etymology, dealing in root words. I dabbled in both of them.”

  When I turn that page in my notebook, the next bears a note that Malcolm X had telephoned me saying “I’m going to be out of town for a few days.” I assumed that as had frequently been the case before, he had speaking engagements or other Muslim business to attend somewhere and I was glad for the respite in which to get my notes separated under the chapter headings they would fit. But when Malcolm X returned this time, he reported triumphantly, “I have something to tell you that will surprise you. Ever since we discussed my mother, I’ve been thinking about her. I realized that I had blocked her out of my mind—it was just unpleasant to think about her having been twenty-some years in that mental hospital.” He said, “I don’t want to take the credit. It was really my sister Yvonne who thought it might be possible to get her out. Yvonne got my brothers Wilfred, Wesley and Philbert together, and I went out there, too. It was Philbert who really handled it.

  “It made me face something about myself,” Malcolm X said. “My mind had closed about our mother. I simply didn’t feel the problem could be solved, so I had shut it out. I had built up subconscious defenses. The white man does this. He shuts out of his mind, and he builds up subconscious defenses against anything he doesn’t want to face up to. I’ve just become aware how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up again. That’s one of the characteristics I don’t like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can’t solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn’t exist. But it exists.”

  It was my turn to be deeply touched. Not long afterward, he was again away for a few days. When he returned this time, he said that at his brother Philbert’s home, “we had dinner with our mother for the first time in all those years!” He said, “She’s sixty-six, and her memory is better than mine and she looks young and healthy. She has more of her teeth than those who were instrumental in sending her to the institution.”

  —

  When something had angered Malcolm X during the day, his face would be
flushed redder when he visited me, and he generally would spend much of the session lashing out bitterly. When some Muslims were shot by Los Angeles policemen, one of them being killed, Malcolm X, upon his return from a trip he made there, was fairly apoplectic for a week. It had been in this mood that he had made, in Los Angeles, the statement which caused him to be heavily censured by members of both races. “I’ve just heard some good news!”—referring to a plane crash at Orly Field in Paris in which thirty-odd white Americans, mostly from Atlanta, Georgia, had been killed instantly. (Malcolm X never publicly recanted this statement, to my knowledge, but much later he said to me simply, “That’s one of the things I wish I had never said.”)

  Anytime the name of the present Federal Judge Thurgood Marshall was raised, Malcolm X still practically spat fire in memory of what the judge had said years before when he was the N.A.A.C.P. chief attorney: “The Muslims are run by a bunch of thugs organized from prisons and jails and financed, I am sure, by some Arab group.” The only time that I have ever heard Malcolm X use what might be construed as a curse word, it was a “hell” used in response to a statement that Dr. Martin Luther King made that Malcolm X’s talk brought “misery upon Negroes.” Malcolm X exploded to me, “How in the hell can my talk do this? It’s always a Negro responsible, not what the white man does!” The “extremist” or “demagogue” accusation invariably would burn Malcolm X. “Yes, I’m an extremist. The black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a black man who isn’t an extremist and I’ll show you one who needs psychiatric attention!”

  Once when he said, “Aristotle shocked people. Charles Darwin outraged people. Aldous Huxley scandalized millions!” Malcolm X immediately followed the statement with “Don’t print that, people would think I’m trying to link myself with them.” Another time, when something provoked him to exclaim, “These Uncle Toms make me think about how the Prophet Jesus was criticized in his own country!” Malcolm X promptly got up and silently took my notebook, tore out that page and crumpled it and put it into his pocket, and he was considerably subdued during the remainder of that session.

  I remember one time we talked and he showed me a newspaper clipping reporting where a Negro baby had been bitten by a rat. Malcolm X said, “Now, just read that, just think of that a minute! Suppose it was your child! Where’s that slumlord—on some beach in Miami!” He continued fuming throughout our interview. I did not go with him when later that day he addressed a Negro audience in Harlem and an incident occurred which Helen Dudar reported in the New York Post.

  “Malcolm speaking in Harlem stared down at one of the white reporters present, the only whites admitted to the meeting, and went on, ‘Now, there’s a reporter who hasn’t taken a note in half an hour, but as soon as I start talking about the Jews, he’s busy taking notes to prove that I’m anti-Semitic’

  “Behind the reporter, a male voice spoke up, ‘Kill the bastard, kill them all.’ The young man, in his unease, smiled nervously and Malcolm jeered, ‘Look at him laugh. He’s really not laughing, he’s just laughing with his teeth.’ An ugly tension curled the edges of the atmosphere. Then Malcolm went on: ‘The white man doesn’t know how to laugh. He just shows his teeth. But we know how to laugh. We laugh deep down, from the bottom up.’ The audience laughed, deep down, from the bottom up and, as suddenly as Malcolm had stirred it, so, skillfully and swiftly, he deflected it. It had been at once a masterful and shabby performance.”

  I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in absolute seriousness that he was the only Negro in America who could either start a race riot—or stop one. When I once quoted this to him, tacitly inviting his comment, he told me tartly, “I don’t know if I could start one. I don’t know if I’d want to stop one.” It was the kind of statement he relished making.

  —

  Over the months, I had gradually come to establish something of a telephone acquaintance with Malcolm X’s wife, whom I addressed as “Sister Betty,” as I had heard the Muslims do. I admired how she ran a home, with, then, three small daughters, and still managed to take all of the calls which came for Malcolm X, surely as many calls as would provide a job for an average switchboard operator. Sometimes when he was with me, he would telephone home and spend as much as five minutes rapidly jotting on a pad the various messages which had been left for him.

  Sister Betty, generally friendly enough on the phone with me, sometimes would exclaim in spontaneous indignation, “The man never gets any sleep!” Malcolm X rarely put in less than an 18-hour workday. Often when he had left my studio at four A.M. and a 40-minute drive lay between him and home in East Elmhurst, Long Island, he had asked me to telephone him there at nine A.M. Usually this would be when he wanted me to accompany him somewhere, and he was going to tell me, after reviewing his commitments, when and where he wanted me to meet him. (There were times when I didn’t get an awful lot of sleep, myself.) He was always accompanied, either by some of his Muslim colleagues like James 67X (the 67th man named “James” who had joined Harlem’s Mosque Number 7), or Charles 37X, or by me, but he never asked me to be with him when they were. I went with him to college and university lectures, to radio and television stations for his broadcasts, and to public appearances in a variety of situations and locations.

  If we were driving somewhere, motorists along the highway would wave to Malcolm X, the faces of both whites and Negroes spontaneously aglow with the wonderment that I had seen evoked by other “celebrities.” No few airline hostesses had come to know him, because he flew so much; they smiled prettily at him, he was in turn the essence of courtly gentlemanliness, and inevitably the word spread and soon an unusual flow of bathroom traffic would develop, passing where he sat. Whenever we arrived at our destination, it became familiar to hear “There’s Malcolm X!” “Where?” “The tall one.” Passers-by of both races stared at him. A few of both races, more Negroes than whites, would speak or nod to him in greeting. A high percentage of white people were visibly uncomfortable in his presence, especially within the confines of small areas, such as in elevators. “I’m the only black man they’ve ever been close to who they know speaks the truth to them,” Malcolm X once explained to me. “It’s their guilt that upsets them, not me.” He said another time, “The white man is afraid of truth. The truth takes the white man’s breath and drains his strength—you just watch his face get red anytime you tell him a little truth.”

  There was something about this man when he was in a room with people. He commanded the room, whoever else was present. Even out of doors; once I remember in Harlem he sat on a speaker’s stand between Congressman Adam Clayton Powell and the former Manhattan Borough President Hulan Jack, and when the street rally was over the crowd focus was chiefly on Malcolm X. I remember another time that we had gone by railway from New York City to Philadelphia where he appeared in the Philadelphia Convention Hall on the radio station WCAU program of Ed Harvey. “You are the man who has said ‘All Negroes are angry and I am the angriest of all’; is that correct?” asked Harvey, on the air, introducing Malcolm X, and as Malcolm X said crisply, “That quote is correct!” the gathering crowd of bystanders stared at him, riveted.

  We had ridden to Philadelphia in reserved parlor car seats. “I can’t get caught on a coach, I could get into trouble on a coach,” Malcolm X had said. Walking to board the parlor car, we had passed a dining car toward which he jerked his head, “I used to work on that thing.” Riding to our destination, he conversationally told me that the F.B.I. had tried to bribe him for information about Elijah Muhammad; that he wanted me to be sure and read a new book, Crisis in Black and White by Charts Silberman—“one of the very few white writers I know with the courage to tell his kind the truth”; and he asked me to make a note to please telephone the New York Post’s feature writer Helen Dudar and tell her he thought very highly of her recent series
—he did not want to commend her directly.

  After the Ed Harvey Show was concluded, we took the train to return to New York City. The parlor car, packed with businessmen behind their newspapers, commuting homeward after their workdays, was electric with Malcolm X’s presence. After the white-jacketed Negro porter had made several trips up and down the aisle, he was in the middle of another trip when Malcolm X sotto-voced in my ear, “He used to work with me, I forget his name, we worked right on this very train together. He knows it’s me. He’s trying to make up his mind what to do.” The porter went on past us, poker-faced. But when he came through again, Malcolm X suddenly leaned forward from his seat, smiling at the porter. “Why, sure, I know who you are!” the porter suddenly said, loudly. “You washed dishes right on this train! I was just telling some of the fellows you were in my car here. We all follow you!”

  The tension on the car could have been cut with a knife. Then, soon, the porter returned to Malcolm X, his voice expansive. “One of our guests would like to meet you.” Now a young, clean-cut white man rose and came up, his hand extended, and Malcolm X rose and shook the proffered hand firmly. Newspapers dropped just below eye-level the length of the car. The young white man explained distinctly, loudly, that he had been in the Orient for awhile, and now was studying at Columbia. “I don’t agree with everything you say,” he told Malcolm X, “but I have to admire your presentation.”

  Malcolm’s voice in reply was cordiality itself. “I don’t think you could search America, sir, and find two men who agree on everything.” Subsequently, to another white man, an older businessman, who came up and shook hands, he said evenly, “Sir, I know how you feel. It’s a hard thing to speak out against me when you are agreeing with so much that I say.” And we rode on into New York under, now, a general open gazing.