White Girls

by Hilton Als

  Could any critical analysis of Mrs. Little substantiated by biographical fact bear up to “My mother...looked like a white woman”? No, it could not. Unless one’s sense of competition as a writer of a color in relation to another—Malcolm X—were very keen on representing Mrs. Little as something other than a nearly colorless vision. Since practically any audience will make me a writer of a color solely and, as such, I am meant to suffer, I will gladly undertake the gargantuan task of remaking Mrs. Little. But how? And according to whose specifications? Shall I begin with the hatred and self-hatred Malcolm projected onto his mother’s face—“My mother...looked like a white woman...I looked like my mother”—while remembering—at times—my own passion for Mother? How shall I “capture” Mrs. Little? As an abhorrent phantom eventually driven mad by her ghostly, noncolored half? What if one were to write of her not as a mother at all, but as Louise, adrift in Grenada, in the then-British West Indies—as part of this common world my own female forebearers understood well enough to escape? To write of Louise in the crêpe de chine dress—her only one—limping as she eventually made her way to America—are these facts? Did she see her future in the stars—the murder of her husband by men not of a color; the murder of her son by men perhaps of a color; her not-gradual slide into madness following her husband’s death and the removal of her children to one foster home or another? Why could she not save them? Didn’t she know obeah? She was so alone. Was her life more horrible than Malcolm’s? And if so, why did she not make the world pay for it, like Malcolm? Was she lonelier than Malcolm, living in this common world? Was she not lonelier than Malcolm, living in this common world? Malcolm lived less for other people than he did for power. His mother had no choice but to live for other people, being first a woman and then a mother. She was not alone long enough to know herself, emigrating, as she did, from Grenada, in the then-British West Indies, to Canada, where she met Earl Little, “an itinerant minister,” whom she married and settled with, finally, in Lansing, Michigan, in western America. No one knew just how young she was before she met Earl Little. In Canada, what did Earl Little preach as an “itinerant” minister? Was Louise Little charmed by his speech? Was it as mad as Malcolm’s? Was Earl Little charmed by Louise Little’s crêpe de chine dress—her only one—as he limped through the provinces, preaching what? Did Louise Little have more language? No one knew what her presence would mean to the United States, its future. Her emigrating to the States—it is never explained let alone described in the Autobiography. She exists in the Autobiography to give birth to Malcolm, go mad, and look nearly colorless. What did Louise feel, growing up in Grenada? What did Louise feel in America? She came from Grenada, in the West Indies, and its green limes, subbitter people, the blue sea, and sense, garnered from her family, that the yellowness of her skin raised her above having to don the mask of piety. Being yellow in the West Indies—what does it mean? It is a kind of elevated status, based in delusions and folly. This folly began in the minds of those who contributed to the creation of this yellow skin. It began: Those smart-mouthed coloreds who want to come into this house where they will learn to hate darkness and the dark ones who remain in the sun, please come in. The stupid people—no, the Masters—who offered this up: They created another race within the colored race when they separated the dark ones from the Yellows. The meaning of the Yellows to people in the West Indies is this: Their external self calls up hatred, self-hatred, and contempt in the dark; pity and fascination in the whites.

  People not of a color who “loved” the Autobiography: in the main they are not different from the noncolored people Louise Little was born to. Since we know so little about these people, we have to assume what Bruce Perry’s biography says about one pivotal person is true: Louise “had never seen her Scottish father.” Had Louise Little’s father read his grandson’s book, I am certain he would have loved it. I am certain of this because for someone neither Earl nor Malcolm knew, Mrs. Little’s Scottish father commanded so much attention. The success of a thing is best measured by the attention men pay it. The noncolored ghost that is Louise Little’s father hovers happily in the Autobiography. That is because he commands the attention of the living ghosts who read this book and love it, not knowing why. They love it, for starters, because of Grandfather. He is what Malcolm’s noncolored readers identify with—a power. Earl and Malcolm speak of no one else with such passion. Earl Little is reported to have said to his parents, on the occasion of Malcolm’s birth: “It’s a boy...But he’s white, just like mama!” Malcolm is reported to have said to his collaborator, Alex Haley: “Of this white father of hers I know nothing except her shame about it.” What is Louise reported to have said about her own father? And of Louise’s “shame.” Did she ever describe it as that? And to a child? Malcolm said: “I remember hearing her say she was glad that she had never seen him. It was, of course, because of him that I...was the lightest child in our family.” Was Louise Little glad not to have seen her father for reasons other than his skin not of a color? Was she glad not to have seen him so as to imagine him dead as her unfortunate mother who died “giving birth to the last of her three illegitimate children?” Was Louise Little glad not to have seen him because she was frightened by Malcolm’s more than physical resemblance to her father’s side of the family? Did Malcolm want to be noncolored too? He had so much ambition—was it genetic? And his need for love on his own terms. From whom did he learn the need not to ask for it? Grandfather? Grandfather did not wear the mask of piety. In order not to, one must believe in oneself to the exclusion of other people. Malcolm believed in the reality of his experience to the exclusion of all other realities except one: Grandfather, who was a ghost.

  Earl and Malcolm attached themselves to Louise’s male, noncolored half. Louise did not have to meet her father. Earl and Malcolm loved him by competing with his ghost at every turn. Is that why Earl loved Louise? Because she looked like the memory of someone he might have loved before her? Had Earl known noncolored people he thought beautiful at one time or another? As a preacher who “[roamed] about spreading the word of Marcus Garvey” in Omaha or one place and another, did Earl spot someone with Louise Little’s father’s red hair, blue eyes, and, long before knowing Louise, think that person beautiful? Was that person with red hair and blue eyes kind to Earl Little? Did she feed him a cool drink of water with her own hands by the side of some road time has forgotten? When he met Louise, did he find her to be the living embodiment of a memory, which is to say was Louise Little that cool drink of water in that noncolored hand that did not lie to Earl Little? Admittedly, this cool water slipping through a noncolored hand past Earl Little’s lips and onto the side of a side road—it would have been a remarkable thing to see outdoors in Omaha, Nebraska, in the late nineteen twenties. It would not have been a remarkable thing to have happened secretly, in America, ever. Did Earl really want Louise’s father? Malcolm holds Louise Little’s father responsible for his mangled consciousness: “I was among the millions of Negroes who were insane enough to feel that it was some kind of status symbol to be light-complexioned...But...later, I learned to hate every drop of that white rapist’s blood that is in me.” I am sure Malcolm did not mean that literally. How do we know that Louise Little’s mother—who is not mentioned in the Autobiography at all—did not love Louise’s father? In my mind’s eye I see Louise Little’s parents meeting on the side of a road in Grenada. Mrs. Little’s mother—she is on foot. Mrs. Little’s father—he is not. What he is: red in the red sun and on a horse. There’s the sound of crickets, and a mongoose’s stuttering run. As they pause to look at one another, the man and woman don’t pause to consider the eventual outcome of their meeting: Louise Little, Louise Little in America, Louise Little in America with Malcolm.

  Does history believe in itself even as it happens? Malcolm wrote, “I feel definitely that just as my father favored me for being lighter...my mother gave me more hell for the same reason. She was very light herself...I am sure that she treated me this wa
y partly because of how she came to be light herself.” Which was? “Her father.” The judgmental air emanating from the above! The judgmental air that comes with knowing nothing! If Malcolm were in the least his mother’s son, he would know that in the West Indies a father is an immaterial thing—a scrap of man born as torment. Louise Little knew that. Perhaps Louise Little’s lack of interest in her father was cultural. Malcolm knew nothing of his mother’s culture. Instead, Malcolm preferred to indulge in the fantasy of Grandfather, his “rape.” That is all Malcolm cared to know of his mother’s past or all that was useful to him about his mother’s past. It is clear Malcolm indulged in this potential fantasy of Grandfather as rapist because it endowed Grandfather with the power Malcolm needed to emulate in order to learn how to take and take in this common world.

  Mrs. Little, as I call her, was “smarter” than Mr. Little. How much did Malcolm hate knowing that? He hated the fact of his mother’s smartness because he admired it. He admired his mother’s mind in the way he admired most things—with loathing and fear, if he couldn’t control it. What Mrs. Little is in the Autobiography: representative of Malcolm’s fear that because he and Mom shared a face, he and Mom shared intelligence. Was Louise Little’s smartness the precursor of her madness?

  Malcolm felt envy for Mrs. Little’s “smartness.” Was his expression of this envy only for himself, or for his father too? “My father and mother...seemed to be nearly always at odds. Sometimes my father would beat her. It might have had something to do with the fact that my mother had a pretty good education.” Malcolm said, “An educated woman, I suppose, can’t resist the temptation to correct an uneducated man. Every now and then, when she [my mother] put those smooth words on him [my father], he would grab her.” Is this not mad? Being smart—it made Mrs. Little feel so different. It made my mother silent so as not to feel different. Did Mrs. Little ask, by speaking, to be punished? Is that how she lost her mind, really? The famous photograph of Malcolm standing at a window in his house with a gun looking out the window—I believe he is on the lookout for his mother. What did he see, looking out that window? Did he see his mother’s quite appropriate anger? Based on the fact that in the Autobiography he refers to her as Louise and in Malcolm: The Life of a Man Who Changed Black America, Bruce Perry refers to her as Louisa? What was her name? Her date of birth? What parish was she born in in Grenada? When Malcolm looked out that window, did he see his mother holding a diary? What was written in it? Mrs. Little (as I call her) did not write: He did not know my name. He could not bear my presence. What did Mrs. Little write? I had a son named Malcolm? Mrs. Little did not write anything. I am writing her anger for her and therefore myself since I hate the nonwriting I have done about my own mother. The fact is, my nonwriting couldn’t contain my mother’s presence. The fact is, Malcolm knew his nonwriting couldn’t support Mrs. Little. My mother’s presence showed my nonwriting up. I am writing the idea of Mrs. Little with, I hope, some authenticity, in the hope that every fake word, idea, gesture, lie I ever told about my mother and others like her will vanish.

  Therein lies the paradox of trying to create an autobiography Mrs. Little can inhabit. Since I am not capable of writing about my mother, how can I honor Mrs. Little? I did not know her. How did I not know my mother? What I know: Malcolm’s interest in his mother is evident in his avoidance. In one of his typically Johnsonian sentences, Malcolm writes of the effect his father’s death had on her, but only as it affected him: “We began to go swiftly downhill. The physical downhill wasn’t as quick as the psychological. My mother was, above everything else, a proud woman, and it took its toll on her that she was accepting charity. And her feelings were communicated to us.” I cannot break Mrs. Little’s heart by not at least trying to imagine what the emotional truth of the following might have meant to her. “I remember waking up to the sound of my Mother’s screaming again...My father’s skull, on one side, was crushed in, I was told later...Negroes in Lansing [the town they lived in then] have always whispered that he was attacked, and then laid across some tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in half.”

  Mrs. Little was in her early thirties when her husband was murdered for “political” reasons. Earl Little was a Garveyite. Marcus Garvey was a native of Jamaica. Mrs. Little was a native of Grenada. I do not know what Mrs. Little’s political beliefs were. Were they the same as Earl Little’s? Earl Little’s being a Garveyite—was this the result of Mrs. Little’s political influence? Her being West Indian? This is just one more thing that Malcolm did not speak of: Mrs. Little’s politics.

  Mrs. Little lost her mind for political reasons, in a sense. When Mrs. Little lost her mind, she was not quite ready not to believe in love, the bed empty of her mortal enemy—according to Malcolm—whom she loved—according to Malcolm—and with whom she lived first in Canada and then in Omaha and then in Michigan. And I am also sure Mrs. Little was not quite ready for a space in her mind to be filled with unconquerable grief and madness. I am sure Mrs. Little did not want to see her children parceled off to one foster home or another. A young woman in her early thirties, her husband dead, with no means of support for herself and with eight children. What did Malcolm make of that? What do I make of that? I cannot bear to imagine unraveling my mother, her hair, her retribution. There is my mother—what to make of her? What to make of Mrs. Little? What to make of these questions? Will they always be at the fore of my consciousness? Is Mom all one will ever have to say who one is or care what one will become? It is difficult to forgive Mom for having to shoulder this responsibility alone as precious few pay attention to her language. It is difficult to forgive the world for not being a place conducive to this complexity. It is not difficult to produce nonwriting that rejects Mom as too great a reality.

  American people of a color who “loved” the Autobiography. The Autobiography plays out the violence of their feelings toward the colored immigrant. Once Malcolm has identified his mother as an immigrant in his book, it is impossible not to see her at a remove. That is the true nature of difference: something stupidly defined so as to be controlled. When American people of a color look at this photograph of Malcolm, gun in hand, and cheer, it is because they believe he is looking for his mother, too—in a sense. People like Mrs. Little expose the myth of the dishonesty of their fellow feeling Americans. Mrs. Little’s appearance is not a comfort; her story is not a comfort; her place of birth is not a comfort: she is a woman of a color, but different. Malcolm represented an intolerance of this difference, and for a very long time. Malcolm says his mother was different at every turn: “She would go into Lansing and find different jobs—in housework, or sewing—for white people. They didn’t realize, usually, that she was a Negro...Once when one of us...had to go for something to where she was working, and the people saw us, and realized she was actually a Negro, she was fired on the spot, and she came home crying, this time not hiding it.” And “Louise Little, my mother, who was born in Grenada, in the British West Indies, looked like a white woman.”

  In the countries they emigrate from, West Indians of a color are in the majority. They project the arrogance and despair that comes with this sense of being central but small onto everything and everyone else in the world. Everyone else in the world counters this arrogance by defining it as that—especially American people of a color. They do so because they are Americans first and prefer to exclude the complexity inherent in imagining what despair means to someone else and how that despair may shape arrogance. Arrogance is a theatrical device, and self-protective. The West Indians I grew up with employed this arrogance to mask their feelings less than most things and seeing this less feeling everywhere. This feeling does not exclude one’s relationship to people of a color.

  For example: most West Indians regard most American people not of a color as ghosts. A ghost is a part of one’s consciousness at times but is not a constant. West Indians are generally not ambivalent about the relationship one must establish with these ghosts: West Indians
believe in ghosts. One takes from these ghosts what one must: warnings given in dreams and one’s waking life, so as to live as profitably in the real world as possible. For American people of a color, these ghosts are real because they rent other people’s blood—the blood, specifically, of American people of a color. This blood—it feeds their “double-consciousness,” as Du Bois termed it. This double-consciousness is not so much the “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body” Du Bois wrote of but, rather, hatred of people not of a color and their reverence for this hatred.

  My grandmother, a native of Barbados, was a Royalist. She did not grow up in a “free” Barbados but in a Barbados not so different from the Grenada Louise Little emigrated from. Both islands were part of the British commonwealth, which meant both islands were the province of Royals who sold their subjects the sense that wearing the mask of piety was identity.

  My grandmother refused to accept that description of herself by believing she was not of any color. She was as wrong in this as she was in her belief that the world attempted to ignore the fact she was a woman. To forget herself and the hideousness of her reality, she attempted to ignore her children who were women, and their children, who were dark. Not unlike Louise Little, my grandmother was Yellow. In my mind’s eye I can see my grandmother now. She is wearing her crêpe de chine dress—her only one—and sits, as she often did, with her legs spread, smelling not of limes but of something equally bitter. Because I am not Yellow, my grandmother encouraged me not to play in the sun; often she said I had the look of someone who had been covered in germs. My color—it was an illness to her. Was Malcolm’s color an illness to his mother? “I feel definitely that just as my father favored me for being lighter...my mother gave me more hell for the same reason.” My grandmother emulated so many Royalist tendencies. She had so little to rule, though. There were no mountains, colonies, or large groups of smart-mouthed coloreds to whom she could say shut up. There was just my little self who hated her for this so much I wrote this hatred down so as not to forget it. Like Malcolm. My version of an Autobiography would be just as mad as his, but more so, since it is difficult for me to speak this madness. Like my mother. Like Louise Little.