Several times in the fall of 1963, Haley asked both Reynolds and Doubleday for more advance money. He needed it to fix his typewriter, to get his telephone turned back on, to go to Arizona to interview Elijah Muhammad, and to move from Greenwich Village to the town of Rome in upstate New York. George Sims’s parents lived in Rome, which led Haley to move there at the same time Sims did. Haley’s financial need made him tempted by the offer of an advance for a book on Sojourner Truth, to which Reynolds objected. “Signing contacts long before you can do the books is just a form of borrowing and you’re paying the equivalent of a terribly high interest because you’re not getting the best kind of contracts. Now you talk to your good wife and see if you can’t pull in your horns and operate on this basis.” That good advice went unheeded, and Reynolds sent more money anyway.23
By late 1963 Reynolds was worried that he would not be able to sell the serial rights for the book to a major magazine. Two magazine editors had already told Reynolds that the Malcolm X story was too explosive for them. “They also feel,” he told Haley, that “they’ve perhaps over written about the problems of race relations.” That year’s Birmingham demonstrations, Medgar Evers’s assassination, the March on Washington, and bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham placed racial issues foremost in the American consciousness. A fatigue about race concerns was setting in among whites.24
In late October Haley submitted two more chapters, these on Malcolm’s early life. They contained scenes of angry encounters between his parents and between his mother, Louise Little, and Ku Klux Klansmen in Nebraska. When Malcolm’s family moved to Lansing, Michigan, his father, Earl Little, came into conflict with both whites and Lansing’s “complacent and misguided so-called ‘middle-class’ Negroes—the typical status-symbol-oriented, integration-seeking type of Negroes.” White arsonists burned down their home. When Malcolm was six years old, Earl was run over by a streetcar and killed. Afterward Louise struggled to keep her eight children fed and clothed, but the family came under the control of welfare workers. Malcolm blamed the breakdown of his family and his mother’s subsequent mental illness on the welfare system. He went through adolescence subject to the authority of white teachers and welfare agents, some of whom were kind and recognized his natural intelligence and leadership ability. But in middle school, when a white teacher asked about his career ambitions and Malcolm said he wanted to be a lawyer, the teacher responded that that was not a realistic goal “for a nigger.” That response turned Malcolm against all authority figures in Michigan, and he went to live with his sister Ella in Boston. Had he not gone there, he concluded, “I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.”
Haley accepted Malcolm’s story of his early life on its face. Malcolm was a young child when his Lansing home burned and his father died, and his accounts of his family’s traumas were based on reports that came to him well after they occurred. Manning Marable wrote that investigators in Lansing suspected Earl Little had torched his own home for insurance money. Marable noted that local blacks believed that a white terrorist group had beaten Earl and left him on the streetcar tracks. Marable also believed that Malcolm exaggerated the extent of his criminal acts. Marable dismissed Haley as having been interested mostly in writing a “potboiler that would sell.” Marable’s evidence, on both Haley and Malcolm, is suggestive, not definitive, but it does point up the subjective, and sometimes fictional, nature of autobiography.25
Haley made up dialogue in relating Malcolm’s relationship with one friend, the middle-class black girl called Laura. Haley’s agent and editors disliked his creation, especially his use of black vernacular. Haley acknowledged that Malcolm had not liked it either. “He has a way of stroking his square chin,” he explained to Reynolds and McCormick. “Er, can you take out the slang?” Malcolm had said to Haley. “I did talk that way then, but I don’t now, and it’s me now in the book.” The vernacular was removed.26
* * *
Throughout 1963, Malcolm’s growing national celebrity had escalated the suspicion and hostility toward him from other leaders in the Nation of Islam, including Elijah Muhammad, John Ali, and Ethel and Raymond Sharrief. Since at least 1962, Malcolm had been aware that Elijah had impregnated several secretaries who worked in the Chicago NOI headquarters. Such sexual immorality was an affront to NOI teachings about female purity and marital fidelity. Malcolm was appalled but kept silent. His knowledge of the situation was discussed within the NOI, and, like his burgeoning national celebrity it was a threat to Elijah Muhammad. In September 1963 the Amsterdam News reporter James Booker wrote about a growing division in the NOI. Malcolm finally said to Haley, “Look, tell me the truth. You travel around. Have you heard anything?” Haley knew nothing at that point, but then he started to hear from C. Eric Lincoln, who had maintained close contact with people in the Nation, about rising hostility toward Malcolm.27
On December 1, 1963, Malcolm gave the first speech by an NOI leader since the Kennedy assassination. Muhammad had warned Malcolm not to criticize Kennedy, because the Messenger knew how popular the president was among blacks. The title of Malcolm’s speech was “God’s Judgment of White America,” and in it, he called the president’s assassination an instance of “the chickens coming home to roost” for a nation perpetuating violence in Vietnam. The remark defied Muhammad’s order and provided a sensational example of Malcolm and the NOI’s anti-American views. Malcolm’s defiance proved to Muhammad’s inner circle that he wanted to replace the Messenger. Muhammad suspended Malcolm from his position as minister.28
Haley was brought closer to the strife within the NOI when, in February 1964, Playboy assigned him to interview the boxer Cassius Clay. Haley asked Malcolm to help arrange the interview, a natural request after Malcolm had spent several days at Clay’s Miami training camp and then more time giving the boxer a tour of Harlem. Clay was a member, or was soon to be a member, of the Nation. To Haley’s surprise, Malcolm replied, “I think you better ask somebody else to do that.” Elijah Muhammad, fearing that the boxer and Malcolm would align in a competing Muslim organization, soon announced that Clay needed a Muslim name and ordained him Muhammad Ali. Haley’s interview focused mainly on Ali’s boxing career; the fighter proudly discussed his psychological warfare against Sonny Liston. He dwelt on his calculated effort to become a celebrity. “People can’t stand a blowhard, but they’ll always listen to him,” he said. Ali spoke of his pride in being a Muslim but said little about Malcolm X. Haley believed, as did Malcolm, that Ali had betrayed Malcolm out of fear of Elijah Muhammad and his inner circle. “You just don’t buck Mr. Muhammad and get away with it,” Ali said. “I don’t want to talk about [Malcolm] no more.” Haley showed Malcolm the notes he had taken in the interview. Malcolm’s hurt feelings were clear on his face and in his voice. Malcolm said he felt “like a blood big-brother to him. . . . He’s a fine young man. Smart. He’s just let himself be used, led astray.”29
During the first days of 1964, Malcolm let Haley know that he, Malcolm, was in danger of being killed. Haley considered what that meant for the book. Malcolm had final approval of the manuscript. Who would give it if he was dead? Reynolds and McCormick worried that if Malcolm was assassinated the autobiography’s sales would be reduced. In early February they pressed Haley for a new completion date. “I can have it all in by March 31,” he replied. That was a ridiculously optimistic prediction: He had just received comments on what would be the sixth chapter of eighteen in the final version of the autobiography—with directions for a total rewrite. He was less than a third of the way through the book, but he began to produce chapters at a quicker pace, and in March 1964 he settled into a Manhattan hotel, where he said he would stay until he was finished.30
In February he explained to McCormick and Reynolds his plans for an afterword to the autobiography. “I plan to look at America and at the society which has produced the Black Muslims, [and] I plan to hit very hard, speaking from the po
int of view of the Negro who has tried to do all of the things that are held up as the pathway to enjoying the American Dream, and who (if not I personally, so many are) so often gets dissolusioned [sic] and disappointed.” But rather than producing book copy, he sent long letters that described unwritten chapters and exulted over the power of the narrative. “We have here a book that, when it gets to the public, is going to run away from everything else.” In late March, he wrote. “Think of this book’s dramatic impact wherever books are read. Paul, think of the bidding for rights.” He still had more than half of the book to write, but he promised that it would be finished in three weeks.31
Haley shaped The Autobiography into a powerful narrative. With his arrival in Boston as a teenager, Malcolm had become a prolific petty criminal. Malcolm “conked” his hair, “the emblem of his shame that he is black.” He thought it was a sign of strength and status to scare whites. He became a procurer of drugs and prostitutes for white men, whose bad morals he later came to see as the source of all evil, including that done by blacks. Malcolm’s misogyny was put on parade: white women were a status symbol to black men, and black men typically preferred them. White women were practical: they lusted after black men but had no intentions of having real relationships with them. But Malcolm himself had a lasting attachment to one white woman, whom he gave the pseudonym “Sophia.” He had a long friendship with a Jewish man, “Hymie.” Still, he held that whites could not see blacks as real people. Blacks functioned as “both servants and psychologists, aware that white people are so obsessed with their own importance that they will pay liberally, even dearly, for the impression of being catered to and entertained.” In prison, Malcolm embarked on an impressive program of self-education. He read widely in the classics and in the new anthropology on the origins of man. While he was there, his brother told him about the Nation of Islam. Prison officials allowed him to write to Elijah Muhammad, because, Malcolm said, they knew the white man was the devil and felt guilt. The Nation of Islam brought him joy and self-justification. He embraced Elijah Muhammad’s explanation that his imprisonment was the fault of the white devil and not the result of his own criminal behavior.
* * *
In March 1964 Malcolm faced up to the fact that he had no future in the NOI. He had begun discussing the Messenger’s immorality with other NOI ministers, which his protégé Louis X (later Louis Farrakhan) reportedly passed on to the Chicago headquarters. On March 8, Malcolm went to M. S. Handler’s home and told the reporter that he was leaving the NOI and creating a new organization, Muslim Mosque, Inc. Handler’s story in the next day’s Times reported that Malcolm was creating a black nationalist political party through which he intended to turn blacks from nonviolence to self-defense against white supremacy. “I remain a Muslim,” Malcolm declared, “but the main emphasis of the new movement will be black nationalism as a political concept and form of social action against the oppressors.” He said the NOI was “too narrowly sectarian and too inhibited” to advance blacks’ cause and that he was prepared “to cooperate in local civil rights actions in the South and elsewhere and shall do so because every campaign for specific objectives can only heighten the political consciousness of the Negroes and intensify their identification against white society.” Though he said he was not encouraging people to leave the NOI, he explained that Elijah Muhammad had kept him from participating in civil rights protests and that that was “going to be different now . . . I’m going to join in the fight wherever Negroes ask for my help.” He especially intended to speak frequently on college campuses, because “white students are more attuned to the times than their parents and realize that something is fundamentally wrong in this country.” He finally opened up about the hostility toward him in the NOI. “Envy blinds men and makes it impossible for them to think clearly. This is what happened.”32
Once the break was made, Malcolm moved forward with his new approach. He met with civil rights activists and discussed efforts to desegregate schools in northern states. He gave a speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” which displayed a much greater commitment on his part to voting rights than he had expressed before. In late March he went to Washington to observe the filibuster that southern senators were carrying out to thwart the omnibus civil rights bill that President Lyndon Johnson and Vice President Hubert Humphrey were pushing. There in the gallery of the Senate, Malcolm met Martin Luther King Jr. for the first and only time. The two shook hands, looking for all the world like the image of a new, united black front.33
In hindsight, Malcolm’s departure from the NOI marked a historic turn in the black freedom movement. Unburdened of the baggage of a secretive, corrupt sect, he could become the voice of a more militant approach toward white racist society. But he could also shed the anti-white racism that was central to the NOI. He had a huge, ready audience among young people, black and white, and among the dispossessed in American inner cities. He pointed black thought in the direction that would be manifest in the Black Power movement and other black liberation efforts in the coming years. Haley joined with a number of black admirers who believed that Malcolm’s intelligence and eloquence would no longer be wasted in defense of a racist sect but applied to the cause of reforming American race relations. Malcolm’s ability to promote assertions of black manhood surpassed that of Martin Luther King Jr., his admirers believed, and that was the next necessary step for lifting blacks in America.34
* * *
Haley was caught unprepared for the rapid changes in Malcolm’s life, but he made adjustments. Through Haley, Malcolm asked Doubleday to make his new organization the beneficiary of book royalties. In the event of his death, payments should go to his wife, Betty. He opened up to Haley about the internal workings of the NOI. Malcolm came close to tears as he said to Haley, “We had the best organization the black man’s ever had—niggers ruined it!” It was the only time Haley ever heard Malcolm use the racial epithet.35
Malcolm’s rejection of the Nation of Islam undermined Haley’s narrative. Up to this point, Malcolm’s story was about his descent into criminality, his re-education in prison, and his redemption under the tutelage of Elijah Muhammad. Now the Messenger was no longer his redeemer but a false teacher and a corrupt fraud. The abrupt revision of Malcolm’s anti-white opinions prompted Paul Reynolds to advise Haley about rewriting the manuscript: “I think you’re going to have to make it a little clearer that this is the past, when he was hating all whites.”
Haley dreaded the thought of redoing Malcolm’s character—and his book. He raised the problem with Malcolm, who had thought about it. “There are a lot of things I could say that went through my mind at times even then, things I saw and heard, but I threw them out of my mind,” he said. He had decided against revising the book, saying, “I’m going to let it stand the way I’ve told it.” If he did not see it immediately, Haley eventually realized that Malcolm’s transformation put a sweeping curve in the book’s narrative arc. The new turn would eventually account for much of its popularity. On March 26, Haley got a note from Malcolm that read, “There is a chance I may make a quick trip to several very important countries in Africa, including a pilgrimage to the Muslim Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina.” Haley soon began to receive letters signed El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. His new name meant “Malcolm of the tribe of Shabazz has made the journey to Mecca.”36
5
Marked Man
In April and May 1964, Malcolm visited Cairo, Jeddah, Mecca, Khartoum, Nairobi, Lagos, Accra, and Algiers. He met many white Muslims, including one in Jedda who had given Malcolm his hotel suite, even though he had heard negative things about him from the American press. This man’s generosity and openness prompted an epiphany: “It was when I first began to perceive that ‘white man,’ as was commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. . . . But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone
had ever been.” M. S. Handler reported that in Mecca Malcolm had “eaten from the same plate, drank from the same glass, slept on the same bed or rug, while praying to the same God” with Muslims “whose skin was the whitest of white, whose eyes were the bluest of blue.” This had forced Malcolm to alter “my own thought-pattern, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.”1
On May 21 a crowd of supporters at New York’s Kennedy Airport greeted Malcolm, who had grown a beard on his trip, perhaps to emphasize the point that the journey had changed him. He and Betty, now pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, picked up Haley and drove him to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, where a large crowd of reporters and photographers was waiting. Haley and M. S. Handler sat together and listened in amazement to Malcolm’s response to the question of whether he no longer thought all whites were evil. “True, Sir! My trip to Mecca has opened my eyes. I no longer subscribe to racism. I have adjusted my thinking to the point where I believe that whites are human beings as long as this is borne out by their humane attitude toward Negroes.” Handler, taking notes furiously, muttered over and over, “Incredible, incredible.” During a long question-and-answer period, Malcolm was supremely confident, often flashing a big smile to the room. “He had never been in better form,” wrote Haley.2
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