I want to be an honest man and a good writer.
Turning Point
*
MALCOLM X
I was one of the school’s top students—but all he could see for me was the kind of future “in your place.”
Malcolm X (1925–1965) was a charismatic, inspirational, and prominent Black nationalist. Serving as a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam for more than a decade, in speeches, public appearances, and media interviews, he articulated the deep-seated frustrations and opinions of African Americans in dealing with society’s racism. Affirming self-worth and the ability for self-determination if allowed equal opportunity, Malcolm X became one of the most quoted and admired leaders among Black people. He also gained international acclaim, as evidenced in his invitations to speak, such as in debate at the Oxford Union Society in 1964, which was televised on the BBC.
Malcolm X was acutely aware of the power of words. Born with the last name Little, when he became a member of the Nation of Islam in 1952, as was the custom of the racially proud and religious organization, he replaced it with an “X” as a symbol of African Americans’ denied ancestral African names and the forced use of last names of slave masters (that have been passed down generationally to this day). After his religious pilgrimage to Mecca, in which he felt he had encountered brotherhood with Whites for the first time, he became a Sunni Muslim and asserted a new name again, in the custom of those who make hajj, to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.
In the months before his assassination, he collaborated with writer Alex Haley on his autobiography. In this excerpt, he shares the story of his early education, those impressionable years of learning in which a teacher’s words can motivate a student—or reinforce society’s low expectations that will affect one’s life forever.
That summer of 1940, in Lansing, I caught the Greyhound bus for Boston with my cardboard suitcase, and wearing my green suit. If someone had hung a sign, “HICK,” around my neck, I couldn’t have looked much more obvious. They didn’t have the turnpikes then; the bus stopped at what seemed every corner and cowpatch. From my seat in—you guessed it—the back of the bus, I gawked out of the window at white man’s America rolling past for what seemed a month, but must have been only a day and a half.
When we finally arrived, Ella met me at the terminal and took me home. The house was on Waumbeck Street in the Sugar Hill section of Roxbury, the Harlem of Boston. I met Ella’s second husband, Frank, who was now a soldier; and her brother Earl, the singer who called himself Jimmy Carleton; and Mary, who was very different from her older sister. It’s funny how I seemed to think of Mary as Ella’s sister, instead of her being, just as Ella is, my own half-sister. It’s probably because Ella and I always were much closer as basic types; we’re dominant people, and Mary has always been mild and quiet, almost shy.
Ella was busily involved in dozens of things. She belonged to I don’t know how many different clubs; she was a leading light of local so-called “black society.” I saw and met a hundred black people there whose big-city talk and ways left my mouth hanging open.
I couldn’t have feigned indifference if I had tried to. People talked casually about Chicago, Detroit, New York. I didn’t know the world contained as many Negroes as I saw thronging downtown Roxbury at night, especially on Saturdays. Neon lights, nightclubs, poolhalls, bars, the cars they drove! Restaurants made the streets smell—rich, greasy, down-home black cooking! Jukeboxes blared to Erskine Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Cootie Williams, dozens of others. If somebody had told me then that some day I’d know them all personally, I’d have found it hard to believe. The biggest bands, like these, played at the Roseland State Ballroom, on Boston’s Massachusetts Avenue—one night for Negroes, the next night for whites.
I saw for the first time occasional black-white couples strolling around arm in arm. And on Sundays, when Ella, Mary, or somebody took me to church, I saw churches for black people such as I had never seen. They were many times finer than the white church I had attended back in Mason, Michigan. There, the white people just sat and worshiped with words; but the Boston Negroes, like all other Negroes I had ever seen at church, threw their souls and bodies wholly into worship.
Two or three times, I wrote letters to Wilfred intended for everybody back in Lansing. I said I’d try to describe it when I got back.
But I found I couldn’t.
My restlessness with Mason—and for the first time in my life a restlessness with being around white people—began as soon as I got back home and entered eighth grade.
I continued to think constantly about all that I had seen in Boston, and about the way I had felt there. I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time.
The white people—classmates, the Swerlins, the people at the restaurant where I worked—noticed the change. They said, “You’re acting so strange. You don’t seem like yourself, Malcolm. What’s the matter?”
I kept close to the top of the class, though. The top-most scholastic standing, I remember, kept shifting between me, a girl named Audrey Slaugh, and a boy named Jimmy Cotton.
It went on that way, as I became increasingly restless and disturbed through the first semester. And then one day, just about when those of us who had passed were about to move up to 8-A, from which we would enter high school the next year, something happened which was to become the first major turning point of my life.
Somehow, I happened to be alone in the classroom with Mr. Ostrowski, my English teacher. He was a tall, rather reddish white man and he had a thick mustache. I had gotten some of my best marks under him, and he had always made me feel that he liked me. He was, as I have mentioned, a natural-born “advisor,” about what you ought to read, to do, or think—about any and everything. We used to make unkind jokes about him: why was he teaching in Mason instead of somewhere else, getting for himself some of the “success in life” that he kept telling us how to get?
I know that he probably meant well in what he happened to advise me that day. I doubt that he meant any harm. It was just in his nature as an American white man. I was one of his top students, one of the school’s top students—but all he could see for me was the kind of future “in your place” that almost all white people see for black people.
He told me, “Malcolm, you ought to be thinking about a career. Have you been giving it thought?”
The truth is, I hadn’t. I never have figured out why I told him, “Well, yes, sir, I’ve been thinking I’d like to be a lawyer.” Lansing certainly had no Negro lawyers—or doctors either—in those days, to hold up an image I might have aspired to. All I really knew for certain was that a lawyer didn’t wash dishes, as I was doing.
Mr. Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. He kind of half-smiled and said, “Malcolm, one of life’s first needs is for us to be realistic. Don’t misunderstand me, now. We all here like you, you know that. But you’ve got to be realistic about being a nigger. A lawyer—that’s no realistic goal for a nigger. You need to think about something you can be. You’re good with your hands—making things. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. Why don’t you plan on carpentry? People like you as a person—you’d get all kinds of work.”
The more I thought afterwards about what he said, the more uneasy it made me. It just kept treading around in my mind.
What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr. Ostrowski’s advice to others in my class—all of them white. Most of them had told him they were planning to become farmers. But those who wanted to strike out on their own, to try something new, he had encouraged. Some, mostly girls, wanted to be teachers. A few wanted other professions, such as one boy who wanted to become a county agent; another, a veterinarian; and one girl wanted to be a nurse. They all reported that Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged what they had wanted. Yet nearly none of them had earned marks equal to mine.
It was a surprising thing that I had never thought of
it that way before, but I realized that whatever I wasn’t, I was smarter than nearly all of those white kids. But apparently, I was still not intelligent enough, in their eyes, to become whatever I wanted to be.
It was then that I began to change—inside.
I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon. It became a physical strain simply to sit in Mr. Ostrowski’s class.
Where “nigger” had slipped off my back before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at whoever said it. And they looked surprised that I did.
I quit hearing so much “nigger” and “What’s wrong?”—which was the way I wanted it. Nobody, including the teachers, could decide what had come over me. I knew I was being discussed.
In a few more weeks, it was that way, too, at the restaurant where I worked washing dishes, and at the Swerlins’.
——
One day soon after, Mrs. Swerlin called me into the living room, and there was the state man, Maynard Allen. I knew from their faces that something was about to happen. She told me that none of them could understand why—after I had done so well in school, and on my job, and living with them, and after everyone in Mason had come to like me—I had lately begun to make them all feel that I wasn’t happy there anymore.
She said she felt there was no need for me to stay at the detention home any longer, and that arrangements had been made for me to go and live with the Lyons family, who liked me so much.
She stood up and put out her hand. “I guess I’ve asked you a hundred times, Malcolm—do you want to tell me what’s wrong?”
I shook her hand, and said, “Nothing, Mrs. Swerlin.” Then I went and got my things, and came back down. At the living room door I saw her wiping her eyes. I felt very bad. I thanked her and went out in front to Mr. Allen, who took me over to the Lyons’.
Mr. and Mrs. Lyons, and their children, during the two months I lived with them—while finishing eighth grade—also tried to get me to tell them what was wrong. But somehow I couldn’t tell them, either.
I went every Saturday to see my brothers and sisters in Lansing, and almost every other day I wrote to Ella in Boston. Not saying why, I told Ella that I wanted to come there and live.
I don’t know how she did it, but she arranged for official custody of me to be transferred from Michigan to Massachusetts, and the very week I finished the eighth grade, I again boarded the Greyhound bus for Boston.
I’ve thought about that time a lot since then. No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions.
If I had stayed on in Michigan, I would probably have married one of those Negro girls I knew and liked in Lansing. I might have become one of those state capitol building shoeshine boys, or a Lansing Country Club waiter, or gotten one of the other menial jobs which, in those days, among Lansing Negroes, would have been considered “successful”—or even become a carpenter.
Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it. I’ve often thought that if Mr. Ostrowski had encouraged me to become a lawyer, I would today probably be among some city’s professional black bourgeoisie, sipping cocktails and palming myself off as a community spokesman for and leader of the suffering black masses, while my primary concern would be to grab a few more crumbs from the groaning board of the two-faced whites with whom they’re begging to “integrate.”
All praise is due to Allah that I went to Boston when I did. If I hadn’t, I’d probably still be a brainwashed black Christian.
Lessons in Living
*
MAYA ANGELOU
Mrs. Flowers taught me that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.
Maya Angelou (1928–2014), poet, dancer, playwright, essayist, and author of a groundbreaking series of memoirs, was a cultural and political activist who worked with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the civil rights movement. In 1993, she was invited by President Bill Clinton to deliver a poetry recitation at his inauguration, the first poet to do so since Robert Frost recited at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 swearing-in. The poem she wrote was “On the Pulse of Morning.” Also known as “the Black woman’s poet laureate,” Angelou published more than a dozen poetry collections. Two of Angelou’s most popular and oft-recited poems are “Still I Rise” and “Phenomenal Woman.”
Given her inspirational oratorical fame, it may be little known that as a child she refused to speak for several years. In this story from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first nonfiction bestseller by an African American woman and the beginning memoir in her series of autobiographies (among her thirty-six books), Angelou tells us how books gave her back her voice.
I had to stop talking.
I discovered that to achieve perfect personal silence all I had to do was to attach myself leechlike to sound. I began to listen to everything. I probably hoped that after I had heard all the sounds, really heard them and packed them down, deep in my ears, the world would be quiet around me. I walked into rooms where people were laughing, their voices hitting the walls like stones, and I simply stood still—in the midst of the riot of sound. After a minute or two, silence would rush into the room from its hiding place because I had eaten up all the sounds.
In the first weeks my family accepted my behavior as a post-rape, post-hospital affliction. (Neither the term nor the experience was mentioned in Grandmother’s house, where Bailey and I were again staying.) They understood that I could talk to Bailey, but to no one else.
Then came the last visit from the visiting nurse, and the doctor said I was healed. That meant that I should be back on the sidewalks playing handball or enjoying the games I had been given when I was sick. When I refused to be the child they knew and accepted me to be, I was called impudent and my muteness sullenness.
For a while I was punished for being so uppity that I wouldn’t speak; and then came the thrashings, given by any relative who felt himself offended.
——
We were on the train going back to Stamps, and this time it was I who had to console Bailey. He cried his heart out down the aisles of the coach, and pressed his little-boy body against the window pane looking for a last glimpse of his Mother Dear.
I have never known if Momma sent for us, or if the St. Louis family just got fed up with my grim presence. There is nothing more appalling than a constantly morose child.
I cared less about the trip than about the fact that Bailey was unhappy, and had no more thought of our destination than if I had simply been heading for the toilet.
——
The barrenness of Stamps was exactly what I wanted, without will or consciousness. After St. Louis, with its noise and activity, its trucks and buses, and loud family gatherings, I welcomed the obscure lanes and lonely bungalows set back deep in dirt yards.
The resignation of its inhabitants encouraged me to relax. They showed me a contentment based on the belief that nothing more was coming to them, although a great deal more was due. Their decision to be satisfied with life’s inequities was a lesson for me. Entering Stamps, I had the feeling that I was stepping over the border lines of the map and would fall, without fear, right off the end of the world. Nothing more could happen, for in Stamps nothing happened.
Into this cocoon I crept.
For an indeterminate time, nothing was demanded of me or of Bailey. We were, after all, Mrs. Henderson’s California grandchildren, and had been away on a glamorous trip way up North to the fabulous St. Louis. Our father had come the year before, driving a big, shiny automobile and speaking the King’s English with a big city accent, so all we had to do was lie quiet for months and rake in the profits of our adventures.
Farmers and maids, cooks and handymen, carpenters and all the children in town, made regular pilgrimages to the Store. “Just to see the travelers.”
They stood around like cutout cardboard figures and asked, “Well, how is it up North?”
“See any of the
m big buildings?”
“Ever ride in one of them elevators?”
“Was you scared?”
“Whitefolks any different, like they say?”
Bailey took it upon himself to answer every question, and from a corner of his lively imagination wove a tapestry of entertainment for them that I was sure was as foreign to him as it was to me.
He, as usual, spoke precisely. “They have, in the North, buildings so high that for months, in the winter, you can’t see the top floors.”
“Tell the truth.”
“They’ve got watermelons twice the size of a cow’s head and sweeter than syrup.” I distinctly remember his intent face and the fascinated faces of his listeners. “And if you can count the watermelon’s seeds, before it’s cut open, you can win five zillion dollars and a new car.”
Momma, knowing Bailey, warned, “Now Ju, be careful you don’t slip up on a not true.” (Nice people didn’t say “lie.”)
“Everybody wears new clothes and have inside toilets. If you fall down in one of them, you get flushed away into the Mississippi River. Some people have iceboxes, only the proper name is Cold Spot or Frigidaire. The snow is so deep you can get buried right outside your door and people won’t find you for a year. We made ice cream out of the snow.” That was the only fact that I could have supported. During the winter, we had collected a bowl of snow and poured Pet milk over it, and sprinkled it with sugar and called it ice cream.
Momma beamed and Uncle Willie was proud when Bailey regaled the customers with our exploits. We were drawing cards for the Store and objects of the town’s adoration. Our journey to magical places alone was a spot of color on the town’s drab canvas, and our return made us even more the most enviable of people.
High spots in Stamps were usually negative: droughts, floods, lynchings and deaths.
Bailey played on the country folks’ need for diversion. Just after our return he had taken to sarcasm, picked it up as one might pick up a stone, and put it snufflike under his lip. The double entendres, the two-pronged sentences, slid over his tongue to dart rapier-like into anything that happened to be in the way. Our customers, though, generally were so straight thinking and speaking that they were never hurt by his attacks. They didn’t comprehend them.
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