Blood Brothers (39 page)

During his twenty-day tour of Egypt, Ali met the Supreme Islamic Council; watched a boxing tournament at an athletic club; visited monuments, museums, and the Aswan Dam; and performed a few boxing exhibitions. Outside Cairo, near the Pyramids of Giza, he straddled a stubborn camel, tightly pulling the reins when the ornery bull bucked. He confidently waved off the camel's owner and steadily gained control. “I'm the champ,” he announced with a grin, “and I can tame a camel just like I handled Sonny Liston.” While some locals laughed at his boasts, others resented his jocular behavior. “A real king,” a Cairene suggested, “would not say he is king of the world about himself. He'd leave it for others to say it about him.”
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Egyptians also wondered if Ali really understood how to perform traditional Muslim rituals. At the Al-Hussein Mosque, he and his brother prayed barefoot on a carpet among 1,500 worshippers. Afterward, Ali was so moved by his experience that he announced he would make the pilgrimage to Mecca before returning home, though he never reached
the Holy City. He also claimed that he wanted to learn Arabic, train Egyptian boxers, marry an Egyptian woman, and live near the Great Pyramids. Watching him pray during what seemed like inappropriate moments, with his palms facing the sky, shouting, “
Allahu akbar,
” left some locals questioning his sincerity.
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Near the end of his stay, he met Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. A passionate boxing fan, Nasser told Ali that he had watched his victory over Liston. Afterward, Ali said they talked for nearly forty minutes “about life, boxing, different things,” seemingly harmless topics. But given Nasser's friendly relationship with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, State Department officials must have cringed when Ali told a reporter that everything he had read about Nasser in the United States was “nothing but lies. It is a shame how they tell lies about great people like Nasser.”
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While the State Department considered whether Ali might make more provocative statements, they soon realized that they no longer had to worry. After five weeks of traveling, he abruptly canceled the final leg of his trip. “I'm tired,” he said to a group of reporters at Kennedy International Airport. “People have been mobbing me. They've been killing me. Women and children were jumping off roofs, and people were coming straight out of the mountains to see me.”
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But Ali wasn't embellishing when he said, “I was treated like a politician.” In Africa, he discovered a whole new world, one where people respected him as a black man and as a Muslim. His experience transformed him into a global icon, an international symbol of Black Power and anticolonialism. Reflecting on his journey, he realized that his worldwide celebrity came with tremendous responsibility. “Sometimes it scares me, all this fame, the world watches me, little children know me, old ladies,” he said. “Gotta set an example of good living, everybody knows me.” He could easily close his eyes and imagine all the black faces smiling at him, chanting his name. “You should have seen them pour out of the hills, the villages of Africa, and they all knew me. Everybody knows me in the whole world.”
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Chapter Sixteen

THE MUSLIM CHAMP

            
This hypocrite is going to get blasted clear off the face of the earth.

—
ELIJAH MUHAMMAD ON MALCOLM X

T
almadge Hayer was the perfect man for the job. He had lived a life of dreams deferred, with festering sores that never healed. He came of age in the slums of Paterson, New Jersey, a depressed and broken city. By the 1960s the “Silk City” had frayed into a badland of poverty, crime, and urban decay. Walking the streets of Paterson, Hayer could see the “crumbs of civilization” all around him: broken glass scattered on the sidewalks, garbage-strewn alleys, “the burned-out shell of a tenement,” abandoned redbrick buildings that were once filled with noisy looms, hustlers loitering on corners, and the vacant stares of old men sitting on stoops, passing time until they had no more time to pass.
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He recalled later that in his early twenties, his “life started coming apart.” He committed petty crimes and eventually was arrested for disorderly conduct and possession of stolen firearms. Some of his friends who were convicted of more serious crimes went to prison and came out as converted followers of Elijah Muhammad. Curious about their transformations, he began reading about the Nation of Islam. Soon he became a regular at Mosque No. 25 in Newark. Transfixed by the rugged, uniformed soldiers standing in military formation, Hayer decided what he really wanted to be: a soldier in the Fruit of Islam. “Had their own
army
, man,” he said years later. “I thought we were going to fight this white, blue-eyed devil.”

The Fruit of Islam had been waiting for Malcolm X to return home from his trip abroad. Malcolm knew when he arrived at JFK International Airport on May 21, 1964, that his life was in danger. The Fruit had orders from the Supreme Captain. “Malcolm,” Raymond Sharrieff promised, “will soon die out.”
Getty Images

After receiving his “X” in the fall of 1962, he embraced his role as a soldier in Elijah Muhammad's army. But on one occasion, when a fellow brother violated Muslim law, Talmadge X zealously took matters into his own hands, violently punishing the man. Consequently, mosque officials suspended him. In exile, he realized that he had to do something to regain their trust and prove his loyalty to the cause.

By the spring of 1964, Talmadge had returned to the Nation in good standing. In April, he unfolded the pages of
Muhammad Speaks
and found a provocative cartoon of Malcolm's decapitated head, replete with satanic horns, bouncing toward a pile of skulls that belonged to the worst
traitors in history. Talmadge read the cartoon clearly. This was a test, he realized, a challenge to the Fruit to eliminate the renegade minister who had betrayed the Messenger.
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On an early June afternoon, while Talmadge strolled through downtown Paterson, a black Chrysler rolled up alongside him. He recognized two young Muslim brothers from Mosque No. 25. After Ben X and Leon X opened a back door, Talmadge got in. The men began talking about how Malcolm had slandered the Messenger. Cautiously, they probed Talmadge for his attitudes about Malcolm and Muhammad. Talmadge told the men that Malcolm must be silenced. Nodding with approval, Ben and Leon had no doubt that he was committed to retaliation.
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When they mentioned killing Malcolm, Talmadge listened intently, assuming that Ben, an assistant secretary, was acting on orders from Minister James Shabazz. A good soldier, he acknowledged, followed orders, and he had a duty to carry out the mission. Soon, they began meeting at Ben's home, plotting Malcolm's death. According to Talmadge, Ben recruited two other men that he knew as Wilbur X and William X. Since Talmadge was familiar with guns, Ben charged him with acquiring the weapons they needed. He dutifully purchased a twelve-gauge shotgun, a Luger, and a .45 automatic. “I didn't ask a whole lot of questions as to who's giving us instructions and who's telling us what,” he said later. “We just knew what had to be done.”

A
FEW WEEKS
before Ben and Leon approached Talmadge, on May 21, Malcolm returned home after traveling for more than month. Around four thirty p.m., Betty, the kids, and a few of his lieutenants greeted him at Kennedy Airport. Following a brief respite at home, a few minutes before seven p.m., Malcolm entered the Hotel Theresa's eleventh-floor Skyline Ballroom, wearing a blue seersucker suit and a broad smile. Reporters hardly recognized the man with the reddish goatee. Some had heard that he was now using his Sunni Muslim name, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, but before he stepped to the podium one of his assistants introduced him as Minister Malcolm. When a writer asked him if “Shabazz” would replace his “X,” he replied with a grin, “I'll probably continue to use Malcolm X as long as the situation that produced it exists.”
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More than fifty photographers, newswriters, and television reporters had crowded into the ballroom. After describing his journey, Malcolm
announced his intention to work with African leaders who would support his charges against the United States for violating black Americans' human rights. Immediately a writer asked him the one question everyone wanted him to answer. “Do we correctly understand that you now do not think that all whites are 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,” he said, pausing contemplatively, “as long as this is borne out by their humane attitude toward Negroes.” He added that although he had seen Muslims of different races living in harmony in the Middle East, he remained unconvinced that such interracial brotherhood would ever exist in America.

When another writer inquired if he planned to cooperate with civil rights groups, Malcolm replied that he wanted to develop a “united front” with other organizations and that he was willing to meet various leaders. Sitting next to Alex Haley, the
New York Times
' Mike Handler could not believe what he was hearing. “Incredible! Incredible!” he kept muttering.
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Malcolm's willingness to work with civil rights leaders led many writers to conclude that his trip had fundamentally changed his political views. Some of his own followers, hearing him concede that he no longer considered all whites to be devils, began wondering if the minister sporting a reddish beard was an imposter. In private meetings, a few men challenged him, and sometimes the disagreements became physical. “I had to hold some brothers off Malcolm,” his aide Charles Kenyatta said later. While Malcolm's perspective had changed—becoming more internationalist—he still identified himself as a minister and a teacher, a Muslim and a revolutionary. Most importantly, he still considered himself a proud black man.
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In the days after his return, Malcolm found himself trapped between his past and his future, struggling to convey his new position as an alternative to the status quo. If he deviated too far from his previous rhetoric, looking for a rapprochement with white liberals, he risked losing his most loyal followers, but if he failed to broaden his thinking, inviting alliances with those he had condemned in the past, then he could not build the unified movement that he envisioned. Malcolm was now convinced that brotherhood between blacks mattered more than
ideology. If a black man was willing to fight alongside him, risking his life for freedom, then that man was his brother.
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When fellow activists pressed him about his position, he maintained that whites were still the enemy of black Americans and that he fully intended “to fight that enemy.” On May 23, during a debate with Louis Lomax at the Civic Opera House in Chicago, he explained that traveling abroad had helped him discover a wider perspective. “Separation is not the goal of the Afro-American,” he told the moderator, Irv Kupcinet. “Nor is integration his goal. They are merely methods toward his real end—respect and recognition as a human being.”
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While Malcolm debated Lomax, he looked out at the audience and noticed John Ali and a squad from the Fruit glaring at him. It was the beginning of an emerging pattern. The moment Malcolm returned home, the Black Muslims escalated threats against him, appearing everywhere he went: lecture halls, radio stations, airports, even his home. In Chicago, Raymond Sharrieff had ordered the Fruit to “get” Malcolm. In early June, the Supreme Captain visited Mosque No. 7, where he delivered a harangue against the “hypocrite,” demanding vengeance. Make no mistake, he said, “Malcolm will soon die out.”
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Malcolm could sense his enemies closing in on him. Walking the streets at night, his eyes darted in every direction while he listened for footsteps. He could imagine a squad from the Fruit sneaking up behind him. The Black Muslims, Peter Goldman wrote, “had crowded him into a corner and so had brought him to his most dangerous condition—that reckless, free-swinging, gut-punching fury in which he would use whatever weapon came to hand.”
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His most potent weapon against the Muslims, of course, was evidence that Elijah Muhammad had carried on numerous affairs, impregnating several of his secretaries. He began retaliating by sending his chief aide, James 67X, to California to obtain signed legal documents from women who claimed that Elijah had fathered their children. Then he began working the phones, calling other women who could corroborate the former secretaries' charges. Malcolm knew that once he pursued this course, his chances of survival deteriorated. Muhammad would stop at nothing to protect his secrets. The FBI overheard Malcolm say on the phone, “Any man who will go to bed with his brother's daughter, and then turn around and make five other women
pregnant, and then accuse all these women of committing adultery, is a ruthless man.”
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On the evening of June 7, at the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm told nearly five hundred people that Elijah kept several concubines and was the father of six illegitimate children. This was the first time that he spoke publicly about Elijah's adultery, a move as wise as swinging a broom at a hornet's nest. The Nation's officials, he declared, “would even murder to keep it quiet.” Later that night, across Harlem, the Black Muslims mobilized, preparing for war. The following morning Betty received the first of many threatening phone calls. Sometimes her tormentors dialed and hung up. Sometimes they said nothing while she pleaded for them to stop calling. And sometimes they threatened her children. But this time a man told her to deliver a message to her husband. “Just tell him he's as good as dead.”
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M
ALCOLM GOT THE
message. Later that day, he appeared on CBS with Mike Wallace, divulging Elijah's improprieties. Muhammad forced him out of the Nation of Islam, he charged, because when he learned about Muhammad's indiscretions he told other officials, who then made it look as if he was “stirring up things.” Wallace asked him if he feared the consequences of exposing Elijah's trysts. “Oh yes,” he answered. “I'm probably a dead man already.”
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