Malcolm X (14 page)

Bea’s self-serving actions left a profound impression on Malcolm. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak,” he observed. “They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.” His misogyny had been reinforced during his time as a steerer for Harlem prostitutes. Reflecting on his experiences, Malcolm wrote, “I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women.” Bea’s actions underlined what he perceived as women’s deceptive, opportunistic tendencies. Malcolm rarely examined his own behavior—his broken relationship with Gloria Strother, his physical abuse of Bea Caragulian—let alone his betrayal of his partners.

CHAPTER 3

Becoming “X”

January 1946–August 1952

 

 

 

O
n March 8, 1946, a Massachusetts state psychiatrist interviewed prisoner number 22843. “He got called every filthy name I could think of,” Malcolm remembered. He described himself as being “physically miserable and as evil-tempered as a snake.” The “Psychometric Report,” written nearly two months later, however, described him as attentive and apparently cooperative. Malcolm blithely informed his interviewer that his parents had been missionaries and his mother a “white Scot” whose marriage to a black man had led to Malcolm’s being taunted by racial abuse throughout his childhood. Other misinformation followed. The psychiatrist, apparently troubled by all he had heard, observed that the prisoner “has fatalistic views, is moody, cynical, and has a sardonic smile which seems to be affected because of his sensitiveness to color.”

His defense lawyer had prevented his speaking on his own behalf during the trials, and Malcolm was convinced that his lengthy sentence was due solely to his involvement with Bea and the other white women. He also dreaded, being not yet twenty-one years old, the challenges of prison life, a dangerous world about which he knew only horror stories. During the weeks he was held in county jails prior to his transfer to the state penitentiary, Malcolm decided he had to exaggerate his criminal experiences, making himself appear tougher and more violent than he really was. He would also present a made-up history of his own family, making it almost impossible for the authorities to know his true background. He already felt outraged by how corrections officers recognized only a convict’s number, rather than his name. In prison, “you never heard your name, only your number,” he would recall years later. “On all of your clothing, every item was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain.”

Two months later, another caseworker filed a report on Malcolm. “Subject is a tall light-complexioned negro,” it ran in part, “unmarried, a child of a broken home, who has grown up indifferently into a pattern of life he liked, colorful, cynical, a-moral, fatalistic.” The report indicated that the prison authorities viewed him as the ringleader of the burglary ring. Perhaps Malcolm once again launched into a string of profanities, for the caseworker judged his prognosis as “poor. His present ‘hard’ attitude will no doubt increase in bitterness. . . . Subject may prove an intermediate security risk as he will find it hard to adjust from the accelerated tempo of night spots to the slow pace of institution life at Charlestown [prison].”

Both Malcolm and Shorty Jarvis had been assigned to Charlestown State Prison, at that time the oldest penal facility in continuous use in the world. It had been constructed in 1804–5 on the west banks of the Charlestown peninsula along the Boston Harbor, and its physical conditions were wretched: its mice-infested cells were tiny—seven feet by eight—and devoid of plumbing and running water. Prisoners relieved themselves in buckets that were emptied only once in twenty-four hours. There was no common dining room, so prisoners were forced to eat in their cells. The atmosphere was hardly improved by the prison’s grotesque history of executions, the most notorious being the 1927 electrocution of anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who had previously been unfairly convicted for a 1920 robbery and double homicide. The place was so beastly that in May 1952, shortly before Malcolm’s release, state governor Paul A. Dever described it as “a Bastille that eclipses in infamy any current prison in the United States.”

At first Malcolm had great difficulty accepting his sentence, and especially what he perceived as Bea’s betrayal in the trial. His fits of outrage and alienation were plain. Shorty, still upset with Malcolm for turning him in, began calling him the “Green-Eyed Monster.” During his first months, Malcolm routinely insulted guards and prisoners alike. He had never been particularly religious, but he now concentrated his profanities against God and religion in general. Other prisoners, listening to Malcolm’s tirades, came up with a further nickname for him: “Satan.” In the Middlesex jail during his trial, Malcolm had been forced to get clean, but once in Charlestown he soon resumed his old drug habit, first getting high on ground nutmeg. In small amounts—roughly four to eight teaspoons—nutmeg is a mild hallucinogen, creating euphoria and visual distortions; when taken in large amounts, as Malcolm may have done, it has similar effects to those of ecstasy. Nutmeg users can achieve highs lasting as long as seventy-two hours, but can also suffer mental breakdown. Some of the symptoms Malcolm described during his early months at Charlestown sound like the effects of nutmeg poisoning, especially the episodes of depression and paranoia. When Ella started sending small amounts of money, he used it to purchase drugs from corrupt guards who were happy to conduct business. Prisoners could obtain almost any drugs they wanted, from hash to heroin.

Malcolm had lived for years in a close web of family and stayed in relatively constant touch through mail and visits wherever he moved, but now, in his anger and shame about what had happened to him, he was reluctant to contact his siblings, especially Ella. During his first year in prison, he wrote only a few letters, including one or more to William Paul Lennon. The first one he received was from Philbert, to say that he had become a member of an evangelical church in Detroit. Philbert’s assurance that the entire congregation was praying for the soul of his younger brother enraged Malcolm. “I scrawled him a reply I’m ashamed to think of today,” he later admitted. Things went no better when Ella visited. On one occasion, about fifty prisoners and visitors were crowded into the small visitation center, all of them surrounded by armed guards. Ella attempted to exchange pleasantries, but was so upset that it was almost impossible for her to talk. Malcolm became so defensive that he “wished she hadn’t come at all.”

His attitude soon left him isolated, but he was not without visitors entirely. Malcolm’s most regular, and perhaps most sympathetic, visitor was a teenager, Evelyn Lorene Williams. Evelyn’s foster mother, Dorothy Young, was a close friend of Ella’s. Indeed, the two women were such good friends that Ella’s son, Rodnell, referred to Young as Aunt Dot. Malcolm had occasionally dated Evelyn during his years in Boston, and Ella had strongly encouraged the relationship. Malcolm had little sexual interest in Evelyn—compared, say, with the chemistry he had with Bea. Evelyn, however, seems to have fallen deeply in love with Malcolm.

Another frequent visitor was Jackie Mason, a Boston woman who had been sexually involved with Malcolm before his incarceration. Ella sharply disapproved of Mason, describing her as a “common street woman” unfit for her brother. Her attitude, according to Rodnell Collins, was that she “was well aware of how much havoc [an] older, experienced predatory woman could wreak on a teenaged, adventurous, highly impressionable” boy.

When Ella did go to see him, she was not happy with what she found— that he was not reflecting in any serious way on why he had wound up in prison or what its consequences might be for him. She was upset about his continuing contact with Paul Lennon, and was scandalized by his resumption of drug use. After several disappointing visits, Ella decided not to see her brother again. When Malcolm learned about this, he appeared contrite. In a plaintive letter dated September 10, he thanked Ella for mailing photos of family members, and for small amounts of cash. But then he incensed her again by trying to get her to contact Paul Lennon on his behalf. “The person that you said called me is a very good friend of mine,” Malcolm explained. “He’s only worth some fourteen million dollars. If you read the society pages you’d know who he is. He knows where I am now because I’ve written and told him, but I didn’t say what for.” Without mentioning Lennon’s name, he appealed to Ella to be cordial. “He may call and ask you. Whatever answer you give him will have to do with my entire future but I still depend on you.” Apparently Malcolm was convinced that Lennon could use his wealth and political contacts to reduce his prison term. According to Collins, Lennon never contacted Ella. In her words, though, she was “outraged” that her half brother had given her phone number to Lennon and that he had asked her to act as a go-between. Lennon, she thought, was obviously “one of those decadent whites whom he had been hustling.”

In the end Malcolm was forced to confront the challenges of prison life by himself. And it didn’t help matters that his attitude toward prison work detail was noncooperative. During his first seven months at Charlestown, he was assigned to the prison auto shop; then, that October, to work as a laborer in the yard. The month following, he was moved again, this time to sew in the underwear shop. Here he immediately ran into problems, being charged with shirking his duties; for this he was given three days’ detention. His work performance improved somewhat when he was reassigned to the foundry, where he was considered “cooperative, poor in skill, and average to poor in effort.” It was also here that he met a tall, light-complexioned former burglar named John Elton Bembry: the man who would change his life.

Bembry, who was about twenty years older than Malcolm, dazzled the young man with his mind. He was the first black man Malcolm would meet in prison (and possibly outside of prison as well) who seemed knowledgeable about virtually every subject and had the verbal skills to command nearly every conversation. Intellectually, Bembry had an astonishing range of interests, able to address the works of Thoreau at one moment, and then the institutional history of Massachusetts’s Concord prison at another. Malcolm was especially attracted to Bembry’s ability to “put the atheist philosophy in a framework.”

Malcolm’s brain came alive under Bembry’s tutelage. Here, finally, was an older man with both intellectual curiosity and a sense of discipline to impart to his young follower. Both men were assigned to the license plate shop, where after work inmates and even a few guards would cluster around to listen to Bembry’s wide-ranging discourses on any number of topics. For weeks, Bembry carefully noted the wild behavior of his young workmate. Finally, taking Malcolm aside, he challenged him to employ his intellect to improve his situation. Bembry urged him to enroll in correspondence courses and to use the library, Malcolm recalled. Hilda had already offered similar advice, imploring her brother to “study English and penmanship.” Malcolm consented: “So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did.”

It is possible that the details Bembry (“Bimbi” in the
Autobiography
) related to other convicts about his successful history of thefts found their way into Malcolm’s tales about his own burglary exploits, but above all Malcolm envied Bembry’s reputation as an intellectual. There was also a strong motive of self-interest: his own newfound enthusiasm for study and self-improvement might get him recommended for a transfer to the system’s most lenient facility, Massachusetts’s Norfolk Prison Colony. The bait of increased freedom was enough to instill discipline within Malcolm, such that he finally chose to pursue a self-directed course of formal study. During 1946–47, he devoted himself to a rigorous program, fulfilling the requirements for university extension courses that included English and elementary Latin and German. He devoured books from Charlestown’s small library, particularly those on linguistics and etymology. Following Bembry’s advice, he began studying a dictionary, memorizing the definitions of both commonly used and obscure words. Education now had a clear, practical goal: it offered a way out, to a prison with better conditions, and maybe even a reduction in prison time. Ironically, it also had the side benefit of making him a more persuasive con man. Refining his oratorical skills, he found new success in hustles of various kinds, including betting on baseball.

Malcolm was duly transferred in January 1947—but to the Massachusetts Reformatory at Concord, only a slight improvement over Charlestown. Concord maintained a so-called mark system of discipline, which set a confusing schedule of penalties and the loss of prisoners’ freedoms for acts of misconduct. No inmate council existed to negotiate the conditions of work and supervision. The new regulations and the lack of prisoners’ rights probably contributed to Malcolm’s continued acts of noncompliance.

During his incarceration at Concord he received a total of thirty-four visits. Among them were five from Ella, three from Reginald, and nineteen from “friends” (according to the redacted files)—undoubtedly Jackie Mason and Evelyn Williams, and possibly William Paul Lennon.

His hard work and professions about wanting to become a better man seem to have convinced Ella that he was finally committed to transforming his life, and she launched a letter-writing campaign to officials urging that he be relocated to the Norfolk Prison Colony. She encouraged Malcolm to write directly to the administrator in charge of transfers there. On July 28, in just such a letter, Malcolm employed his enhanced language skills to good effect: “Since my confinement I’ve already received a diploma in Elementary English through the State Correspondence Courses. I’m very much dissatisfied, though. There are many things that I would like to learn that would be of use to me when I regain my freedom.” Still, he undermined his efforts by continuing to cause trouble. Throughout 1947, he was assigned to the prison’s furniture shop, where he was evaluated as a “poor and uncooperative worker.” In April, he had been suspected of possessing “contraband”—in this case, a knife. In September he would be charged with disruptive behavior, and on two more occasions penalized for poor work. But Malcolm was as adept as Ella in skirting penalties. After each infraction he improved his job performance sufficiently so as to avoid severe discipline.