Sophia and her sister sat at a table inside, near the dance floor, with a white man.
I don’t know how I ever made such a mistake as I next did. I could have talked to her later. I didn’t know, or care, who the white fellow was. My cocaine told me to get up.
It wasn’t Sophia’s husband. It was his closest friend. They had served in the war together. With her husband out of town, he had asked Sophia and her sister out to dinner, and they went. But then, later, after dinner, driving around, he had suddenly suggested going over to the black ghetto.
Every Negro who lives in a city has seen the type a thousand times, the Northern cracker who will go to visit “niggertown,” to be amused at “the coons.”
The girls, so well known in the Negro places in Roxbury, had tried to change his mind, but he had insisted. So they had just held their breaths coming into this club where they had been a hundred times. They walked in stiff-eyeing the bartenders and waiters who caught their message and acted as though they never had seen them before. And they were sitting there with drinks before them, praying that no Negro who knew them would barge up to their table.
Then up I came. I know I called them “Baby.” They were chalky-white, he was beet-red.
That same night, back at the Harvard Square place, I really got sick. It was less of a physical sickness than it was all of the last five years catching up. I was in my pajamas in bed, half asleep, when I heard someone knock.
I knew that something was wrong. We all had keys. No one ever knocked at the door. I rolled off and under the bed; I was so groggy it didn’t cross my mind to grab for my gun on the dresser.
Under the bed, I heard the key turn, and I saw the shoes and pants cuffs walk in. I watched them walk around. I saw them stop. Every time they stopped, I knew what the eyes were looking at. And I knew, before he did, that he was going to get down and look under the bed. He did. It was Sophia’s husband’s friend. His face was about two feet from mine. It looked congealed.
“Ha, ha, ha, I fooled you, didn’t I?” I said. It wasn’t at all funny. I got out from under the bed, still fake-laughing. He didn’t run, I’ll say that for him. He stood back; he watched me as though I were a snake.
I didn’t try to hide what he already knew. The girls had some things in the closets, and around; he had seen all of that. We even talked some. I told him the girls weren’t there, and he left. What shook me the most was realizing that I had trapped myself under the bed without a gun. I really was slipping.
—
I had put a stolen watch into a jewelry shop to replace a broken crystal. It was about two days later, when I went to pick up the watch, that things fell apart.
As I have said, a gun was as much a part of my dress as a necktie. I had my gun in a shoulder holster, under my coat.
The loser of the watch, the person from whom it had been stolen by us, I later found, had described the repair that it needed. It was a very expensive watch, that’s why I had kept it for myself. And all of the jewelers in Boston had been alerted.
The Jew waited until I had paid him before he laid the watch on the counter. He gave his signal—and this other fellow suddenly appeared, from the back, walking toward me.
One hand was in his pocket. I knew he was a cop.
He said, quietly, “Step into the back.”
Just as I started back there, an innocent Negro walked into the shop. I remember later hearing that he had just that day gotten out of the military. The detective, thinking he was with me, turned to him.
There I was, wearing my gun, and the detective talking to that Negro with his back to me. Today I believe that Allah was with me even then. I didn’t try to shoot him. And that saved my life.
I remember that his name was Detective Slack.
I raised my arm, and motioned to him, “Here, take my gun.”
I saw his face when he took it. He was shocked. Because of the sudden appearance of the other Negro, he had never thought about a gun. It really moved him that I hadn’t tried to kill him.
Then, holding my gun in his hand, he signaled. And out from where they had been concealed walked two other detectives. They’d had me covered. One false move, I’d have been dead.
I was going to have a long time in prison to think about that.
If I hadn’t been arrested right when I was, I could have been dead another way. Sophia’s husband’s friend had told her husband about me. And the husband had arrived that morning, and had gone to the apartment with a gun, looking for me. He was at the apartment just about when they took me to the precinct.
The detectives grilled me. They didn’t beat me. They didn’t even put a finger on me. And I knew it was because I hadn’t tired to kill the detective.
They got my address from some papers they found on me. The girls soon were picked up. Shorty was pulled right off the bandstand that night. The girls also had implicated Rudy. To this day, I have always marveled at how Rudy, somehow, got the word, and I know he must have caught the first thing smoking out of Boston, and he got away. They never got him.
I have thought a thousand times, I guess, about how I so narrowly escaped death twice that day. That’s why I believe that everything is written.
The cops found the apartment loaded with evidence—fur coats, some jewelry, other small stuff—plus the tools of our trade. A jimmy, a lockpick, glass cutters, screwdrivers, pencil-beam flashlights, false keys…and my small arsenal of guns.
The girls got low bail. They were still white—burglars or not. Their worst crime was their involvement with Negroes. But Shorty and I had bail set at $10,000 each, which they knew we were nowhere near able to raise.
The social workers worked on us. White women in league with Negroes was their main obsession. The girls weren’t so-called “tramps,” or “trash,” they were well-to-do upper-middle-class whites. That bothered the social workers and the forces of the law more than anything else.
How, where, when, had I met them? Did we sleep together? Nobody wanted to know anything at all about the robberies. All they could see was that we had taken the white man’s women.
I just looked at the social workers: “Now, what do you think?”
Even the court clerks and the bailiffs: “Nice white girls…goddam niggers—” It was the same even from our court-appointed lawyers as we sat down, under guard, at a table, as our hearing assembled. Before the judge entered, I said to one lawyer, “We seem to be getting sentenced because of those girls.” He got red from the neck up and shuffled his papers: “You had no business with white girls!”
Later, when I had learned the full truth about the white man, I reflected many times that the average burglary sentence for a first offender, as we all were, was about two years. But we weren’t going to get the average—not for our crime.
—
I want to say before I go on that I have never previously told anyone my sordid past in detail. I haven’t done it now to sound as though I might be proud of how bad, how evil, I was.
But people are always speculating—why am I as I am? To understand that of any person, his whole life, from birth, must be reviewed. All of our experiences fuse into our personality. Everything that ever happened to us is an ingredient.
Today, when everything that I do has an urgency, I would not spend one hour in the preparation of a book which had the ambition to perhaps titillate some readers. But I am spending many hours because the full story is the best way that I know to have it seen, and understood, that I had sunk to the very bottom of the American white man’s society when—soon now, in prison—I found Allah and the religion of Islam and it completely transformed my life.
CHAPTER 10
SATAN
Shorty didn’t know what the word “concurrently” meant.
Somehow, Lansing-to-Boston bus fare had been scraped up by Shorty’s old mother. “Son, read the Book of Revelations and pray to God!” she had kept telling Shorty, visiting him, and once me, while we awaited our sentencing. Shorty had read t
he Bible’s Revelation pages; he had actually gotten down on his knees, praying like some Negro Baptist deacon.
Then we were looking up at the judge in Middlesex County Court. (Our, I think, fourteen counts of crime were committed in that county.) Shorty’s mother was sitting, sobbing with her head bowing up and down to her Jesus, over near Ella and Reginald. Shorty was the first of us called to stand up.
“Count one, eight to ten years—
“Count two, eight to ten years—
“Count three…”
And, finally, “The sentences to run concurrently.”
Shorty, sweating so hard that his black face looked as though it had been greased, and not understanding the word “concurrently,” had counted in his head to probably over a hundred years; he cried out, he began slumping. The bailiffs had to catch and support him.
In eight to ten seconds, Shorty had turned as atheist as I had been to start with.
I got ten years.
The girls got one to five years, in the Women’s Reformatory at Framingham, Massachusetts.
This was in February, 1946. I wasn’t quite twenty-one. I had not even started shaving.
They took Shorty and me, handcuffed together, to the Charlestown State Prison.
I can’t remember any of my prison numbers. That seems surprising, even after the dozen years since I have been out of prison. Because your number in prison became part of you. You never heard your name, only your number. On all of your clothing, every item, was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain.
Any person who claims to have deep feeling for other human beings should think a long, long time before he votes to have other men kept behind bars—caged. I am not saying there shouldn’t be prisons, but there shouldn’t be bars. Behind bars, a man never reforms. He will never forget. He never will get completely over the memory of the bars.
After he gets out, his mind tries to erase the experience, but he can’t. I’ve talked with numerous former convicts. It has been very interesting to me to find that all of our minds had blotted away many details of years in prison. But in every case, he will tell you that he can’t forget those bars.
As a “fish” (prison slang for a new inmate) at Charlestown, I was physically miserable and as evil-tempered as a snake, being suddenly without drugs. The cells didn’t have running water. The prison had been built in 1805—in Napoleon’s day—and was even styled after the Bastille. In the dirty, cramped cell, I could lie on my cot and touch both walls. The toilet was a covered pail; I don’t care how strong you are, you can’t stand having to smell a whole cell row of defecation.
The prison psychologist interviewed me and he got called every filthy name I could think of, and the prison chaplain got called worse. My first letter, I remember, was from my religious brother Philbert in Detroit, telling me his “holiness” church was going to pray for me. I scrawled him a reply I’m ashamed to think of today.
Ella was my first visitor. I remember seeing her catch herself, then try to smile at me, now in the faded dungarees stenciled with my number. Neither of us could find much to say, until I wished she hadn’t come at all. The guards with guns watched about fifty convicts and visitors. I have heard scores of new prisoners swearing back in their cells that when free their first act would be to waylay those visiting-room guards. Hatred often focused on them.
I first got high in Charlestown on nutmeg. My cellmate was among at least a hundred nutmeg men who, for money or cigarettes, bought from kitchen-worker inmates penny matchboxes full of stolen nutmeg. I grabbed a box as though it were a pound of heavy drugs. Stirred into a glass of cold water, a penny matchbox full of nutmeg had the kick of three or four reefers.
With some money sent by Ella, I was finally able to buy stuff for better highs from guards in the prison. I got reefers, Nembutal, and Benzedrine. Smuggling to prisoners was the guards’ sideline; every prison’s inmates know that’s how guards make most of their living.
I served a total of seven years in prison. Now, when I try to separate that first year-plus that I spent at Charlestown, it runs all together in a memory of nutmeg and the other semi-drugs, of cursing guards, throwing things out of my cell, balking in the lines, dropping my tray in the dining hall, refusing to answer my number—claiming I forgot it—and things like that.
I preferred the solitary that this behavior brought me. I would pace for hours like a caged leopard, viciously cursing aloud to myself. And my favorite targets were the Bible and God. But there was a legal limit to how much time one could be kept in solitary. Eventually, the men in the cellblock had a name for me: “Satan.” Because of my antireligious attitude.
The first man I met in prison who made any positive impression on me whatever was a fellow inmate, “Bimbi.” I met him in 1947, at Charlestown. He was a light, kind of red-complexioned Negro, as I was; about my height, and he had freckles. Bimbi, an old-time burglar, had been in many prisons. In the license plate shop where our gang worked, he operated the machine that stamped out the numbers. I was along the conveyor belt where the numbers were painted.
Bimbi was the first Negro convict I’d known who didn’t respond to “What’cha know, Daddy?” Often, after we had done our day’s license plate quota, we would sit around, perhaps fifteen of us, and listen to Bimbi. Normally, white prisoners wouldn’t think of listening to Negro prisoners’ opinions on anything, but guards, even, would wander over close to hear Bimbi on any subject.
He would have a cluster of people riveted, often on odd subjects you never would think of. He would prove to us, dipping into the science of human behavior, that the only difference between us and outside people was that we had been caught. He liked to talk about historical events and figures. When he talked about the history of Concord, where I was to be transferred later, you would have thought he was hired by the Chamber of Commerce, and I wasn’t the first inmate who had never heard of Thoreau until Bimbi expounded upon him. Bimbi was known as the library’s best customer. What fascinated me with him most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen command total respect…with his words.
Bimbi seldom said much to me; he was gruff to individuals, but I sensed he liked me. What made me seek his friendship was when I heard him discuss religion. I considered myself beyond atheism—I was Satan. But Bimbi put the atheist philosophy in a framework, so to speak. That ended my vicious cursing attacks. My approach sounded so weak alongside his, and he never used a foul word.
Out of the blue one day, Bimbi told me flatly, as was his way, that I had some brains, if I’d use them. I had wanted his friendship, not that kind of advice. I might have cursed another convict, but nobody cursed Bimbi. He told me I should take advantage of the prison correspondence courses and the library.
When I had finished the eighth grade back in Mason, Michigan, that was the last time I’d thought of studying anything that didn’t have some hustle purpose. And the streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school; I didn’t know a verb from a house. My sister Hilda had written a suggestion that, if possible in prison, I should study English and penmanship; she had barely been able to read a couple of picture postcards I had sent her when I was selling reefers on the road.
So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did begin a correspondence course in English. When the mimeographed listings of available books passed from cell to cell, I would put my number next to titles that appealed to me which weren’t already taken.
Through the correspondence exercises and lessons, some of the mechanics of grammar gradually began to come back to me.
After about a year, I guess, I could write a decent and legible letter. About then, too, influenced by having heard Bimbi often explain word derivations, I quietly started another correspondence course—in Latin.
Under Bimbi’s tutelage, too, I had gotten myself some little cellblock swindles going. For packs of cigarettes, I beat just about anyone at dominoes. I always had several cartons of cigarettes in my cell; they were, in prison, nearly as
valuable a medium of exchange as money. I booked cigarette and money bets on fights and ball games. I’ll never forget the prison sensation created that day in April, 1947, when Jackie Robinson was brought up to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Jackie Robinson had, then, his most fanatic fan in me. When he played, my ear was glued to the radio, and no game ended without my refiguring his average up through his last turn at bat.
—
One day in 1948, after I had been transferred to Concord Prison, my brother Philbert, who was forever joining something, wrote me this time that he had discovered the “natural religion for the black man.” He belonged now, he said, to something called “the Nation of Islam.” He said I should “pray to Allah for deliverance.” I wrote Philbert a letter which, although in improved English, was worse than my earlier reply to his news that I was being prayed for by his “holiness” church.
When a letter from Reginald arrived, I never dreamed of associating the two letters, although I knew that Reginald had been spending a lot of time with Wilfred, Hilda, and Philbert in Detroit. Reginald’s letter was newsy, and also it contained this instruction: “Malcolm, don’t eat any more pork, and don’t smoke any more cigarettes. I’ll show you how to get out of prison.”
My automatic response was to think he had come upon some way I could work a hype on the penal authorities. I went to sleep—and woke up—trying to figure what kind of a hype it could be. Something psychological, such as my act with the New York draft board? Could I, after going without pork and smoking no cigarettes for a while, claim some physical trouble that could bring about my release?
“Get out of prison.” The words hung in the air around me, I wanted out so badly.
I wanted, in the worst way, to consult with Bimbi about it. But something big, instinct said, you spilled to nobody.
Quitting cigarettes wasn’t going to be too difficult. I had been conditioned by days in solitary without cigarettes. Whatever this chance was, I wasn’t going to fluff it. After I read that letter, I finished the pack I then had open. I haven’t smoked another cigarette to this day, since 1948.