It was about three or four days later when pork was served for the noon meal.
I wasn’t even thinking about pork when I took my seat at the long table. Sit-grab-gobble-stand-file out; that was the Emily Post in prison eating. When the meat platter was passed to me, I didn’t even know what the meat was; usually, you couldn’t tell, anyway—but it was suddenly as though don’t eat any more pork flashed on a screen before me.
I hesitated, with the platter in mid-air; then I passed it along to the inmate waiting next to me. He began serving himself; abruptly, he stopped. I remember him turning, looking surprised at me.
I said to him, “I don’t eat pork.”
The platter then kept on down the table.
It was the funniest thing, the reaction, and the way that it spread. In prison, where so little breaks the monotonous routine, the smallest thing causes a commotion of talk. It was being mentioned all over the cell block by night that Satan didn’t eat pork.
It made me very proud, in some odd way. One of the universal images of the Negro, in prison and out, was that he couldn’t do without pork. It made me feel good to see that my not eating it had especially startled the white convicts.
Later I would learn, when I had read and studied Islam a good deal, that, unconsciously, my first pre-Islamic submission had been manifested. I had experienced, for the first time, the Muslim teaching, “If you will take one step toward Allah—Allah will take two steps toward you.”
My brothers and sisters in Detroit and Chicago had all become converted to what they were being taught was the “natural religion for the black man” of which Philbert had written to me. They all prayed for me to become converted while I was in prison. But after Philbert reported my vicious reply, they discussed what was the best thing to do. They had decided that Reginald, the latest convert, the one to whom I felt closest, would best know how to approach me, since he knew me so well in the street life.
Independently of all this, my sister Ella had been steadily working to get me transferred to the Norfolk, Massachusetts, Prison Colony, which was an experimental rehabilitation jail. In other prisons, convicts often said that if you had the right money, or connections, you could get transferred to this Colony whose penal policies sounded almost too good to be true. Somehow, Ella’s efforts in my behalf were successful in late 1948, and I was transferred to Norfolk.
The Colony was, comparatively, a heaven, in many respects. It had flushing toilets; there were no bars, only walls—and within the walls, you had far more freedom. There was plenty of fresh air to breathe; it was not in a city.
There were twenty-four “house” units, fifty men living in each unit, if memory serves me correctly. This would mean that the Colony had a total of around 1200 inmates. Each “house” had three floors and, greatest blessing of all, each inmate had his own room.
About fifteen percent of the inmates were Negroes, distributed about five to nine Negroes in each house.
Norfolk Prison Colony represented the most enlightened form of prison that I have ever heard of. In place of the atmosphere of malicious gossip, perversion, grafting, hateful guards, there was more relative “culture,” as “culture” is interpreted in prisons. A high percentage of the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates went in for “intellectual” things, group discussions, debates, and such. Instructors for the educational rehabilitation programs came from Harvard, Boston University, and other educational institutions in the area. The visiting rules, far more lenient than other prisons’, permitted visitors almost every day, and allowed them to stay two hours. You had your choice of sitting alongside your visitor, or facing each other.
Norfolk Prison Colony’s library was one of its outstanding features. A millionaire named Parkhurst had willed his library there; he had probably been interested in the rehabilitation program. History and religions were his special interests. Thousands of his books were on the shelves, and in the back were boxes and crates full, for which there wasn’t space on the shelves. At Norfolk, we could actually go into the library, with permission—walk up and down the shelves, pick books. There were hundreds of old volumes, some of them probably quite rare. I read aimlessly, until I learned to read selectively, with a purpose.
I hadn’t heard from Reginald in a good while after I got to Norfolk Prison Colony. But I had come in there not smoking cigarettes, or eating pork when it was served. That caused a bit of eyebrow-raising. Then a letter from Reginald telling me when he was coming to see me. By the time he came, I was really keyed up to hear the hype he was going to explain.
Reginald knew how my street-hustler mind operated. That’s why his approach was so effective.
He had always dressed well, and now, when he came to visit, was carefully groomed. I was aching with wanting the “no pork and cigarettes” riddle answered. But he talked about the family, what was happening in Detroit, Harlem the last time he was there. I have never pushed anyone to tell me anything before he is ready. The offhand way Reginald talked and acted made me know that something big was coming.
He said, finally, as though it had just happened to come into his mind, “Malcolm, if a man knew every imaginable thing that there is to know, who would he be?”
Back in Harlem, he had often liked to get at something through this kind of indirection. It had often irritated me, because my way had always been direct. I looked at him. “Well, he would have to be some kind of a god—”
Reginald said, “There’s a man who knows everything.”
I asked, “Who is that?”
“God is a man,” Reginald said. “His real name is Allah.”
Allah. That word came back to me from Philbert’s letter; it was my first hint of any connection. But Reginald went on. He said that God had 360 degrees of knowledge. He said that 360 degrees represented “the sum total of knowledge.”
To say I was confused is an understatement. I don’t have to remind you of the background against which I sat hearing my brother Reginald talk like this. I just listened, knowing he was taking his time in putting me onto something. And if somebody is trying to put you onto something, you need to listen.
“The devil has only thirty-three degrees of knowledge—known as Masonry,” Reginald said. I can so specifically remember the exact phrases since, later, I was going to teach them so many times to others. “The devil uses his Masonry to rule other people.”
He told me that this God had come to America, and that he had made himself known to a man named Elijah—“a black man, just like us.” This God had let Elijah know, Reginald said, that the devil’s “time was up.”
I didn’t know what to think. I just listened.
“The devil is also a man,” Reginald said.
“What do you mean?”
With a slight movement of his head, Reginald indicated some white inmates and their visitors talking, as we were, across the room.
“Them,” he said. “The white man is the devil.”
He told me that all whites knew they were devils—“especially Masons.”
I never will forget: my mind was involuntarily flashing across the entire spectrum of white people I had ever known; and for some reason it stopped upon Hymie, the Jew, who had been so good to me.
Reginald, a couple of times, had gone out with me to that Long Island bootlegging operation to buy and bottle up the bootleg liquor for Hymie.
I said, “Without any exception?”
“Without any exception.”
“What about Hymie?”
“What is it if I let you make five hundred dollars to let me make ten thousand?”
After Reginald left, I thought. I thought. Thought.
I couldn’t make of it head, or tail, or middle.
The white people I had known marched before my mind’s eye. From the start of my life. The state white people always in our house after the other whites I didn’t know had killed my father…the white people who kept calling my mother “crazy” to her face and before me and my brothers and sisters, until
she finally was taken off by white people to the Kalamazoo asylum…the white judge and others who had split up the children…the Swerlins, the other whites around Mason…white youngsters I was in school there with, and the teachers—the one who told me in the eighth grade to “be a carpenter” because thinking of being a lawyer was foolish for a Negro….
My head swam with the parading faces of white people. The ones in Boston, in the white-only dances at the Roseland Ballroom where I shined their shoes…at the Parker House where I took their dirty plates back to the kitchen…the railroad crewmen and passengers…Sophia….
The whites in New York City—the cops, the white criminals I’d dealt with…the whites who piled into the Negro speakeasies for a taste of Negro soul…the white women who wanted Negro men…the men I’d steered to the black “specialty sex” they wanted….
The fence back in Boston, and his ex-con representative…Boston cops…Sophia’s husband’s friend, and her husband, whom I’d never seen, but knew so much about…Sophia’s sister…the Jew jeweler who’d helped trap me…the social workers…the Middlesex County Court people…the judge who gave me ten years…the prisoners I’d known, the guards and the officials….
A celebrity among the Norfolk Prison Colony inmates was a rich, older fellow, a paralytic, called John. He had killed his baby, one of those “mercy” killings. He was a proud, big-shot type, always reminding everyone that he was a 33rd-degree Mason, and what powers Masons had—that only Masons ever had been U. S. Presidents, that Masons in distress could secretly signal to judges and other Masons in powerful positions.
I kept thinking about what Reginald had said. I wanted to test it with John. He worked in a soft job in the prison’s school. I went over there.
“John,” I said, “how many degrees in a circle?”
He said, “Three hundred and sixty.”
I drew a square. “How many degrees in that?” He said three hundred and sixty.
I asked him was three hundred and sixty degrees, then, the maximum of degrees in anything?
He said “Yes.”
I said, “Well, why is it that Masons go only to thirty-three degrees?”
He had no satisfactory answer. But for me, the answer was that Masonry, actually, is only thirty-three degrees of the religion of Islam, which is the full projection, forever denied to Masons, although they know it exists.
Reginald, when he came to visit me again in a few days, could gauge from my attitude the effect that his talking had had upon me. He seemed very pleased. Then, very seriously, he talked for two solid hours about “the devil white man” and “the brainwashed black man.”
When Reginald left, he left me rocking with some of the first serious thoughts I had ever had in my life: that the white man was fast losing his power to oppress and exploit the dark world; that the dark world was starting to rise to rule the world again, as it had before; that the white man’s world was on the way down, it was on the way out.
“You don’t even know who you are,” Reginald had said. “You don’t even know, the white devil has hidden it from you, that you are a race of people of ancient civilizations, and riches in gold and kings. You don’t even know your true family name, you wouldn’t recognize your true language if you heard it. You have been cut off by the devil white man from all true knowledge of your own kind. You have been a victim of the evil of the devil white man ever since he murdered and raped and stole you from your native land in the seeds of your forefathers….”
I began to receive at least two letters every day from my brothers and sisters in Detroit. My oldest brother, Wilfred, wrote, and his first wife, Bertha, the mother of his two children (since her death, Wilfred has met and married his present wife, Ruth). Philbert wrote, and my sister Hilda. And Reginald visited, staying in Boston awhile before he went back to Detroit, where he had been the most recent of them to be converted. They were all Muslims, followers of a man they described to me as “The Honorable Elijah Muhammad,” a small, gentle man, whom they sometimes referred to as “The Messenger of Allah.” He was, they said, “a black man, like us.” He had been born in America on a farm in Georgia. He had moved with his family to Detroit, and there had met a Mr. Wallace D. Fard who he claimed was “God in person.” Mr. Wallace D. Fard had given to Elijah Muhammad Allah’s message for the black people who were “the Lost-Found Nation of Islam here in this wilderness of North America.”
All of them urged me to “accept the teachings of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad.” Reginald explained that pork was not eaten by those who worshipped in the religion of Islam, and not smoking cigarettes was a rule of the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad, because they did not take injurious things such as narcotics, tobacco, or liquor into their bodies. Over and over, I read, and heard, “The key to a Muslim is submission, the attunement of one toward Allah.”
And what they termed “the true knowledge of the black man” that was possessed by the followers of The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was given shape for me in their lengthy letters, sometimes containing printed literature.
—
“The true knowledge,” reconstructed much more briefly than I received it, was that history had been “whitened” in the white man’s history books, and that the black man had been “brainwashed for hundreds of years.” Original Man was black, in the continent called Africa where the human race had emerged on the planet Earth.
The black man, original man, built great empires and civilizations and cultures while the white man was still living on all fours in caves. “The devil white man,” down through history, out of his devilish nature, had pillaged, murdered, raped, and exploited every race of man not white.
Human history’s greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.
The devil white man cut these black people off from all knowledge of their own kind, and cut them off from any knowledge of their own language, religion, and past culture, until the black man in America was the earth’s only race of people who had absolutely no knowledge of his true identity.
In one generation, the black slave women in America had been raped by the slavemaster white man until there had begun to emerge a homemade, handmade, brainwashed race that was no longer even of its true color, that no longer even knew its true family names. The slavemaster forced his family name upon this rape-mixed race, which the slavemaster began to call “the Negro.”
This “Negro” was taught of his native Africa that it was peopled by heathen, black savages, swinging like monkeys from trees. This “Negro” accepted this along with every other teaching of the slavemaster that was designed to make him accept and obey and worship the white man.
And where the religion of every other people on earth taught its believers of a God with whom they could identify, a God who at least looked like one of their own kind, the slavemaster injected his Christian religion into this “Negro.” This “Negro” was taught to worship an alien God having the same blond hair, pale skin, and blue eyes as the slavemaster.
This religion taught the “Negro” that black was a curse. It taught him to hate everything black, including himself. It taught him that everything white was good, to be admired, respected, and loved. It brainwashed this “Negro” to think he was superior if his complexion showed more of the white pollution of the slavemaster. This white man’s Christian religion further deceived and brainwashed this “Negro” to always turn the other cheek, and grin, and scrape, and bow, and be humble, and to sing, and to pray, and to take whatever was dished out by the devilish white man; and to look for his pie in the sky, and for his heaven in the hereafter, while right here on earth the slavemaster white man enjoyed his heaven.
Many a time, I have looked back, trying to assess, just for myself, my first reactions to all this. Every instinct of the ghetto jungle streets, every hu
stling fox and criminal wolf instinct in me, which would have scoffed at and rejected anything else, was struck numb. It was as though all of that life merely was back there, without any remaining effect, or influence. I remember how, some time later, reading the Bible in the Norfolk Prison Colony library, I came upon, then I read, over and over, how Paul on the road to Damascus, upon hearing the voice of Christ, was so smitten that he was knocked off his horse, in a daze. I do not now, and I did not then, liken myself to Paul. But I do understand his experience.
I have since learned—helping me to understand what then began to happen within me—that the truth can be quickly received, or received at all, only by the sinner who knows and admits that he is guilty of having sinned much. Stated another way: only guilt admitted accepts truth. The Bible again: the one people whom Jesus could not help were the Pharisees; they didn’t feel they needed any help.
The very enormity of my previous life’s guilt prepared me to accept the truth.
Not for weeks yet would I deal with the direct, personal application to myself, as a black man, of the truth. It still was like a blinding light.
Reginald left Boston and went back to Detroit. I would sit in my room and stare. At the dining-room table, I would hardly eat, only drink the water. I nearly starved. Fellow inmates, concerned, and guards, apprehensive, asked what was wrong with me. It was suggested that I visit the doctor, and I didn’t. The doctor, advised, visited me. I don’t know what his diagnosis was, probably that I was working on some act.
I was going through the hardest thing, also the greatest thing, for any human being to do; to accept that which is already within you, and around you.
I learned later that my brothers and sisters in Detroit put together the money for my sister Hilda to come and visit me. She told me that when The Honorable Elijah Muhammad was in Detroit, he would stay as a guest at my brother Wilfred’s home, which was on McKay Street. Hilda kept urging me to write to Mr. Muhammad. He understood what it was to be in the white man’s prison, she said, because he, himself, had not long before gotten out of the federal prison at Milan, Michigan, where he had served five years for evading the draft.