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 topmost 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.
CHAPTER 3
“HOMEBOY”
I looked like Li’l Abner. Mason, Michigan, was written all over me. My kinky, reddish hair was cut hick style, and I didn’t even use grease in it. My green suit’s coat sleeves stopped above my wrists, the pants legs showed three inches of socks. Just a shade lighter green than the suit was my narrow-collared, three-quarter length Lansing department store topcoat. My appearance was too much for even Ella. But she told me later she had seen countrified members of the Little family come up from Georgia in even worse shape than I was.
Ella had fixed up a nice little upstairs room for me. And she was truly a Georgia Negro woman when she got into the kitchen with her pots and pans. She was the kind of cook who would heap up your plate with such as ham hock, greens, black-eyed peas, fried fish, cabbage, sweet potatoes, grits and gravy, and cornbread. And the more you put away the better she felt. I worked out at Ella’s kitchen table like there was no tomorrow.
Ella still seemed to be as big, black, outspoken and impressive a woman as she had been in Mason and Lansing. Only about two weeks before I arrived, she had split up with her second husband—the soldier, Frank, whom I had met there the previous summer; but she was taking it right in s
tride. I could see, though I didn’t say, how any average man would find it almost impossible to live for very long with a woman whose every instinct was to run everything and everybody she had anything to do with—including me. About my second day there in Roxbury, Ella told me that she didn’t want me to start hunting for a job right away, like most newcomer Negroes did. She said that she had told all those she’d brought North to take their time, to walk around, to travel the buses and the subway, and get the feel of Boston, before they tied themselves down working somewhere, because they would never again have the time to really see and get to know anything about the city they were living in. Ella said she’d help me find a job when it was time for me to go to work.
So I went gawking around the neighborhood—the Waumbeck and Humboldt Avenue Hill section of Roxbury, which is something like Harlem’s Sugar Hill, where I’d later live. I saw those Roxbury Negroes acting and living differently from any black people I’d ever dreamed of in my life. This was the snooty-black neighborhood; they called themselves the “Four Hundred,” and looked down their noses at the Negroes of the black ghetto, or so-called “town” section where Mary, my other half-sister, lived.
What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes, living well, working in big jobs and positions. Their quiet homes sat back in their mowed yards. These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified, on their way to work, to shop, to visit, to church. I know now, of course, that what I was really seeing was only a big-city version of those “successful” Negro bootblacks and janitors back in Lansing. The only difference was that the ones in Boston had been brainwashed even more thoroughly. They prided themselves on being incomparably more “cultured,” “cultivated,” “dignified,” and better off than their black brethren down in the ghetto, which was no further away than you could throw a rock. Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them “better,” these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.
Any black family that had been around Boston long enough to own the home they lived in was considered among the Hill elite. It didn’t make any difference that they had to rent out rooms to make ends meet. Then the native-born New Engenders among them looked down upon recently migrated Southern home-owners who lived next door, like Ella. And a big percentage of the Hill dwellers were in Ella’s category—Southern strivers and scramblers, and West Indian Negroes, whom both the New Englanders and the Southerners called “Black Jews.” Usually it was the Southerners and the West Indians who not only managed to own the places where they lived, but also at least one other house which they rented as income property. The snooty New Englanders usually owned less than they.
In those days on the Hill, any who could claim “professional” status—teachers, preachers, practical nurses—also considered themselves superior. Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.
I’d guess that eight out of ten of the Hill Negroes of Roxbury, despite the impressive-sounding job titles they affected, actually worked as menials and servants. “He’s in banking,” or “He’s in securities.” It sounded as though they were discussing a Rockefeller or a Mellon—and not some gray-headed, dignity-posturing bank janitor, or bond-house messenger. “I’m with an old family” was the euphemism used to dignify the professions of white folks’ cooks and maids who talked so affectedly among their own kind in Roxbury that you couldn’t even understand them. I don’t know how many forty- and fifty-year-old errand boys went down the Hill dressed like ambassadors in black suits and white collars, to downtown jobs “in government,” “in finance,” or “in law.” It has never ceased to amaze me how so many Negroes, then and now, could stand the indignity of that kind of self-delusion.
Soon I ranged out of Roxbury and began to explore Boston proper. Historic buildings everywhere I turned, and plaques and markers and statues for famous events and men. One statue in the Boston Commons astonished me: a Negro named Crispus Attucks, who had been the first man to fall in the Boston Massacre. I had never known anything like that.
I roamed everywhere. In one direction, I walked as far as Boston University. Another day, I took my first subway ride. When most of the people got off, I followed. It was Cambridge, and I circled all around in the Harvard University campus. Somewhere, I had already heard of Harvaid—though I didn’t know much more about it. Nobody that day could have told me I would give an address before the Harvard Law School Forum some twenty years later.
I also did a lot of exploring downtown. Why a city would have two big railroad stations—North Station and South Station—I couldn’t understand. At both of the stations, I stood around and watched people arrive and leave. And I did the same thing at the bus station where Ella had met me. My wanderings even led me down along the piers and docks where I read plaques telling about the old sailing ships that used to put into port there.
In a letter to Wilfred, Hilda, Philbert, and Reginald back in Lansing, I told them about all this, and about the winding, narrow, cobblestoned streets, and the houses that jammed up against each other. Downtown Boston, I wrote them, had the biggest stores I’d ever seen, and white people’s restaurants and hotels. I made up my mind that I was going to see every movie that came to the fine, air-conditioned theaters.
On Massachusetts Avenue, next door to one of them, the Loew’s State Theater, was the huge, exciting Roseland State Ballroom. Big posters out in front advertised the nationally famous bands, white and Negro, that had played there. “COMING NEXT WEEK,” when I went by that first time, was Glenn Miller. I remember thinking how nearly the whole evening’s music at Mason High School dances had been Glenn Miller’s records. What wouldn’t that crowd have given, I wondered, to be standing where Glenn Miller’s band was actually going to play? I didn’t know how familiar with Roseland I was going to become.
Ella began to grow concerned, because even when I had finally had enough sight-seeing, I didn’t stick around very much on the Hill. She kept dropping hints that I ought to mingle with the “nice young people my age” who were to be seen in the Townsend Drugstore two blocks from her house, and a couple of other places. But even before I came to Boston, I had always felt and acted toward anyone my age as if they were in the “kid” class, like my younger brother Reginald. They had always looked up to me as if I were considerably older. On weekends back in Lansing where I’d go to get away from the white people in Mason, I’d hung around in the Negro part of town with Wilfred’s and Philbert’s set. Though all of them were several years older than me, I was bigger, and I actually looked older than most of them.
I didn’t want to disappoint or upset Ella, but despite her advice, I began going down into the town ghetto section. That world of grocery stores, walk-up flats, cheap restaurants, poolrooms, bars, storefront churches, and pawnshops seemed to hold a natural lure for me.
Not only was this part of Roxbury much more exciting, but I felt more relaxed among Negroes who were being their natural selves and not putting on airs. Even though I did live on the Hill, my instincts were never—and still aren’t—to feel myself better than any other Negro.
I spent the first month in town with my mouth hanging open. The sharp-dressed young “cats” who hung on the corners and in the poolrooms, bars and restaurants, and who obviously didn’t work anywhere, completely entranced me. I couldn’t get over marveling at how their hair was straight and shiny like white men’s hair; Ella told me this was called a “conk.” I had never tasted a sip of liquor, never even smoked a cigarette, and here I saw little black children, ten and twelve years old, shooting craps, playing cards, fighting, getting grown-ups to put a penny or a nickel on their number for them, things like that. And these children threw around swear words I’d never heard before, even, and slang expressions that were just as new to me, such as “stud” and “cat” and “chi
ck” and “cool” and “hip.” Every night as I lay in bed I turned these new words over in my mind. It was shocking to me that in town, especially after dark, you’d occasionally see a white girl and a Negro man strolling arm in arm along the sidewalk, and mixed couples drinking in the neon-lighted bars—not slipping off to some dark corner, as in Lansing. I wrote Wilfred and Philbert about that, too.
I wanted to find a job myself, to surprise Ella. One afternoon, something told me to go inside a poolroom whose window I was looking through. I had looked through that window many times. I wasn’t yearning to play pool; in fact, I had never held a cue stick. But I was drawn by the sight of the cool-looking “cats” standing around inside, bending over the big, green, felt-topped tables, making bets and shooting the bright-colored balls into the holes. As I stared through the window this particular afternoon, something made me decide to venture inside and talk to a dark, stubby, conk-headed fellow who racked up balls for the pool-players, whom I’d heard called “Shorty.” One day he had come outside and seen me standing there and said “Hi, Red,” so that made me figure he was friendly.
As inconspicuously as I could, I slipped inside the door and around the side of the poolroom, avoiding people, and on to the back, where Shorty was filling an aluminum can with the powder that pool players dust on their hands. He looked up at me. Later on, Shorty would enjoy teasing me about how with that first glance he knew my whole story. “Man, that cat still smelled country!” he’d say, laughing. “Cat’s legs was so long and his pants so short his knees showed—an’ his head looked like a briar patch!”
But that afternoon Shorty didn’t let it show in his face how “country” I appeared when I told him I’d appreciate it if he’d tell me how could somebody go about getting a job like his.
“If you mean racking up balls,” said Shorty, “I don’t know of no pool joints around here needing anybody. You mean you just want any slave you can find?” A “slave” meant work, a job.