Boston changed Malcolm X, and Malcolm X changed me
When you’re sitting up in a hospital bed with your own blood on your hands, from an accident of your own doing, all you want to feel is whole. In 2009, with screws in my ankles and a disdain for the person I’d fashioned myself into, I reached for a book.
Malcolm X, who would have turned 90 this week, was the subject of that book. Boston changed his life, and he changed mine.
On October 29th, 1965, nearly 50 years ago, Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X saw the light of day. Decades before, a young Malcolm Little arrived in Boston to be with his oldest half-sister. The time he spent in the city, arriving as a wide-eyed, though hardened, youth, and leaving as a reformed career criminal with a newfound religious fervor, shaped and molded him into a new person.
Malcolm returned the favor done to him by a city to a nation, as his speeches and words have shaped thought and lives in the decades since his assassination.
They shaped me in ways I’ve only recently come to fully understand.
★★★★★
Malcolm Little was born in North Omaha, Nebraska on May 19th, 1925, to parents Louise and Earl Little. He was the fourth of seven children. He lost his black father to white supremacists. He lost his black mother, who fell victim the mental weight of motherhood, in the debilitating wake of losing a husband to beheading by train. He lost his cool, stealing and causing trouble as a young boy. And he lost his siblings, when he was parceled off to a different foster home by the state. Young Malcolm had seen the business end of all this country had to offer to black citizens in his day.
In the face of these odds, he managed to excel, though he never felt comfortable in the process. He made high marks, and was elected class president. Even though he felt like a pink poodle doing it, even though he felt a way black bodies still feel in ivory towers, board rooms, and restaurants with Michelin stars. Still, he spoke well. He didn’t fight. He did everything he could do to be suffered by the white people around him.
The same morally bankrupt place that put his father’s neck on those train tracks would likely describe him as a credit to his race.
And then, in the face of Malcolm’s success, a funny thing happened. As Haley tells it, after telling his white teacher that he hoped to be a lawyer, Malcolm’s teacher told him that a lawyer was no job for a nigger. Carpentry would work fine. I’m sure Malcolm argued. I’m sure he replayed the moment in his head. But the ceiling was set, and even those who were supposed to hold a vested interest in his success would have it no other way.
Malcolm, full of potential, with the same mind that would become the man so many would eventually admire, came to Boston, already blighted by the sting of racism. His half-sister, Ella, who, according to the great Manning Marable, he sees as an “assertive, no-nonsense woman,’’ invited him into her home in the racially diverse Dorchester with her second husband.
Racism blights you, and your friends, too. But it doesn’t tell you what you cannot do in the form of a teacher. Malcolm grows tired of earning meager wages under the ceiling that racism placed on him in middle school. He gets fired from the Roseland State Ballroom on Mass. Ave., and tells his sister he “couldn’t find time to dance and shine shoes, too.’’ He works at a parking lot in Chinatown. A transplant from a few one horse towns in Michigan, and North Omaha before that, he’s dazzled by the lights of Dudley, what he called “downtown Roxbury.’’ He sees thousands of black folk “congregated in Boston’s busy streets,’’ and “black-white couples walking together easily, without obvious fear.’’
In February of 1941, before he gets off his Greyhound from Michigan, Ella decides that a 16-year-old, six-foot Malcolm would attend an all-boys academy. Malcolm walks in, realizes he’s surrounded by all boys, and never returns to a classroom. He goes on the hunt for a job. He and his sister, who had lived in a few places around the city, and even briefly relocated to Everett, get along, though her “idyllic middle-class existence hid an erratic lifestyle supported by petty crime.’’
And when he’s tired of working in ballrooms, or working in lots, or hawking sandwiches on trains while lugging coffee pots, he turns to crime, like his sister, with his friend Shorty. He goes to jail for it, and endures it. He comes out on the other end as the man who impacts you, some decades later.
You believe in your Christian God, and he in Allah. One of them, or maybe both of them in concert, saw to it that Malcolm Little from North Omaha, Nebraska be something more than a lawyer somewhere. They saw to it that he was a grunt worker they called Sandwich Red, and then a criminal they called Detroit Red, and then an inmate they called Satan, and then a firebrand they called X. Not that those things are better things to be, but they’re certainly more.
★★★★★
My Massachusetts license lists a home address in Malden. I’ve always lived at that address when I’ve found myself living here. But Boston is home.
I was born in 1988 to a mother from Albany, Georgia and a father from Port Au Prince, Haiti. He left the house when I was 4, and, until the birth of my younger half-sisters in the mid-aughts, chose quality time with Johnnie Walker over quality time with us more often than not. He lived between Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. If he was sober enough when my mother picked up the phone, I spent weekends with dad.
I have an older sister. My love of music, and my money-sucking sneaker addiction, are holdovers from the days when she was the coolest person in the world next to Michael Jordan. She didn’t lose her spot, Jordan did.
With her, I explored Filene’s Basement in Downtown Crossing, the late Funky Fresh Records in Roxbury, and countless other destinations for DJ Clue mixtapes, when they were actual cassette tapes with yellow covers and Clue’s beeper number on the spine.
My older cousin Candy had me every chance she could, and made sure I saw local museums, the Franklin Park Zoo, the circus, and countless other attractions. And my mother, a singer in the choir at our baptist church in Everett, had a life that revolved around Boston.
Kale and collard greens weren’t showing up on restaurant tables in the financial district in the ‘90s, but they were on our kitchen table on Sundays, and they were in abundance at Lord Jeff’s in Roxbury. Weaves and braids hadn’t made it onto the Kardashians of the day, so white people still thought they were ghetto, which meant the women in my family had to make the trip to Miss Farrow’s on Blue Hill Avenue. And the pastors and choirs my mother wanted to see weren’t performing at the Catholic and Methodist churches nearby, so some Sunday nights were spent in Boston pews.
None of the women charged with my care owned a car. Before the age of 9, I’d probably walked, taxi’d, or biked nearly every piece of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan.
This Boston was the Boston upon which I’d superimpose the one from my days as a menace.
Between my life and Malcolm’s, his cut down, mine in what some would call its prime years, are only passingly similar. We are both black men, endeared to the public (though my “public’’ is smaller than the attention he commanded by degrees of magnitude) only by our use of the written or spoken word. But we were both, at one point or another, wastes of potential. The honorable Elijah Muhammad, by way of Malcolm’s family, was the rope down into the pit of the man once called Detroit Red’s destructive rebelliousness.
And Detroit Red, nearly 50 years later, was the rope down into mine.
★★★★★
In 2005, at the tail end of my junior year of high school, Mr. Garrett Rockwell assigned Haley’s book on X. It wasn’t typically assigned to students in my predominantly white, Catholic high school. Maybe Rockwell saw me struggle to keep my cool while kids raved over Mark Twain and To Kill a Mockingbird. Maybe he saw me sleepwalk through papers on East of Eden. Or maybe he knew it was a damn good book, one about a compelling man who dealt with issues, both personal and societal, that the walls of our high school were totally fine with keeping out. Either way, two things are certain. First, I grabbed a hold of that book and never fully let go. And second, Mr. Rockwell never taught at my school past my junior year. Administration never told students, who loved Rockwell, why.
Malcolm X takes up more space than Superman in the hearts of angry black boys from sea to shining sea. He burns bright in the hearts of those same teenage boys when grown men cage their inner teenage boy. He is tall, focused, sharp, and angry. He is always angry in the eyes of a teenage boy, because anger is how you process the noise racism screams at you. Your mother tells you not to look angry, not to wear your hair like so, or dress like this or that, or to talk how you may. Chances are, she doesn’t hate any of that about you. Within the confines of your home, she is content with, and even tickled at the sight of, her young black boy. She will ask you why you won’t cut your hair, laugh when you tell her what this new word means, and suck her teeth in playful disbelief at the proclamations of her teenage boy. But the outside is no place for that. They kill black boys on the outside.
Still, Malcolm and all his anger existed inside the home, too. He was on the wall. Maybe his book was on the shelf. If your mother was like mine, she pulled you out of school to see his movie. It didn’t matter that you were 4 if your mother was like mine. It mattered that you were black, and Malcolm was great.
Years later, she’d smile when Mr. Rockwell assigned you the book that had sat on your shelf since before you were a twinkle in her eye. You couldn’t mark up the copy from her shelf, like you couldn’t wear your church shoes to go to a dance with the girlfriend who made her roll her eyes, but she was happy all the same.
And 15 years later, Malcolm becomes great to you because you live vicariously through all you have left of him. You cannot be angry outside. You cannot be anything that may look like angry to anyone who is unable to understand you outside. So you cheer on and live through the anger of a dead man you will never meet until God tarries.
And, if you are black in Boston, Malcolm burned in you in the same places anger burned in Malcolm.
I took to Malcolm because when I heard him speak, or read his words, it felt like some clairvoyant had peeked his head into current circumstance, taken stock of his surroundings, looked at the powers that be, and said “no.’’ But his no wasn’t like mine. It was backed up with plainly stated logic. Pulling the knife out of a man doesn’t constitute progress between two parties. Of course it doesn’t. We know it doesn’t. We see it doesn’t on Blue Hill Avenue, and near Dudley. We feel it doesn’t with our faces against the hoods of police cars. But Malcolm peeked down on me, the stocky teenager with the pitch skin and the black hoodie, who wanted to scream sometimes when cops asked him 20 questions walking out of the corner store on Hemenway, and reduced that feeling to a quote.
I didn’t read Malcolm or listen to his speeches for leisure. I didn’t pour through everything I could get my hands on for the hell of it. I armed myself with Malcolm. I distinctly remember feeling stronger, as a teenager, for knowing him and his story. When I walked down the street and didn’t feel like I had to smile at white face to stop them from clutching their purses, that was Malcolm. When I stopped letting outsiders police my self worth, that was Malcolm.
But Malcolm never told me not to do coke off of my dashboard.
★★★★★
By the time drugs had come within inches of consuming my life, I felt a connection to Malcolm I never hoped to. I felt like a waste of potential.
On January 9th, 2009, my 21st birthday, I got an email from the financial aid department at the local university I attended. I owed $37,750.50. The sight of that number is seared into my memory. I graduated from a private Catholic high school with a high GPA, attractive extracurriculars, a ton of community service, and all the recommendations that I could squeeze out of being a pink poodle. Malcolm made me realize I wasn’t unique in that regard, and my mother made me play it to my advantage. I got accepted everywhere I applied, but I chose this place because alumni guaranteed me an experience I would love, and a hefty sum of scholarship money.
The money came, but I hated it there. My grades showed it. But I made sure to keep them just high enough to keep my scholarship money intact. I also made sure to file paperwork well in advance of any deadlines. But someone had made a mistake, misplaced or failed to file my paperwork, and here I was in the hole nearly 40 grand, with two days to either pay or be removed from courses and taken off of email servers.
I was happy for the way out. I was afraid of the prospect of repaying such a hefty sum. And I was happy to drown out the noise with substances. So I continued trends that were already in full swing.
I drank until I threw up and blacked out in strange places. I smoked weed laced with god-only-knows, and let the imaginary bugs crawl up my fingers and into my eye sockets. I dropped acid and cried in a corner as the Blessed Mother melted in the window. And I did coke in all the places Sam I Am came to resolve eating green eggs and ham. I did it til my nose or eyes bled. I did it til I put my head through glass. I did it on the side of the highway before I drove to Hampton Beach and topped out at about 110 mph. And I hid it all. I never did my drugs with real friends. I rarely did them at home. And I didn’t talk about them. You didn’t talk about drugs with me unless you wanted a fight.
It wasn’t that I wanted to die, so much as I hated living as myself.
Looking back, I know I wanted to run away. Smart as I was, I should’ve been smart enough to do just that. It would’ve saved me from damaging my body. It would’ve saved me from damaging relationships beyond repair. In the moment, though, I wouldn’t have told anyone that. I was too busy lying, cheating, and stealing my way through life to slow down for any brief moment of clarity. I’d have told you I was just having fun, or that I had it under control. Or, if you were my mother, I’d have sneered at you, told you nothing, and stormed out of the house on the way to a night about which I’d lie the following day.
Drugs became a significant part of my life in 2008. If not for a broken leg, they might still be. But you can’t do coke when the girlfriend from which you’ve been hiding your habit is tending to your every need. With your leg elevated in a cast, when you’re not nodding off from the medicine, there’s not much you can do, actually.
But you can read. And, if you’re in the midst of very purposefully destroying yourself because you feel inadequate and weak in the face of a genuine human error, like you’re a waste of all the time and money and hope people have in you, you can read. And, if you remember looking down at the blood on your T-shirt days prior, looking at Len Bias’ face on it, the same shirt that read that nothing was as tragic as wasted potential, and if you remember just wanting to die in that hospital bed before you woke up in a cast, you can read. You can read what made you feel strong before you felt you had wasted that poential. You read what made you feel like you could beat the world. You read Malcolm X again.
So you read about the man who you used to arm yourself with, and you feel weak. You read about a man rising above humble beginnings, and rising above all of the work he was told niggers could do, and above even the man he once credited with saving his life, and you realize that you don’t share a connection with this man like you thought you did.
Malcolm X, as a child with potential, was wounded because racism had a name, a face. It didn’t care what he could be, but it made sure to tell him what he couldn’t be. You, a man with potential, are laid up in a bed in your childhood home because you felt bad for yourself.
Get it together, and figure out what you’re going to do next.
I did. I stopped going some places. I started reading, and writing, again. Malcolm introduced me to other black voices who made me feel strong, and I read them, too. Baldwin, Hurston, Morrison and Hughes took up time previously spent filling my lungs with smoke. I stopped polluting my body with powders and crystals and cheap lagers. I apologized, I was honest, and I was available.
Malcolm peddled cocaine in the same places I would’ve bought it. He gambled around the same places that now-elderly men used to shoot dice. In fact, the only thing that stopped Malcolm’s stint in Boston from being confined to his menial jobs and “downtown Roxbury’’ was the crime that eventually landed him Charlestown State Prison.
Before he got there, I’m sure his life was similar to the lives of two men, young and old, rehabbing together in shallow water.
After my cast came off, I went to physical therapy and stood in the shallow end of a pool, water up to my waist, and listened to stories from a 70-something man about his life. He grew up in Roxbury.
In August 2010, I left for Rutgers University in New Jersey. I graduated, made friends, fell in love, wrote, worked, and explored nearby New York City and Philadelphia. Rutgers treated me well. New York is a lovely city of which I’ve yet to drink my fill. And Philadelphia has a certain Boston-ness to it that made it immediately endearing. But absence made the heart grow fonder, so I came back.
The spaces I now tend to find myself in have shown me how peculiar space can be.
My adult stories of Boston, Malcolm’s affairs in Boston, and the tales of the man from the YMCA pool overlapped in ways they just shouldn’t. Not because we knew the same people or did the same thing. But a city that prides itself on its liberalism, that’s given the nation some of its most liberal, progressive statesmen, the cradle of our democratic republic, should aspire to more than the muck and mire of its racist history arguably more than any other place in our union.
The overlap in our stories, however, shows Boston has no such aspirations.
Boston’s black neighborhoods are rich with history, talent, characters, and ideas. The lives of the people in them are often kneecapped by the space they occupy.
Living as black in an area as rich with history as Boston, it can be dizzying to know that the city you move and live in, and even love, was built in large part with the money and arm-twisting of people who either actively hated you, or could hardly muster the energry to wish you well. Not you specifically. You never pissed off Louise Day Hicks. You didn’t see Paul Revere ride past the skeleton of a slave left in the open air to warn others. But you are here now. And the city built on these men’s dimes and reputations seems intent to coerce the rest of the world into forgetting it never made much place for you.
How many friends and associates did Malcolm see die, only to have police drag their feet in the aftermath? How many times was he cuffed and searched, thrown against the hood of car and asked his destination on his way to lunch? How protected did he feel, how valued could he have felt by the same city that allows a large swath of itself to lag behind the others in every tangible way. Did he feel integral, or fungible?
In their hearts, were his cohorts, who were born, raised, and hardened in this city, Bostonians? Did they feel any connection, any love to the city they called home?
And, before Malcolm, who could black kids here have looked to for strength?
In more than 70 years, we have transformed the Seaport from a rotting corpse of a neighborhood into a vibrant, moneymaking section of our city. The Jamaica Plain of my childhood is one wholly dissimilar from Jamaica Plain today. One of our city’s greatest public projects, once it stopped crushing people, has been largely successful and welcome.
The city looked at these areas, saw the problems in them, and moved decisively to solve them. They mattered. And, as a result of their importance, the experiences had on the Seaport in 1965 would have little in common with memories made today. The Zakim has supplanted the expressway, and a coffee shop is now a stone’s throw from where I used to purchase codeine.
But no one in Boston has ever lived or died based on their proximity to pour-over coffee. While lives are made and destroyed based on their proximities to spaces the city has all but abandoned, hotels spring up, boutiques open their doors, and development happens in places less than a dozen bus stops away from the areas that need it most.
Boston changed Malcolm X’s life. It changed mine. It seems Boston refuses to change great portions of itself.
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