To Be Made Free

The Autobiography of Malcolm X

By Malcolm X, with the assistance of Alex Haley, foreword by Gary Younge. 2007. London: Penguin Books. ISBN: 978-0-141-03272-6.

No One Is Talking About This

By Patricia Lockwood. 2021. London: Bloomsbury Circus. ISBN: 978-1-5266-2976-0.

Malcolm X’s reputation precedes him. Without having heard directly from or read him, most will have a gut judgment about him — his character, his cause, his tactics. His book probably doesn’t help. We’re told never to judge a book by its cover, but of course we often do. In big red font, the back starts: “They called him the ‘ANGRIEST BLACK MAN IN AMERICA’ . . .”

One could describe Malcolm in many ways, just as he was called many different names. He was born as Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, to a Baptist minister and his Grenadan-immigrant wife. His early life was scarred by racial violence: white people burned down his family’s house in Omaha when he was four (81), leading the family to relocate to East Lansing, Michigan; at six, his father was killed (“Negroes in Lansing have always whispered that he was attacked, and then laid across some tracks for a streetcar to run over him. His body was cut almost in half,” 89); and his mother, eventually, suffered a mental breakdown, leading the state to split him and his siblings up (99–101).

Malcolm went to school in Lansing, where he was top of his class academically and elected class president in the seventh grade (112), but he grew disillusioned with being one of a few Black students in a white, Northern school. It was the paternalism of the white liberal, for Malcolm, that was so frustrating. He describes a conversation with his eighth grade English teacher, where, when asked about a future career, Malcolm said he wanted to be a lawyer. The response:

“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.” (118)

One reason why Malcolm’s views were regarded as so controversial was that he was deeply critical of the Northern liberal. He writes:

The white Southerner, you can say one thing — he is honest. He bares his teeth to the black man; he tells the black man, to his face, that Southern whites never will accept phony “integration.” . . . But the Northern white man, he grins with his teeth, and his mouth has always been full of tricks and lies of “equality” and “integration.” When one day all over America, a black hand touched the white man’s shoulder, and the white man turned, and there stood the Negro saying “Me, too …,” why, that Northern liberal shrank from that black man with as much guilt and dread as any Southern white man. (377)

It’s not hard to see where that perspective comes from: his childhood fleeing the Midwest due to racial violence and his routinely degrading treatment at a Northern school that led him, as he later put it, to “try[ ] so hard, in every way I could, to be white” (112).

After deciding to leave Lansing as a teenager, Malcolm went to Boston, where he worked and took part in a vibrant Black nightlife scene, spending his nights both shoeshining and dancing away in his zoot suits (one was “just wild: sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee and angle-narrowed down to twelve inches at the bottom, and a long coat that pinched my waist and flared out below my knees,” 135). He began drinking and smoking. He met women. And he eventually found his way to Harlem, where he was known as “Detroit Red” (partly a misunderstanding about where he was from and partly in reference to his hair color). By the age of eighteen, he was dealing drugs, gambling, pimping, and eventually engaging in armed robbery. It’s clear that Malcolm always was strong-willed, but he shows his nerves of steel when planning robberies, at one point playing Russian roulette just to prove a point to his collaborators. “‘I’m doing this, showing you I’m not afraid to die,’ I told them. ‘Never cross a man not afraid to die’” (235).

Throughout the Autobiography, Malcolm describes himself as living on borrowed time. Certainly as a hustler that would be expected. The “jungle” of Harlem hustler circles, as he calls it, is a dangerous place. “Deep down,” he reflects, “I actually believed that after living as fully as humanly possible, one should then die violently. I expected then, as I still expect today, to die at any time” (229). His life of crime ended not with death, though, but with spiritual rebirth in a prison cell.

Malcolm spent over half a decade behind bars, where he was initially known as “Satan” for his fervent anti-religiosity. But prison ends up being fundamental to his development, leading him to a completely different life trajectory. It is where he teaches himself to read and write (“the streets had erased everything I’d ever learned in school; I didn’t know a verb from a house,” 247). It is where he discovers philosophy (of Schopenhauer, Kant, and Nietzsche: “they are always arguing about something useless,” 275). It is where he famously begins to debate (“my baptism into public speaking,” 277). And it is where he learns of what he called the “true knowledge” (256) of the Nation of Islam.

The leader of the Nation of Islam, whom Malcolm refers to as Mr. (or The Honorable) Elijah Muhammad, taught that history had been “whitened” to erase the violence committed by Europeans on the rest of the world. He taught that Africans trafficked through the Atlantic slave trade were culturally killed, their languages, religions, and histories erased and flattened into a singular Black race in the Americas (256). His followers talk of “the devil white man” and “the brainwashed black man” (254), and they place blame on Christianity as taught to the Black descendants of slaves and colonized peoples:

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. (257)

The target especially is on hypocritical Christian notions of afterlife: “No heaven was in the sky,” Malcolm attributes to Wallace Fard Muhammad, who was Elijah Muhammad’s teacher, “and no hell was in the ground. Instead, both heaven and hell were conditions in which people lived right here on this planet Earth” (306). For, as Malcolm says repeatedly, “The white man is the devil” (278).

In joining the Nation of Islam, Malcolm Little, Detroit Red, Satan — all would die. He became known as Malcolm X, the X signifying “the true African family name that he never could know” (296). He was a religious zealot, working to expand the Nation of Islam and preaching the teachings of Elijah Muhammad. He argued for “complete separation” between Black and white people in the United States (348), gathering massive (Black-only) crowds to emphasize self-dependence on the part of Black communities (358–61). He was harshly critical of the civil rights protestors, describing the March on Washington in 1963 as a “monumental farce,” “an outing,” “a picnic,” “a status symbol” for liberal whites and bourgeois Black people (387–88).

Eventually, with Malcolm’s rise to national prominence as a leader in the Nation of Islam, there was internal strife. Malcolm lost faith in Elijah Muhammad as an ethical leader, and Elijah Muhammad ordered Malcolm silenced (405–16). Malcolm suggests that Elijah Muhammad even called for Malcolm’s assassination. A distraught and disillusioned Malcolm converts to mainstream Islam (the Nation of Islam is not regarded by most Muslims as a legitimate form of Islam) and goes on the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca.

The final portions of the Autobiography describe Malcolm’s experiences on the Hajj and how it changed his worldview. It is on the Hajj that Malcolm changes his name one last time (to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and recants many of his previously held ideas. He writes in a public letter,

Throughout my travels in the Muslim world, I have met, talked to, and even eaten with people who in America would have been considered ‘white’ - but the ‘white’ attitude was removed from their minds by the religion of Islam. I have never before seen sincere and true brotherhood practiced by all colors together, irrespective of their color. (454)

His political philosophy toward the end of his life is one of Black Nationalism, where Black people were to work within their own communities to develop economic self-sufficiency and where well-meaning whites were to work with other whites on their own racial prejudices (493–95). And though he maintains his harsh criticism of the role of Christianity in anti-Black racism (“what is the greatest single reason for this Christian church’s failure? It is its failure to combat racism. . . . The Christian church sowed racism — blasphemously; now it reaps racism,” 497) and emphasizes a need for all Americans, especially Black Americans, to turn toward Islam (486), he does call for interfaith solidarity in response to racism (493).

*

One way to read Malcolm’s story is as a kind of Augustinian conversion story, one where a depraved man eventually finds solace in religion. I once was lost, one imagines Malcolm writing, but now am found; was blind, but now I see. But for the hymn’s Christian background, its story is structurally similar to Malcolm’s: the redemptive arc of a man who committed grievous crimes (for Malcolm, the life of the hustler, about which he would call himself “the personification of evil,” 264 ; for John Newton, the writer of “Amazing Grace,” the much more condemnable life of a slave trader) but, through the spirit of their god, was reformed and called to a life in service of justice. The Autobiography is a Whig story more than a factual retelling of Malcolm’s life, for it is obvious throughout that he is reflecting from his then-current perspective as a member of the Nation of Islam and later as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.

The Autobiography can also be read as a sociological text, one that is rich with Malcolm’s observations of life in Harlem, Boston, and so on. He is perceptive. His instincts, like Tocqueville’s, are to categorize and rationalize human behavior. But while Tocqueville saw cultural attitudes of equality everywhere, Malcolm saw caste (and its periodic transgression) as the defining characteristic of social organization. Thus Malcolm points to the sexual preferences of white New York elites, the role of hair styling among Black youths (his discussion of conking his hair, 136–39, is fascinating), or the attitudes of school teachers toward him as the lone Black kid in an otherwise white school, just as Tocqueville noticed rules about inheritance, extra-political associational life, and the restiveness of pioneering frontiersmen. One could take a modern social scientific approach to dissecting both books (what is their research question? what is their theoretical framework?) and come away modestly satisfied.

There is a third way of thinking about the Autobiography, though, which I think is both more honest to its author and that places it in conversation with Patricia Lockwood’s new book, No One Is Talking About This. They are both books about love.

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No One Is Talking About This, told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, is a facially about illness. The opening half of the book depicts the frenetic thoughts of a narrator addicted to the “portal” — social media (presumably Twitter). The portal not only shapes her thinking but engulfs her personality: She owns a cat named “Dr. Butthole” (21); orders “the worst thing on the menu on purpose, to be funny” (26); and is famous for a post that reads, “Can a dog be twins?” (13).

Written in short sections often approaching the length of a tweet, No One Is Talking About This in both form and content depicts what it is to be on the internet today. There’s the absurd politics (“Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores,” 4). There’s the drug-like addiction (“When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear,” 59). There’s also the internet’s undeniable, incredible ability to connect people. This book will make very little sense to people who are not on Twitter, but to those who are, the references to the “causcasianblink.gif” (53) or the “incest commercial” (the sister and brother who “consume a mug of hot black FOLGERS”) (73) are eerily, damningly understandable. For such people, there is truly something special about knowing someone who gets your internet references: “They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online” (118).

To be addicted to the internet is not simply to have a grotesquely ironic form of humor. It is also to be occupied with trivial issues. Our narrator’s job, we are told, is to travel the world talking about internet culture, debating “why it was objectively funnier to spell it sneazing” (14). But even more traditionally important political questions — such as debates over economics or policing — are distorted on the internet. A “woke” internet proceeds by conventional wisdoms and assumptions, drawing lines between in- and out-groups, rather than seeking to persuade others: “Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like ‘I’m a retard with butt aids’ was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way” (10). And it breeds a politics that is performative and insular rather than collective and broad-based: when the narrator is distraught, “she would tug her phone off the bedside table, post the words eat the police in the portal, wait for it to get sixty-nine likes, then delete it” (133). Hardly the stuff of political legend.

To read the Lockwood’s book for its politics, though, would miss the central drama of the book. The illness of the narrator’s mind — that addiction to the dark corners of the internet — is juxtaposed with a brutal physical illness revealed around two-thirds of the way through the book. The family discovers that the narrator’s sister will give birth to a baby girl with proteus syndrome (136), a rare disease characterized by the uncontrollable growth of parts of the body. The baby is unlikely to survive for more than a few months. And it is that unenviable reality that pulls our narrator out of her stupor, that grounds her. For when the baby is born, just holding her is a miracle that flushes the mumbo-jumbo out of her mind:

All the worries about what a mind was fell away as soon as the baby was placed in her arms. A mind was merely something trying to make it in the world. The baby, like a soft pink machete, swung and chopped her way through the living leaves. A path was a path was a path was a path. A path was a person and a path was a mind, walk, chop, walk, chop. (143)

The precious child, whose time is counting down, clarifies and purifies our narrator’s life. “It was a marvel how cleanly and completely this lifted her out of the stream of regular life,” the narrator reflects. “She wanted to stop people on the street and say, ‘Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!’” (145).

* * *

As I have portrayed them, there is a simplicity, an elegance, to both Malcolm’s and our narrator’s arcs. It is in finding Allah in prison or in facing the impending death of a baby girl that one gains perspective on the important things in life. There’s a sense of awakening, of finding truth, that animates their progress. Malcolm often describes people, including his former self, as “mentally dead” or brainwashed (324). But by turning to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad, and then later to more orthodox Islam, Malcolm was awakened.

The analogy in No One Is Talking About This is Lockwood’s depiction of the portal’s effect on the mind: it had “once been the place where you sounded like yourself,” but “[g]radually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone” (72). Part of Lockwood’s genius is that fully understanding its esoteric references implies that the reader’s own mind has been eroded to a certain degree. But our narrator is freed from that trap as her life begins to revolve not around silly internet debates about spelling but around a living, breathing, struggling baby. Walk, chop, walk, chop — perhaps not just the baby forging a path through life, but also the narrator through the dense jungle of internet haze.

Nevertheless, the animating principle here isn’t about redemption or perspective. It’s about love. Both Malcolm’s and our narrator’s growth are accompanied by love and vulnerability. Malcolm finds his way to Boston in part inspired by his older sister Ella, whose self-love and confidence (she was “the first really proud black woman I had ever seen in my life”) were “unheard of among Negroes in those days, especially in Lansing” (114). His conversion to the Nation of Islam while imprisoned was only through the continual urging and coaxing of his family, as well as his prolific correspondence with Elijah Muhammad himself. And of course, his final experiences on his Hajj were of profound corporate love:

There were tens of thousands of pilgrims . . . of all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans. But we were all participating in the same ritual, displaying a spirit of unity and brotherhood that my experiences in America had led me to believe never could exist between the white and the non-white. (454)

Equally, in each experience, Malcolm faces precarity: the indignities of living with paternalistic racists as a tween; the cruelty of the prison cell; the loneliness of being in a new context surrounded by people who were unfamiliar and who could not communicate with him. In moments of helplessness, he was shown love. And those moments in turn became pivotal for who he was.

So too with Lockwood’s narrator, who is exposed to and made vulnerable by a kind of unconditional love, described in terms of “[t]he great gift of the baby knowing their voices, contentless entirely except for love—how she turned so wildly to where the pouring and continuous element was, strained her limbs toward the human sunshine, would fight her way through anything to get there” (156). These are the things that move us. These are the things that change us. These are the things that make us free.

* * * * *

Rose: Last week was orientation week for my new program, and I’ve started classes this week. It’s really been nice to meet new people; LSE feels a lot more like Pomona now that I’m routinely seeing people again. There has also been a nice mix of seeing old friends, which has been absolutely wonderful. Also, I went to the British Library last week to see some archival material related to habeas. Here is a picture of a report of the Five Knights’ Case, a landmark case for habeas nerds like myself.

Sir Thomas Darnell's Case (i.e., the Five Knights' Case)!

Also, I’ve found London to be really beautiful recently.

Bud: I think all experiences of meeting a lot of new people segue into a stage of consolidation, where you figure out who you’ll end up being close friends with. I’m eager to figure that out.

Thorn: I spent all of last Saturday basically working on an R prep course, which was very boring. But hopefully it ends up being helpful, and I become fairly proficient at R.

Gratitude: My mom sent me mooncakes to celebrate the lunar festival with. They were delicious, and I am very grateful.