Ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm

There, the white people just sat and worshipped with words; but the Boston Negroes, like all other Negroes I had ever seen at church, threw their souls and bodies wholly into worship. Two or three times, I wrote letters to Wilfred intended for everybody back in Lansing. My restlessness with Mason—and for the first time in my life a restlessness with being around white people—began as soon as I got back home and entered eighth grade.

I continued to think constantly about all that I had seen in Boston, and about the way I had felt there. I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time. The white people—classmates, the Swerlins, the people at the restaurant where I worked—noticed the change. 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. 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.

Have you been giving it thought? Ostrowski looked surprised, I remember, and leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands behind his head. We all here like you, you know that. You need to think about something you can be. Everybody admires your carpentry shop work. It just kept treading around in my mind. What made it really begin to disturb me was Mr.

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. 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 ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm strain simply to sit in Mr. And they looked surprised that I did. Nobody, including the teachers, could decide what had come over me. I knew I was being discussed. 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 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. 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. 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.

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. No physical move in my life has been more pivotal or profound in its repercussions. Whatever I have done since then, I have driven myself to become a success at it.

Ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm

Mason, Michigan, was written all over me. 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. 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 stride. 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. The only difference was that the ones in Boston had been brainwashed even more thoroughly. Any black family that had been around Boston long enough to own the home they lived in was considered among the Hill elite. Then the native-born New Engenders among them looked down upon recently migrated Southern home-owners who lived next door, like Ella.

The snooty New Englanders usually owned less than they. 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. 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. 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. 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.

I made up my mind that I was going to see every movie that came to the fine, air-conditioned theaters. Big posters out in front advertised the nationally famous bands, white and Negro, that had played there. They had always looked up to me as if I were considerably older. Though all of them were several years older than me, I was bigger, and I actually looked older than most of them.

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. I spent the first month in town with my mouth hanging open.

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. 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. You mean you just want any slave you can find? He asked what kind of work I had done. He nearly dropped the powder can. Man, gimme some skin! He took us to be about the same age. At first I would have been embarrassed to tell him, later I just never bothered.

Shorty had dropped out of first-year high school in Lansing, lived a while with an uncle and aunt in Detroit, and had spent the last six years living with his cousin in Roxbury. But when I mentioned the names of Lansing people and places, he remembered many, and pretty soon we sounded as if we had been raised in the same block. Well, stick around until I get off.

When I told him where I lived, he said what I already knew—that nobody in town could stand the Hill Negroes. I wished I had studied a horn; but I never had been exposed to one. He said as soon as he hit a number, he would use the winnings to organize his band. I was ashamed to have to admit that I had never played the numbers. Some of them had white whores, he whispered.

My embarrassment at my inexperience showed. I had a few before I left Lansing—them Polack chicks that used to come over the bridge. But before he left, he held out to me the six or seven dollars he had collected that day in nickel and dime tips. But Shorty made me take three more. Before we went out, he opened his saxophone case and showed me the horn.

It was gleaming brass against the green velvet, an alto sax. Some of the cats will turn you up a slave. He had left a message that over at the Roseland State Ballroom, the shoeshine boy was quitting that night, and Shorty had told him to hold the job for me. The ballroom was all lighted when I got there. I told him I wanted to see the shoeshine boy, Freddie.

But downstairs before I went up, I stepped over and snatched a glimpse inside the ballroom. At the far end, under the soft, rose-colored lights, was the bandstand with the Benny Goodman musicians moving around, laughing and talking, arranging their horns and stands. Yeah, I told them I was going to get me one—just to bug them. You darted over and offered a small white hand towel.

Your towels are really your best hustle in here. Cost you a penny apiece to launder—you always get at least a nickel tip. I guess I stood transfixed. But even more exciting to me was the crowd thronging in. Freddie had some early customers ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm I got back upstairs. Between the shoeshine stand and thrusting towels to me just as they approached the wash basin, Freddie seemed to be doing four things at once.

Man, our people carry on! Buy them for a nickel a pair, tell cats they need laces if they do, and charge two bits. During another customer lull, Freddie let me slip back outside again to listen. Peggy Lee was at the mike singing. She had just joined the band and she was from North Dakota and had been singing with a group in Chicago when Mrs.

Benny Goodman discovered her, we had heard some customers say. She finished the song and the crowd burst into applause. She was a big hit. I never had neither. Brush, liquid polish, brush, paste wax, shine rag, lacquer sole dressing…step by step, Freddie showed me what to do. Then, because business was tapering off, he had time to give me a demonstration of how to make the shine rag pop like a firecracker.

He did it in slow motion. I got down and tried it on his shoes. I had the principle of it. He talked to me all the way. You notice some of those cats that came up to me around the end of the dance? Cats will ask you for liquor, some will want reefers. So long, Red. I also learned that white girls always flocked to the Negro dances—some of them whores whose pimps brought them to mix business and pleasure, others who came with their black boy friends, and some who came in alone, for a little freelance lusting among a plentiful ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm of enthusiastic Negro men.

The fact is that very few white bands could have satisfied the Negro dancers. I would really make my shine rag sound like someone had set off Chinese firecrackers. He was in the chair one night, having a friendly argument with the drummer, Sonny Greer, who was standing there, when I tapped the bottom of his shoes to signal that I was finished.

Hodges stepped down, reaching his hand in his pocket to pay me, but then snatched his hand out to gesture, and just forgot me, and walked away. Musicians never have had, anywhere, a greater shoeshine-boy fan than I was. After the white dances, when I helped to clean out the ballroom, we would throw out perhaps a dozen empty liquor bottles. But after the Negro dances, we would have to throw out cartons full of empty fifth bottles—not rotgut, either, but the best brands, and especially Scotch.

The white people danced as though somebody had trained them—left, one, two; right, three, four—the same steps and patterns over and over, as though somebody had wound them up. But those Negroes—nobody in the world could have choreographed the way they did whatever they felt—just grabbing partners, even the white chicks who came to the Negro dances.

And my black brethren today may hate me for saying it, but a lot of black girls nearly got run over by some of those Negro males scrambling to get at those white women; you would have thought God had lowered some of his angels. Times have sure changed, if it happened today, those same black girls would go after those Negro men—and the white women, too.

I could feel the beat in my bones, even though I had never danced. Then a couple of dozen really wild couples would stay on the floor, the girls changing to low white sneakers. The band now would really be blasting, and all the other dancers would form a clapping, shouting circle to watch that wild competition as it began, covering only a quarter or so of the ballroom floor.

The band, the spectators and the dancers, would be making the Roseland Ballroom feel like a big, rocking ship. The spotlight would be turning, pink, yellow, green, and blue, picking up the couples lindy-hopping as if they had gone mad. Sometimes I would be down there standing inside the door jumping up and down in my gray jacket with the whiskbroom in the pocket, and the manager would have to come and shout at me that I had customers upstairs.

But I know they were all mixed together with my first shooting craps, playing cards, and betting my dollar a day on the numbers, as I started hanging out at night with Shorty and his friends. I still was country, I know now, but it all felt so great because I was accepted. Everybody understood that my head had to stay kinky a while longer, to grow long enough for Shorty to conk it for me.

One of these nights, I remarked that I had saved about half enough to get a zoot. A salesman, a young Jew, met me when I came in. Then he said I ought to also buy a hat, and I did—blue, with a feather in the four-inch brim. Then the store gave me another present: a long, thick-linked, gold-plated chain that swung down lower than my coat hem.

I was sold forever on credit. The long coat and swinging chain and the Punjab pants were much more dramatic if you stood that way. One picture, I autographed and airmailed to my brothers and sisters in Lansing, to let them see how well I was doing. Shorty soon decided that my hair was finally long enough to be conked. I took the little list of ingredients he had printed out for me, and went to a grocery store, where I got a can of Red Devil lye, two eggs, and two medium-sized white potatoes.

Then at a drugstore near the ted mcminn autobiography of malcolm, I asked for a large jar of vaseline, a large bar of soap, a large-toothed comb and a fine-toothed comb, one of those rubber hoses with a metal spray-head, a rubber apron and a pair of gloves. A jelly-like, starchy-looking glop resulted from the lye and potatoes, and Shorty broke in the two eggs, stirring real fast—his own conk and dark face bent down close.

The congolene turned pale-yellowish. I cupped my hand against the outside, and snatched it away. But the longer you can stand it, the straighter the hair. Then, from the big vaseline jar, he took a handful and massaged it hard all through my hair and into the scalp. He also thickly vaselined my neck, ears and forehead. But then my head caught fire.

I gritted my teeth and tried to pull the sides of the kitchen table together. The comb felt as if it was raking my skin off. My eyes watered, my nose was running. I was cursing Shorty with every name I could think of when he got the spray going and started soap-lathering my head. He lathered and spray-rinsed, lathered and spray-rinsed, maybe ten or twelve times, each time gradually closing the hot-water faucet, until the rinse was cold, and that helped some.

My knees were trembling. I think we got it all out okay. You get used to it better before long. You took it real good, homeboy. You got a good conk. My scalp still flamed, but not as badly; I could bear it. He draped the towel around my shoulders, over my rubber apron, and began again vaselining my hair. I could feel him combing, straight back, first the big comb, then the fine-tooth one.

Then, he was using a razor, very delicately, on the back of my neck. Then, finally, shaping the sideburns. My first view in the mirror blotted out the hurting. The mirror reflected Shorty behind me. We both were grinning and sweating. How ridiculous I was! It makes you wonder if the Negro has completely lost his sense of identity, lost touch with himself.

I admire any Negro man who has never had himself conked, or who has had the sense to get rid of it—as I finally did. I mean the legal-minimum-wage ghetto-dwelling kind of Negro, as I was when I got my first one. The ironic thing is that I have never heard any woman, white or black, express any admiration for a conk. I met chicks who were fine as May wine, and cats who were hip to all happenings.

And in no time at all, I was talking the slang like a lifelong hipster. I was up in the jostling crowd—and suddenly, unexpectedly, I got the idea. It was as though somebody had clicked on a light. My long-suppressed African instincts broke through, and loose. But here among my own less-inhibited people, I discovered it was simply letting your feet, hands and body spontaneously act out whatever impulses were stirred by the music.

From then on, hardly a party took place without me turning up—inviting myself, if I had to—and lindy-hopping my head off. I made up for lost time now so fast, that soon girls were asking me to dance with them. My shine rag popped with the rhythm of those great bands rocking the ballroom. White customers on the shine stand, especially, would laugh to see my feet suddenly break loose on their own and cut a few steps.

Whites are correct in thinking that black people are natural dancers. Well, I was like a live one—music just wound me up. She was glad, because she had never liked the idea of my working at that no-prestige job. Shorty could dance all right himself but, for his own reasons, he never cared about going to the big dances. He loved just the music-making end of it.

He practiced his saxophone and listened to records. Anyway, Shorty was really serious about nothing except his music, and about working for the day when he could start his own little group to gig around Boston. This time, I studied carefully everything in my size on the racks. And finally I picked out my second zoot. It was a sharkskin gray, with a big, long coat, and pants ballooning out at the knees and then tapering down to cuffs so narrow that I had to take off my shoes to get them on and off.

With the salesman urging me on, I got another shirt, and a hat, and new shoes—the kind that were just coming into hipster style; dark orange colored, with paper-thin soles and knob style toes. It all added up to seventy or eighty dollars. It was such a red-letter day that I even went and got my first barbershop conk. That night, I timed myself to hit Roseland as the thick of the crowd was coming in.

In the thronging lobby, I saw some of the real Roxbury hipsters eyeing my zoot, and some fine women were giving me that look. My replacement was there—a scared, narrow-faced, hungry-looking little brown-skinned fellow just in town from Kansas City. Everything felt right when I went into the ballroom. Once I really got myself warmed and loosened up, I was snatching partners from among the hundreds of unattached, free-lancing girls along the sidelines—almost every one of them could really dance—and I just about went wild!

I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air. I met her at my next job. When I quit shoeshining, Ella was so happy that she went around asking about a job for me—one she would approve. Just two blocks from her house, the Townsend Drug Store was about to replace its soda fountain clerk, a fellow who was leaving to go off to college.

But speaking my mind right then would have made Ella mad. Even the young ones, my age, whom Ella was always talking about. The soda fountain was one of their hang-outs. Yes, there were several runners on the Hill; even dignified Negroes played the numbers. I won sixty dollars, and Shorty and I had a ball with it. I wished I had hit for the daily dollar that I played with my town man, paying him by the week.

Among the many things I admired about Malcolm X was his thirst for knowledge. I knew right there, in prison, that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I always thought I would adhere more closely to Dr. Not that I am advocating violence, but radicalness and action is sometimes needed, as are anger and indignation.

And his enduring message is as relevant today as when he first delivered it. In the searing pages of this classic autobiography, originally published inMalcolm X, the Muslim leader, firebrand, and anti-integrationist, tells the extraordinary story of his life and the growth of the Black Muslim movement to veteran writer and journalist Alex Haley.

In a unique collaboration, Haley worked with Malcolm X for nearly two years, interviewing, listening to, and understanding the most controversial leader of his time. Raised in Lansing, Michigan, Malcolm Little journeyed on a road to fame as astonishing as it was unpredictable. Drifting from childhood poverty to petty crime, Malcolm found himself in jail.

Stone compare the narrative to the Icarus myth. Considering this, the editors of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature assert that, "Malcolm's Autobiography takes pains to interrogate the very models through which his persona achieves gradual self-understanding American writer and literary critic Harold Bloom writes, "When Haley approached Malcolm with the idea, Malcolm gave him a startled look Haley reminded him that the book was supposed to be about Malcolm X, not Muhammad or the Nation of Islam, a comment which angered Malcolm X.

Haley eventually shifted the focus of the interviews toward the life of his subject when he asked Malcolm X about his mother: [20] I said, "Mr. Malcolm, could you tell me something about your mother? And he said, "I remember the kind of dresses she used to wear. They were old and faded and gray. And he said, "I remember how she was always bent over the stove, trying to stretch what little we had.

And he walked that floor until just about daybreak. Wideman suggests that as a writer, Haley was attempting to satisfy "multiple allegiances": to his subject, to his publisher, to his "editor's agenda", and to himself. The man speaks and you listen but you do not take notes, the first compromise and perhaps betrayal. You may attempt through various stylistic conventions and devices to reconstitute for the reader your experience of hearing face to face the man's words.

The sound of the man's narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts—quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech—vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes Haley's voice in the body of the book is a tactic, Wideman writes, producing a text nominally written by Malcolm X but seemingly written by no author.

Thus where material comes from, and what has been done to it are separable and of equal significance in collaborations. Haley "took pains to show how Malcolm dominated their relationship and tried to control the composition of the book", writes Rampersad. He scratched red through 'we kids. Haley, describing work on the manuscript, quoting Malcolm X [45] While Haley ultimately deferred to Malcolm X's specific choice of words when composing the manuscript, [45] Wideman writes, "the nature of writing biography or autobiography I was appalled when they were soon returned, red-inked in many places where he had told of his almost father-and-son relationship with Elijah Muhammad.

Telephoning Malcolm X, I reminded him of his previous decisions, and I stressed that if those chapters contained such telegraphing to readers of what was to lie ahead, then the book would automatically be robbed of some of its building suspense and drama. Malcolm X said, gruffly, 'Whose book is this?