A chronology of changes

[bloodygranuaile]

Given the recent mass protest events I, like everyone else, decided it was timely to read some things about racism in the United States. Having already read The End of Policing last year and being too much of a snob to want to read any of the 10 books with titles like “How To Not Be Racist” that everyone else is reading (even though some of them are supposed to be quite good), I figured it was therefore time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

To be fair, it was actually long past time for me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, I just habitually don’t read books until well past time for me to do so. I had read a few excerpts back when I was working at Pearson; the bit where he re-learns to read by copying the dictionary in Norfolk Prison Colony is included in some of their American literature anthologies. That segment is both an excellent piece of writing on its own, hence its inclusion in the American lit anthologies, and also the sort of thing directly calculated to appeal to me personally as a huge dork.

Malcolm X was a hell of a talker and Alex Haley was a hell of a writer and between them both, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a hell of a book. It is by turns funny, shocking, moving, incisive, dramatic, and even relatable. That last one is part of how you can tell just how well the book is crafted, since literally nothing about Malcolm X’s life bears any sort of resemblance to mine, unless you count “living in Boston” in its absolute broadest sense.

The most exemplary anecdote here is the one where teenage Malcolm, having made a few friends after a few months in Boston, first conks--i.e., chemically straightens--his hair. The way this story is told is whimsical and a bit self-deprecating, but only in the way that any story told as an adult about one’s teenage fashion adventures tends to be self-deprecating. Though this particular story concerns Black men in Roxbury in the 1940s and involves chemicals I’d never even heard of, the “country kid gets big city makeover” or “young person gets their first [insert significant adult beauty process here]” type story, whether real or fictional, is familiar enough for readers of any background to feel like they get what’s going on, and probably to bring back memories of whatever dumb shit they did in their teens to try to look cool (I have some less than dignified recollections of rinsing poorly toned hair dye out in the basement sink and essentially waterboarding myself in the process). There is no political commentary in this story as it is being told, just an amusingly earnest teen who is very excited about getting to be one of the cool guys now. Or there isn’t until the triumphant moment when baby hipster Malcolm looks into the mirror at his fashionable new hair, at which point author Malcolm recontextualizes the whole anecdote in terms of Black adoption of white beauty standards, theorizing that the conk represents internalized anti-Blackness and “self-degradation” and making the reader (or at least, this reader) feel like an entire dumbass for having been like “Haha, what a cute and structurally familiar story, this is a nice break from all the heavy political stuff” for even a minute, like, what fuckin’ book did I think I was reading? Just an absolute masterclass in setting up expectations and then batting your audience in the face with them.

It’s actually kind of wild how much of the book is funny given that most of its subject matter is extremely grim. The book kicks off with Malcolm’s family being threatened by the Klan while he is still in utero, and the violence in his early life escalates from there, including his house being burned down and his father being murdered and left on the railroad tracks. From a strictly storytelling perspective this is also very well done because setting that context right at the beginning really highlights how self-serving and point-missing all the white defensiveness is later in the book, when he has a speaking career that consists largely of fending off white journalists shitting their pants at the idea that he or anyone else might not like white people very much, although given that this is nonfiction and the choice to tell the story in a linear, chronological fashion is a fairly standard one, it would perhaps be putting it on a bit thick to credit that entirely to the authors. What is creditable to the authors is that they tell it very well; they know when to editorialize and when it’s more effective to just lay out shocking events plainly. 

The parts of the book that take place in Roxbury and Harlem are certainly the most colorful, and not just because the fashion at the time involved loudly pigmented zoot suits. The slang is also to die for if you, like me, have an interest in historical slang, and it is never not funny to see people treat the word “cool” as if it is highly subcultural flash patter in the same register as calling someone “daddy-o.” This is also the part of the book where Malcolm falls into a life of crime, and who doesn’t like reading about people who have fallen into a life of crime? Even when it is not romanticized--and Malcolm X takes great pains to point out that living a life of crime is in fact bad, hazardous to one’s health as well as injurious to one’s morals--if it is told at all well it cannot help but be an exciting read.

After getting busted for running a drug-fueled armed burglary ring in Harvard Square, Malcolm is sent to prison, where we spend time in two different facilities: the ancient Charlestown State, which is now closed, and the Norfolk Prison Colony, now MCI Norfolk. Reading about Norfolk in the 1940s was quite interesting to me because at the time it was basically considered the swanky prison, given that it had flush toilets, and you could go into the library. It was founded as a “reform” prison and I guess this idea had not completely collapsed yet at the time Malcolm X was incarcerated there. This is a sharp contrast to the stories coming out of MCI Norfolk these days, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is raging through the Massachusetts prison system like a wildfire. Prisoners are being denied medical care, PPE, and basic cleanliness, while the Department of Corrections drags its feet on acknowledging the extremely basic fact that you can’t do social distancing in a prison, especially not one with a 134% overcrowding rate. MCI Norfolk also has well-documented issues with water cleanliness, and removed bottled water from the prison commissary somewhere around week three of the pandemic officially hitting the state. So yeah, it’s kind of weird to read about someone having a reasonably edifying time there, quietly working his way through the library and honing his rhetorical skills in the debating society. 

In Norfolk Malcolm is converted to the Nation of Islam, a somewhat fundamentalist, very American sect of Islam that is in large part a cult of personality around a guy who (quite predictably, IMO) later turns out to have been fucking his secretaries. The book does a very good job of explaining why this sect was attractive to the people who joined it, not just ideologically, but in terms of the actual concrete ways in which it helped the people who were involved, from its success rate in rehabbing people off drugs to the self-defense classes it ran (which, predictably, scared the shit out of white people). The accounts of Malcolm X’s career as the Nation’s main spokesperson and “the angriest black man in America” are also extremely funny, in that they really succeed in highlighting how ridiculous the white press’ freakouts over the Nation of Islam were. White people’s concern about Nation of Islam was not wariness over the cult of personality aspect, which would be normal and sensible; instead, we are treated to a parade of highly undignified displays of white defensiveness, to which Malcolm does not concede one inch of cover. It probably wasn’t funny to have to deal with on a regular basis, but it’s pretty entertaining to read.

Following an acrimonious split with the Nation of Islam, Malcolm goes traveling, where he has many wholesome experiences dealing with non-American white people who aren’t terrible that cause him to develop somewhat less bitter, more optimistic views about the possibility of people of different races getting along if we can somehow purge America of its addiction to being racist as shit. While there is a bunch of really good stuff in this part of the book, I still found it a bit of a lull, because I am a terrible person as a reader and don’t go in much for wholesome stuff, and certainly not stuff that’s both wholesome and spiritual. The lull does make a pretty brilliant tonal setup toward the end of the book, all this becoming nicer and more optimistic sort of thing, because as you probably know, at the end he gets brutally murdered.

The epilogue, which runs a full 75 pages and is written in first-person POV by Alex Haley, is riveting. The beginning gives us a behind-the-scenes peek at the stuff we’ve all just read, and a different, outside perspective on Malcolm X, one unmediated by Malcolm’s own editorializing about what other people think of him. The middle recounts the weeks before the murder, as they rushed to get the autobiography finished, knowing that it was likely that one of the attempts on his life could be successful at any time. And the end is a horrifyingly unputdownable account of the assassination itself and its aftermath, including the unanswered questions about who actually carried out the murder, and why.

Fortunately for me, there is a Netflix documentary series that further explores those unanswered questions, so I might actually be motivated to carve out some time for myself to sit down and watch some TV like a normal person for the first time since this pandemic started.