Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [142]
Though Benjamin 2X had begun serving as a ministry assistant in 1958, it was not until the early 1960s that Malcolm came to rely on him for a wide variety of duties. Although Henry X remained Mosque No. 7’s official chief assistant minister, everyone knew that Benjamin was the closest to Malcolm. The spiritual bond between the two was second only to that between Malcolm and Louis X. In 1961-62, Benjamin’s role within the mosque significantly changed, and consequently so did his relationship with Malcolm. The FBI noted that Benjamin was increasingly given additional assignments. For example, from September 1961 until August 1962, he attended meetings to establish an NOI mosque in Bridgeport, Connecticut. During May and June 1962, he was one of several featured speakers at Philadelphia’s Mosque No. 12, and in mid-July of that year was named the mosque’s “main speaker.” He also increasingly accompanied Malcolm on out-of-town engagements.
His greatest value, so far as Malcolm was concerned, lay in the humble attitude he brought to his position. By all accounts, his disposition was pastoral and spiritual; he sought the meaning of his faith through the good works he did. Over the years, he enjoyed meals and other forms of fellowship in Malcolm’s home hundreds of times. He knew, and lovingly admired, his senior minister, making him the pastoral counterbalance to James 67X, the men representing two distinctive aspects of Malcolm’s personality. Yet unlike James, who was the only man who would vigorously argue with Malcolm to his face, there was always a distance, an absence of intimacy, between Benjamin and Malcolm. “He used to send me out of town, and I’d come back and go to his house maybe at one in the morning and we’d talk,” Benjamin recalled. “But we didn’t get close. Not in the buddy sense. He was always in command.ʺ
After his Sunday sermons at Mosque No. 7, Malcolm usually invited his assistants back home for dinner. The young ministers thought of such occasions as tutorials. Increasingly, however, they witnessed tense confrontations between Betty and Malcolm. Betty’s anger and anxiety became so overwhelming that by early 1963 she had fled again, to Detroit. When Malcolm arrived back home one evening after being away, he discovered his spouse and children were gone. This time he didn’t go looking. After a few days, Betty grew terribly worried; perhaps she finally had pushed her husband too far. Eventually Malcolm learned where she was, and he contacted her: “I don’t have a job where I can leave at a certain time. . . . You knew that when you married me. If you leave again, I’m not coming after you.” Sometimes, when the couple was experiencing difficulties, he dispatched Betty and the children to stay at the Boston home of Louis Farrakhan and his wife. “Because he knew I loved him,” Farrakhan explained, “and he knew that I would defend him. . . . It was a good place for Betty to be.”
By the early fall of 1962, Malcolm had decided that he would not seek an open confrontation with his critics inside the Nation. He greatly reduced the number of interviews and television appearances he accepted, to dispel the impression that he saw himself as Muhammad’s successor. Nevertheless, he still did some radio and television. On the night of September 30, when thousands of federal troops were occupying the University of Mississippi to ensure the enrollment of James Meredith, he was on the Barry Gray radio show, denouncing racial intermarriage. As for Meredith, Malcolm curtly commented, “One little black man going to a school in Mississippi in no way compensates for the fact that a million black people don’t even get to the grade school level in Mississippi.” At every opportunity he made plain his boundless belief in Elijah Muhammad’s perfection. At a Mosque No. 7 meeting on October 19, he drew attention to a negative newspaper article about the Messenger. No one, he preached, must be permitted “to defame the name of Elijah Muhammad,” adding that if he saw the reporter of the article on the street he would punch