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By Root 1705 0

abyss of poverty. Earl held a one-thousand-dollar life insurance policy, which was now paid to Louise, but she was not allowed to keep the money for long. The news of her husband’s death brought a host of irate petitioners to the probate court, demanding payment for past services. Local physician U. S. Bagley, for one, came asking for ninety-nine dollars, claiming he had assisted at the births of Louise and Earl’s youngest children, Yvonne and Wesley, in addition to his household visits to treat Philbert for pneumonia. Dentist bills, rental fees, roof repairs—all of these added up; even the funeral company was still owed close to four hundred dollars, including burial expenses in Georgia. Almost none of the petitioners received anything, because the estate was worth only a thousand dollars—the equivalent of about $15,000 in 2010. Louise had petitioned the court for a “widow’s allowance,” requesting eighteen dollars per month “for the maintenance of myself and the family.” Nearly $750 from the insurance payment went to cover the widow’s allowance. After paying the court fees and the probate administrator, the policy payout was almost exhausted.

At first, Louise fought desperately to maintain stability. “My mother had a lot of pride,” Yvonne Little Woodward, Malcolm’s younger sister, would recall. “She crocheted gloves for people. . . . She rented out garden space, she sharecropped with the man that would come and rent garden space. We had a dump behind our house—she rented that out.” Hilda, almost ten years old, became the surrogate mother, taking care of her younger siblings while finding occasional employment as a babysitter. Wilfred used his fatherʹs rifle to hunt game for the family’s suppers. The only children who apparently failed to rally were Philbert and Malcolm, who took no part in the household obligations. After school, at Lansing’s Pleasant Grove Elementary, the two boys would hang out with local whites “to create mischief,” as Philbert later admitted. On one such occasion, they deliberately moved the outhouse of a neighbor who routinely “used to give them a bad time,” one of Malcolm’s childhood friends, Cyril McGuine, recalled. “When he came out to chase them, all of a sudden he just dropped out of sight with a scream and fell into the hole that they had prepared.”

Even at seven, Malcolm had a knack for avoiding hard work. Yvonne recalled her mother sending a group of the children out to work in the garden. Almost immediately, “Malcolm would start talking, and we would start working. . . . I can remember Malcolm lying under a tree with a straw in his mouth. [He] was telling these stories, but we were so happy to be around him that we worked.” Wilfred noticed that his younger brother already possessed an unusual self-confidence. “When a group [of children] would start playing, [Malcolm] would end up being the one that was leading.” When the local white children played in the woods behind the Littles’ property, “Malcolm would say, ‘Let’s go play Robin Hood.’ Well, we’d go back there, and Robin Hood was Malcolm. And these white kids would go along with it—a Black Robin Hood!”

Already difficult, things grew more frustrating when Louise was forced to contend with Michigan’s bedeviling welfare bureaucracy. The state had passed its first comprehensive pension law in 1913, providing financial support for poor children whose mothers were judged suitable guardians. This established a statewide standard of three dollars per week per child, but in reality—the result of a 1931 state law that separated “poor relief” from the administration of “mothers’ pensions”—the average weekly payment was no more than $1.75. In some cases, women who headed households with six or more children received payments covering only three. Recipients had few rights. Unlike those on poor relief, who were required to live in a particular county for a full year before they could become eligible, mothers could move throughout the state without surrendering benefits. However, because the pensions were administered by counties, local administrators