Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [22]
The year 1934 was especially trying. Michigan’s welfare department was constantly investigating the Little household, and Louise just as constantly faced down its officers, protesting at the “meddling in our lives.” Hunger was the family’s constant companion, and occasionally Malcolm and his siblings became dizzy from malnourishment. By the fall, a subtle psychological shift had taken place; the Garveyite sense of pride and self-sufficiency began to fade. The Littles started to see themselves as victims of the state’s bureaucracy.
Louise desperately continued to seek ways to keep her family afloat. She was careful to maintain a household routine that would nurture order and a sense of family. At the end of the day, they “would all gather around the stove,” said Wilfred, “and my mother would tell us stories. Or we would sing our alphabets, or we would sing our math, and then she taught us French. . . . And then she would tell us stories about our ancestry.” For Louise, the family increasingly became her only enduring source of support. The small network of Garveyites with whom she and her husband had worked had unraveled during the Great Depression. She solicited help from members of a nearby Seventh-Day Adventist Church, but their assistance came with the price of assimilation. With Wilfred, she read through the Adventists’ many pamphlets, modifying the family’s food intake to conform to what the church taught. This included a ban on pork and rabbit, two staples of their diet.
At school, Malcolm’s stigmatization as a child on relief affected him deeply; Michigan’s schools were integrated, and it was difficult enough to be black, much less black and on welfare. Before long he began stealing food from local stores, both as a way of acting out and to satisfy his hunger. It was still far from enough. For days at a time, when the Littles had no food, Malcolm started showing up around suppertime at the home of their neighbors Thornton and Mabel Gohanna. The Gohannas “were nice, older people, and great churchgoers. I had watched them lead the jumping and shouting when my father preached,” Malcolm recalled. Their household always included a number of interesting drifters and the indigent who needed care. The Gohannas were soon lavishing attention on the growing boy. After Malcolm had been caught stealing several times, his petty thievery became a contentious issue for county welfare workers, who approached the Gohanna family to see if they were willing to take him in as a foster child. The Gohannas consented. “My mother threw a fit, though,” Malcolm related.
The fabric of life seemed to be worn increasingly threadbare by daily events, large and small. Yvonne recalled an incident when her mother had managed to scrape enough together to buy some new bedroom furniture. One day soon afterward, a truck pulled up in front of her home, and the driver explained that he had been ordered to return the purchases to the store. “My mother kept saying, ‘I have paid this. I have the receipt,’” but the driver refused to listen. The next day, Louise went downtown to rectify the problem, and the furniture was returned to her. Still, the incident rattled her, as it compounded the stress of poverty by challenging her efforts to keep up appearances in front of her white neighbors. “How many of them saw [the furniture] come back?” Yvonne questioned. “They didn’t know that [it] was paid for. The store apologized, but look what they put my mother through.” In another incident, someone killed the family’s dog. Wilfred explained, “They shot [it] just for the purpose of seeing to it that you don’t have a dog. I guess, just to give you a hard time.” Local whites, with few exceptions, treated Louise and her