Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [23]
Louise was not yet forty and, despite these hardships, remained an extremely attractive woman. Sometime in 1935 or 1936, she began dating a local African American. Malcolm described the man’s physical appearance as similar to his fatherʹs, noting that Louise would brighten whenever her suitor came by. The man—never identified in Malcolm’s account—was selfemployed and possessed modest resources. His presence in their lives offered a glimpse of promise: only the security of marriage could guarantee that welfare officers would keep out of the Little family’s lives. For a time a proposal seemed likely; then, in late 1937, Louise became pregnant with the man’s child. Once he discovered she was pregnant, Malcolm recalled, he “jilted my mother suddenly.”
It was either just before or during the pregnancy, when Malcolm was eleven or twelve, that welfare workers placed him in the Gohannas’ home. He resisted the move, but Louise could no longer look after the whole household. “We children,” Malcolm reflected, “watched our anchor giving way.” He was unhappy at first, but put on a good face when his transfer to his foster neighbors was made official: the new arrangement eased the financial burden on his mother, and he was close enough to visit frequently. The Gohanna family, out of its religious convictions, was also known for welcoming ex-convicts into their home. Perhaps it was here that the genesis of Malcolm’s later strategy of “fishing” for religious converts among the homeless and former prisoners was born.
As the winter of 1938 turned into spring, the Littles’ slender hopes disintegrated. Physically and psychologically, Louise grew weaker. That summer, she gave birth to her eighth child, Robert. Several weeks later, in the fall, Malcolm was enrolled in West Grove Junior High School in Lansing. By all indications, he performed well academically and easily established friendships with other children, black and white. At home, though, the new baby had pushed Louise beyond her breaking point. Days before Christmas, police officers found her trudging barefoot along a snow-covered road, her new child clutched to her chest. She appeared traumatized and did not know who or where she was. In early January 1939, a physician certified that she was “an insane person and her condition is such as to require care and treatment in an institution.” On January 31, 1939, Louise was received at Kalamazoo State Hospital, accompanied by Sheriff Frank Clone, Deputy Sheriff Ray Pinchet, and Wilfred Little. She would be confined to the state hospital’s grounds for the next twenty-four years.
Michigan’s mental health facilities were primitive by the era’s standards, in some cases no better than old-fashioned asylums where the mentally ill were warehoused. Their wards were frequently overcrowded, and recovery rates remained low. Kalamazoo State Hospital had been established in 1859 as the Michigan Asylum for the Insane, and by the time Louise arrived, it wore its age plainly; throughout the 1930s, its administrators complained of chronic understaffing, which contributed to neglect and improper diagnoses. A 1903 Michigan law on insanity had mandated that asylums “use every proper means to furnish employment to such patients as may be benefited by regular labor suited to their capacity and strength.” Beginning in the 1920s, female patients were routinely assigned to weave rugs and construct mattresses in the asylum’s industrial building. Elsewhere, women patients cooked, ironed and mended clothing, and kept house. Louise was expected to carry out such tasks. Given her diagnosis of severe depression, her treatment at the time seems likely to have included electroconvulsive therapy. Whatever the treatment, it offered her little relief, and she drifted in and out of a dazed state for years.
Malcolm would rarely visit his mother, and seldom spoke of her: he was