Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [24]
Welfare officials determined that Wilfred, twenty, and Hilda, eighteen, were old enough to be responsible for the household. That summer, however, a state worker decided that the Gohannas could no longer provide for the now fourteen-year-old Malcolm and recommended that he be reassigned to the Ingham County Juvenile Home in Mason, ten miles south of Lansing. The town was virtually all white, as was the school to which Malcolm would be forced to transfer. During his time with the Gohannas, Malcolm had often spent weekends at home with his family, but the reassignment severely limited such access.
At first, he adjusted easily to Mason’s junior high school—he was elected class president during his second semester, and finished academically near the top of his class. The handsome black boy began to develop crushes on several white female classmates. Tall and painfully thin, he was noticeably unathletic; his two attempts at boxing were comic disasters, and he was a poor performer in basketball. Yet his charm and verbal and intellectual skills won him admirers. He was a natural leader, and others enjoyed being around him. White teens nicknamed him “Harpy,” because he kept “harping” on pet themes or talking loudly and rapidly over others. Within Lansing’s black community, however, he received a different nickname—“Red,” due to the color of his hair.
With Malcolm separated from the family, and Wilfred and Hilda struggling to support the rest of their siblings after their motherʹs institutionalization, help arrived from Boston in late 1939 or early 1940 in the form of Ella Little, their oldest half sister. One of Earl’s children from his first marriage, Ella had moved north from Georgia with other family members in the 1930s. Though she had never met—or at least had never been much involved with—Earl’s second family, when news reached her of their troubles in Lansing, she set out to take an active role in the children’s supervision. To the fifteen-year-old Malcolm, she was an assertive, no-nonsense woman. During Ella’s visit, the Little children accompanied her to Kalamazoo to call on their mother. Malcolm was particularly affected by the physical differences between the two women; Ella’s jet-black skin and robust physique provided a striking contrast to Louise’s much lighter complexion. Several days later, just prior to her return home, Ella urged Malcolm to write to her regularly. Perhaps, she ventured, he might even spend part of the summer with her in Boston. “I jumped at the chance,” Malcolm recalled.
When Malcolm made the trip in the summer of 1940, he was overwhelmed by the city’s sights. Ella was only twenty-six, but seemed worldly and independent. She lived with her second husband in a comfortable single-family home on Waumbeck Street in the racially mixed Hill district of Boston. Her younger brother, Earl, Jr., and her shy younger sister, Mary, resided there as well. On the weekends, thousands of blacks congregated in Boston’s busy streets—shopping, going to restaurants or movies. For the first time in his life, Malcolm saw black-white couples walking together easily, without obvious fear. He was fascinated by the sounds and rhythms of jazz, which poured forth from clubs like Wally’s Paradise and the Savoy Café, along Massachusetts Avenue between Columbus and Huntington avenues. It was a thrilling world, a lively, urban environment, and its magic took hold of his imagination in a lasting way.
When he returned home that fall, he made some efforts to readjust to small-town life. Despite his physical awkwardness, he tried out for, and made, Mason’s football team. Over two decades later a local newspaper published a photograph of Mason’s 1940 squad, which included Malcolm; the paper claimed that he “showed a preference for tackling ball-carriers . . . instead