Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [27]
Malcolm must have pondered what his parents would have thought about his new neighborhood. He would later recall that initially he believed Ella’s neighbors were high class and educated, and echoing his father’s distaste for the black bourgeoisie, would observe that “what I was really seeing was only a big-city version of those ‘successful’ Negro bootblacks and janitors back in Lansing.” Looking back, he said he could quickly see the chasms of nationality, ethnicity, and class that subdivided black Bostonians. The older black bourgeois families, whose kinfolk extended back multiple generations in New England, perceived themselves as socially superior to immigrants from the South and the Caribbean; but the newcomers embraced an aggressive entrepreneurial spirit. Malcolm observed with approval that it was the Southerners and the West Indians, more frequently than blacks from the North, who appeared to open up businesses and restaurants. Malcolm was also acutely aware that he was something of a country bumpkin who knew little about the big city: “I had never tasted a sip of liquor, never even smoked a cigarette, and here I saw little black children, ten and twelve years old, shooting craps, playing cards.”
At fifteen, Malcolm was entering an early adulthood with little sense of how to carry himself in the world. He continued to feel connected to the memory of his father, and remembered the evenings they had spent together for Garvey’s great cause, but unlike Earl he had not been given a trade and seemed to lack the constitution for hard work. Living with Ella may have reinforced the importance of politics and racial identity, prized by his parents, but her example also gave him a different set of ideas on how to get on in the world. Over a twenty-year period, Ella was arrested an astonishing twenty-one times, and yet convicted only once. Her criminal behavior and knack for evading responsibility presented him with a vivid message. Unchecked by any moral counterforce, he was set on an unsteady path that would define the next phase of his youth. Years later he would describe this time as a “destructive detour” in an otherwise purpose-driven life.
Without a guide or mentor, Malcolm fashioned his own version of adult behavior whole cloth, learning to present himself as being older, more sober, and more worldly than he really was. He studied carefully the different types of adult males he met. His eye was drawn first to his half brother, Earl Little, Jr. Dark skinned, handsome, and flashy (like his comrade-in-arms, Kenneth Collins), Earl at that time was trying to break into show business, performing as a singer in dance halls and nightclubs under the stage name Jimmy Carlton. Within months of his nephew’s move to the city, however, he contracted tuberculosis and before yearʹs end was dead. Around this time a much longer-lasting male influence also came into Malcolm’s life. One night at a local Boston pool hall, as he remembered it, a “dark, stubby conkedheaded fellow” approached him and introduced himself as “Shorty.” The two teenagers were pleased to discover that they were both from Lansing, and Shorty immediately dubbed his new friend “Homeboy.”
This was Malcolm “Shorty” Jarvis, who would soon become, as Rodnell Collins described it, “Malcolm’s guide and companion in the Boston street life and nightclub scene.” Two years older than his redheaded friend (though Malcolm would put it at ten in the Autobiography), Shorty was already a minor figure in Boston’s black nightlife. An accomplished