Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [287]
I am almost certain that within the next two or three days Malcolm’s widow, Sister Betty, will contact me asking for some advance money from Doubleday or some other would be possible for her, to tide her through the immediate weeks. She hasn’t a home since last week they moved in the middle of the night, just ahead of the next day’s legal eviction to return the home to the Muslims. And Malcolm, talking with me yesterday, said that he had “two or three hundred dollars ” which would be the total extent of Sister Betty’s funds.
A few days later, Haley had another thought. Again writing to Reynolds, he suggested, “Maybe some magazine might wish to pay well enough for a probing interview of Elijah Muhammad. I could accomplish this.” Haley proposed something along the lines of his earlier personal interviews with Malcolm and Martin Luther King, Jr., featured in Playboy. Haley assured Reynolds that he would not be at any personal risk from such an assignment. “I know there would be no danger from the Muhammad faction side of the fence; they would want me to do it. They associate me with major publicity done with dignity, which they desperately want.” Some of Malcolm’s friends might “feel nettled that I was in Chicago with Muhammad,” but they could be handled. Get the contract first, Haley advised; he would then “contact Sister Betty and also a couple of Malcolm’s close lieutenants and tell them that I had the order, which is a professional job.” Another benefit for Haley would be to maintain his line of communications with the Nation’s leadership. “It would give me a chance to say to Muhammad some things I’d like to regarding the book—that he isn’t attacked as he might think, that he actually is praised by Malcolm.” Haley insisted that “some other writers might presently have bigger ‘names’ (Baldwin, Lomax, Lincoln) . . . [but] actually I have the very best inside track to the Muslims’ confidence.” Nothing came of these overtures, and Haley and Reynolds’s fears were fully justified. Within two weeks, in a terribly shortsighted move, Doubleday’s owner, Nelson Doubleday, abruptly canceled the contract.
On the day of the assassination, NOI enforcer Norman Butler was still out on bail for the Benjamin Brown killing. That morning he’d visited a doctor to obtain treatment for leg injuries, which had come from his violent beating by the police during his recent arrest. Butler had spent most of Sunday watching television at home. When he saw the news reports about Malcolm’s murder, he phoned Mosque No. 7 and finally reached Captain Joseph, who strongly advised him to get himself seen by others as soon as possible—to walk to the corner store and “buy a quart of milk,” to speak to several neighbors in his building, and so on. Butler decided not to follow Joseph’s advice; after all, he had not attended the event at the Audubon. He slumped back in his chair and continued watching television. That decision would cost him two decades of his life.
Thomas 15X Johnson, like Butler, had not known that Malcolm “was going to get hit that Sunday.” At the time, he lived in a top-floor apartment across from the Bronx Zoo. A neighbor called up to Johnson and yelled, “Turn your TV on . . . Big Red just got hit!” Since the Benjamin Brown shooting and Johnson’s arrest, Captain Joseph had forbidden Johnson from attending Mosque No. 7 functions. For weeks Joseph had met with him privately, giving him orders. Johnson was not at all surprised by Malcolm’s murder: “I already knew—John Ali made it known.” He found himself pleased that Malcolm was finally dead.
In Detroit, at Nation of Islam Mosque No. 1, Malcolm’s oldest brother, Wilfred X Little, was conducting a service that Sunday afternoon when he received word of the