Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [29]
Though he posed to the outside world as an urban sophisticate, the anxious teen mailed a constant stream of letters to his family, as well as occasional ones to school friends. A lively correspondence continued throughout 1941 and early 1942. One old classmate brought Malcolm up to speed on the latest gossip at Mason High School. Another sketched in Mason’s basketball season, and some former sweethearts also kept in touch. For his part, he had dutifully written home within days of arriving in Boston, but his sloppy handwriting provoked Philbert to urge him to write more clearly in the future. Reginald, the brother to whom he was closest, asked whether he had yet enrolled at a high school—and also detailed his budding relationships with several Lansing girls. Malcolm kept quiet about his decision to give up his formal education.
He was determined to transform his outward appearance to fit into his cool new world. Although not naturally athletic, he patiently learned to dance by watching others at neighborhood house parties and then trying out his techniques on the Roseland’s fabled dance floor. At Shorty’s insistence, he purchased his first colorful “zoot suit” on credit. Shorty administered a cultural rite of passage by “conking” his hair, using a “jellylike, starchy-looking glop” produced from lye, several potatoes, and two eggs. The mixture burned intensely, but the final product, viewed from a mirror, more than satisfied. “I’d seen some pretty conks, but when it’s the first time, on your own head,” Malcolm wrote, “the transformation, after a lifetime of kinks, is staggering.”
Hair styles in the African-American community then, as now, carried a certain weight or meaning, and whether or not to straighten one’s hair—conking it with various chemicals—was a contentious issue. Until he went to prison five years later, Malcolm would continue to conk his hair, though he eventually came to disdain the practice. As an NOI leader, he would routinely recite this episode from his early life as the ultimate act of selfdebasement. Yet the 1940s aesthetic of the conk was far more complicated than the mature Malcolm could admit. Most middle-class black males, as well as many popular jazz artists, rarely tortured their hair in this way, preferring a short, natural style. The conk was the emblem of the hippest, street-savvy black, the choice of hustlers, pimps, professional gamblers, and criminals. It was directly influenced by wavy-haired Latinos, whom blacks sought to emulate.
Similarly, the zoot suit uniform was an act of defiance against white standards of behavior. In the wave of national patriotism following Pearl Harbor and the United States’ going to war, zoot-suiters were widely identified with draft-dodging. For this reason, in 1942 the War Production Board banned their production and sale. In 1943, hundreds of Mexican Americans and blacks wearing the suits were beaten up by uniformed sailors in Los Angeles’s streets, prompting the city council to declare the wearing of a zoot suit a misdemeanor. Similar smaller riots took place in Baltimore, Detroit, San Diego, and New York City. Malcolm’s obsession with jazz, Lindy Hopping, zoot suits, and illegal hustling encompassed the various symbols of the cultural war waged between oppressed urban black youth and the black bourgeoisie.
By the fall of 1941 Malcolm, who was now generally known as “Red,” had gained confidence and skill as a dancer. He had also begun romancing a black Roxbury girl, Gloria Strother. Since she was from a middle-class