Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [30]
Of the many women who diverted Malcolm’s attention from Gloria, none enchanted him quite so much as a blonde Armenian named Bea Caragulian. Surprisingly little is known about this ethnic white woman who, with the exception of Betty Shabazz, maintained the longest intimate relationship with Malcolm. Several years his senior, Bea had been a professional dancer at small-time clubs. She was pleasant looking, but not stunning. It is difficult to know her motives for having an open sexual relationship with a black teenager, and Malcolm himself did little to illuminate them; in his Autobiography , he devoted far more attention to the plight of Gloria than to any discussion of Bea, who is referred to as “Sophia.” He placed their initial meeting at the Roseland, culminating in sex mere hours later, but this story, like Bea’s pseudonym, was a fabrication—the two actually met at the far less glamorous Tick Tock Club. Within several weeks, Bea was showering Malcolm with gifts and small amounts of money, while he proudly paraded his blonde conquest at nightclubs throughout black Boston, to the envy of his friends. Their sexual relationship was yet another violated taboo in a society still defined by race and class, but Bea’s obvious desire created, for Malcolm, a sense of masculine authority and power. To the world of hustlers, he had arrived as a serious player.
The liaison infuriated Ella, who was incensed at the thought of her brother dating a white woman. According to Rodnell Collins, she saw Bea as “a thrill[-seeker] for whom young black men like Malcolm are just another wild adventure.” Late one night, Malcolm attempted to sneak Bea up into his second-floor bedroom. Ella heard the couple and, in comic-opera style, pushed a bookcase down the stairs right on top of them. Malcolm was not yet legally an adult, however, and lacked the resources to maintain his own living quarters elsewhere. For the time being he had to stay put.
He next found work as a soda fountain clerk at Roxbury’s Townsend Drugstore, but with the new job came fresh frustrations. Forced to serve his middle-class betters, he was yet again irritated by “those penny-ante squares who came in there putting on their millionaires’ airs, the young ones and the old ones both.” He did not last long; with his ghetto persona enhanced by his very public liaison with Caragulian, the job of lowly soda clerk quickly lost its appeal. With Bea’s financial help, he finally left Ella’s home for Shorty’s apartment. Over four months he drifted through a series of menial jobs: at a South Boston wallpaper company warehouse; washing dishes at a restaurant; then briefly in Boston’s elite hotel, the Parker House, working in the dining room as a waiter.
Although Bea was now his regular girlfriend, Malcolm continued to see other women. In late 1941 through mid-1942, he maintained a lively correspondence with several who lived in either Boston or Michigan, and nurtured intimate relationships with a number of them. In a November 1941 letter to Zolma Holman of Jackson, Michigan, for instance, Malcolm bragged that he had already traveled through twenty-three different states. Apparently writing from a train, he noted that he was heading toward Florida, and that he hoped to travel to California soon. Then there were Roberta Jo of Kalamazoo, Edyth Robertson of Boston, a Charlotte from Jackson, and Catherine Haines, dashing off a one-page letter from her summer resort at Martha’s Vineyard, describing her boredom. These diverse contacts may have reinforced Malcolm’s growing belief that most