Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [32]
Next on his itinerary was the grand Apollo Theater on West 125th Street. Built some thirty years before as a whites-only burlesque house, it had become nationally known as an entertainment center featuring black performers. A few blocks east was the celebrated Hotel Theresa. Designed in a neo-Renaissance style, the hotel first opened in 1913. Until the late 1930s it had accepted only white guests, but with new management African Americans began staying there. A host of black celebrities, including Duke Ellington, Sugar Ray Robinson, Josephine Baker, and Lena Horne, made the Hotel Theresa their headquarters in the city. Since New York’s major hotels in midtown refused Negro guests throughout the 1940s and the early 1950s, the Theresa became the center for all black elites—in entertainment, business, civic associations, and politics. When Malcolm first saw the hotel in early 1942, it may have already been known to him for hosting boxer Joe Louis’s celebration with thousands of Negroes after he won the heavyweight championship. By that evening, Malcolm made what would be a fateful decision: “I had left Boston and Roxbury forever.”
In most respects, he had already left. Most nights he spent in transit, either working or sleeping on the train, and when he was in New York he sometimes stayed at the Harlem YMCA on West 135th Street. He took to visiting Small’s on a regular basis, as he did the nearby bar at the Braddock Hotel on West 126th Street, a hangout for the Apollo’s entertainers. Before long, he was living a double life. At work, on the Yankee Clipper, he excelled as Sandwich Red, entertaining white patrons with his harmless clowning. In Harlem, he was simply “Red,” a wild, cocky kid, learning the language of the streets. He began supplementing his income by peddling marijuana, casually at first, then more aggressively. Bea frequently came down from Boston to visit, and Malcolm showed her off at his favorite nightspots. For a boy who on May 19, 1942, had reached only his seventeenth birthday, barely more than a year after settling in the Northeast, his reinvention was remarkable.
For an irresponsible, headstrong young man, trying to compartmentalize these two wildly different personas would prove impossible. Malcolm’s behavior on the Yankee Clipper soon grew erratic and confrontational, aggravated all the more by his frequent pot smoking. He provoked arguments with customers, and especially with servicemen. In October 1942, he was fired, but the shortage of experienced workers on the railroads was so severe that he was hired again on two further occasions, and he used these shortterm jobs to transport and sell marijuana across the country. Malcolm would return from long hauls “with two of the biggest suitcases you ever saw, full of that stuff . . . marijuana pressed into bricks, you know . . . but they would pay him a thousand dollars a trip,” his brother Wilfred claimed. It is highly unlikely that the trafficking was that substantial or lucrative, but the barrier between legal and illegal activity no longer mattered, and Malcolm was more than willing to jeopardize his job to profit from an illegal hustle. His career in drugs was relatively penny ante—literally selling reefers stuffed in his socks or shirt—but it still took him over a line.
Life on the railroads influenced Malcolm in other ways. The sounds of the trains have been woven into the fabric of jazz, blues, and even rhythm and blues. As the writer Albert Murray has observed, railroads have long been a central metaphor in African-American folklore because of the nineteenth-century abolitionists’ Underground Railroad that spirited thousands of enslaved blacks to freedom. Malcolm’s Harlem style helped him meet and learn from the jazz musicians who were his marijuana customers. More important, the experiences on the railroad began Malcolm’s love affair with travel itself, the excitement and adventure of encountering new cities and different people. These trips provided an essential education