Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [33]
His siblings continued writing to him, but his replies became sporadic. Reginald and Hilda both sent letters asking for money, although they knew that Malcolm was hardly making enough money to support himself. Bea’s occasional gifts of cash augmented his meager wages, but went only so far. Several tailoring establishments sent him bills for clothing he had obtained on credit, but he had no intention of paying. One or more creditors turned over their claims to the Boyle Brothers collection agency, which threatened legal action. Before he was fired, Malcolm was even behind in his dues to the Dining Car Employees Union.
In late 1942, he returned to Lansing to show off his new appearance, and had the satisfactory effect of shocking his family. “My conk and whole costume were so wild that I might have been taken as a man from Mars,” he recalled. Attending a neighborhood hop at Lincoln High School, he showed off his dance steps before admiring crowds, a true celebrity. Without a hint of embarrassment, he even signed autographs for admiring teenagers with the bold signature “Harlem Red.”
Malcolm’s autobiography implies that his trip home was brief—Harlem, after all, had become the center of his new life—but he actually stayed in Lansing for at least two months. His evenings were spent pursuing a number of different women. During the day he was scrambling to find money—for himself and his family, which had continued to struggle financially in his absence. For a few weeks he worked at Shaw’s jewelry store, then at nearby Flint’s A/C spark plug company. But his return home was also about receiving family validation and support. Still a teenager, Malcolm depended on the love of his siblings. He didn’t expect them to understand Harlem’s jazz culture or his zoot suit costumes, but he needed them to recognize that he had become successful. He finally returned to Harlem in late February 1943. Once again he was hired by the New Haven Railroad, only to be fired seventeen days later for insubordination.
Malcolm wrote in his autobiography that he’d stopped seriously looking for work after 1942 and had instead devoted himself to increasingly violent crime. He dated his employment at Small’s Paradise from sometime in mid-1942, just after he had turned seventeen, till early 1943. Yet either his memory was faulty or he was at work on his legend, because he was still in Lansing at that time. His job at Small’s actually began in late March 1943 and was terminated less than two months later, when he asked an undercover military detective posing as a Small’s patron “if he wanted a woman”—prompting arrest for solicitation, and another firing.
From 1942 to 1944, he worked sporadically at a much less glamorous site, Jimmy’s Chicken Shack, a late-night Harlem hot spot for black artists and entertainers. Even washing dishes, he was in esteemed company: Charlie Parker had done the same in the thirties when Art Tatum held court at the piano. Clarence Atkins, Malcolm’s close friend at that time, recalled that Malcolm was “flunking for Jimmy . . . doing anything, like washing dishes, mopping floors, or whatever . . . because he could eat, and Jimmy had a place upstairs, over the place where he could sleep.” One of his fellow employees was a black dishwasher, John Elroy Sanford, who had aspirations to be a professional comedian. Both Malcolm and Sanford had red hair, and to distinguish the two Sanford was called “Chicago Red,” referring to his original hometown. Since no one had even heard of Lansing, Malcolm was eager to be known as “Detroit Red.” Years later, Sanford would become famous as the comedian Redd Foxx.
The Detroit Red of the Autobiography is a young black man almost completely uninterested