Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [39]
Writing about the day of his scheduled induction at Local Draft Board #59 on June 1, 1943, Malcolm recalled, “I costumed like an actor . . . I frizzled my hair up into a reddish bush of conk.” He addressed one white soldier, sitting at the receptionist desk, as “Crazy-o.” Eventually pulled from the induction line, the zoot-suited hustler was interrogated by a military psychiatrist to determine his fitness to serve. Malcolm rambled incessantly before whispering in the psychiatrist’s ear, “I want to get sent down South. Organize them nigger soldiers, you dig? Steal us some guns, and kill us crackers!” The medic, stunned, uttered, “That will be all,” later marking him as 4-F, unfit for duty. “A 4-F card came to me in the mail,” Malcolm concluded triumphantly, “and I never heard from the Army anymore.”
A subsequent FBI report released in January 1955 gave the official version of Malcolm’s rejection: “The subject was found mentally disqualified for military service for the following reasons: psychopathic personality inadequate, sexual perversion, psychiatric rejection.”
Harlem’s racial grievances—employment discrimination, widespread lack of jobs, the closing of the Savoy, the Stuyvesant Town agreement, and the August 1943 race riot—color all of Malcolm’s actions concerning his military induction. He was pushed in new directions largely by external events. Malcolm’s zoot-suited performance at the induction center was a different version of his Sandwich Red routine on the railroad. Both were examples of buffoonery, designed to achieve, respectively, financial reward and a permanent deferment from military service; both directly repudiated the forward, militant, and assertive model of his father. Though he had objected in principle to going to war, his choice of method for avoiding service was pointedly the opposite of actually embodying that principle.
Malcolm had learned well how to play the role of the clown or buffoon, but this pose was beginning to come up against his slowly forming new political attitude. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.’s leadership during these years had deeply impressed him, reminding him of the more positive heritage of active engagement once practiced by his parents. What made Earl Little and Powell different from Detroit Red, or other tricksters, was their sense of responsibility to others within their community, and to African Americans generally. The trickster or hustler “getting over” was the ultimate opportunist who would use others to achieve his own ends. Malcolm would soon have to choose which model of black masculinity he would claim.
The Autobiography’s narrative suggests that, in 1944–45, Malcolm had ceased seeking legitimate work and had graduated from small-time street hustling into burglary, armed robbery, and prostitution, in order to pay for what was becoming a regular drug habit. The narrative’s key character during this destructive phase is appropriately called “Sammy the Pimp,” later identified as Sammy McKnight. As Malcolm would have it, over a six-to-eightmonth period he pulled a series of robberies and burglaries outside New York City. During one heist, the robbery encountered “some bad luck. A bullet grazed Sammy. We just barely escaped.” Malcolm subsequently described his involvement in the numbers racket: “My job now was to ride a bus across the George Washington Bridge where a fellow was waiting for me to hand him a bag of betting slips. We never spoke. . . . You didn’t ask questions in the rackets.” He also claimed to work as a “steerer” in Times Square, making connections with potential johns and placing them with white and Negro prostitutes working out of Harlem apartments. Through these criminal activities, Detroit Red was witnessing what he viewed as the filth and hypocrisy of the white man.