Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [45]
Bea’s self-serving actions left a profound impression on Malcolm. “All women, by their nature, are fragile and weak,” he observed. “They are attracted to the male in whom they see strength.” His misogyny had been reinforced during his time as a steerer for Harlem prostitutes. Reflecting on his experiences, Malcolm wrote, “I got my first schooling about the cesspool morals of the white man from the best possible source, from his own women.” Bea’s actions underlined what he perceived as women’s deceptive, opportunistic tendencies. Malcolm rarely examined his own behavior—his broken relationship with Gloria Strother, his physical abuse of Bea Caragulian—let alone his betrayal of his partners.
CHAPTER 3
Becoming “X”
January 1946–August 1952
On March 8, 1946, a Massachusetts state psychiatrist interviewed prisoner number 22843. “He got called every filthy name I could think of,” Malcolm remembered. He described himself as being “physically miserable and as evil-tempered as a snake.” The “Psychometric Report,” written nearly two months later, however, described him as attentive and apparently cooperative. Malcolm blithely informed his interviewer that his parents had been missionaries and his mother a “white Scot” whose marriage to a black man had led to Malcolm’s being taunted by racial abuse throughout his childhood. Other misinformation followed. The psychiatrist, apparently troubled by all he had heard, observed that the prisoner “has fatalistic views, is moody, cynical, and has a sardonic smile which seems to be affected because of his sensitiveness to color.”
His defense lawyer had prevented his speaking on his own behalf during the trials, and Malcolm was convinced that his lengthy sentence was due solely to his involvement with Bea and the other white women. He also dreaded, being not yet twenty-one years old, the challenges of prison life, a dangerous world about which he knew only horror stories. During the weeks he was held in county jails prior to his transfer to the state penitentiary, Malcolm decided he had to exaggerate his criminal experiences, making himself appear tougher and more violent than he really was. He would also present a made-up history of his own family, making it almost impossible for the authorities to know his true background. He already felt outraged by how corrections officers recognized only a convict’s number, rather than his name. In prison, “you never heard your name, only your number,” he would recall years later. “On all of your clothing, every item was your number, stenciled. It grew stenciled on your brain.”
Two months later, another caseworker filed a report on Malcolm. “Subject is a tall light-complexioned negro,” it ran in part, “unmarried, a child of a broken home, who has grown up indifferently into a pattern of life he liked, colorful, cynical, a-moral, fatalistic.” The report indicated that the prison authorities viewed him as the ringleader of the burglary ring. Perhaps Malcolm once again launched into a string of profanities, for the caseworker judged his prognosis as “poor. His present ‘hard’ attitude will no doubt increase in bitterness. . . . Subject may prove an intermediate security risk as he will find it hard to adjust from the accelerated tempo of night spots to the slow pace of institution life at Charlestown [prison].”
Both Malcolm and Shorty Jarvis had been assigned to Charlestown State Prison, at that time the oldest penal facility in continuous use in the world. It had been constructed in 1804–5 on the west banks of the Charlestown peninsula along the Boston Harbor, and its physical conditions were wretched: its mice-infested cells were tiny—seven feet by