Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [47]
When Ella did go to see him, she was not happy with what she found— that he was not reflecting in any serious way on why he had wound up in prison or what its consequences might be for him. She was upset about his continuing contact with Paul Lennon, and was scandalized by his resumption of drug use. After several disappointing visits, Ella decided not to see her brother again. When Malcolm learned about this, he appeared contrite. In a plaintive letter dated September 10, he thanked Ella for mailing photos of family members, and for small amounts of cash. But then he incensed her again by trying to get her to contact Paul Lennon on his behalf. “The person that you said called me is a very good friend of mine,” Malcolm explained. “He’s only worth some fourteen million dollars. If you read the society pages you’d know who he is. He knows where I am now because I’ve written and told him, but I didn’t say what for.” Without mentioning Lennon’s name, he appealed to Ella to be cordial. “He may call and ask you. Whatever answer you give him will have to do with my entire future but I still depend on you.” Apparently Malcolm was convinced that Lennon could use his wealth and political contacts to reduce his prison term. According to Collins, Lennon never contacted Ella. In her words, though, she was “outraged” that her half brother had given her phone number to Lennon and that he had asked her to act as a go-between. Lennon, she thought, was obviously “one of those decadent whites whom he had been hustling.”
In the end Malcolm was forced to confront the challenges of prison life by himself. And it didn’t help matters that his attitude toward prison work detail was noncooperative. During his first seven months at Charlestown, he was assigned to the prison auto shop; then, that October, to work as a laborer in the yard. The month following, he was moved again, this time to sew in the underwear shop. Here he immediately ran into problems, being charged with shirking his duties; for this he was given three days’ detention. His work performance improved somewhat when he was reassigned to the foundry, where he was considered “cooperative, poor in skill, and average to poor in effort.” It was also here that he met a tall, light-complexioned former burglar named John Elton Bembry: the man who would change his life.
Bembry, who was about twenty years older than Malcolm, dazzled the young man with his mind. He was the first black man Malcolm would meet in prison (and possibly outside of prison as well) who seemed knowledgeable about virtually every subject and had the verbal skills to command nearly every conversation. Intellectually, Bembry had an astonishing range of interests, able to address the works of Thoreau at one moment, and then the institutional history of Massachusetts’s Concord prison at another. Malcolm was especially attracted to Bembry’s ability to “put the atheist philosophy in a framework.”
Malcolm’s brain came alive under Bembry’s tutelage. Here, finally, was an older man with both intellectual curiosity and a sense of discipline to impart to his young follower. Both men were assigned to the license plate shop, where after work inmates and even a few guards would cluster around to listen to Bembry’s wide-ranging discourses on any number of topics. For weeks, Bembry carefully noted the wild behavior of his young workmate. Finally, taking Malcolm aside, he challenged him to employ his intellect to improve his situation. Bembry urged him to enroll in correspondence courses and to use the library, Malcolm recalled. Hilda had already offered similar advice, imploring her brother to “study English and penmanship.” Malcolm consented: “So, feeling I had time on my hands, I did.”
It is possible that the details Bembry (“Bimbi” in the Autobiography) related to other convicts about his successful history of thefts found their way into Malcolm’s tales about his own burglary exploits, but above