Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [60]
He had on a dark suit. I remember. I could see him as plainly as I see anyone I look at. He wasn’t black, and he wasn’t white. He was light-brown-skinned, an Asiatic cast of countenance, and he had oily black hair. I looked right into his face. I didn’t get frightened. I knew I wasn’t dreaming. I couldn’t move, I didn’t speak, and he didn’t. . . . He just sat there. Then, suddenly as he had come, he was gone.
He would come to believe that his vision had been that of “Master W. D. Fard, the Messiah.” Days later, Elijah Muhammad sent a stern reply, chastising his new disciple for his pleas. “If you once believed in the truth, and now you are beginning to doubt the truth, you didn’t believe the truth in the first place,” he charged.
Such a letter of rebuke, combined with the twilight vision of “Master Fard,” convinced Malcolm that Reginald’s censure was not only justified but absolutely necessary. His actions could not be tolerated within the Nation’s small community. Months later, when Reginald visited again, Malcolm noted his physical and mental deterioration, and reasoned that this was evidence of “Allah’s chastisement.” Several years later, Reginald’s complete mental collapse led to his being institutionalized. To Malcolm, struggling to make sense of his brotherʹs fate, there was only one explanation: Reginald had been used by Allah “as a bait, as a minnow, to reach into the ocean of blackness where I was to save me.”
By early 1950, Malcolm had converted several black inmates, including Shorty. The small group began to demand concessions from the prison administrators, on the grounds that they were exercising their rights of religious freedom. They requested that Norfolk’s menu be changed, to accommodate the dietary restrictions of Muslims, and also refused to submit to standard medical inoculations. Norfolk’s officials viewed these requests as disruptive, and in March 1950 Malcolm and Shorty were told that they would be transferred back to Charlestown along with several other Black Muslims. Norfolk’s officials also recorded that Malcolm’s letters provided indisputable evidence of “his dislike for the white race.”
Malcolm rationalized the transfer as best he could. “Norfolk was getting on my nerves in many ways, and I didn’t have as much Solitude as I wished for,” he complained to Philbert. “Here we are in our cells for seventeen of the twenty-four hours in each day . . .” He also recounted a brief visit by their sister. “Ella wants to try to get me out. What should I do? Previously when she had asked me if I wanted out I have said ‘not particularly.’ But Saturday I told her to do whatever she can.”
He began agitating for even greater concessions, impelled by the requirements of his faith. He and other Muslims not only insisted on changes in their food and on the rules governing typhoid inoculations; they asked to be moved into cells that faced east, so that they could pray more easily toward Mecca. When the warden rejected their requests, Malcolm threatened to take their grievances to the Egyptian consul’s U.S. office, at which point the warden backed down. The local media learned about the controversy, and several articles soon appeared, the first to present Malcolm to a public audience. On April 20, 1950, the Boston Herald reported the incident under the headline “Four Convicts Turn Moslems, Get Cells Looking to Mecca.” More colorful and descriptive was the Springfield Union: “Local Criminals, in Prison, Claim Moslem Faith Now: Grow Beards, Won’t Eat Pork, Demand East-Facing Cells to Facilitate