Malcolm X_ A Life of Reinvention - Manning Marable [96]
From Betty’s perspective, marriage to Temple No. 7’s minister meant constantly sharing her husband with others, leaving little time for her. She also sensed that she had become the object of vicious gossip. Malcolm had grown too powerful to criticize openly, but Betty was an easy target. Some of the rumors circulating about her were cruel. For example, when she gave birth to a series of daughters, temple gossipmongers suggested that Allah was punishing her for her constant challenges to the male-dominated hierarchy. She would not be able to bear sons, they whispered, until she first learned to control her behavior. The more criticism that came Betty’s way, the more assertive she became. She also began to develop a circle of women friends inside the temple, providing some measure of support. But to critics, her group displayed arrogance and the willingness to divide MGT into feuding factions. “She made sure that you appreciated the distance between you and her,” James 67X tartly observed. “Because of her relationship with Malcolm, you and her were no longer equals.”
In February 1959, Betty was again sent to an NOI training program at Chicago headquarters. It lasted several weeks. Upon her return, Malcolm informed Muhammad, “She said to me that if I didn’t watch out she was going to embarrass me and herself (which under questioning she later said she was going to seek satisfaction elsewhere).” For a Muslim male, cuckoldry was intolerable. For Malcolm, it would not only end his marriage but jeopardize his position as a minister. Perhaps he reasoned that the only way to keep Betty under control, or less sexually desirable to other males, was to keep her perpetually pregnant, so after six months of abstinence, he began having sex with his wife again. Betty’s response was to heap ridicule on her husband. She “told me that I was impotent . . . and even tho [sic] I could father a child I was like an old man (not able to engage in the act long enough to satisfy her).” Complicating matters, the entire temple knew about their disharmony; the other Muslims living in the same duplex as the battling couple kept Captain Joseph well apprised.
Since their bitter break, Joseph’s feelings toward Malcolm had grown increasingly hostile, and he may have seized on Malcolm’s marital distractions to tip the balance of power in the Nation back in his direction. He undoubtedly reported Malcolm’s marital problems to his superior, Supreme Captain Raymond Sharrieff. Through Sharrieff, other members of Muhammad’s family would have learned about their difficulties. In the late fifties, the Chicago headquarters expanded Joseph’s authority to all temples in the northeastern United States, which gave him authority over the deployment of thousands of FOI members. Joseph could now influence the selection of captains across the country. Malcolm’s only means to contest this, and to minimize the stigma over his marital woes, was to throw himself even more single-mindedly into NOI affairs.
On May 14, 1958, as Malcolm was lecturing in Boston, two detectives from the Astoria precinct, Joseph Kiernan and Michael Bonura, came to the front door of his East Elmhurst home. They had been ordered to serve a federal bench warrant issued for a woman named Margaret Dorsey, whose official residence was on East 165th Street in the Bronx but who supposedly lived on the ground floor of the Littles’ duplex. (Malcolm would later claim to BOSS detectives that the police officers had not asked