That morning after getting off work, Malcolm rode his bike downtown.
He was aware of the eyes on him, white people watching, their faces hard with suspicion—and also, he realized with a jolt, fear. A police officer riding shotgun in a cruiser eyeballed him hard. Malcolm pretended not to notice and kept on riding.
He rode until he got to an office building on Front Street with a Western Union in the lobby. He chained his bike to a lamppost outside and walked in. Some stubby white man in a straw fedora was ahead of Malcolm in line. He turned, shifting a bitter-smelling cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other as he stared at Malcolm with frank interest and even franker malice. Malcolm stared back. Eventually, the man turned away.
When the white man had finished his business and Malcolm reached the counter, he asked for a telegraph blank and then wrote out a message and handed it to the white woman in the cat’s-eye glasses on the other side.
Writing to apologize. STOP. Behavior was inexcusable. STOP. Understand that now. STOP. Would like to return to school. STOP. Please give me another chance. STOP. Promise you won’t be sorry. STOP.
She glanced up at him and he could see the questions dancing in her eyes, but she didn’t ask. “Who’s this going to?” she said.
Malcolm gave her the name and address of the dean at the white college who had suspended him. He paid for the telegram, went outside, and retrieved his bicycle. He rode past the white man with the smelly cigar, who was making his way very slowly, leaning heavily on a cane. Malcolm felt the burn of the man’s gaze in the center of his back.
He rode south through the wasteland of yesterday’s violence. National Guardsmen stood on street corners smoking cigarettes, chatting together. They glanced up, appraising him as he passed. A personnel carrier went in the opposite direction, its treads rumbling and squeaking. The soldiers all turned their heads.
A few people were out in the riot zone, curious onlookers come to see the destruction for themselves, insurance adjusters with clipboards in hand, men with hammers and plywood nailing up the gaping maws of looted stores, merchants and proprietors scraping push brooms against the sidewalk. Glass glittered in dustpans that were emptied into cardboard boxes because no trashcans were available. Mounds of garbage towered over alleys and side yards.
People watched him as he passed. Without knowing anything about him beyond the color of his skin, their eyes found him guilty of all this. And he was. He always would be, more than they could ever know.
Malcolm fixed his gaze on a point in the middle distance and rode toward it.
Finally, he reached home, hauled the bike up the familiar stairs, and up to the familiar door. He walked in. His father was in the kitchen making breakfast. Pop looked up, but did not speak. Malcolm stood in the doorway separating kitchen from front room and watched. He could not make himself cross the threshold.
Behind him on the television, a white man with a brush cut and black frame glasses was excoriating Martin Luther King for, he said, starting the violence and running away. He called him a hypocrite. He called him a coward. He called him “Martin Loser King.”
Pop said, “You gon’ eat, or you just gon’ stand there?” He was dishing up two plates. Oxtails and eggs.
Malcolm sat down. “Look, Pop…”
“What happened with that old lady?”
“She died.”
Pop had been scraping eggs onto a plate. He stopped and some emotion Malcolm couldn’t quite read filmed his eyes. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. He went back to fixing the plate, passed it over to Malcolm.
Malcolm lifted his fork. “Look, Pop, I want to talk to you about…”
“She wasn’t a bad old lady. I know me and her ain’t never got along, but still…”
Malcolm put his fork down. “Pop, would you listen to me?”
His father regarded him with sober eyes. Finally, he said, “Junior, some things, you got to leave them alone.”
“Pop…”
“What’s that y’all young ones say? ‘Let it all hang out?’ Can’t always do that.”
“But I just wanted to say that I didn’t mean…”
“Don’t,” said his father. Malcolm stopped. The older man looked at him. Then he shook his head. “You think I don’t know what you see when you look at me, June? Tired old man ain’t never been nowhere, ain’t never learned nothin’, ain’t never done nothin’, ain’t never gon’ be nothin’. And you, look at you. You shiny and new like a penny. You the future. I guess the future always look down on the past. I guess that ain’t no big surprise.”
Malcolm felt the tears leaking onto his cheeks. His voice was ashen. “Pop, listen to me…”
Pop plowed right through the barrier of Malcolm’s protests. “But see,” he said, “you might be future and I might be past, but we tied together, you and me. We tied together ’cause we live in this house. We tied together ’cause we blood. I’m your father and you my son. Ain’t nothin’ gon’ never change that fact. So what’s the use, you sayin’ somethin’ to me right now? About yesterday, I mean. That’s done. That’s over. And here we are, still in this house, together, still father and son. That’s why I say, Junior: some things, you can’t do nothin’ about. Some things, you just got to leave them alone. Look past them. Live with them. Do you understand what I’m saying?” His father was watching him closely.
Malcolm nodded. He didn’t trust his voice.
“Good,” said his father. “Now eat.”
Malcolm did not know whether to be grateful or ashamed. He did not know whether he had escaped something or been set free. He picked up his fork and began to eat. His father did the same. They ate together in the darkened kitchen of the little house. They didn’t speak about the awful thing Malcolm had said. They never would.
The letter came five days later.
Malcolm was dozing in his room when his father came in with the mail and shook him awake. “Thought you might want to see this,” he said. And he dropped a large envelope on the bed next to Malcolm. The return address showed that it had come from the dean’s office at the white college.
Malcolm sat up and broke the seal eagerly. He pulled out a course catalog for summer classes. Clipped to that was a neatly typed letter from the dean. It began: “I am in receipt of your telegram asking for readmission. I have given it serious consideration and I have come to this conclusion: if you are willing to buckle down and take your obligations seriously, I am willing to extend you another chance.” It went on to advise him that he would need to take summer courses this year and next to make up for the work he had missed during his suspension. He would also need to agree to work to pay off the cost of cleaning his graffiti off the wall. He was to report back to school next month.
“They lettin’ you back in?”
Malcolm was surprised to realize Pop was standing above him. “Yeah,” Malcolm told him. “I go back next month.”
Pop smiled. “That’s good, Junie. That’s real good. I ain’t even knowed you applied to go back.”
“I guess I didn’t tell you,” said Malcolm. “I met Martin Luther King last week. We talked. He’s the one who told me I should take my ass back to school.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah. It was at the hotel, the night after, well, you know… He was standing out back where I usually take my breaks.”
Pop said, “What’s he like?”
Malcolm considered this. He thought of the sad, exhausted eyes. He thought of the grim determination. “He gave me a lot to think about,” he told his father. Pop looked at him, waiting for Malcolm to say more. Malcolm shrugged, unable to put words to what he was trying to convey. “That’s it,” he said, almost apologetically. “I’ve just been thinking about a lot of things since then, is all.”
Pop regarded him for a long moment. He said, “King coming back to town tonight. He say he got to have another march in Memphis; he got to prove it can be nonviolent. I was goin’ over to hear him. You want to go with me?”
Malcolm didn’t even have to think about it. “Yes,” he said.
They rode the bus over to Mason Temple that evening under a sky mottled with black and gray clouds. When Malcolm and his father got off on E.H. Crump Boulevard, they stepped into the sort of wind that would rip an umbrella inside out, snatch it from you, and fling it down the street. So they didn’t even bother with opening the one they had brought, simply turned up the collars on their coats, adjusted their hats, and staggered doggedly against the pushing and shoving of the air.
Lightning blasted the world white and then came thunder, crashing so hard and so close Malcolm could feel it like a solid thing against his chest. The rain had not come yet, but it would. It was only a matter of time.
A car rushed past. It was full of men his father knew, probably going where he and his father were going. He saw Pop glance over and knew he had seen the same thing. It made the guilt flare up like a toothache that just won’t stop.
“You didn’t have to do this, Pop,” he said. “You could have rode with Sonny.”
Sonny had not explicitly said that Malcolm was not welcome in his car. But his silences and his ice-water stares had spoken more clearly than words ever could. And that was when he came around, which was not so often now as it once had been.
“Yeah,” said Pop. “I could have.”
“He’s your best friend, Pop.”
A bolt of light stabbed the earth and the thunder detonated again, more ferocious than before, so loud that Malcolm almost missed what his father said in response. Almost.
“Yeah, but you my son.”
It was a simple declaration, little more than a statement of fact, but it set emotions colliding in Malcolm’s chest so hard he actually gasped. He felt ashamed of himself. And he felt a sudden, overpowering love. He draped an arm across his father’s shoulder, surprising them both. There was a moment. Then his father did the same.
Staggering together against the wind, father and son walked toward Mason Temple. The rain had just begun—stinging darts that felt like tiny knives against the skin—when the building came in sight.
The room was not full. The weather had kept the crowd down. White men with microphones and TV cameras were arrayed before the pulpit—crews from national television networks. A union leader was addressing the crowd.
Malcolm and his father were still standing just inside the door, shaking the water off, when there came a sudden burst of applause. Malcolm craned his neck to see what had caused it. He saw Ralph Abernathy entering the auditorium by a side door. Malcolm looked for King. He saw his father looking for King, too. But King was not to be seen. Abernathy had come alone. Disappointment and confusion rumbled up from the crowd in an audible murmur.
“King not gon’ be here?” his father asked.
Before Malcolm could even hunch his shoulders to indicate his own bafflement, Sonny was there, holding out a flier for Pop. “Mo? You seen this?” He spared less attention for Malcolm than he would have a chair or a table.
Pop took the flier. Malcolm read it over his shoulder.
MARTIN LUTHER KING has proven himself to be a yellow Uncle Tom. YELLOW instead of BLACK. Now BLACK POWER will have to finish what the YELLOW KING could not.
It went on like that. It promised violence. “Burn, Baby, Burn,” it said.
“These all over town,” said Sonny. “Young niggers and that black power bullshit. They gon’ fuck up everything, Mo. Everything we tryin’ to do.”
He eyes were on Malcolm as he spoke.
Pop, still staring at the flier, missed this. He shook his head slowly. “This town is a mess,” he said. “This whole thing is a mess. King shouldn’t of never come back. I wouldn’t have.”
“They callin’ him coward,” said Sonny. “They sayin’ he run away. What else he gon’ do? Ain’t had no choice. He had to come back.”
“Yeah,” said Pop in a reluctant voice, “I know.”
Sonny said, “He had to prove he could have a march without young fools tearin’ it up.” And again he stared pointedly at Malcolm.
Malcolm stared back. Then he looked away. He said, “Let’s get our seats, Pop.”
From outside came the hiss of rain on stone and above that, the eerie rise and fall of civil defense sirens. Pop looked to the ceiling as they edged their way into an aisle. “Storm warnin’,” he said. “Must be gettin’ bad out there.”
Pop and Malcolm sat together on the unforgiving wooden seats. Sonny sat behind them—close, but not too close. A local preacher was at the podium. Malcolm looked into the pulpit and was surprised. Abernathy had disappeared. He wondered where he’d gone.
“I heard King’s not comin’,” said Sonny.
At that, a man in the row ahead of them turned. “I heard he is,” he said, through a broad smile. “They goin’ to get him now.”
So they waited to see. Storm shutters rattled. They waited. Yet another preacher who was not King spoke. A student from Northside High spoke, promising that he and his classmates would participate in the next march nonviolently. Someone sang. Ralph Abernathy reappeared in the pulpit. They waited.
And then the side door opened and Martin Luther King walked in. The small crowd rose to its feet, all as one in their adoration, palms banging together in an ovation that rose and rose in volume. King grinned and waved at them before mounting the pulpit to shake hands with the various ministers and dignitaries.
Everything was all right now, in spite of the storm.
Malcolm remembered the small man standing out back of the hotel just a few nights before and how, soul-weary as he was, he had not backed down from Malcolm’s anger but engaged it. Malcolm remembered how the man had defined and claimed “black power” and made it something somehow higher than a clenched fist and a broken window, how he had defended, with heartfelt earnestness, the crazy idea that letting a man beat on you without resistance was some greater calling, how he had stubbornly refused to admit that white people were beyond redemption.
He gave me a lot to think about.
Malcolm leaned over to his father. “I’m going to try to talk to him afterward,” he said, still applauding. “I told him I’d let him know what I decided to do.”
Pop was beaming. It made him look like a different man. “That’s a good idea, Malcolm,” he said.
And it was a moment before Malcolm realized: his father had called him by his name, his new name, the one Pop had seen as a rejection just a few weeks ago. Malcolm was about to speak, about to say something to acknowledge this. But then the ovation crested, the audience began to be seated, and Malcolm took his seat as Abernathy came to the microphone. Abernathy’s introduction was a speech in itself. He spent almost half an hour lionizing this great friend with whom he had fought shoulder to shoulder for 13 years in the trenches of human rights. His remarks took King from birth to school, to college, to Montgomery, and finally to Memphis. “He has not yet decided to be president of the United States,” Abernathy joked, “but he is the man who tells the president what to do.”
Finally, Abernathy sat and King came to the podium with a puzzled smile playing on his heavy features. He waited for the applause to pass, then started speaking in the slow preacher’s baritone so familiar from TV news. The great voice was back on duty, no longer addressing one college dropout out back by the Dumpsters. No, now it was addressing history. “It’s always good to have your closest friend and associate to say something good about you,” said King. “And Ralph Abernathy is the best friend that I have in the world.”
He spoke for 45 minutes. He used no notes. His voice strong and true, King took them on a “mental flight” through history, the audience laughing appreciatively as he rattled off the names of Greek philosophers—“Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes”—even as he assured them that no matter the magnificence of that age, no matter the majesty of Rome’s empire, no matter the glory of the Renaissance or the courage of Franklin Roosevelt railing against fear itself, there was no era he would rather live in, if given the choice, than this one.
This, he acknowledged, was a strange thing to say, given the sickness and troubles roiling the land. “But I know somehow that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century”—he tapped the lectern for emphasis—“in a way that men in some strange way are responding. Something is happening in our world.”
King noted how the violence that destroyed the previous march drew attention to itself and away from the plight of the sanitation men. So they had to march again, he said. He spoke of the need for Negroes to make use of their power, to “redistribute the pain” by withdrawing economic support—boycotting—companies that did not treat black people fairly. Boycott Coca-Cola, he said. Boycott Wonder Bread.
The preacher turned to the Bible then, recounting the parable of the Good Samaritan, the man who stopped on the Jericho Road to help a stricken man of another race. After others had passed by without stopping, the man from Samaria aided this stranger without thought to his own safety or inconvenience. And King located in that well-worn tale why the plight of Malcolm’s father and 1,300 other sanitation men mattered, or should matter, even to people who had never toted a tub of garbage or picked maggots from their hair.
Perhaps, said King, the men who passed by that stricken man were afraid for their safety—after all, the Jericho Road was dangerous. Perhaps they wondered what would happen to them if they stopped there to help this stranger. But the man from Samaria, said King, reversed the question and asked himself: if I do not stop to help this stranger, what will happen to him? This, he said, was what people should be asking themselves about the sanitation men in Memphis.
Something seemed to seize him then and he began to talk about the old days. He told them about the time he was stabbed by a deranged black woman while he was signing books in New York and how he almost died. And, oh, what he would have missed if he had.
He would have missed students standing up for great American ideals by sitting down at lunch counters, he said. He would have missed students confronting segregation head on by riding for freedom in interracial groups on interstate buses. He would have missed Selma and Birmingham. He would have missed the chance to stand at the temple of Lincoln and tell America about his dream.
He would have missed Memphis.
Malcolm sat up straight. He looked at his father. Pop was clapping and cheering, yelling in response to the preacher’s call. “Preach, Doctor! Tell ‘em about it!” All around Malcolm it was the same, sanitation workers and women and young people, all roaring loudly enough to drown the storm. So maybe they didn’t hear it. But Malcolm did. Some ghost of valediction haunted those words.
And then, even in the cacophony of the people’s adoration and applause, the valediction turned somber. Memphis, said King, was where he had been warned not to return because there was too much danger, too much risk, too many threats.
“Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop”—his voice trembled on that word—“and I don’t mind.”
Don’t mind what?
But Malcolm knew. Didn’t want to know, but he did.
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life,” King was saying. “Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seeeeen”—singing the word, making it almost musical—“the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we as a people will get to the Promised Land!”
The audience was on its feet roaring love. Malcolm stood slowly. He stared at Martin Luther King and he could tell that King did not see them or hear them. His eyes ticked back and forth in their sockets, as if he were listening to some voice only he could hear, as if he viewed some vista visible only to him. And then all at once, he threw his head back and thundered one last time in defiance.
“And so I’m happy tonight! I’m not worried about anything! I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
He turned abruptly from the pulpit, still speaking. The microphones did not catch the words and no one would ever know what they were. King all but slumped into the arms of Ralph Abernathy as he took his seat. All around Malcolm, people were cheering, people were calling, people were weeping with unrestrained joy.
Malcolm applauded, too. His hands seemed to have a mind of their own. He cheered. And this was something his throat had decided on its own to do. His body was moving without him. But his mind was stunned. He felt as if he had been struck between the eyes with a hammer.
“You still going down there?” Pop was at Malcolm’s shoulder.
Down in front, people were swarming the podium, reaching for King, straining to touch him, to talk to him.
“I’ll see him tomorrow,” said Malcolm, finding his voice. “He’s at the Lorraine, I think.” He still wanted to tell King about the decision he had made, the decision King had pushed him to. But there was something else, too. That ghost of valediction that had walked through the great man’s words, that had peered out through the great man’s eyes, seemed to demand something of Malcolm simply because he had seen it and heard it. Yet Malcolm had no idea what that something was. Was he to question it? Challenge it? Console it?
Something.
“I’ll see him tomorrow,” repeated Malcolm in an absent voice and they began to file toward the exit.
But of course, tomorrow came too quickly. And what happened happened.
Bantering one moment, about to turn a smile toward Malcolm one moment, and in the next lying on the balcony floor with one leg drawn up, the side of his face obliterated in a mass of wet, red pulp. And Andrew Young wailing. And Billy Kyles kneeling. And Ralph Abernathy cradling his best friend’s head. And policemen running with guns drawn. And people pushing past Malcolm. And a camera flashing. And Malcolm staring.
And Malcolm staring.
And Malcolm staring.
And Malcolm backing slowly away. Sirens wailing. People screaming. Malcolm walking away now, the things he’d intended to say lost to him. Slowly, he went down the stairs. Slowly, he passed through the courtyard, buffeted by people running past, people screaming orders, people crying.
He heard it from a distance, saw it from some far place. He found the bicycle he had left downstairs and climbed slowly aboard. One last glance above. He saw the sole of King’s left shoe. Malcolm put his head down and rode away.
He rode without seeing and without destination, the riding itself being the entire point. He rode past people glued to car radios listening to terse bulletins. He rode past police cars traveling at high speed. He rode past black men with clenched jaws, their eyes dancing with fire. He rode past a white man who exulted to another white man, “They finally got the son of a bitch!” He rode past mountains of trash.
He rode and then stopped. To his surprise, he found himself at the hotel. And right that instant, as if on cue, Melvin Cotter came boiling out the front door, ripping off his busboy’s smock as if it were burning his skin.
“Malcolm! Did you hear? They done shot him! They done shot Dr. King!”
“I was there.” Malcolm spoke in a voice he didn’t recognize.
Melvin threw his smock to the ground. His eyes glittered with raw fury. “They done done it now,” he declared. “Fuck them! Fuck all of ’em! You was right the whole time, man. Black power! Black power! Violence the only language fuckin’ honkies understand!”
“No, I was wrong,” said Malcolm in his new voice.
But Melvin didn’t hear. “Done shot Dr. King! Jesus! They done gone too far now. You hear me? They done gone too fuckin’ far! We gon’ burn this motherfucker down tonight!”
He stormed away, cursing the uncaring night.
Malcolm walked inside. He met dazed eyes. The young white girl at the desk had her hand to her mouth. White people stared at him, waiting, he supposed, to see what he would do. Malcolm entered the Employees Only area. He opened Rupert Pruitt’s office without knocking.
Pruitt looked up in alarm. He was behind his desk, holding his shotgun braced against his lap. He had been feeding shells into the breach.
“Toussaint? What do you want?” Fear had stretched his eyes wide.
“Wanted to give two weeks’ notice,” said Malcolm. “I’m quitting. I’m going back to school.”
Pruitt was incredulous. “Give notice? Jesus Christ, boy! Ain’t you heard what just happened?”
Malcolm spoke softly. “I heard,” he said. He closed the door and walked away.
Back in the lobby, he paused a moment. The front door, the door through which he had entered, was to his left. Malcolm went right. He walked through the lounge where white people were hunched together, speaking in hushed, urgent whispers. He went out the back of the hotel to where far below, the Mississippi River carved its restless path to the sea.
And there he stood. Just stood. Just breathed.
The word was going out now, spreading by telephone, radio, teletype, television. Pretty soon, the whole world would know what Memphis knew, would know what Memphis had done. And when they heard, how many black people would feel like Melvin? How many would say, This is enough! This is war!
Most of them, he supposed. Maybe all of them. Even now, he could hear the distant scream of sirens.
Violence the only language fuckin’ honkies understand! We gon’ burn this motherfucker down tonight!
And Malcolm would have been right there with Melvin, last week. Indeed, would have stormed ahead of him. A very long time ago, last week.
But the memory of the tired man he had met in this place would not allow it.
He knew what many black people would think. What had happened here was a reason to give up on all of it, all those sweet, integrationist dreams, all those homilies about the mystical power of nonviolence, all those gentle hymns of perseverance and overcoming and, most of all, the idea that white people would ever be anything other than white people, the idea that they would ever think of you as a brother or a sister in the human family, and treat you accordingly.
King’s murder, they would say, tears in their eyes, Molotov cocktails in their fists, was a reason to give up on all those things. But for Malcolm, it was the opposite. It was the reason he could not.
Because the question King had asked was profound: what happens then? And Malcolm still could not answer it.
All at once, he became aware of the weight in his front pocket. He reached in and fished out the pistol he had bought when he was broken and looking to be whole again. He studied it for a moment in the light of a streetlamp near the Dumpsters, then turned it over in his palm. It was a snub-nosed revolver, an evil, ugly thing.
Without even knowing he was going to do it, Malcolm suddenly screamed some cry without words, clenched the gun hard in his fist, and flung it with everything he could muster. The pistol traced a high arc against the paling moon. By the time it landed with a distant splash in the river, Malcolm had already turned to leave.
He wanted to get home before the fires started. He wanted to get home to his dad.