In February 2016, I was neck-deep in research for my first book, “The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age.” As I often did in those days, I took some time away and went into what I called Malcolm’s World. King and Malcolm X had been dominating my free time ever since 2012. So when I stumbled upon Garrett Felber’s guest post about Malcolm for Black Perspectives, a blog run by the African American Intellectual History Society, I grabbed some coffee. Felber, like me, knows how to dig, and what he found changed my career: a previously unknown poem penned by Malcolm himself.
Malcolm had a difficult childhood. In 1931, when he was 5, he lost his father in a horrific trolley accident. In late 1938, his mother — who, for years, had managed to keep Malcolm and his six siblings together — was admitted to a mental hospital. Malcolm moved to Roxbury, Massachusetts, soon after to live with his half-sister Ella, and his life markedly changed. He met jazz musicians such as his lifelong friend Malcolm Jarvis, to whom he would send the poem, and started selling drugs and stealing. Jarvis had been a part of Malcolm’s burglary team, and they were both sent to Charlestown State Prison in February 1946. Three months later, Jarvis was transferred to Norfolk Prison Colony, where Malcolm would eventually join him in March 1948.
At Norfolk, he wrote the poem, which would be preserved only through a historical accident and discovered in an archive many decades later. He wrote it in July 1949, when he was 24, and sent it to a friend whose correspondence was kept for posterity by Jarvis’ psychiatrist. When I first read it, my eyes began to water. I’d already been researching Malcolm’s life for several years, and the poem felt like a large window had opened, letting in new air. Here he was, young and struggling, searching for his voice behind prison walls.
When you listen to Malcolm speak, there is a poetic rhythm in his delivery, as if he knows precisely which word to deploy, and at what speed. These communicative abilities were partly forged through music and partly through the reading he did while at Norfolk. The poem shows him at this stage, experimenting with language. In yet another historical accident, this level of reading could only have been done in a progressive institution like Norfolk, with its huge library and commitment to rehabilitation. Malcolm was to explore his burgeoning faith in Islam, pursue intellectual issues to do with race and society and discover vast amounts of poetry — all of which would combine to form the leader he became.
