III.

In the eighth grade, something happened
that Malcolm would later make reference to
as "the first major turning point in my life."
His white English teacher asked him to do
a paper about the career he would like.
Malcolm wrote about practicing law.
But the teacher gave Malcolm a response
that turned out to be the last straw:
"A lawyer -- that's no realistic goal
for a nigger. You need to think
about something you can be," and suggested
Malcolm become a carpenter and shrink
from such fantasy and realize who he was.
Malcolm was shocked. He had done fine
as one of the top students in his class.
But that he could not work with his mind
seemed to be what his white teacher was saying.
"It was then I began to change -- inside.
I drew away from white people," he said.
Malcolm finished his school year in stride
with good grades, but was never happy again
in school. He left Detroit and was sent
to live that summer in Boston
with his older stepsister and there he went
to work, at first as a shoeshine boy
at a famous ballroom. It was there
that he would follow the fashion
by putting a 'conk' on his hair.
That mixture of lye, potatoes, eggs
and vasoline would make it straight.
It burned badly, but it did work.
He would later describe this mistake:
"This was my first big step toward 
destroying my dignity. Now I don't see
how a black woman with any race pride
can walk down the street," said he,
"with a black man wearing a conk --
the mark of his shame that he is black."
Malcolm worked at a number of jobs.
One of them was on trains going back
and forth between New York and DC.
And this job was to be for Malcolm,
another turning point in his life,
for it would take him to Harlem.

IV.

And young Malcolm would love Harlem
from the first moment that he was there.
It was exciting and it was a place
where black people would not have to bear
racial hatred as he had all his life.
A popular restaurant, Small's Paradise,
hired Malcolm to work as a waiter,
and it was there he learned about vice.
He heard customers there talking about
all manner of underworld activities,
and before long, a friend talked him into
selling marijuana by the baggie and key.
Only 17, he quickly slipped into
the underworld jungle there.
And he became a well-known hustler
during the next four years. It was where
he sold drugs, gambled, ran numbers,
and delivered bootleg liquor. He'd say,
"The only thing I thought was wrong was what
I got caught doing," in a later day.
"I had a jungle mind. I was living
in a jungle. Everything I did was done
by instinct to survive." For Malcolm
the lowest point in his life had begun.
And yet all of this was important,
for his ability to speak and organize
would come partly from the fact
that he had learned to be street-wise.
And it was also while in Harlem
that he learned what racism would do
to black people, though it was a lesson
that he would not really be able to
understand until some time later.
After a while, police and other gangs
were looking for Malcolm, and so he went
back to Boston where he would hang
out with the same unsavory characters.
He formed a group which would break into
houses and rob them, but he got caught
and he was sentenced to do
ten years in prison. It was 1946,
and Malcolm was not yet quite 21.
But it would be another turning point
for Malcolm before it was done.



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