Authors: Ilyasah Shabazz

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“Their mother works here,” Mrs. Stockton said. “She needs to know what they’re up to.”

The head seamstress glanced at us, brow wrinkled. “No. I don’t employ any Negroes.”

Mrs. Stockton shook her head. “I’m just sure . . .”

The door to the workroom opened wider. A stream of women dressed in the paler blue smocks began to exit. Mom emerged, along with the others finishing the day shift. “Ah, there she is,” said Mrs. Stockton. “Louise!”

Mom’s steps faltered. Her brow furrowed. She swallowed hard.

The head seamstress balked, looking from Mom to us. “These are your children?”

Mom drew herself up straight. “They are.” The gaze that pointed to us promised a significant whipping to come. My backside smarted in anticipation.

The head seamstress paced around Mom, peering more closely at her features — her fine bones, creamy skin, and straight dark hair. “You’re a Negro!”

“Yes, I am.” Mom didn’t blink.

Philbert and I dropped our heads in shame. Mom didn’t flinch, didn’t shy away from the discomfort of it. Stood firm as the woman poked her skin and squeezed the ends of her hair while the other seamstresses looked on. Mom had never looked prouder to me.

Finally the head seamstress stepped back. “I don’t know how you fooled me,” she said. “But I don’t employ niggers. Take your lot and go.”

Mom nodded curtly. She stepped toward Mrs. Stockton, who had released our ears and now stood with her hands over her mouth.

“Louise, I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Stockton whispered.

Mom ignored her. She spun Philbert and me each around by a shoulder.

“Home,” she ordered us. “Now.”

“They thought you were white?” Philbert said to Mom on the long walk home. He should have known better than to speak. Mom smacked him on the back of the head. We both knew there was a good paddling awaiting us at home.

How could anyone mistake Mom for white? Mom was a proud black woman, the proudest I knew. She hated us having to take welfare food, hated accepting anything we needed but did not earn. We had a picture of Marcus Garvey on the living-room wall, talking about going back to Africa, talking about the power of blackness and the strength of the Negro heart. I couldn’t imagine looking at Mom and not seeing that.

“They all think I’m white,” she said after a moment. “That’s how I keep a job.”

Trudging down the road that day, I didn’t give what Mom said all that much thought. I was more worried about what punishment she’d lay down when we got home. I guess that’s why I didn’t notice until later how, in the space of that instant, everything Mom and Papa ever told me became a little less true.

On the Bus, 1940

The fact of the matter was you had to be white to keep a decent job in Lansing during the Depression. Mom was just doing what she had to. It stung like a betrayal, but I know better now. Mom talked a good game about the power of blackness, but she knew that the white world held even more power. You just needed to find a way to break in.

Out the bus window, the air is somewhere between black and brown and gray. Rural Michigan looks like a landscape on ink-stained canvas. There’s day and there’s night, and somewhere, I guess, there’s a line between them. Just like black and white. A moment when it stops being day and starts being night or vice versa. That’s what we’re driving on right now. That line. I look out the bus window and it’s night, and it’s night, and it’s night, and then suddenly it’s not. The sun hasn’t come up, but you get the feeling that it’s out there, somewhere, lingering, like a promise. And nothing changes, except everything. And the bus just rolls and rolls into the lightening sky.

Lansing, 1938

With Mom out of a job, the pressure came on the rest of us to bring in money and food. She would get a job again — she would — but there might be a bit of a wait. Jobs came and went for Mom, always. Now that I understood why, it smarted.

I thought that was just life. I didn’t know it was a Negro thing.

Down at the market, I was thinking about how to acquire some things that we needed. A sack of flour, maybe, or some cheese rounds at least. I paced the outskirts of the parking lot, planning it.

The squawking distracted me.

I was familiar with the sound of chickens. We used to raise them on our farm when Papa was alive. They made me think of dinner, which made my stomach speak, which threw off my thinking.

I followed the squawking.

In the parking lot, I found a farmer’s pickup truck, chock-f of farm-related wares. Bushels of corn, bundles of raw wool, and a pile of three-foot crates that proved to be the source of the squawking.

Six chickens in each crate.

Loud, plump, red-and-white hens, ripe for the plucking — just like the ones we used to have.

It was too tempting, that big crate of chickens. We could eat some and keep some for the eggs, as long as we could hold out without eating those, too.

I sidled up to the truck. The closest crate was right on the edge, beneath a bundle of rope.

First things first. I moved the bundle. Easy enough.

No one appeared to be around. The farmer was still in the market. No one else was in sight.

I slid my hands up, right into place inside the looped rope handles at either end of the crate. Easy enough.

I glanced around. Then in one smooth arc, lifted the crate. And started walking away. Easy.

Picked it up to a jog. Had to get out of sight.

Not as easy. I had to keep my elbows bent to raise the frame above my jutting knees. The chickens strutted and squawked, changing the weight distribution of the crate. It rocked in my grip and began to feel heavy.

“Hey!” I heard shouted behind me. “Stop! You thieving nigger. You stop right there!”

I didn’t stop.

I’m fast, but I was running with the chicken crate. Holding it in front of me was breaking my stride.

Before long, thick hands landed on my shoulders. The farmer panted heavy in my ear. “Them’s my chickens,” he said. “Goddamned nigger.”

I dropped the chicken crate and tried to wriggle free, but he had me good and tight by the arms, and there was no way to get loose. I kicked and thrashed and stomped, but his boots were thick — no match for my shoes’ soft soles — and his muscles were like rocks after decades of hard labor against the earth. I could do no damage.

So I stood limply in his grip until the sirens came, and the policemen in their little black caps chained my wrists together and shoved me in the back of their car.

Wilfred came down to the police station to collect me.

“Malcolm, you gotta stop this,” he said. “What’s wrong with the rabbits and the traps?”

Trapping was no kind of guaranteed supper. Stealing, on the other hand . . . “We don’t always catch anything, you know.” That’s what I said out loud, but in the meantime I was thinking about how to get better at swiping things from the store. This whole back-of-the-truck concept was new to me, but it seemed like a good direction to go. I didn’t care much about the man whose chickens I’d taken. He had a whole truck full of chickens and things. I didn’t even figure he’d miss them.

On the whole walk home, Wilfred went on and on about how we were in this together. And something about reflecting on the family.

“What would Papa think, to see you getting hauled in?” Wilfred said. “You can’t,
you can’t
get on the wrong side of the law like this. You know what happens. . . .”

I tuned him out all the way at that point. Papa wasn’t there. He wasn’t there and I was hungry, and I didn’t want to wait for welfare package day, or walk along the creek and hope to find a rabbit in the trap we couldn’t even eat ourselves, or go down to the Seventh-Day Adventist meeting so Mom could pray for our daily bread.

I did what I had to. Didn’t see anything wrong with it. Not a thing.

“I understand you’re out of work,” the government man said first off.

Mom stood with her body in the doorway, as if to block his entry. He pushed past her, of course, in a way that made me feel ashamed of her for even trying. It made everything worse, the way she fought it.

“I’ll get work again,” she protested. “I always do.”

It was true, so far. No job lasted forever, but before the seamstress work, Mom was cleaning in a white family’s home and, before that, another family’s. In the meantime, we’d take the welfare packages, with their bundles of meat and cans of things.

“The larger issue is that there are simply too many mouths to feed,” the man said. “And too many children to discipline.”

“My children are very well behaved,” Mom answered. Her gaze cut to Philbert and me, about which this was absolutely untrue. Like a warning. “They are excellent students as well.” Mom folded her hands. She did not offer him a seat or a beverage, which was rude. But then again, politeness is about making a guest feel welcome, which the government man certainly was not.

He sat down anyway. Right in the middle of the sofa, with his legs spread wide. He had a thick folder of papers, which he opened like a suitcase. He riffled through and extracted a group of clipped pages.

“Malcolm Little,” he said. “Yes, here he is. Malcolm, come over here.”

I separated myself from the others and edged around to stand beside Mom.

“It’s time to make a change,” the man said.

“A change?” Mom’s voice rose. Her arm went around me, over my shoulder, clutching me to her. I don’t know if she felt herself do it. It was like a reflex. But she grabbed me tight. “What sort of change?”

“It’s like I’ve told you. If you can’t control all these children, we’ll be forced to find another arrangement,” the slim man said, pushing up his glasses.

Mom sputtered an indecipherable protest.

“In fact,” the man went on, “we’ve already made arrangements for Malcolm here to stay with another family.”

My heart exploded in my chest.

“No,” Mom declared. “These are my children, and this is our home. Malcolm is staying with us.”

“That’s no longer your decision.”

“You can’t take him,” Mom said. “You can’t.”

The man slapped his portfolio closed. The soft smack screamed finality. “The foster home is only half a mile away. He won’t be far.”

Tears rolled down Mom’s face. She was no match for him.

“They have the means to take him in, and clearly his behavior indicates that he’s beyond your control,” he said. “Malcolm obviously needs a father figure and a firm hand.”

My chest filled with scalding heat. I shook loose from Mom’s arms. The firm hand against me had always been Mom’s. But for these white men to say anything against Papa or our loss of him . . . “No,” I said. “I’m not going.”

“I’m not asking,” the government man said. “Your recent trip down to the police station?” he added. “This move is an alternative to some kind of detention.”

The chickens. It all came back to the chickens. I wanted to laugh. Out of the hundreds of things I’d successfully stolen, I was being punished for the only time I’d ever failed.

“Detention?” I repeated, uneasy.

“He won’t do it again. Anything like that. Ever,” Mom insisted.

I glanced at her. Sure I would. Put those chickens in front of me again, they’d be mine. I’d just take a minute to learn how best to run with a crate.

But the government man shook his head anyway, as if he knew what I was thinking. For a quick second, when he met my eyes, I knew what he was thinking, too. Malcolm, the troublemaker. Malcolm, the one who won’t toe the line. Looking in his eyes — a thing I maybe never did before — it speared me.

The government men who were always coming around, they were always talking to me. Up on the side, just me.
Malcolm, this. Malcolm, that. Malcolm, you need to . . . Malcolm, why don’t you . . . ? Malcolm. Malcolm. Malcolm.

Maybe it had been me causing this trouble all along. All my antics. I was the problem, the one who couldn’t do right, no matter what.

If I would just go, maybe it would all stop. Maybe they would leave Mom and my family alone.

“Pack your things, Malcolm,” the man said.

So I did.