This Manning Marable thing, I can see as well as anyone by now, is becoming something of a tic, a bad joke with no punchline, Woody Allen fretting endlessly (while Alison Porchnik sighs) about whether Oswald was marksman enough to have hit a target the size of JFK’s head in a moving car from that distance.

This is the last thing I have to say about the matter, (at least for tonight).  The book still, to my mind, conveys a three dimensional person with convincing motivations, although the research does not seem to be, in many cases, very well-sourced.  In many cases there is no attribution at all for statements Marable makes with great certainty and, also troubling, no sources for direct quotes.  

This is unsettling in an academic book written by a distinguished professor at one of the world’s most respected universities.    The book also poses sensible arguments but seems to back them in a feeble way, particularly when they rely on a single source, or when no source is given.

Take for example Marable’s  easily sensationalized and distracting claim to have “circumstantial but strong evidence, [that] Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon” (66).  Does it make a real difference whether a fictionalized alter-ego for Malcolm in the Autobiography or the actual young hustler Malcolm was the man paid to sprinkle talcum powder on the kinky old naked white man?

Marable presents this purported deception as part of his case that Malcolm, a very private and very public man, brutally candid and also skilled in constructing his public image, exaggerated his criminal exploits in the Autobiography, while hiding other shameful details of his life, to heighten the story of redemptive rebirth he underwent when he converted to Islam in prison.  He presents Malcolm’s arguably misleading account of the paid homosexual encounters as an example of Malcolm concealing and reinventing himself, while at the same time unable to omit the freaky details of a very odd job he once did in service to a wealthy, perverse White Devil.  Surely there were equally good and less problematic examples a careful reading of the Autobiography could have produced to support Marable’s thesis.

The example also provides shaky support for the thesis, since other explanations for why Malcolm would conceal that part of his employment history spring to mind.  For one thing, Malcolm or anyone else, black or white, would not in 1965, nor today, for that matter, be in a hurry to divulge details about a short stint working for a wealthy man who paid good money for his butler to strip, undress him, carry him like a baby to his bed and sprinkle talcum powder on him until he ejaculated.  I can’t think of many people who would advertise this, mention it on their CV or casually reveal it.  What is the relevance of it in an autobiography, a biography?  

I don’t think it’s a question of being tolerant of difference, open-minded, or homophobic, particularly since nothing about Malcolm’s sexual orientation is mentioned anywhere else in Marable’s otherwise detailed biography.  It’s not as though this particular hustle, whether done by “Rudy” or “Detroit Red”, provides insight into anything else about the subject’s life, except that at one point he was desperate enough to take that rather odd employment and that he may have partially concealed it in telling his Autobiography to Alex Haley.  

Marable clearly concluded it was not a big deal, or any kind of character assassination, to include this detail, based on the “circumstantial but strong” evidence he’d found in a Massachusettes prison record and a Boston want ad.  And he may have been right to conclude he was providing nuance, color and texture to the life of his biographical subject.

But, I mean, really, Marable, even if your circumstantial “but strong” evidence for this makes it most probably true, what?  I mean, really, professor, I know you’re dead and all, but WTF?

The storm is still raging following the late Manning Marable’s recent Malcolm X biography.  Books are now in print taking aim at it, taking it to pieces, from the looks of it (see below).   I was in the library today, found Marable’s book on the shelf and checked the end notes.  They are indeed surprisingly sparse and almost random, as the critic who called the research amateurishly done by a team of grad students claimed they were.

I checked out two controversial assertions by Marable and went to the end notes.   There was a conspicuous lack of sources for Marable’s statement that “Based on circumstantial but strong evidence, Malcolm was probably describing his own homosexual encounters with Paul Lennon” (66).  The circumstantial evidence was that Malcolm Little’s prison records indicate that he was once employed as a male secretary for the homosexual Lennon.  This one could probably go either way.

The same probably cannot be said for the thread about the 18 year-old mistress Marable says Malcolm carried on an affair with during the last few months of his life.  This woman, in Marable’s account, may have stolen into Malcolm’s 12th floor single room in the Hilton the last night of his life, making her responsible for the ominous wake up call he received in that room early the next morning.  This same woman, interviewed by the NYPD after the murder, had been sitting in the front row at the Audubon as Malcolm was shot.  She had been seated next to a member of the Newark Mosque (the mosque where all the known assassins allegedly came from)  a man she went on to live with for 40 years.  It was this same Sharon 6X Poole, according to Marable, who called to volunteer false information to the cops a few days later that helped implicate, and later convict, two Harlem NOI men who were not involved in the shooting (or even present at the Audubon on the day of the murder).

If Marable’s account is credible, this woman had a direct hand in setting Malcolm up for death and then misleading the police about the identities of his killers in order to protect them.  One looks in vain for a footnote establishing the source of Marable’s belief.  Marable writes of the alleged affair:

Of these [earlier possible affairs or liaisons] no certainty can be had, but after his return from Africa, Malcolm appears to have begun an illicit sexual affair with an eighteen-year-old OAAU secretary named Sharon 6X Poole.  Little is known about her or about their relationship except that it appears to have continued up to Malcolm’s death.  (394)  

No source is given in the notes.

That she “may have joined him” in his room at the Hilton on Feb. 20, 1965, Marable attributes to a 6/18/03 oral history with Malcolm’s second in command James 67X Warden.  A page or two earlier Marable describe’s James 67X’s frustration with not being kept up to date about Malcolm’s whereabouts the last few days of Malcolm’s life, including that last night.

Much as I initially applauded and was moved by Marable’s account of Malcolm’s life, the speculative nature of these kinds of weaselishly worded passages, making, at best, careless, assertions against the veracity (my acquaintance “Rudy” did the  homosexual routine with the perverted rich white guy, not me)  and character (Elijah Muhammad is a hypocrite to commit adultery with young secretaries, I am above that temptation) of a man many of us admire greatly, I may have to join the group who is after the ghost of Manning Marable to push him up against the wall and demand “what?”

cut and pasted:

By Any Means Necessary Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented