The political life continued to be a peripatetic one for the Littles. They moved from Omaha to Milwaukee, from Milwaukee to East Chicago, in Indiana, and then from East Chicago to Lansing, Michigan. There Earl bought a small farmhouse for the family, and not only mobilized support for the UNIA in the area but also helped to transport the UNIA faithful from many of Michigan’s small towns to larger assemblies in nearby Detroit, by then a hub of Garveyism and black working-class activism more generally. But Earl’s political troubles also worsened. White neighbors tried to have the Littles evicted and, failing, firebombed their house. Earl thought to put his carpentry skills to use in building a new house in another part of town, though not before being legally outmaneuvered. Not surprisingly, Louisa sensed the peril they were in and begged Earl to exercise vigilance. It was to no avail. In September 1931, off to run an errand across town, Earl met a violent death under suspicious circumstances that the local police ruled accidental. Malcolm was all of six years old.

Earl Little’s death threw his family into desperate circumstances. Louisa would end up institutionalized (Marable speculates this may have encouraged Malcolm to believe that women were by nature weak and unreliable), and Malcolm was placed in a juvenile home near Lansing, by which time he had earned the nickname “Red” owing to his hair color. Into this maelstrom, sometime in late 1939 or 1940, stepped Malcolm’s half-sister Ella, who had been born and abandoned by Earl in Georgia, and later moved to Boston. Having heard of the family’s troubles, she took it upon herself to see how the children were faring. By early 1941, she brought Malcolm (the youngest at age fifteen) back east with her, beginning what Marable calls the “first major reinvention” in Malcolm’s life.

Ella was tough, though something less than a rock of stability. She had been married to a Jamaican-born physician (himself a Garveyite) and divorced, then remarried and divorced again, this time shortly after Malcolm arrived in Boston. Money problems led her to shoplift, and an explosive temperament resulted in arrests for assault and battery. Years later, after many more arrests (though only one conviction), she would be admitted to the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Although she did try to put Malcolm on a steady path, enrolling him in a private all-boys academy, her personal example did not help keep him there. Discovering that the school had no girls in it, Malcolm walked out on the first day and never returned to the school, or attended any other one.

For the next few years Malcolm attempted to make his way in Boston and then in New York City, and his various exploits involving street life, crime, drugs, prostitution, and imprisonment have become the stuff of legend, thanks to the Autobiography. But as Marable demonstrates, the true “reinvention” would come not so much with his activities in the 1940s as with the Malcolm-Haley collaboration of the 1960s. To be sure, Malcolm was no choirboy. He used and sold marijuana, and took part in petty theft. Yet he was not the increasingly hardened and violent criminal he later made himself out to be. He labored briefly as a cook for a railroad line, and then bounced between Boston, New York, and Lansing— including a stint as a “butler and occasional house worker” for a wealthy Boston man, with whom he also shared sexual intimacies (there is no evidence for subsequent homosexuality)—effectively struggling to survive. Along the way he hung out with jazz musicians, performed as a bar entertainer, became romantically involved with a white woman, and moved in the vibrant cultural and political environment that was Harlem. Although the Autobiography portrays a “young black man almost completely uninterested in, even alienated from, politics,” Malcolm in fact carried his childhood political lessons with him, speaking about Garvey’s ideas and looking admiringly at the flamboyant politician and Baptist minister Adam Clayton Powell Jr.