Malcolm X on how he learned to read in prision and how it changed his life (#76)

"the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive."

The most fascinating things are those that arise, seemingly, from nothing.

A 20-something accountant turns imported shoes sold from the trunk into NIKE. A magician with no apparent talent becomes Steve Martin. Two Ohioan bicycle mechanics build the world’s first motor-powered flying machine.

In the late 1940s, Malcom X summoned similar something-to-nothing magic to go from a practically illiterate felon into one of the most eloquent writers and speakers of the 20th century.

Many who today hear me somewhere in person, or on television, or those who read something I’ve said, will think I went to school far beyond the eighth grade. This impression is due entirely to my prison studies.

In his book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, X shares the incredible step by step process.

And it’s the subject of today’s OGT.

“I Began Copying”

Malcolm X was arrested in 1946 for larceny, and sentenced to 8-10 years in prison.

To stay connected to his family, including with his brother on the subject of a new interest in the Muslim faith, he started handwriting—or, trying to write—letters.

This frustrating experience was the initial spark that lit his something-to-nothing path to literacy aglow.

I became increasingly frustrated at not being able to express what I wanted to convey in letters.

..

In the street, I had been the most articulate hustler out there. I had commanded attention when I said something. But now, trying to write simple English, I not only wasn’t articulate, I wasn’t even functional.

A lot of his writing woes stemmed from poor reading comprehension.

..every book I picked up had few sentences which didn’t contain anywhere from one to nearly all of the words that might as well have been in Chinese. When I just skipped those words, of course, I really ended up with little idea of what the book said. So I had come to the Norfolk Prison Colony still going through only book-reading motions. Pretty soon, I would have quit even these motions, unless I had received the motivation that I did.

This is where, I think, X makes his first genius move: he takes action.

I saw that the best thing I could do was get hold of a dictionary—to study, to learn some words. I was lucky enough to reason also that I should try to improve my penmanship.

It was sad. I couldn’t even write in a straight line. It was both ideas together that moved me to request a dictionary along with some tablets and pencils from the Norfolk Prison Colony school.

I spent two days just riffling uncertainly through the dictionary’s pages. I’d never realized so many words existed! I didn’t know which words I needed to learn.

Finally, just to start some kind of action, I began copying.

In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet everything printed on that first page, down to the punctuation marks…I believe it took me a day. Then, aloud, I read back, to myself, everything I’d written on the tablet. Over and over, aloud, to myself, I read my own handwriting.

I woke up the next morning, thinking about those words—immensely proud to realize that not only had I written so much at one time, but I’d written words that I never knew were in the world. Moreover, with a little effort, I also could remember what many of these words meant. I reviewed the words whose meanings I didn’t remember.

I was so fascinated that I went on—I copied the dictionary’s next page….

Finally the dictionary’s A section had filled a whole tablet—and I went on into the B’s. That was the way I started copying what eventually became the entire dictionary. It went a lot faster after so much practice helped me to pick up handwriting speed.

Between what I wrote in my tablet, and writing letters, during the rest of my time in prison I would guess I wrote a million words.

I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying.

This is the next key moment.

Once he gets going, and crucially, raises his confidence with the positive feedback of progress, his interest also increases. And interest, coupled with enthusiasm, is the formula for learning anything.

And it turned him into a reading fiend.

Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.

Let me tell you something: from then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. You couldn’t have gotten me out of books with a wedge. Between Mr. Muhammad’s teachings, my correspondence, my visitors—usually Ella and Reginald—and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life…No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me, of being able to read and understand.          

I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room.When I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P.M. I would be outraged with the “lights out.”...

Fortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when “lights out” came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow…At one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes—until the guard approached again. That went on until three or four every morning.

Finally, now well-read, writing everyday, and even participating in prison debates, X started growing as a person. He went the way that all readers do—starting to consider, and question ideas he’d taken for granted.

And this caused him to invent some of his own.

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America.

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?”

I told him, “Books.”

The OGT: “Start with some kind of action”

The thing you start to learn when you read a lot of biographies is this fact: no body—ever— knows where to start.

There is no place to start. Anywhere will do. Just start.

It’s like Hemingway said, just write one true sentence. Just start with what you know. Worst comes to worse, just start copying from a dictionary.

There are two benefits of “just starting.” The first is that if you’ve started at the wrong place, you’ll start to find out quicker. Of course, there is a best place to start. But the thing is, you don’t know where it is until you are in the thing. That is, unless you have some good advice from a teacher, which is one advantage of great teachers. But short of having a great teacher, experience must be the teacher, and so you just begin, and then you adjust.

The second advantage of action, is that you get caught in this feedback loop that X found himself in. The feedback loop of: action→ feeling of progress → rising of confidence→ interest → enthusiasm→ much more action.

The only way to access that feedback loop is to act. I’m the first proponent of reading for learning how to do something. But though reading can also access interest, it can’t catch you in the above feedback loop. The actual progress, you know, comes from action. And without actual progress, you can’t truly build confidence. And without confidence you won’t continue, and so on.

So, whatever you want to start or learn or do, I’ll leave you with two quotes, the first from Teddy Roosevelt, the second from Goethe:

Get action. Do things; be sane; don't fritter away your time; create, act, take a place wherever you are and be somebody; get action.

Whatever you do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

Act. Start. Today.

And then figure it out from there.