The Autobiography of Malcolm X

by Malcolm X

But when Malcolm X returned this time, he reported triumphantly, “I have something to tell you that will surprise you. Ever since we discussed my mother, I’ve been thinking about her. I realized that I had blocked her out of my mind—it was just unpleasant to think about her having been twenty-some years in that mental hospital.” He said, “I don’t want to take the credit. It was really my sister Yvonne who thought it might be possible to get her out. Yvonne got my brothers Wilfred, Wesley and Philbert together, and I went out there, too. It was Philbert who really handled it. “It made me face something about myself,” Malcolm X said. “My mind had closed about our mother. I simply didn’t feel the problem could be solved, so I had shut it out. I had built up subconscious defenses. The white man does this. He shuts out of his mind, and he builds up subconscious defenses against anything he doesn’t want to face up to. I’ve just become aware how closed my mind was now that I’ve opened it up again. That’s one of the characteristics I don’t like about myself. If I meet a problem I feel I can’t solve, I shut it out. I make believe that it doesn’t exist. But it exists.” It was my turn to be deeply touched. Not long afterward, he was again away for a few days. When he returned this time, he said that at his brother Philbert’s home, “we had dinner with our mother for the first time in all those years!”