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1930s: proclaiming founder W. D. Fard as the Savior Allah incarnate, much as Jesus was called the incarnation of the Christian god. More than once, Wallace had asked how his father could demand worship of a human being—Fard—in light of the Q’uran’s clear definition of “one God, the everlasting refuge, who begets not nor is he begotten,” and Elijah Muhammad said he would not understand.
    Malcolm X, who presided in Muhammad’s absence, made excuses for Wallace by prearrangement. Very privately, the two men met during the convention as the two most likely successors—friends but possibly rivals—each of whom threatened the top officials at headquarters. When Wallace disclosed his determination to resist his father’s bizarre, unorthodox religious teachings, Malcolm defended Elijah’s adaptations such as the assertion that white people were devils by creation, saying they fit the experience of black people closely enough to gain their attention, and Elijah could correct come-on doctrines once the “lost-found” people were ready. In a related complaint, Wallace confessed that several of his own relatives prospered off the Nation without knowing the first thing about Islam. His stories about power struggles over jewelry and real estate touched a nerve, and the two men fell into collusion.
    Malcolm X convened a meeting of Elijah Muhammad’s family during the February convention in Chicago, at which he carefully announced his intention to mediate solutions for festering problems before they injured the Nation. They were delicate, he said, and included everything from petty personal disputes to gross personal misconduct and disrespect for doctrine. Privately, he told one family member that he just wanted to help—that he had known of shortcomings in Chicago for some time but had been afraid Allah would punish him if he investigated. Family members boycotted a second meeting, however, and the phone wires burned with indignant calls to Phoenix. Wallace’s sister Ethel Sharrieff told her father that Malcolm was insinuating there was something wrong with them and “smart” Malcolm must act as parent. Others warned Elijah that Malcolm was maneuvering to divide them, promote himself, and take over the Nation. It was subversive on its face that he called such a meeting without clearance from Elijah. They said Malcolm was using Elijah’s Cadillac and making speeches all over the Midwest to promote himself. From Phoenix in mid-March, Elijah told officials to seize the keys to his Cadillac, cancel Malcolm’s lectures, and order him back to New York.
    Only then did Malcolm broach to Wallace a fourth issue of corruption beyond money, religious distortion, and dishonest exploitation of the Stokes shootings. At Elijah Muhammad’s home before Savior’s Day, he said, two former secretaries appeared on the lawn with their babies and shouted that they were going to stand there in the cold until Mr. Muhammad comforted his abandoned children. The household had reacted strangely, said Malcolm, who told Wallace he had rebuffed such rumors until the two frightened and shunned women petitioned in person for help. Wallace replied uncomfortably that he would seek out the secretaries, whom he knew personally, and he soon confirmed to Malcolm that he believed their confessions. Elijah had told them that his wife, Clara, was dead to him, like Khadijah, the wife of the original Prophet Muhammad, and likewise Elijah felt divinely sanctioned to seek out virgins to produce good seed.
    Wallace Muhammad felt the revelations as a cruel injustice to his spurned mother, and raged against Elijah as an imposing but distant icon. Wallace scarcely knew his father, who had vanished into hiding for seven years after rival heirs to Fard offered a $500 bounty for his death in the 1930s. Although disciples arrived with daily tributes and breathless word of the aspiring Messenger, Wallace