Wallace's stories, poems, and essays appear in publications around the country. In this essay, Wallace considers Baldwin's use of names and naming to chart the way in which Malcolm X's identity, both public and private, shifted over the course of his life.

Satan. Homeboy. Red. El Hajj Malik El Shabazz. Malcolm Little. Malcolm X.

Over the course of his short, dramatic life, the man most commonly known as Malcolm X was known by many names and went through as many changes. He was a class president and a drug dealer, a thief and a prisoner, a minister, an agitator, a peacemaker—and with each new identity, he seemed to take a new name. In One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario, James Baldwin's screen adaptation of Alex Haley's landmark Autobiography of Malcolm X, Baldwin plays with these names and the larger question of naming, to...