Footsteps

by Umm Zakiyyah

  Aminah glanced at her note cards, skimming the words in that gesture and finding that she had already deviated from her prepared speech. She drew in a deep breath, this time more discreet in her exhale. “And we also thank God for allowing us to gather on the night of a very special event. Many of you attended the graduation ceremony this morning and witnessed Tamika being awarded a bachelor’s degree in religion and honored to be amongst those students who maintained an A or B grade point average throughout their matriculation at Streamsdale. Although we hear of similar ceremonies each year, we are often not aware of the hard work, sacrifice, and significance of such an accomplishment. Yet, we could, in reality, be witnesses to a piece of history unfolding. And that’s what we witnessed this morning. Tamika Douglass, graduate of Streamsdale University on May tenth nineteen ninety seven, was the first in her family to graduate from college and be granted such a degree. So to you, Tamika, we say congratulations, and may God bless you.”

  A roar of applause filled the room and seemed to grow louder in a crescendo until everyone was on their feet.

  “And to commemorate this day, this honor and achievement, we present to you a customized plaque for you to hang on your wall and, God-willing, the walls of your children and grandchildren, so they can know you as we’ve known you tonight.”

  Nusaybah had taken her place at the foot of the steps and now ascended to carry the plaque to Tamika, who met her halfway and now stood a few feet from Aminah with tears glistening in her eyes and shaking her head at Nusaybah for this surprise. She gave Aminah a similar look as Aminah stepped from behind the platform to embrace and congratulate her. The crowd’s applause filled the room again, and everyone remained on their feet.

  When everyone had quieted and taken their seats, and Tamika had sat back down next to her mother and aunt who read the award with smiles of pride on their faces, Aminah began to speak again.

  “And we cannot forget the people who made this accolade possible. And to Thelma White and Jacqueline Rhodes we present these tokens of thank you.” Nusaybah had descended the steps and now ascended them carrying two 8 ½” by 11” oak-framed certificates and two bouquets of flowers. Surprise lit their eyes, but they maintained their composure as they stood and accepted their gifts with the shaking of hands as the frames were placed before them at the table. Again, a roar of applause filled the room, and the crowd stood as Tamika hugged her mother and aunt in congratulations, now all three managing to hold back the tears that glistened in their eyes.

  “Latonya,” Aminah said with a nod. Her words were barely heard over the applause, and that’s how she liked it. She was able to leave the podium and take a seat at her mother’s table and watch as Tamika’s sister came to the microphone that Khadijah had used earlier.

  “This is for you, Tamika,” Latonya said looking at her sister, and the guests grew quiet. Then she turned to where everyone sat. “For those of you who don’t know, I’m Latonya Douglass, Tamika’s big sister. And this song is dedicated to her.”

  Latonya shut her eyes as she slowly drew in a deep breath and sang a song that had been their favorite from the moment they heard it in the movie “Beaches”. “I know it was cold there in my shadow, never to have sunlight on your face,” she sang. Tears slipped down Tamika’s cheeks and she made no effort to stop them as she listened to the beautiful words of Bette Midler that she knew her sister was singing from her heart. Tamika’s mother and aunt couldn’t keep the tears from coming, but they dabbed at their eyes to prevent them from sliding down their faces as Latonya sang about her sister being her source of strength.

  “Fly,” she sang, “so high you almost touch the sky. Thank you, thank you. Thank God for you, the wind beneath my wings.”

  Chapter Three

  “I can see why you like her,” Khadijah said as she unfastened the scarf pin from her rayon black scarf before tossing the khimaar to the couch, where her matching face veil already lay.

  A hesitant smile creased a corner of Omar’s mouth, and Khadijah felt him studying her though she avoided his gaze. She ran a palm over her hair that was braided in cornrows that began at her hairline and met an array of twists that spread over the back of her head. She had gone to a beautician the night before, and Omar had asked about her sudden concern for her appearance. It was only a walimah, he had said. Did all Muslim sisters exert so much effort in beautifying themselves for a wedding celebration in which the men and women would have their own separate parties? But she knew Omar wasn’t complaining. It was his way of expressing how refreshing it was to see her elaborately dressed.

  “Who said I liked her?”

  Khadijah sighed as she let herself collapse on the couch after removing her black jilbaab and laying it next to her head cover and face veil. She rolled her eyes and smirked, meeting her husband’s gaze. “Yeah right, babe. I ain’t stupid.”

  “Just ‘cause I wanted to marry her don’t mean I like her.”

  “If I had any doubts before, I don’t now.”

  Omar laughed in self defense, throwing up his arms. “Man, you women read into stuff too much.”

  “So I was right.” Khadijah smiled triumphantly and folded her arms.

  He shook his head and chuckled. “So what if I did?”

  She shrugged. “I was just saying I can see why.”

  Omar slid into the couch next to his wife and put an arm around her. “So you like her?”

  She lifted a shoulder in a shrug. “She’s alright.”

  “What’d ya’ll do?”

  “Sang some songs, ate, you know.”

  “Sang?” Omar looked at his wife in surprise. “You sang?”

  Khadijah gathered her eyebrows and met his gaze with a smirk. “What you trying to say?”

  “No, I was just surprised.”

  “You think I ain’t good enough?”

  “No, it ain’t that. I thought you were saying she sang.”

  She studied her husband for a moment before saying, “She did.” It was more than she should have shared, but curiosity had a way of taking precedence even when it shouldn’t. Besides, she figured he knew more than she could share in any case since he and Tamika had planned to get married at one point.

  Omar’s eyebrows rose, apparently at a loss for words.

  “Why? You didn’t know she sang?”

  Khadijah watched his gaze fall to the music CDs sprawled on the floor in front of the tall speakers across from the couch, and she forced herself to be patient. She wished she could see inside his head, his heart.

  “I knew she used to.”

  She studied her husband long enough to make him visibly uncomfortable. “Why wouldn’t she sing now?”

  He took a deep breath, the exaggerated one he took when he had decided any evasiveness on his part could be misinterpreted by Khadijah to mean more than it did. Normally, it bothered her, but tonight she just wanted to hear what he had to say. “Before she became Muslim, she sang all the time. When her friend got killed in a car accident, she stopped.”

  “You talking ‘bout Durrah?”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise and he met her gaze. “You knew Dee?”

  She shook her head. “I heard of her though. She was in a lot of the papers before she died. But I ain’t know Tamika was friends with her.”

  “They were pretty close. Roommates at Streamsdale. That’s how they met.”

  “I remember reading about the accident.” She shook her head. “That was really sad.”

  “Tamika was in the car.”

  Khadijah’s eyes grew wide. “That night?”

  He nodded. “She was in the hospital afterward. But she wasn’t Muslim then.”

  “How long after that she convert?”

  “The night she came from the hospital.”

  Khadijah’s gaze grew distant, and she felt the familiar tightening in her chest. She reached the tips of her fingers into her shirt to soothe the area, but, instead, she felt her fingertips massaging the skin over her heart.


  “What you thinking?”

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. He already knew, but the edge in his voice told her he hoped he was wrong. They had been married for seven months before she finally told him the story. And even then, she couldn’t look at him, had to imagine the words slipping from her, escaping, taking on a life of their own. She had imagined herself alone, her words less of tongue than mind. It made it easier to speak, to sit still, her fingers grasping her knees, and her eyes narrowed as if she were struggling to read her lines from the aged paint on the apartment walls.

  Even then, as she sat there, thinking of Tamika and the tragedy of that night, the memories came as flashes first, then still images as if slides on a projector, then a movie itself.

  There was a time Khadijah would have fought the memories, pushed them from her as one fighting for her life. But they would come back only more vividly, more insistently, and corporeal. At the store, the bank, or even years later as a Muslim at Jumu’ah, they would come. It would be so unexpected, so inappropriate, so in defiance of logic that she would be shocked, momentarily lost in a world different from the one she was in. Kiki, the name, she would hear it, as if whispered into her ear. Or she would hear Angie, her own name spoken in Kiki’s voice.

  A trick of the mind, a hallucination, whatever it was in “reality”, at that moment, even if for only that moment, it was real. Once, she was walking down the street and saw the diamond-less ring. She was so stunned, so taken aback that it was there, she stopped, stared and finally willed herself to reach for it and pick it up. The heat of the metal stung her fingers, and she examined it closely, confused that it was only a bottle cap.

  Another time, she heard the coughing, the gurgling and it only grew louder as she walked away from the source of the sound. For years she couldn’t sleep. Slumber would lull her, beg her, but she would refuse. But it would seize her finally, making her prisoner to her dreams. It was then that she and Keiya would switch places, and Angela felt the stinging stab wounds in her own stomach and chest. Khadijah would jolt awake and find herself terrified of the imagined more than the real, although gunshots routinely echoed outside the fragile panes of her window, where gangs ruled the streets. And the three hours until morning felt longer, more torturous than the twelve she pushed herself through at work, not because she couldn’t sleep, but because she feared she would.

  “Don’t think of it too much,” Omar said, a gentle voice calling her back.

  It took several seconds, but the movie faded, the images releasing her, and she breathed. “I’m okay.”

  He stood and disappeared into the kitchen, reappearing a minute later with a glass of grape juice in his hand.

  “Here,” he said, sitting next to her. “Relax.”

  “It was May twelfth,” she said, accepting the glass but only staring at it as she spoke.

  “I know, just a day like any day in the year.” He put an arm around her. “Babe, you gotta chill.”

  She nodded. “I’m tryin’.”

  He sighed, apologizing in that sound. “I know.”

  “It was nice meeting you too,” Faith said, extending a hand to shake Alika’s as they stood next to Faith’s car. Faith’s brunette hair glistened under the dimly lit parking lot, and Alika felt a tinge of guilt for finding comfort in not being the only one not strong enough to cover her hair fulltime. But she wore a khimaar tonight, a loosely draped fabric that covered her hair that was now pulled back by a ponytail holder, making the cloth bulge at the back of her head.

  “You too,” Alika said, feeling awkward now that Faith’s son had finished securing the animal cages behind seatbelts in the back seat. He now stood at the passenger’s door, his hair moving gently with the wind as he waited for them to finish talking.

  “Next Saturday,” Faith said and Alika nodded.

  “I appreciate it.”

  Faith waved her hand dismissively. “No, thank you. I’m glad to have the opportunity to help with such a worthy project. It’s good that someone’s considering the Muslim point of view. I can’t wait to read it once it’s published.”

  Alika laughed self-consciously. “I don’t know if it’ll ever be published, but I hope—”

  “Nonsense,” Faith cut her off good-naturedly. “If no one’s got sense enough to see the need for it, publish it yourself. There’s no multi in multicultural if Muslims aren’t included. Even those who attempt to tackle that perspective see us as homogenous. I don’t think anyone’s ever researched multicultural awareness among Muslims themselves.”

  “That’s why I chose the topic,” Alika said, excited that by next week she would have the perspective of a White Muslim. “The natural diversity is part of what attracted me to Islam. I was already working on the project, but from an African to African-American perspective.”

  “That should be quite interesting,” Faith said with a nod. “I would include that too.”

  “I plan to. But I want to wait to see the best approach. I’m thinking to compare and contrast somehow between the two groups.”

  “This is too unique a research to give to your master’s. Why don’t you delay it for a doctorate thesis?”

  “It’s two faceted, actually. I’m doing this phase as a general premise, and the program I’m in allows me to continue the same program and research for my PhD if I keep my same major, or as long as I don’t deviate too far from it.”

  “Good,” Faith said, opening the driver’s side door. “I’m on board. But we’ll talk.”

  “Thanks.”

  “No,” she said with a smile, “thank you.”

  Alika turned to go, and she heard Faith’s son ask about her before his voice faded as he climbed inside the car and shut the door. She wondered if he would be willing to be a part of her research too. She would be interested in hearing his point of view. Faith had told Alika that her husband was a writer and traveled a lot, often internationally, and on occasion their son accompanied him. Faith had said her husband would be more than willing to talk to Alika after returning from his most recent trip, but now Alika wondered if Faith’s son wouldn’t mind participating too.

  “Oh, there you are.”

  Alika lifted her gaze from where she was looking into her purse for her car keys as she walked. Alika smiled as Sarah approached her.

  “Thanks so much for coming tonight,” Sarah said, linking her arm through Alika’s, making Alika slightly uncomfortable at the show of affection. Alika decided to dig out her keys once she was at the car.

  “I enjoyed it,” Alika said.

  “Well, I’m glad you came.”

  “It was really nice. This is my first walimah.”

  Sarah laughed in pleasure. “Well, I hope it was a good experience.”

  Alika nodded. “It was.”

  They walked in silence in the dark parking lot.

  “I’m sorry about my sister.”

  Alika creased her forehead in confusion and looked at Sarah. “Sorry for what?”

  “My sister Kate,” Sarah said. “She isn’t Muslim and doesn’t understand things correctly.”

  Alika relaxed her forehead as she recalled the uncomfortable discussion, but she was still a bit confused. “Did she say something wrong?”

  “No,” Sarah said as if choosing her words carefully. “But I just wanted you to know, I’m sorry if she offended you in any way.”

  Alika nodded, lost in thought momentarily. “It’s okay,” she lied, stopping behind her car and feeling Sarah’s arm loosen until it released Alika. Sarah’s hands rested at her sides, against the cloth of her abiya, her gold wedding band reflecting in the light coming from the banquet hall windows.

  “I don’t want you to think that it’s common,” Sarah said, “or expected of you.”

  Alika opened her purse and began searching for her keys again. She reached inside until she felt them against the tips of her fingers. They jingled in the quiet of the night as she withdrew them. “Thank you,” she said, looping a finger through the ring
of a key chain and silencing the noise by turning up her palm.

  “We should get together sometime,” Sarah said. Alika caught the quickness of the offer, as if the words were spoken more to change the subject than to express sincere desire for her company. But Alika wasn’t offended. She understood Sarah’s need for something else to say.

  Alika smiled and nodded. “Yes, we should.”

  “You still have my number?”

  “Yes. It’s in my phonebook.”

  “Give me yours.” Sarah laughed. “Only Allah knows where that piece of paper is by now.” She patted her sides, apparently in search of something to write with. “You have a pen?”

  “I think so,” Alika said, peering into her handbag again. She pulled out a pen a second later and scribbled her number, again, on a torn sheet of paper. She handed the paper to Sarah.

  “Call me,” Sarah said with a smile as she started to return to the building. “Anytime.”

  “You do the same.”

  “As-salaamu’alaikum.”

  “Wa’alaiku-mus-salaam.”

  Alika sighed, walking to the driver’s side door. She slipped her key inside and turned it before pulling at the handle to open the door. She climbed in and shut the door, feeling perspiration beading beneath her clothes in the stuffy car. She turned on the ignition, and caught a glimpse of Sarah before she disappeared into the building.

  Alika bit her lower lip as she held the steering wheel, hesitating as the air conditioner blew out warm air that gradually grew cool, and she wondered at her reaction earlier that night, and just moments before. There was so much that she had withheld, and for so many years. And it scared her that, tonight, she had been inclined to share. Sarah had misinterpreted Alika’s discomfort for offense, restlessness in the face of the unknown. But Alika’s uneasiness was due more to the familiarity of the subject than it being bizarre. Years of compelled silence had made her forget that polygamy, polygyny, pulsed in her veins.