C H A P T E R O N E
Aftermath
I was there that day. We all were, all except baby Gamilah who, in the last-minute rush to go hear Daddy speak, got left behind with friends because her little snowsuit was too damp to wear out into the cold. But the rest of us were there, sitting stage right on a curved and cushioned bench: Mommy, Attallah, Qubilah, myself. Even the twins, Malikah and Malaak, were present to bear witness, carried not in Mommy's arms but inside her womb, deep beneath her heart.
It was February 21, 1965. My father, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz— Malcolm X—telephoned my mother at the Wallace home that morning with a surprising request. He wanted Mommy to bring us girls and come to the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem to hear him speak. My mother was elated; just the day before he had warned her not to come, saying it was too dangerous.
We were staying with the Wallace family because eight days before our house in Elmhurst, Queens, had been firebombed. It was early Sunday morning and cold outside. Mommy and Daddy were asleep in their bedroom, Attallah, Qubilah, and I were in our room, and Gamilah was in the nursery when a blast awakened us all. Barking orders and grabbing terrified children, my father got us all up and out the back door into the yard. It took the fire department an hour to extinguish the flames. Mommy telephoned the Wallaces, saying, “The house is on fire.” The Wallaces put their twelve-year-old daughter Gail—our baby-sitter and play “big sister”—in the car and drove to our house. Gail told me she remembers walking into the house and being almost overwhelmed by the smell of smoke.
“Everyone was in the kitchen,” Gail said, “and to get to the kitchen you had to walk through the foyer, the living room, a long hallway, and your room, the room you girls slept in. That room was a mess, burned and wet and scattered, because that's where the bomb had been thrown. I saw all these people standing in the kitchen. I remember crawling through men and women, Muslim men, to get to your mother. She was sitting at the kitchen table talking and when she saw me she said, ‘Oh, dear heart, they're trying to burn me out of my house.' She was happy to see me because she knew once I was there I would take over the girls enough so she could get the situation under control. She had a little grin on her face but it wasn't one of pleasure.”
The Wallace family—Antoinette, her husband Thomas, who is Ruby Dee's brother and was known then as Thomas 57X, and their four children—took us in that night. My father made sure we were settled at the Wallace home, then checked into the Theresa Hotel (although the night before the assassination he stayed at the New York Hilton). He knew he was a walking target and he didn't want anyone else to get hit. He told Mommy he wanted to take the trouble away from us.
Four days later, the Nation of Islam went to court to evict us from our home.
In the aftermath of the fire, my father never stopped working. Friends like Ossie Davis begged him to flee. His brother Wilfred advised him to “hush and forget this whole thing” and go to Africa until things cooled down. There were any number of African nations whose leaders would have been happy to offer him refuge, but Daddy refused to even discuss the idea. He was not about to run. He took what security precautions he could, but through it all he kept working, flying to Detroit to speak at an event in honor of Charles Howard, a renowned journalist who covered the African liberation movement for Muhammad Speaks and other black newspapers, then turning around and flying back home to New York for another flurry of speaking engagements and interviews. In between all this activity, he worked hard to find a new home for all of us.
He knew the end was coming soon.
Percy Sutton tells a story of sitting in the backseat of a car with Daddy and two armed guards around this time. Mr. Sutton asked my father if it bothered him being surrounded by people with guns.
My father said to him, “Have I told you the story of Omar the slave? Omar said to his master, ‘Give me your fastest horse, I'm going to escape the Face of Death.' It being a slave belief that if you rode by day and got through the day with the swiftness of the horse, you were safe by night. There were seven paths down which Omar could go. He started down the center path, pulled the horse back. Started to the left, and pulled back again. Only a short distance down the third path stood the Face of Death. Death said to Omar, ‘For three days I've waited at this spot for you to come. Why has it taken you so long?' ” And then Minister Malcolm said, “So you see, counselor, you can twist, you can turn, but there's destiny.”
Meanwhile we stayed with the Wallaces and waited for Daddy. The NYPD sat outside the Wallace home and followed us everywhere. They even followed the Wallace children to school, until Gail Wallace and her siblings gave them the slip by sneaking out the back window. They said they were there to help but no one believed it. What they were really doing was shadowing my father, casing him and his movements, preparing for February 21.
On February 20 Daddy came by the Wallace house to check on us. As he was leaving, Brother Thomas asked what he could do to help. Our exhausted-looking father shook his head. “It's something unseen all around me,” he told Brother Thomas. Then he climbed into his car and drove away.
“A funny feeling came over me hearing that,” Mrs. Wallace told me years later. “I felt like I was seeing this man for the last time.”
So when Daddy called that morning of February 21 and asked us to come hear him speak, Mommy was happy. She loved Daddy and missed him and wanted to be present for support. She hurried about, dressing herself and us, then Brother Thomas drove us into Manhattan and up to Harlem to the Audubon. We arrived just after noon.
After we left the telephone rang and Mrs. Wallace answered it. It was Wallace Muhammad, son of Elijah Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad was the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam, the man my father had once credited with saving his life and the man whose followers my father now suspected were among those who wanted to take it. Wallace Muhammad was agitated. He said he'd been trying to reach my father for days. He wanted to warn him, to tell him they were going to kill him soon. He did not say who “they” were.
Brother Thomas dropped us off at the front door and went to park the car. I cannot begin to imagine my mother's feelings as she ushered us into that ballroom to hear her husband speak. My mother loved my father deeply, and she admired his commitment to changing the lives of black people in America and throughout the world. But she also knew the toll that work had taken on him. She knew how draining was the constant traveling, how wearing were the harassment by the FBI and the intimidation by the members of the Nation of Islam. She knew how deeply pained he was by the attack on the house where his wife and daughters lay asleep. She knew how tired he was, and she knew that as much as she wanted to make it all better, she couldn't. No one could.
I imagine my mother walked into that ballroom full of joy, pride, anxiety, love, and not a little fear.
And she walked out shattered in a way that could never, ever be repaired.
I write all this as though I remember, which I do not, Allah be praised. I was two years old, going on three, and though I surely felt confusion and fear at the time, I have no memory of any of it. From these experiences I carry only a dislike of endings, a lingering uneasiness with good-byes. My oldest sister, Attallah, was six years old when my father was assassinated; Qubilah was four. How much, exactly, they remember is something we never discussed while growing up. Somehow Mommy kept us so busy and fulfilled we never talked about it, or maybe it was just too hard. It wasn't until recently, just a few years ago, that I finally asked Qubilah if she remembered that day. I was in graduate school working on a paper and she was visiting me. We began discussing the condition of African people throughout the world, and from there the conversation turned to Daddy and his work.
Yes, she said. She remembered him and she remembered that day in all its confusion and terror. She remembered noise and screaming and confusion and Daddy not coming home.
I didn't push her on her memories. Really, what more was there to say?
It was a fairly mild February a
fternoon. Outside the Audubon, children played on the street while Christian men and women strolled home from Sunday church services. My mother took us girls and went inside the auditorium, which was quickly filling up. More than four hundred people, many of them non-Muslim, had come to hear Malcolm X speak. He had promised earlier to present the charter of his newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity on that day, but the drafting committee had fallen behind, the charter was unfinished, and he was upset. My father did not like to break his word.
We sat right up front in a reserved booth near the stage where we could see our father clearly and be sure he saw us. We settled in; my mother took off our snowsuits. My father was backstage, preparing to speak. The ballroom grew full. Time passed. The program was late getting started because they were waiting for two invited guests, the Reverend Dr. Milton Galamison, a civil rights activist, and Ralph Cooper, a popular disk jockey. After awhile my father's assistant, Benjamin X, took the stage. He spoke for about twenty minutes. He talked about a ship crossing the ocean, about the storms and trade winds and doldrums and other delays that might keep even a well-captained ship from reaching its destination on time, alluding to the delayed charter. Then he introduced Daddy.
My father walked onto the stage to applause and gave the familiar greeting. “As-salaam alaikum, brothers and sisters.” (May peace be unto you.)
“Wa-alaikum salaam,” the audience responded. (May peace be unto you, too.)
Just then, a few rows back from the front, a disturbance occurred. Some kind of scuffle, a man's voice saying, angrily, “Get your hand out of my pocket!” Everyone in the audience turned to look.
My father raised his hands, trying to calm the situation. “Hold it! Hold it! Don't get excited,” my father said. “Let's cool it, brothers—”
Or something like that. Those words come via Alex Haley, who “wrote” my father's autobiography. Other witnesses remember different words from Malcolm X, but whatever his words, his intent was clear: to calm the situation, to diffuse what he thought was tension among his own. My mother, in her testimony before the grand jury investigating my father's death, recalled her husband's last words as these: “Everything's all right.” Such soothing words.
Using the distraction as cover, three men in the front row stood up and began firing. People screamed, dove for the ground, rushed the exits. My mother pushed us to the floor, shoved us beneath the booth and threw her body over ours, trying both to protect our lives and our innocence. I believe she knew what was happening; some already-shattered part of her knew and didn't want us to see. We were only babies. Bad enough that we had to hear the thunderous shots, the terrified screams, the chaos and crashing of chairs.
Sixteen bullets tore through my father's body, striking him in his chest, near his navel, in his thigh, knee, ankle, right hand and forearm, and left biceps. He fell backward over the chairs behind him and tumbled to the floor. In the bedlam that followed people scattered in all different directions, including toward my father onstage. They ripped open his shirt and tried to staunch the bleeding. At least two people tried to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation: Yuri Kochiyama, the Asian American activist, and my mother, a nurse. Someone else rushed to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital's Vanderbilt Clinic, which was only ten blocks away, and brought back a stretcher, and they raced him to the hospital that way. Mommy went, too. A photographer got a picture of him being carried on that stretcher, head thrown back, mouth open, eyes closed.
(When I was young, that photograph was deeply disturbing and painful to me. Yet some part of me had to see it, to see his eyes, his mouth, his teeth, his chest, his arms, everything. I always wondered how he was feeling. Did it hurt? Was he scared? What was he thinking? I could never look at that photograph without half-covering my eyes, but I wanted to look at it. I wanted to see him and whatever was happening to him. It is easier for me now, as an adult, to see that photograph. Now I know that whatever the appearance of his body at that moment, his soul was at peace.)
He was declared deceased at 3:30 p.m., but he probably passed away before that.
All that I know about that terrible, terrible day I have learned from the Autobiography, from other written sources, and from the painful recollections of friends, including the Wallaces. My mother herself never spoke to us about what happened on February 21, 1965. My mother would not revisit that moment, ever. She could not.
We girls were brought back to the house by someone, probably Brother Thomas. Our mother wasn't with us. Our father wasn't with us. We were terrified. The living room in the Wallace house was dark. The adults were wet-eyed and shaking. We were all sobbing, though probably only Attallah and Qubilah really understood the reason for our tears. Qubilah looked up at Gail Wallace and asked, “Is Daddy dead?”
Gail was only twelve, but we looked up to her. She was our baby-sitter and our friend; she took care of us and so naturally we expected her to have the answers. “I didn't know what to say,” she told me many years later. “I was a little girl, too.”
My mother did not take us to the funeral, held on February 27, 1965, at the Faith Temple, Church of God in Christ, at 147th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. We did not see the more than seventeen hundred people packed into the church nor the six thousand plus mourners waiting outside in the bitter cold. We did not hear the telegrams of condolences from every major civil rights organization and dozens of Middle Eastern dignitaries, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the ambassador from Lagos, the president of the Republic of Ghana. We did not see our father's body wrapped in the delicate white winding cloth of Muslim burials.
We did not hear Ossie Davis deliver his stirring eulogy: “Many will ask what Harlem finds to honor in this stormy, controversial, and bold young captain—and we will smile…. They will say that he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist—who can only bring evil to the cause for which you struggle.
“And we will answer and say unto them: Did you ever talk to Brother Malcolm? Did you ever touch him or have him smile at you? Did you ever really listen to him? Did he ever do a mean thing? Was he ever himself associated with violence or any public disturbance? For if you did you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him: Malcolm was our manhood, our living black manhood. This was his meaning to his people. And in honoring him, we honor the best in ourselves…. And we will know him then for what he was and is—a Prince, our own black shining Prince!—who didn't hesitate to die because he loved us so.”
We didn't see Mommy bend to kiss the glass over Daddy's coffin, then burst into tears.
I don't remember what we did the rest of that day. Probably we stayed at home with Mrs. Wallace and her daughters and did whatever little girls do when some terrible event beyond their imagining has occurred and the grieving adults around them don't know how to begin to explain. Played with dolls. Colored with crayons. Ate some snacks.
Wondered when Mommy and Daddy would be home.
C H A P T E R T W O
Alone
Afew years ago I traveled to Chicago to accept an award in honor of my father. At a party afterward I met this white guy. For the sake of this story, let's call him Ed.
We were standing side by side in the VIP section of the club when Ed turned to me and said something like, “That girl should not be wearing those pants unless she means to send the kind of signal she's sending.” I was so startled I laughed—first, because I actually thought the pants were pretty nice, and second, because it was such a surprising thing for a man to have an opinion about, at least one he would share with a woman he did not know. Ed must have taken my laughter as a sign of encouragement, because the next thing I knew he was giving me a running commentary about all the white women in the room and how he could tell who was “fast” just by the pants they were wearing. From there we moved on to women versus men, Chicago versus New York, and a host of other topics. It was a fun conversation and I was having a good time, intrigued by how much a man's point of view differed from a woman's.
After a few more minutes of conversation, Ed smiled. “You know, you're a very beautiful woman,” he said.
“Thanks.”
“Not only beautiful, but sexy.” Ed leaned in. “And very cool. That's nice. You don't seem to have any hang-ups. That's unusual.”
I smiled back at Ed, trying to walk that line between being nice and encouraging what was obviously turning into a pass. He seemed like a decent and even innocent guy, but I was not interested. Still, I thought I knew what he was talking about. I've always been teased by my family about my openness, my willingness to walk right up to strangers and talk to them as if they were long-lost friends. “Hang-ups? Like what?”
“You know,” Ed said. “Black hang-ups. Racial hang-ups. You're so self-assured, and so open. That's nice. You don't seem to be carrying a chip on your shoulder.”
It turned out that one of Ed's best friends was African American, a man he had roomed with in college and cared about in a brotherly way. But no matter how close the two men were, how many footballs they tossed or six-packs they shared, Ed felt that something always kept them from becoming really good friends. Something stood between them; Ed believed it was his friend's deep and unreasonable distrust of white people.
“He's not open like you are,” Ed said. “He has hang-ups, big time.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah,” Ed assured me. “In fact, a lot of black guys I know are like that. I don't understand it.”
The party was warming up and I could have just shrugged and walked away. But Ed looked so genuinely perplexed, and a little sad, something in me wanted to explain. But where to begin?
We talked for a while and I tried to explain why the brothers might feel the way Ed described. I steered the conversation to Malcolm X, discussing his contributions and his legacy and the impact Malcolm X had and continues to have to this day on African Americans like his friend. I didn't reveal my relationship; I like to hear what people think about my father without them knowing he's my father. The results are sometimes exhilarating, sometimes absolutely ridiculous, but always informative.
Growing Up X Page 2
