Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  The pain was excruciating, as though the earth, furious at my arrogance in trying to climb above it, had reached up and snatched me back down and snapped my arm in two, which in a way it had. I thought I was dying, and in that moment of fear I didn't think about my father and I didn't think about my sisters. The only person in my thoughts was my mother. “Tell Mommy I love her!” I cried to Gamilah. “Tell her she was the most important person in my life!”

  I kept saying the same thing over and over, even as the counselors and staff arrived at the scene and scooped me off the ground. I said it even as they drove me into the town to the local hospital and as the doctors set my broken arm. “I'm dying,” I said, a little less urgently once the painkillers kicked in. “Tell Mommy I love her. Tell her she was the last thing on my mind.”

  Mommy, though, had many other things besides me on her mind.

  For one thing, there was the financial and emotional support of all of us. My mother had gone back to work part-time as a nurse, often working the late-evening or overnight shift so she could be home with us during the day. By this time she had received whatever modest sum she was going to get from the publication of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and there was still the small circle of giving people around helping to make sure we survived. But the brunt of the responsibility for the six of us fell squarely on my mother. She did it all. “If I didn't make the money and bring the food in and pay the mortgage and pay the car note, and pay the school bill, we didn't eat, we didn't sleep, we didn't have a house,” she wrote once. “I had to do everything.”

  There was also my mother's lingering grief. With my father's death, she had lost not just a husband but a friend and a lover, and eight years is not too much to grieve such a loss. It angers me when someone tries to portray my father as a sinister or, worse, a violent man. He was so far from that. My father was warm and personable and loving, and he poured all of that emotion out on my mother, whom he was crazy about.

  Theirs was a great love story; not many people know that. Everyone who knew my parents as newlyweds tells me how tender, how sweet, and how romantic Malcolm was toward Mommy. During my mother's pregnancies, my father always made certain he was the one who took her to the doctor for her checkups. If he was going to be out of town on the day of the appointment, he would cancel it. After my oldest sister Attallah was born, my father, on those rare occasions when he was not traveling, sometimes took his family to the beach. “While he wrote his speeches,” my mother wrote, “the baby and I would sit on the sand or play in the water. He used to read poetry to us, too, and was very good at it. He was also very complimentary in an offhanded kind of way. If I were to cook something especially good, he used to say, ‘I can cook, you know, Betty. If necessary, I'll cook in a minute.' But he never cooked the entire time we were married.”

  Whenever my father traveled, which was often, he always made sure to telephone my mother and let her know where he was. And often during these conversations he would say, “Betty, go look in the kitchen cupboard” or “Go look under the pillow in our bedroom.” My mother would do as he asked and find, tucked away, a love note or a ten-dollar bill he left for her to buy herself some special treat. He loved to make her laugh. He loved to compliment her on her beauty and her intelligence and her good cooking. She loved caring for him and learning from him and offering him the sustenance only she could provide. In his autobiography, my father said, “She's the only woman I ever even thought about loving. And she's one of the very few whom I have ever trusted.” In an article for Ebony, my mother wrote, “In retrospect, marriage to Malcolm was hectic, beautiful and unforgettable—the greatest thing in my life.”

  So I have to believe that even as I was learning how to row a boat and build a fire in the woods, my mother was still struggling with her grief. She did so privately, keeping her pain hidden from the eyes of the world and from us.

  And on top of all that, she was working through an issue that must have been, in some ways, much more difficult than any of the others. In the wake of my father's death, Mommy had begun taking the first few tentative steps in creating, or re-creating, her own identity, one that was proudly linked to, but distinct from, that of Malcolm X. She had begun the challenge of becoming more fully herself.

  That's not to say Mommy was a wallflower who had to learn to stand on her own for the first time in her life. Betty Sanders possessed drive and ambition long before she met my father. She had already traveled from a comfortable, sheltered life in Detroit to racist Alabama and then to the bright lights of New York. She had already earned her nursing degree. And in marrying my father, she had, for the first time in her life, defied the wishes of her parents.

  Even as a member of the Nation of Islam, which taught that women were to be subservient, my mother maintained her sense of independence. She was a nurse, she taught classes for Muslim women, and she developed curriculum at mosques up and down the East Coast. If someone asked her opinion, she gave it, wholeheartedly and without hesitation, not believing she should keep quiet just because she was a woman or the wife of Malcolm X. She declined to be a second-class citizen in the same way she declined to cover her hair. She believed hair covering was a cultural dictate not a religious one, and she chose not to follow it. Her sister-in-law, Dr. Ameenah Omar, said my mother refused to look anything but beautiful. She was beautiful and she wanted to look that way.

  Nor did she ever, in her marriage to my father, take the backseat. My mother embraced her position as a wife, mother, and homemaker when she married my father, but she was not passive or submissive. She knew exactly who she was. During the early days of their marriage my mother wanted to put her nursing degree to good use by working part-time outside the home. At the time, my father was completely devoted to Elijah Muhammad, and he devoted all his time and energy toward building the Nation of Islam without any thought toward personal gain. My mother supported his work but also wanted her young family to have a measure of financial stability. She believed that by working she could help put money aside for a home of their own.

  But my father would not even entertain the idea. According to Nation of Islam teachings, the woman's place was at home, devoted to the care of her husband and children. My mother was so unhappy with his refusal that she walked out on him—not once, but three times. The first time, just after Attallah was born, she went to her cousin's house in Brooklyn. The second time, after Qubilah was born, she ran to her father and stepmother's house in Philadelphia. The third time, after I came along, she went back to Detroit. Each time she left she knew my father would find her and bring her home. And she was always happy when he did.

  But as hard as it is to maintain one's sense of self as the wife of a great man, it's even harder to do so as the widow of a martyr. A wife's duty is to love, cherish, and support the man; a widow's duty is to safeguard the legacy. That is an enormous responsibility if a person takes it seriously, and Mommy did. She knew how important to African Americans and oppressed people everywhere—and how unfinished—was my father's work. She knew it could not be left to misinterpretation or allowed to vanish into the dustbin of history.

  One of the many bits of wisdom my mother passed on to us was that everyone has a purpose in this life. God is not random; each of us is here for a reason. Our job is to recognize that reason, embrace it, and put all our strength and effort into achieving whatever purpose the Creator set out for us. “You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem,” my mother used to say, quoting Brother Huey Newton. I spent much of my late teenage and early adult years wondering about my own purpose on this earth, but I never had to wonder about those of my parents.

  More than almost anyone else, Malcolm X brought about a change in African Americans, not just in our social and legal status but in the way we viewed ourselves. Malcolm X taught us that centuries of slavery and oppression had combined to make us believe the myth of inferiority, and to act accordingly. “We didn't land on Plymouth Rock,” he said often. “Plymouth Ro
ck landed on us.” But my father sought to liberate African Americans from the crippling effects of that oppression and myth. He sought to connect us with the true greatness of our heritage. He sought to link our struggle to the struggle of oppressed people everywhere and to empower all people of color to liberate themselves.

  My mother never spoke about her purpose directly, but it was also crystal clear. God put her on this earth to love and support her husband, to raise his six daughters, and to do continuous battle on behalf of poor and struggling people everywhere, whether it was poor women in China, hungry children in Africa, or disaffected people in America. Her purpose was also to ensure my father's contributions were correctly positioned in the great international struggle for human rights.

  By the time I was six or seven my mother had begun securing my father's legacy. She attended several public memorial services held for him. She granted select interviews with magazines such as Ebony and Essence to make sure his memory was kept alive and not distorted by either the government, which feared him, or the well-meaning but misguided groups that sought to manipulate his message for their own purposes.

  “What you have to understand,” she said once in a speech, “is conditions for the African diaspora have not changed appreciably. A lot of very narrow-minded people say ‘by any means necessary' was a violent statement. I say anyone who says ‘by any means necessary' is a violent statement is violent themselves, because it is a comprehensive statement. If you write a proposal, they want to know about options; they want to know about variances. ‘By any means necessary' is not violent. It's comprehensive. It could be political, social, religious.

  “Politics have always been violent. Slander is violent. The violence in a storm, uprooting trees—that's violence. My husband was not violent. He was born into a violent climate. His ancestors came over here from Africa at the bottom of slave ships. He didn't put himself there.”

  In 1972, Mommy oversaw and approved a documentary about Daddy's life directed by Marvin Worth and based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by my father with Alex Haley. My mother's friends Frances and John Keefe told me a story about this time. It took place during a showing of the documentary to benefit the Westchester County Day Care Council, an organization that set standards and developed curriculum for day care centers in our part of New York. My mother served as president of the board of directors for several years in the early 1970s.

  At the end of the film an emotional Mrs. Keefe made her way up the aisle toward Mommy, who was standing near the door greeting people as they left. Seeing my mother there, knowing how much she had suffered, Mrs. Keefe could not keep the tears from streaming down her face.

  An angry young African American woman scoffed at Mrs. Keefe's tears. “What are you crying for, honky?” she said with contempt. “You don't know anything about this.”

  Mrs. Keefe was horrified. She didn't know how to respond to such anger, so she just lowered her eyes and kept walking up the aisle, prepared to keep going straight out into the night. But when she reached my mother, Mommy looked straight into her eyes and smiled. Then she opened her arms.

  “Well, the face of that woman behind me fell,” Mrs. Keefe said, remembering the incident with a laugh. “Betty hugged me and thanked us for coming. She was so regal. She was wonderful.”

  But the woman who safeguards a legacy must be careful. Keeping the flame can become a full-time job, can slowly squeeze out all other aspects of selfhood until there is very little left. Lord knows it would have been easy for my mother to curl up and die after my father was killed, but that's not the kind of person she was. It would have been easy, too, for her to simply crawl inside her widowhood and stay there, to perform a kind of emotional suttee, throwing herself onto her husband's burning funeral pyre. It would have been easy for her to spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Malcolm X.

  But great men marry great women. And great women know they must carry on despite heartbreak and tragedy, know they must carve out a new life not only for their children but for themselves. Coretta Scott King did it by founding the King Center for Non-violent Social Change to educate future generations of civil rights activists. Jacqueline Kennedy did it by marrying one of the world's wealthiest men and using that wealth to carve out some measure of privacy and normalcy for her children in New York City.

  My mother did it by going back to school.

  C H A P T E R F I V E

  Mommy's Home

  I must have been seven or eight years old when Mommy first went back to school. She already had a registered nursing degree from the Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing and was working hard to support us. But hospital hours are long and irregular; trying to schedule her work around our care was difficult and, as she said, the baby-sitting fees were adding up. Mommy decided that if she wanted to build a stable financial foundation for her family, while at the same time positioning herself to carry on the struggle in which she had always believed and for which her husband gave his life, she would have to find a new profession. Naturally enough, she chose education. She began taking classes at Jersey City State College on her way to earning a bachelor's degree in public health administration and a master's degree in early childhood education.

  While my mother went to school, a small cadre of people took turns caring for us. Sometimes our friend and neighbor Mrs. Elise Sherrer would pitch in. Mrs. Sherrer was the foster mother of Jean Owensby, who was also like a sister to us. Jean was closest in age to Attallah and was always in our yard playing or we in hers.

  Sometimes our aunt Ruth, who was really my mother's distant cousin, would come to our house to baby-sit, or take us to her home on Pacific Street in Brooklyn. Aunt Ruth had an oversized studio in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and we loved hanging out with the other children who lived in the neighborhood. Aunt Ruth's block was bigger, wider, and less intimate than ours, which only added to the excitement and feel of being in the city.

  We never thought of ourselves as suburban girls, and no one on Pacific Street ever made us feel that way. Mommy didn't let us roam wild across New York, but she did let us take the train down to Grand Central and the subway out to Aunt Ruth's house if Aunt Ruth couldn't come for us, and so we didn't feel out of place walking along city streets. We were sure we could handle ourselves, and for the most part we did.

  There was one time, though, when I got taken by a local con man. Mommy had brought the three oldest girls beautiful, 24-carat bracelets from St. Croix, and I, in my youthful exuberance, accepted an offer from a local jewelry store owner to “trade.” The bracelet he gave me was twice the size in width of my flowered bracelet from Mommy. I raced back to Aunt Ruth's house to show off my prize.

  “You did what?” Qubilah asked.

  “I traded. Don't you think it's pretty?” I twirled the bracelet around my wrist for her inspection.

  “Yasah, this is not gold,” Qubilah said.

  “Yes it is.”

  “Let me see.” Qubilah took the bracelet from my wrist and scratched it with a coin. Then she held her finger up for my inspection. “Yasah, gold doesn't come off.”

  Qubilah marched me back to that store and demanded the man return my bracelet, which he did. This is one of the stories I think about when people ask me what it was like to grow up in a houseful of girls, because it illustrates the best part of having five sisters: someone always has your back.

  We loved Aunt Ruth. She was not even five feet tall, with ample hips and arresting gray eyes. She spoiled us in some ways, buying us things Mommy did not buy. But Aunt Ruth did have her limits, and when we crossed them, she was old school. When Mommy wanted to physically discipline us, she would take one of the small, wooden paddles—the kind that came with a rubberband-like string and ball attached—and smack our hands a couple of times, relying more upon the pain of her disappointment than the pain of our bodies to make her point. (Still, she used the paddles. I think a lot of parents used that same method, which is probably why they stopped making those paddle balls.
I imagine children all over the country standing in toy stores and shaking their heads, “No, that's okay, Mommy. I don't want another one of those.”)

  But Aunt Ruth wasn't interested in paddles; Aunt Ruth believed in the switch. To us, this was like something from plantation days. The idea of switches was so old-fashioned, so completely unlike our mother that I think the first time Aunt Ruth made clear her intentions we all just sat around, more stunned than afraid. She's going to whip us with what? Our house sat on a hill and you had to climb two sets of stairs to reach the front door; a walkway between the two sets of stairs was graced by a set of bushes. Whenever one of us did something really bad, Aunt Ruth would go out the door, down that long second set of stairs, and break off a piece of one of those bushes. Then, taking her time, she would climb back up, stripping the switch of its leaves as she came. I remember when we once stayed out past our curfew; Aunt Ruth came up the street to the top of the hill that entered into the woods, our playing grounds, at the end of Cedar Avenue, where we hung out with all the other neighborhood children, and spanked us all the way back to our house. My sisters and I tore down that hill, leaving in our wake a trail of laughter from our friends.

  And then there were the housekeepers my mother hired. They, by and large, did not spank us, whether by direction from our mother or of their own restraint, and the result was that we pretty much ran roughshod over them. There were probably a half-dozen in all, but the two who remained with us the longest were Ms. Hopgood and Ms. Thomas.