Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  I admired, if not exactly loved, our principal, Miss Ellis. She was a pretty, well-traveled, and impeccably put together Caribbean woman who ran the school like a drill sergeant. She issued commands and expected results. If you did something so awful as to warrant a trip to Miss Ellis, heaven help you. We feared Miss Ellis. She was so intimidating that students would begin crying and hiccuping even before they got to her office.

  None of the teachers at St. Joseph's ever said anything to me about my father. If they knew who he was, and I'm sure they did since Attallah had attended the school before me, they kept their opinions about him to themselves.

  But some of the children knew—or rather their parents knew. And not everyone was happy about it. There was a girl at St. Joseph's named Claudine. Her mother was from Trinidad and her father from Switzerland and she was smart and funny and sweet and, like me, loved to dance. We hit it off immediately and became good friends. Claudine's mother was an intelligent and very strict woman who did not approve of Malcolm X and what she thought was his message. I don't know how I knew this—she never said anything to me directly—but I did.

  One year Mommy went to a leather goods warehouse and bought a stack of purses for my sisters and me to give to our friends as Christmas presents. I picked the best of the bunch for Claudine, who accepted the gift with a squeal and a hug. But the next time I saw her, she gave the purse back.

  “I'm sorry,” she said. “My mother will not let me accept it.”

  “Why not?”

  Poor Claudine looked as baffled as I felt. “You know. Because of your father.”

  I probably went home and asked Mommy, who treated the incident lightly and said something warm and distracting like “Well, precious, some people are just confused,” and then sent me on my way. That was the way Mommy handled things and it worked pretty well; I don't remember being unduly upset by the incident and Claudine and I remained good friends (and are to this day). But I'm sure somewhere deep inside it had to hurt. My ten-year-old mind had to wonder why someone's mother did not want me giving her gifts. What did Daddy ever do to her?

  I remember only one similar incident when the media-distorted image of my father directly affected my little world. There was a girl in my neighborhood named Renee. One day she told me flat out that her mother didn't want her playing with me because my father was Malcolm X and therefore I must, in some way, be “bad.” One day not long afterward I happened to run into Renee's mother on the street. “I never liked your father,” she said. Her eyes were wet and she was walking funny and her breath smelled strangely sweet and so I just walked around her and went on home. I tried to dismiss her comments; everyone knew Renee's mother was an alcoholic, anyway. But in a way that just made it hurt more. How could someone with a drinking problem think she was better than my father? How could she think she was better than me?

  I loved all the friends I made at St. Joseph's: Kim and Sybil and Yvette and Carla and Monique and Claudine and Lisa. At the end of each school year we would get together and perform a dance number for the other students at the school, sometimes joined by a girl named Robin Givens. Robin was as pretty then as she is now, and everything she wore fit as if it had been hand-tailored just for her, which maybe it was. She was always perfectly coifed, even when we were practicing our dance routines. And practice we did, for weeks ahead of time in one another's basements. I usually choreographed, taking various steps I had learned from my lessons in African dance and modern dance and combining them with whatever moves I saw on “Soul Train” that week: the penguin or the funky chicken mixed together with copious glides and splits. Whatever we saw the Jackson Five or the Spinners or the Temptations doing is what we did while singing along to “Stop, the Love You Save” or “Papa Was a Rolling Stone.”

  For all those reasons, graduation from St. Joseph's was very emotional for me. I was thirteen years old, poised at the threshold of adulthood but not quite sure I really wanted to step into that room. My friends and I would all be going to different high schools in the fall, and although we would still see one another, it would not be the same. Graduation was the breaking up of our family, the end of my being the mother hen to all my friends, the end of our childhood. We were moving on.

  My mother helped eased the pain by letting me buy platform shoes for the graduation ceremony. All my friends had been strutting around in platforms for years, but Mommy did not believe in fads. She bought us Hush Puppies, Stride Rites, oxfords: sturdy, sensible, boring shoes. Some of the shoes she bought us were so tough we could have worked construction in them. But in honor of my maturing sensibilities, Mommy took me shopping and let me pick out a snazzy pair of camel-colored platform sandals and a gorgeous, camel-colored pantsuit. My mother always wore suits and so, standing in that dressing room mirror, looking at myself, I felt more like her, so grown-up and mature. I was sharp.

  I wore that suit and my new platforms to graduation with pride, and performed, along with my friends, a final dance tribute to St. Joseph's to the tune “Maybe Tomorrow.” We danced and raised our voices along with Michael Jackson's as tears streamed down our faces. It was kind of pathetic. Afterward Mommy gave me my graduation presents: a new watch, a new pocketbook, and a wallet to match. The wallet especially was exciting; after years of just tossing my money into my purse any old way, I could now place my dollar bills neatly in one compartment and my change in another. I felt so grown and organized. Mommy always told me I had to treat my money with respect.

  In celebration, Mommy took me and a group of friends to the Embassy Diner, a favorite hangout of ours because the french fries were delicious and all the booths had little jukeboxes right there on the tables. We pooled our quarters and played Michael Jackson songs again and again, dancing near our table until Kitty the waitress came rushing up and told us to sit down.

  Attallah and Qubilah were attending the United Nations International School in Manhattan, but that fall I enrolled in the Masters School, a private and, at the time, all-girls school in Dobbs Ferry. At the interview my mother sat up proud and straight and beautiful and answered every question the admissions staff threw my way. Finally one of them said, very kindly, “Well, Dr. Shabazz, can she speak?” But I couldn't, not really. I managed to squeak out enough intelligible words to get me admitted, but they had seen the reality of my life. My mother always spoke for me, just as she did for my sisters. My mother did everything for us, bless her heart.

  Walking onto the Masters campus for the first time I felt as though I had fallen into the pages of some English novel. The grounds were immaculately manicured, the buildings stately and stone, the view over the Hudson River magnificent. The girls were shiny and beautiful and sophisticated; they had perfect posture and smoked cigarettes in the rec room and talked casually about sex. Everything about the Masters School was beautiful and everything exuded wealth.

  I entered Masters—or Dobbs, as we called it—as a freshman, having skipped eighth grade like many graduates of St. Joseph's. This made me younger than most of the girls in my class, but because of my height and physical development, the difference was not readily apparent. I was one of five new African American girls, a veritable wave of diversity in a school that just the year before had counted only four African Americans among its student body of about 250.

  Dobbs was a boarding school, but my mother did not want and could not afford for me to board. So every morning I had to rise before the sun to catch the bus at 5:45 a.m. My poor mother would come to my room, flip on the light, and plead with me, “Ilyasah, would you please wake up? You're going to miss the bus.”

  “It's too early!” I'd cry, pulling a pillow over my head.

  The bus drove all over lower Westchester picking up day girls, as we were called to distinguish us from the boarding students. There were about fifteen of us, scattered throughout Bronxville, Scarsdale, Hartsdale, White Plains. I was the only one from Mount Vernon.

  There were things I liked about Dobbs. I liked occasionally spending the nig
ht with my friend Karole Dill in one of the dorms. Karole was, like me, younger than our classmates and very, very smart. My mother loved her because on the day we first came to visit Dobbs, Karole took us on a tour of the school. My mother was already impressed by this bright, young sister who seemed so confident and self-assured. And then we got to Karole's room and there, hanging proudly on the wall, was a big poster of my father. It turned out Karole had studied Malcolm X Speaks as a young child in summer school at Uhuru Sasa School at The East in Brooklyn. Once my mother heard this bit of information, Karole was in.

  I enjoyed assembly, when the entire school community would gather in the auditorium each morning to hear guest speakers or have a school discussion on some topic. I liked my English teacher, Miss Marks, though she was pale and nervous and always slightly startled, like a bird. Nonetheless she introduced us to Thoreau and Salinger and in class we would veer off into wide-ranging discussions about life and the meaning thereof. I loved my dance instructor, Marlene Furtek, and the classes in modern, tap, and ballet. I loved my French instructor, Madame Davidson, and French class where the desks had earphones that let you hear the lesson translated at just your speed.

  What I did not like about Dobbs was American history class; it was boring and mundane and in those stories of brave white men fighting for their freedom I saw no relevance to my life. I didn't care about the Revolutionary War or Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. To me, American history was boring and dark and depressing.

  What I also disliked about Dobbs was having to come home each afternoon on the bus, riding through the neighborhood like some big dork, the only black face among a sea of white people. It wasn't being among whites that embarrassed me, it was the high visibility, the disconnected nature of coming home at a different time in a different way from a different school. When the bus turned the corner onto the tree-lined streets of my neighborhood, I would slouch down low in my seat, praying my friends would stay inside their homes for the minutes it would take me to race from the bus to my front door.

  But it was while I was a student at Dobbs that I began to emerge from the protective cocoon Mommy had spun for all of us. Sometimes I joke that my mother raised six princesses, or six kept women—that's how much she satisfied our every need and desire, and kept us sheltered from the outside. She kept us so sheltered that we grew up with little understanding of how difficult, and even cruel, the world could be. But by my fourteenth year, I began to understand.

  When I was twelve or so, a girl named Deirdre moved into her grandmother's house on East 5th Street, two blocks from our house, and because she was my age and because she was so nice, we quickly became friends. Deirdre was tall and caramel-colored and beautiful; she looked like a young Vanessa Williams, only much prettier. She was so pretty that a lot of girls hated her.

  One day as we were walking up East 5th Street toward my house, a group of girls appeared out of nowhere and began calling our names. Although we knew them and they knew us, these were not girls from our neighborhood. They were from the South Side and they were tough girls, gang girls, all fists and nails and attitude. They called themselves the Chain Gang and had taken to hanging around our community because one of them, Sharon, had a crush on my friend Tony Abney. Tony was very popular.

  They walked toward us, calling our names and smiling all the while. “Hey, Yasah, we just want to talk to Deirdre a minute, just a minute, don't worry, come on.” Before I realized what was happening, they had Deirdre on the ground, smashing her with their fists and ripping off her clothes. By the time I jumped into the crowd, Deirdre was a screaming, crying mess. Her shirt was gone, her bra exposed. The fox coat she'd been wearing looked like the pelt of a mangy dog. I got the girls off her but only because they were finished anyway. They walked off, laughing. One of the girls, her name was Carol, called back a parting shot. “Guess you don't think you're all that cute now.”

  I don't know who was more shocked, Deirdre or me. I couldn't get over the fact that they'd beat her up just because she was beautiful.

  One day I decided to give Tony Abney a present. We were good friends; Tony treated me like a little sister and I looked up to him and wanted to thank him for being so nice to me. At any rate, when I decided to give him a present, I walked into the campus bookstore at Dobbs and found this beautiful hunter green leather-bound journal. I charged it, the way I charged a hundred things at the store, not understanding my mother had to pay those charges at the end of each month.

  And so, I inscribed the book “To Tony, love, Yasah,” and gave it to him. A few days later a girl appeared at our front door, asking for me. It was Sharon from the South Side. She looked me up and down, curled her lip, then held out Tony's journal as if it were a snake. “What the hell do you think you're doing giving my man this book?” she asked.

  Although she was clearly threatening me, I wasn't frightened, only confused. Her man? What did that mean? Why couldn't I give my friend a present if I wanted to? What difference did it make to her? I didn't know anything about jealousy. I didn't know anything about possessiveness. I had never experienced the deep, violent fear of a teenage girl who thought she might lose the one thing of value in her life. So I said, “Tony's my friend. If I want to give him a book, I will.”

  The next thing I knew, the Chain Gang was looking to jump me. I managed to avoid them for a while, but one day as Gamilah and I were walking home from the train station we saw, up ahead of us, a girl named Charmaine. I was instantly on alert, because I knew she was Sharon's best friend. But Charmaine just smiled and waved and went on her way. After a few minutes, I relaxed. Maybe the Chain Gang had taken me off their list.

  We rounded the corner to our street, walked two blocks, and stopped in our tracks. There, at the side entrance to my house, stood a group of girls waiting for us. Apparently Charmaine had smiled to lure us into a false sense of security, then run onto the block and sounded the alarm: “Yo, Sharon! Yasah and Gamilah are on their way down the street!” By the time we approached the Cedar Avenue corner of our house, there they stood.

  “What are we going to do?” Gamilah asked. She was terrified. She couldn't let that gang beat up her sister, but she didn't want to fight either.

  “I don't know.” If we ran, they would catch us and beat us. If we kept walking, they'd catch us and beat us. There didn't seem to be a good solution either way.

  But just as we were about to raise our fists and give up hope, Mommy appeared like an angel, walking down the last set of stairs from our front door. At the sight of her, my eyes flooded with tears of relief. Speaking with firmness but warmth, she told the girls to go home, there would be no fighting that day or any day, we could not afford to fight ourselves when there was so much injustice against African people all over the world that needed to be fought. She was wearing a nightgown and robe, but I thought she looked more majestic than I had ever seen her look and my heart flooded with love. The tension in the air dissolved instantly. One by one, the girls wandered off down the street. They weren't happy, but no one threatened us or spoke to us or said anything disrespectful. They just turned and left. Gamilah and I went inside, and later, when Qubilah came home, I told her how frightened I had been. She told me if anyone ever tried to beat me up, the best line of defense was to act crazy, to start swinging wildly and grunting and screaming and, if possible, foaming at the mouth. Then they would leave me alone.

  I never did get jumped by the Chain Gang, thank God. I stayed close to home for a few days, then avoided Sharon and Charmaine and the others altogether for a few weeks, and after awhile my name got pushed down on the Chain Gang Hate List, replaced by some other soul who made the mistake of smiling at somebody's boyfriend, or thinking herself cute, or being smart and showing it, or otherwise trying to live her turbulent adolescent life.

  Later on, after I'd graduated from college and was living on my own, I ran into one of the old Chain Gang members. Her hair was brittle and broken, her face was worn, and in one of her fights, she had chi
pped a front tooth. She looked exhausted, though it was only eight o'clock in the morning, and I was going to pretend not to see her as we passed in the restaurant parking lot, not for my sake but for hers. But she recognized me and smiled and I smiled back and waved. We both said hello.

  Michael Peeples was the hustle king of Lower Westchester County and, at thirteen, I was his queen. Michael was like Fred Astaire with soul, John Travolta with funk. Everybody wanted to dance with Michael, everybody wanted to be his partner, but he chose me.

  He was two years older than me, a tall, good-looking, ebony young man of Caribbean descent. He was wildly popular and dated lots of girls, including my friend Lisa and my play cousin Simone, but he always treated me like a little sister and I looked up to him as a trusted friend. My mother liked him so much she allowed him to escort me to parties when no one else could.

  We would practice in each other's living rooms on Saturdays, perfecting our steps, working our groove. Then, on Saturday night, we hit the town: dances at Mount Vernon high, clubs like the T-Connection in the Bronx and the Diamond J in White Plains. Everywhere we went, we stole the show. Michael always wore a three-piece suit; I wore shimmery little disco dresses and tried not to trip in my platform shoes. (It actually happened once, at the T-Connection. We had just finished dancing and were leaving and I skidded in my brand-new, very grown-up high heels and slid on my bottom all the way down a flight of stairs.)

  It was all very Saturday Night Fever. We'd step into the ballroom with the music blasting and the mirrored ball spinning and the colored lights flashing, and it was all so exciting for a young girl. The dance floor would be packed with couples shaking their stuff, but when Michael grabbed my hand and spun me around, the crowds parted. We danced our little hearts out.

  Sometimes, driving to or from one of the dances, we would stop at a traffic light, jump out of the car, hustle a bit in the glow of our headlights, then jump back in and drive away. Other times Michael would steer the car to some brightly lit parking lot, say the one of the local Corvette dealership, and we'd jump out, dance a few steps for the surprised salesmen, then get back in the car and roar off into the night, laughing all the way.