Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  I took my hustle queen title with me to Dobbs and taught my friends there how to dance. On Saturday nights, when the school held dances with boys from Lawrenceville or Trinity-Pawling, the African American students held alternative dances downstairs in a common room. My friend Tony Abney would bring his records and some friends from the neighborhood. While the rest of the school was rocking to Bruce Springsteen, we were getting down to Stevie Wonder and the Bee Gees. Even after I left Dobbs, the boys from Mount Vernon continued to serve as stand-in boyfriends for the African American girls there, providing music at their parties and escorting the girls to their proms. Karole told me the introduction to my neighborhood completely changed her Dobbs social life.

  At the same time I was dancing my way across Westchester County I was also hoping to become the next Beverly Johnson. When I was thirteen years old a woman who ran a local modeling agency approached my mother and asked if I had ever considered modeling. Naturally, I was thrilled; I immediately saw myself strolling down the runways of Paris and posing for the cover of Vogue.

  Unfortunately, Mommy was less enthusiastic about the idea. “She needs to finish high school first,” she told the woman, gently but firmly shooing her away. To soothe my disappointment Mommy enrolled me in a Barbizon School of Modeling, but it was mainly a distraction. She wanted me to focus on my education and not be swept away by dreams of making it big in the fashion world.

  Still, I enjoyed the classes in makeup, fashion design, poise, and carriage. Throughout high school I did some small runway work, modeling in the occasional mall or charity fashion show, including one at the United Nations. When I finished high school the same woman suggested I try modeling again. “She needs to go to college first,” Mommy said. When I finished college, the woman asked a third time. “She needs to get her master's degree,” Mommy said.

  At that point, taking matters into my own hands, I made an appointment with someone at the Ford Agency. She was a polite but crisp woman who looked me up and down and took less than five minutes to tell me to forget it. It was like, “Next!”

  So ended my modeling career.

  C H A P T E R E I G H T

  Roots

  For African Americans of my generation, Roots was like the assassination of John F. Kennedy: Everybody can remember where they were and what they were doing when the momentous event took place.

  I was fourteen years old and a student at Dobbs. It was a cold week at the end of January and I happened to be staying in the dorm with my friend Karole Dill, which meant that she and I watched the miniseries in a room full of white girls. Every night at nine o'clock we all thundered down to the common room, switched on the television, and, like millions of Americans, were swept away by the horror that was slavery and the bravery and fortitude of those who were slaves. I don't know how the white girls in the room felt—probably they were as shocked as Karole, Veronica, Angela, Kathy, Sandy, and I. Maybe they were also a little ashamed. But I know exactly how we felt: We were horrified. Certainly we knew there had been slavery. I knew, from my lessons with Brother Tawfiq and from Mommy, that slavery had stripped our true heritage from us. But knowing about slavery in a disconnected, intellectual way and seeing it portrayed so vividly are two very different things, especially to fourteen-year-old girls. Seeing the loving and dignified African family that welcomed the baby Kunta into the world filled us with pride (even though the “bush” setting may not have been accurate), but watching our people so abused and degraded night after night filled us with pain. Every night it got worse and worse. Kunta Kinte, handsome and happy and free, being hunted and trapped like an animal and stolen from his home. Kunta Kinte, brutally whipped and hanging from a beam, finally forced to submit, at least outwardly, to the name “Toby.” Kizzy being sold off the plantation and dragged from her parents' arms.

  Every night, when the episode ended, I would stagger up from the television in a kind of daze, raw and alienated from girls who, only hours before, had been my friends. And the next day, as I walked around the dorm and the campus staring at the paintings of great white men and women on the walls, I would wonder: Did you do this, too?

  What's interesting is that I recall absolutely no discussion about the miniseries, not one word. You might think such a vivid recreation of history would be a perfect launching pad for a frank conversation about slavery and race relations in America and that one of the teachers, if not one of us girls, would initiate it. But no, no one said a thing.

  Perhaps partly in response, all of us girls of color tried to reach out to our brothers and sisters. We volunteered to tutor the younger African Americans and Latinas who were placed at various foster care and juvenile facilities in Dobbs Ferry. Working with these girls I found that I identified with them more than I thought I would. In a real way, their existence was mine.

  The following summer I went to camp in Vermont and realized for the first time on a conscious level how few African Americans were around. The realization did not upset me; I still loved camp and had a great time. But once a person steps into the bright light of awareness it's hard to go back into the shadows. And so that was my last year at Camp Betsey Cox.

  By my tenth-grade year at Dobbs, Attallah and Qubilah had both begun college, while Gamilah, Malikah, and Malaak were all in private schools. Although my mother was employed as an associate professor of health administration at Medgar Evers College, she was still having trouble keeping up with all the tuition payments. At one point she called on her adopted mother, Helen Malloy, to help pay my bill at Dobbs.

  After two years, I left Dobbs and enrolled at the Scarborough Country Day school. Mommy never specified the reason for the change, but I assumed it was my oft-stated wish to go to school with boys. I had enjoyed my two years at Dobbs, but its single-sex status felt limiting and unrealistic. Not that I was boy-crazy; I was still a little scared of the whole mating dance. But I wanted to be in a school that felt a little more like the real world.

  The Scarborough Country Day school was about fifteen miles from Dobbs. Scarborough was smaller than Dobbs, with fewer students and a campus that was more quaint than grand. These classrooms were older than those at Dobbs, with wooden desks and less high technology. The teachers had long hair and said “Groovy.” The students were as wealthy as those at Dobbs, but seemed to come from families where the parents seemed largely too busy or too distracted to notice the many ways in which their teenage children were amusing themselves. Everyone had long hair and loved Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead and hated disco; a sign above the stereo in the foggy smoking room read “Disco Sucks!” And tobacco was not the only thing being smoked at Scarborough Country Day.

  There were only a handful of black students at Scarborough, but no one made a big deal of it. I made friends with a girl named Joy, and in our discussions of the issue, we decided Scarborough was fine but we both wanted to attend historically black colleges. It was while I was at Scarborough that the father of a friend of mine, Jon Usadi, pulled me into his study and, like my friend Lisa Anthony's father had, told me how great a man my father was, how admirable he was, and how significant his contributions were to humanity. I thought that was very nice.

  I also made friends with a white girl named Debi who lived in Scarsdale and rode the schoolbus with me. Debi was very pretty and very cool. Her mother kept her nails and her hair “done.” We were only fifteen, but she came to school with hair like Farrah Fawcett's and nails that never saw a chip or a nick and changed colors every week. I was so impressed that one Friday I went home and did my nails. The following Monday I strolled into the lounge and Debi took one look and loudly said, “Oh, Yasah. What did you do—get Lee Press-ons?” I said “Yeah” as nonchalantly as I could and chuckled, but my feelings were hurt. I wasn't that crazy about her afterward.

  Michelle Weiss was the most popular girl at Scarborough. She was blonde and pert and pretty, and one day she invited a group of us to her house for lunch. We ate sitting around the pool in the backyard of her Cha
ppaqua home, and some of the kids drank so much I thought they would never be able to go back to school after lunch. But they did.

  Some days Attallah would pick me up and take me out to lunch. She was attending Manhattanville College and lived nearby, so it was an easy drive for her. I'd sit on the bench outside the main building, a structure that looked like a smaller version of the White House, and watch Attallah drive up in her little Volkswagen bug. I was so proud of my beautiful big sister, and impressed with the way she whipped that little bug around the narrow country roads of upper Westchester County.

  The basketball coach at Scarborough somehow got it into his mind that because I was tall (five feet ten inches) I should join the basketball team. Most of the girls on the team were in excited agreement, Michelle and Cheryll among them. I protested that I, in fact, did not know how to play basketball, had never dribbled a ball, and had never taken a shot in my life. They didn't believe me.

  “All you have to do is run up and down the court,” they said. They seemed to believe that once I laced up my shoes, the spirit of the Harlem Globetrotters would take over and I would be knocking down shots with the best of them. And they were so insistent I finally gave in.

  In the locker room before my first game I watched a few of my teammates warm up by doing shots of Southern Comfort. Then we ran out onto the floor and shook hands with our visitors, a team from a local Catholic school. The ref blew the whistle and the game began. Heart pounding already, I started running up and down the court, just like I'd been told to do. Everybody else was playing ball, but I was running up and down the court, up and down, praying no one was stupid enough to pass the basketball to me. Behind me, I heard Michelle's voice, low and vicious.

  “Get out of my way, you fucking spic!” she hissed.

  For a moment I was confused. What was she talking about? Then I looked at the players from the other team—I'd been too nervous to really look at them before—and realized several of the girls were Latina.

  “Fucking greaseball,” Michelle hissed again in a clutch.

  I was too stunned to say anything, so I just began to run slowly up and down, up and down the court, completely bewildered. Sometimes one of my teammates would try to pass the ball to me. But I either lost it or dropped it or just passed it as quickly as I could and, after awhile, they gave up. When I announced the next day that I was quitting the team, nobody tried to stop me.

  My mother visited the school one day and saw a couple of students wandering around, long-haired and glassy-eyed. She took me out of there after one year.

  In 1978, at the age of fifteen, I entered my third and final high school: the Hackley Preparatory School in Tarrytown. Hackley was a lot more like Dobbs than Scarborough Country Day. It had a big, beautiful campus and a larger student body; it was old and historic and had once been an all-boys school. There was a dress code: Boys had to wear a coat and tie and could not wear blue jeans. The girls' dress code was harder to define. Basically we were forbidden to wear tight, revealing dresses or any manner of seductive dress. But I remember occasionally slipping past in one of my disco dresses— one pink and one ice blue—and struggling up the long, steep hill to the academic building in high heels. It was ridiculous.

  Again, I was among only a handful of black students at Hackley. Gordon Parks's daughter Leslie was there in the lower school, and there were two other girls in my senior class, one of whom was in the same chapter of Jack and Jill as I was. There was a boy named Ashley one year behind me; he played on the football team and was very popular.

  And there was a senior named Benji. They called him Fuck'Em-and-Chuck-'Em Benji, for reasons that are self-explanatory. Benji dated only white girls, which may have bothered some African American girls on other campuses but which secretly made me glad. I didn't want him practicing his love-'em-and-leave-'em techniques on me.

  Interracial dating is a touchy subject, one of those topics that can raise hackles on all sides. The sight of a black man and a white woman or a white man and a black woman strolling hand in hand pushes more buttons in many Americans than an accordionist— fear, guilt, anger, self-loathing, echos of subjugation and exploitation, centuries and centuries of pain. People who don't know me sometimes assume I hold strong views on the topic; they expect the daughter of Malcolm X to be right out front of the segregationist parade, waving the flag for sticking with one's own kind. It is true that my father once preached against integration in general, and interracial marriage in particular, believing there were so many other issues we needed to resolve. That was a stage in his progression and learning, in his assimilation of the varied influences upon his life. One of the truly remarkable things about my father was his capacity for change, for self-improvement and self-analysis. His whole life, especially the latter part of it, was a journey. He was a man who embraced new worlds, new scenery, new ideas. Remember, he was only thirty-nine when he was assassinated, and in those thirty-nine years he never stagnated, but grew and grew.

  Make no mistake: I'm not making excuses for my father, nor apologizing for him. Malcolm X needs no one to make excuses for him. There was the constant refrain that Daddy was changing his beliefs toward the end of his life, an idea at which Mommy scoffed. She said my father used to say that people, especially white people, had pompous gall to insist that he change before white people changed their treatment of African Americans. But in traveling to Mecca and experiencing, for the first time in his American life, true brotherhood with people of all skin colors and hues, my father was blessed with a deeper understanding of humanity. And he was a big enough man to accept that understanding, even if it conflicted with his previous views.

  In his last television interview with Canadian journalist Pierre Berton in Toronto, one month before he was killed, my father said, “I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being, neither white, black, brown, nor red. When you are dealing with humanity as one family, there's no question of integration or inter-marriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being, or one human being living around and with another human being. I must say, though, that I don't think the burden to defend any such position should ever be put upon the black man. Because it is the white man collectively who has shown that he is hostile towards integration and towards intermarriage and towards these other strides towards oneness. So, as a black man, and especially as a black American, I don't think that I would have to defend any stand that I formerly took. Because it's still a reaction of the society and it's a reaction that was produced by the white society.”

  My feeling about interracial dating is this: It's a matter of personal choice. I have never dated a white man, though I have been attracted to a few. I thought Peter Brady on “The Brady Bunch” was cute, Keith Partridge was sexy, and Davy from the Monkees had a nice way of swinging that hair. At Scarborough there was a boy named Bill who had brown hair, a sweet smile, and made my heart speed up whenever he said hello. But he never asked me out and I never did anything to make him think I would be receptive to the idea. At Hackley I admired the looks of Rick Romero and Bill Wolman. But something always held me back from white men; something always told me no. Some of my friends have dated white men and still do; I say God bless them. If you can find someone to love in this world, why would you hesitate to embrace that person based simply on the color of his skin?

  I am bothered, however, by those who are in interracial relationships simply to be with a person of another ethnic group. If an attraction is based on the complexion of the skin rather than the content of the character, if a person wants just to have a white woman because she's white or a black man because he's black, that bothers me.

  Here's a story about my father, told by Dr. Dorothy Height, chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women:

  “I can never forget the time when the United Civil Rights Leadership was called to come to Pleasantville, New York, by Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier shortly after Malcolm X returned from Mecca. Malcolm want
ed to talk, and he asked them to bring us all together. He explained that too much effort was put on dealing with white prejudice, and he thought that much more attention needed to be put on black unity and on our learning to work together.

  “I remember that Lorraine Hansberry was lying on a couch when Malcolm said that we needed to talk to each other and not about each other through the press. She leaned up and said, ‘Well, Malcolm, I agree with you, but how do you think I felt lying in a hospital fighting for my life and I heard you say I was disloyal to my race because I married a white man? You didn't ask me who he was or what I knew about him or why I married him.' And Malcolm just said, very gently, ‘You're perfectly right, sister.'

  “And that was all he said.”

  It was at Hackley that I first heard a white person use the word nigger in my presence. I was hanging out in the recreation room with my friends Liz, Paola, Kristene, Andi, and Michelle. They were sweet girls; we got along famously, consumed, as we all were, with boys and fashion and grades and scoring as high as possible on the SAT. I don't think the subject of race had ever been raised between us.

  Until that afternoon, Liz, flicking back her hair and rolling her eyes for dramatic purposes, mentioned that someone had broken into her father's car. It happened while she and some friends were down in the Village the previous weekend, and since she'd been driving, her father blamed her. He was making her pay for the smashed window out of her own pocket. Liz was incensed.

  We all clucked in sympathy. “That's too bad. Did they take anything? At least they didn't steal the car.”

  “That's true,” Liz said. “But it makes me so mad. How dare those niggers break into my father's car like that?”