Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  “Howie …” I began.

  He cut me off. “Baby, come on. Please don't do this.”

  It was killing me, hearing the pain in his voice. “Please go,” I said.

  “Baby …”

  “Howie, you need to leave!”

  Howie staggered slowly to his feet, stunned by my insistence, by the fact that this was, indeed, the end. I was a little stunned myself; goodness knows I didn't want to lose him. My whole body ached to be back in his arms. But I knew I could never be with Howie again, not after what he'd done. No matter how much it hurt, it had to end.

  My father was physically absent for most of my life, and yet he had managed to teach me how a man should act and what a man should be. My father never cheated on my mother and so that was my standard. A man should not cheat. I would not compromise.

  Of course, now I see it wasn't only my high standards that made me so rock-solid in sending Howie on his way. There was, in that teenage girl, a self-protectiveness already at work, a belief that it was better to sever a relationship as soon as it became clear things weren't going to work out, rather than stay and risk the eviscerating pain of eventually being left behind. I think my teenage heart had already absorbed this painful belief: Men leave. Sometimes even when they don't want to.

  C H A P T E R T E N

  College

  After twelve years in predominantly white schools, I hoped, at the age of sixteen, to spend my college career surrounded by African Americans. I really, really wanted to attend a historically black school.

  I dreamed about Clark and Virginia-Union. I fantasized about becoming a Spellman woman, walking proudly down the streets of Hotlanta on the arm of a Morehouse man. I sent away for applications to several of these schools, but one day before I finished filling them out Mommy woke me and said, “Come on, Yasah. Let's take a ride up to New Paltz.”

  We got in the car and headed up the New York State Thruway, across the gleaming Hudson River, past apple orchards and lush vineyards to the Catskills and this quaint little village and a pretty little campus of the State University of New York. I thought we were just checking it out as a backup school. But my mother climbed from the car and looked around and announced, in so many words, “Well, Yasah, how do you like your new school?”

  It never occurred to me to question Mommy's decision. All my life I had this deep and abiding trust in my mother and her word. If she said to me “Ilyasah, jump over this stick,” I would do it without hesitation because I knew she was leading me in the right direction. So when she said “Go to New Paltz,” I said “Yes ma'am.” Later I figured out she had somehow pulled some strings and gotten me into New Paltz without the usual application process.

  Looking back now, I believe she sent me to New Paltz in part because that was what she could afford. The tuition there was considerably less than my high school tuition, and Mommy had six daughters to put through school.

  But I also think she worried I'd be lost if she sent me south to a historically black college, or to some big university anywhere. I was young and sheltered, largely innocent of racial politics. I was completely unprepared to play the role people would want me to play as the daughter of an African American hero. I had not a clue who I was, either as the daughter of Malcolm X or as simply myself, Ilyasah Shabazz. Mommy probably worried that if I enrolled at a historically black college, the expectations she had so carefully and thoroughly shielded me from my entire life would rise up like a tidal wave and swallow me whole.

  Of course, it happened anyway. Almost.

  The State University of New Paltz was not exactly a “black” college in 1979. Of the more than six thousand undergraduate students, only about ten percent were African Americans or African. Still, that was hundreds of people of color, far more than had attended any school I had gone to. Walking onto campus that first summer I was ecstatic at the sight of so many beautiful faces of color: African Americans, Africans, Latinos, Native Americans, African Caribbeans. All of a sudden it didn't matter that New Paltz was not one of the schools of my dreams; I was just so happy to be at a school with people of color.

  In my exuberance and naivet I greeted every person of color, especially African Americans, I saw walking across the quad. My famous line was “Hi, my name is Ilyasah and I live in 302A Du Bois.” I invited everyone to come visit and I meant it innocently and sincerely. I thought we were all one big family.

  Certainly my new family had already begun exerting its influence, including embracing my full name, Ilyasah. Mommy, for reasons of her own, had set me up in a dorm called Crisspell. She took me out shopping for all the basic dorm room equipment, which I picked out myself: blanket and comforters for my bed, other linen, posters and hot pots and an eight-track clock radio.

  Crisspell was a single-sex dorm and the girls in it were, for the most part, white. My roommate, whose name I can no longer remember, had a curly blonde Afro; she looked a bit like Little Orphan Annie. She was nice, from what I remember; all the girls in my suite were nice. But I barely got to know them because no sooner had my mother kissed me good-bye and departed than a group of older African American students decided I should be in the “black” dorm, named after W. E. B. Du Bois. These students knew who I was because a girl from Mount Vernon named Darlene, who used to hustle with us at my friend Tony's house, was now a student at New Paltz and had already spread the word. The group presented its decision to me as a fait accompli; they arrived, packed up my things, moved me down the hill to Du Bois. It never occurred to me that I had anything to say about this move. I was a tumbleweed blowing in the wind and that wind, usually provided by my mother, was now blowing from a different direction. My people wanted me. I smiled and tumbled along.

  For the first time in my life I became MALCOLM X'S DAUGHTER! Everywhere I went on campus, people already knew who I was or, at least, who they thought I should be. I'd be walking along the path, thinking about my next class, and suddenly someone I didn't know was right up in my face. “Are you Malcolm X's daughter?” It was demanded with such undisguised skepticism I felt like pulling out my ID to prove it to all concerned. “What are you doing here?” Other people would just point and whisper as I passed, their voices traveling on the wind. There she goes! Are you certain that's Malcolm X's daughter? She sure doesn't look it! It was startling and bewildering and a little disturbing. I was sixteen years old. What did they want from me?

  What I knew about my father at this point in my life came not from what I'd read but from what was shared by Mommy and family friends. I knew about Malcolm the husband, Malcolm the father, Malcolm the friend, not Malcolm X the spokesman, the revolutionary, the icon. I knew he was a great man who had made significant contributions to people of the African diaspora and the world, but I didn't know precisely what those contributions were. I didn't know why some people were surprised to learn I was his daughter. I decided I needed to find out.

  I had brought a copy of my father's autobiography with me from home. I sat down to read it, trying to distance myself from the man in its pages, trying not to think of him as my father but as simply a man.

  Even so it was a very emotional experience. Although I'd lived with and played with the Autobiography of Malcolm X all my life, this was the first time I read it with anything approaching adult comprehension. The story of Malcolm Little's transformation into Malcolm X and then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz is one of the most powerful stories of the twentieth century. In some ways it is the story of the twentieth century, of the brutal oppression and degradation of one group of people by another and of that first group's fight to reliberate themselves physically, emotionally, and psychologically.

  Night after night during those first summer months I sat in my dorm room reading and crying. My roommates must have thought I was losing my mind! But reading the story of Malcolm X filled me with awe for the man, for the human being he was. He was different from any man I had ever met or read about or saw on television, so honest and loyal and committed and genuine and deep
ly, deeply spiritual. Reading the Autobiography made me prouder than I already was to be the daughter of Malcolm X. But it also worried me. How in the world could I possibly ever live up to a man like that?

  Much later in my life Attallah told me that all of us sisters called her during our freshman or sophomore years with questions about our identities. She always seemed to have the answers, to have the gift of knocking out our insecurities and uncertainties. “You don't owe an explanation to anyone,” she said. “You are Malcolm X's daughter—you don't have to pass a test. You are his daughter and all he would want for you is to be whole as you explore yourself in this new space.”

  Still, that people expected me to be like my father was becoming quite clear. For one thing, I found myself running for cultural chairperson of the black student union. Somebody suggested it; someone else put my name on the ballot. A girl named Peaches wrote my campaign speech. She told me exactly what to say and how to say it and I stood up before the union and repeated her rhetoric word for word. I won.

  Back in Du Bois, things started off well enough. My suite mates treated me nicely—so nicely that I was surprised, upon visiting the home of one of them over vacation, to find many of my clothes in her bedroom closet. Later I found out she had also been reading my diary when I was out of the room. And then I found out that several of them were talking about me behind my back, saying very hurtful things.

  A friend of mine, named, appropriately enough, Ernest, took me aside one day toward the end of the first semester. “I think you should know,” he said, not quite meeting my eyes. “People are saying things about you.”

  “Really?” I asked, not alarmed. I was unaccustomed to being the subject of rumors. Except for my dust-up with the Chain Gang, I had never encountered the kind of peer maliciousness and hostility that makes the lives of so many teenagers a living hell. Somehow I had slipped untouched through all three of my high schools, protected by Mommy, a compact circle of friends, and an impenetrable armor of guilelessness. It never occurred to me that people—black people, my people—would want to say bad things about me.

  “You know Jessica?” Ernest asked.

  Everybody knew Jessica. She was an upperclassman, a pretty girl, sandy-haired and voluptuous, the campus sexpot who had been around and around. Or so rumor had it.

  “People are saying you're just like Jessica,” Ernest said.

  It turned out my friendly invitations to visit my dorm room had been misjudged. Badly misjudged. The talk was flying fast and furious that I was sleeping my way through freshman year, bedding down with anyone and everyone who walked through my door. My suite mates had done nothing to counter the rumors. They may even have begun them; I don't know.

  Looking back from the advantage of adulthood, I can see that many of my young sisters and brothers were struggling themselves. They were away from home for the first time, thrust into a small-town, predominantly white environment when they were used to the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens; some of them were unprepared for the academic challenges that lay ahead.

  Then, too, I imagine some of the anger stemmed from their disappointment in me. They were expecting Malcolm X's daughter and what they got was a young girl educated in predominantly white schools who knew her African history but didn't seem to grasp the undercurrent of tension on campus between blacks and whites. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I imagine a group of eager, excited students, self-styled revolutionaries all, marching over to Crisspell to liberate the progeny of their hero, the by-any-means-necessary man (though they may not have truly understood what he meant by that statement). I imagine them expecting a girl with flowing locks and a dashiki, expecting a girl with raised fists and burning eyes, expecting a fiery Black Muslim who came to shake up things in sleepy little white New Paltz. And they walk into the room and there I am, sitting on the bed in my little brown T-shirt with my name “Yasah” in tan letters across the front and my tan walking shorts and my cute little sandals and my relaxed hair in a ponytail. “Hi!”

  Whoa.

  Whatever the reasons for the wild rumors, I was so stunned and so hurt by them that I burst into tears. Poor Ernest didn't know what to do. He tried to comfort me and after awhile I calmed down and made my way back to my room.

  I called my girlfriend Kristine. She was a senior at Hackley and we had often talked about her coming up to visit me at New Paltz on a school holiday. “You can't come here, Kristine,” I said. “This is a whole different scene.” Kristine was white and I didn't want her presence to aggravate what was already a bad situation. Maybe no one would have said anything, but I didn't want to take a chance.

  And then, as usual, I turned to Mommy. During a visit home between semesters, I went out to dinner with Mommy and confided in her.

  “People are saying all these things,” I told her, tearing up. “They're saying I sleep with boys, I sleep with girls.”

  “Oh, baby,” she said. Her voice sounded so sad.

  “Mommy, I don't know why they're saying these things. But … I was wondering if I could move off campus?”

  She didn't hesitate. “Of course.”

  I was surprised it was that easy. Yes? Just like that?

  “Oh, thank you, Mommy. Thank you!” And I hugged her and gave her a big, fat kiss. She was so beautiful, my heroine then and always. Looking back now I realize my mother understood my sense of betrayal because she herself had been so bitterly betrayed. She knew I was in pain and she knew she had to help, just the way she always did. She didn't ask how much it would cost or wonder aloud how she would afford it, and I, not thinking in those terms, didn't ask. At the end of my freshman year I moved into the South Side Terrace apartments, about half a mile from campus. One bedroom, a kitchen, dining and living room, bathroom, and a terrace just outside the sliding glass door. When Mommy came to visit my new home she took me out and bought me all new furniture.

  Having experienced the Autobiography, I wanted to explore my father's life and work even more deeply, so I signed up for a class on Malcolm X. The instructor, a very young, very kind visiting professor from Morehouse, Dr. George Roberts, knew who I was without my telling him but was very kind in not making me stand out. The professor would occasionally ask me questions, but only in the way he asked other students. Did you read the assignment? What was Marcus Garvey's influence on Malcolm X? From whom did Elijah Muhammad receive the mantle of leader of the Nation of Islam? He never put me on the spot.

  It was this professor who helped me really understand my father's philosophy and his enormous contribution to our people and to humankind. Again I was deeply moved by Malcolm X's lovingness, his selflessness. It was so beautiful. For the first time in my life I had experienced the lack of unity and self-love that has been so destructive to our people. To understand how hard my father worked to rid us of all that just blew me away.

  One day the professor asked who in class would be ready for a revolution? All hands shot up, as did mine.

  “That's good,” he said. “But the next revolution will be waged not on horseback with shotguns but in these very chairs. The next revolution will be won by our people advancing themselves through education, through each of us taking seriously the responsibility to use what we learn here to attack social and economic injustice.”

  It was around this time that I first met my aunt Hilda. Hilda is my father's eldest sister, the second child and first girl born to Louise and Earl Little. In the Autobiography my father says Hilda was like a second mother to him in the years after his father's murder. She cooked and cleaned and attended to the younger children as their mother struggled to keep the family from falling apart. Although we had little contact with my father's brothers and sisters when I was a child, Mommy never discouraged our interest in that side of the family. When Attallah, at the age of seventeen or eighteen, wanted to reconnect, my mother gave her as much information as she could about the family's whereabouts. Attallah located Aunt Hilda in Massachusetts and went for a visit; she came b
ack beaming with joy.

  “She's wonderful, Ilyasah,” Attallah said. “You really should meet her. You and she look just alike!”

  When I got to college and began exploring my father's life, I telephoned Aunt Hilda. She was pleased to hear from me and promptly invited me to visit her in Massachusetts. I drove up one weekend with my friends Eliot and Danielle, excited and a little nervous about meeting this new relation. But Aunt Hilda put me immediately at ease, hugging me and welcoming me into her home.

  “We do look alike,” I told her, delighted. She was tall and strong-looking and brown-skinned just like I was. I thought she might be me in forty years.

  “Actually,” she said with a smile, “you look more like your aunt Yvonne.”

  We spent the whole weekend shopping and sightseeing around Boston and talking nonstop. One of the first things she told me was that she had dreamed about my father in those first, painful days after his assassination.

  “He came to me and told me everything was okay where he was,” Aunt Hilda told me. “He said, ‘It's so peaceful here. There's not a worry in the world.' ”

  Hearing her story affirmed my belief that Daddy was in a better place and gave me an amazing sense of peace.

  Aunt Hilda also told me her mother was deliberately and cruelly harassed into a state of nervous exhaustion and then stripped of her children and placed in a mental institution because a local probate judge coveted the family land. He put incredible pressure on Louise Little to sell, telling her she could receive welfare and still own the land. She refused to sell but that didn't stop him. He arranged for her monthly widow's support check to come through him, and every time she went to pick it up, he pressured her more. She was alone, without support, struggling to raise eight children, and eventually her physical health declined and the authorities pounced. Despite her education and intellect, Louise Little was a black woman alone in 1930s America; she had no defense against the power of white officials. On the day she was taken away, welfare officials came to the house and told her they would take her somewhere where she would be given food and clothing for the children. They promised to bring her back that afternoon, but she never returned to that house.