“Ibti, good to see you,” Coach Mustilli said, walking toward me with his mask in his hand. When he got closer to me, he reached for his glasses, which were lying on a nearby table. We exchanged small talk, but neither of us were really good at it. Soon there was an awkward pause in the conversation, and Coach Mustilli stared at me expectantly.
“What can I do for you, Ibtihaj?” he finally asked.
I wanted to say, Can you help me makes sense of my life? Instead I settled for, “Do you think you could give me a lesson?”
Coach gave me a funny look, but he said okay. “Get your gear on,” he said and went into his office. I already had on sweats and a long-sleeved shirt, so I walked over to the equipment area to find what I needed. I pulled a saber out of the rack of weapons and found a spare mask and glove.
“Do some warm-ups,” Coach yelled from his office. I ran around the court a few times, and stretched out my legs and arms. Part of me felt like I was wasting the coach’s time with my request for a lesson, but I pushed those feelings aside, because I needed to be in this safe space again.
We set up on strip number one—there were twelve different strips on the floor—and Coach took me back through all of my best high school moves. It felt like coming home. I easily parried and lunged and landed the most fluid attacks on my former coach.
Thirty minutes later, Coach Mustilli was panting, but I was just getting warmed up.
“Coach,” I said half laughing but still serious, “can you give me a harder lesson?”
Coach raised his thick, bushy eyebrows. “Okay, Ibtihaj, let’s see what you’ve got,” he said. And then he let me have it. It was the first time Coach Mustilli treated me like an equal opponent. He didn’t hold back. He ran me up and down the strip, giving me the hardest lesson I’d ever had. I met him lunge for lunge, attack for attack. I was quick on my toes, and my saber sliced through the air. The sounds of our blades clashing and an occasional roar filled the room. I could feel the electricity coursing through the air like I was coming alive for the first time in months, and I loved it. I was in control, and no one could take that feeling away.
Finally, Coach Mustilli yelled, “Time!” We were both out of breath now. I took off my mask, taking in big gulps of air, and smiled at Coach Mustilli. “That was awesome, Coach.”
He walked slowly off the strip and over to the tables. He got two bottles of water from his cooler and beckoned me over to sit down. The sweat was pouring off his face now, and his black hair, now lightly streaked with gray, was plastered across his forehead. He took a healthy swig of water before asking, “Ibtihaj, what are you doing here? What do you really want?”
I was unprepared for this question. What did I want?
“What I saw out there,” Coach continued, still trying to catch his breath, “was something I didn’t know you had.”
My eyes grew wide in surprise. “Really. You think I still have talent?”
“Talent? Ibti, I don’t think you’ve even hit your peak yet. I think if you want to go all the way with fencing you can.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. No one had ever said this to me before. Not at Duke and not even at the foundation. And I never really imagined anything beyond college fencing.
“What do you mean go all the way, Coach?” I asked nervously.
“I mean that you should think about competing on the international circuit and maybe even think about the Olympics,” Coach Mustilli said. “I’m serious. I saw something out there today that I honestly didn’t know you had.”
I beamed from inside and out. After all of the recent rejections, this assessment of my potential ignited a spark that I thought had long since been extinguished.
“Don’t thank me, Ibti,” Coach Mustilli said with a warning in his tone. “If you decide to actually take up the challenge, it won’t be easy. In fact, it’ll be the hardest thing you’ll probably ever do. Being a champion is a long, lonely road. You’ll have to get up every morning hungry, and you can’t go to bed until you’ve exhausted yourself. Every single day. And there won’t be anyone on this path with you. It’s you, and that’s it.”
Even though I trusted Coach Mustilli with all of my fencing aspirations, I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the existential life crisis I was currently living in, questioning my very purpose in the world. I didn’t think he needed to hear that his words were literally feeding my soul at that moment.
“Do you think you can do it?” Coach Mustilli asked, interrupting the jumble of thoughts and emotions running through my mind. But what I heard then in his question wasn’t could I handle the hard work as a full-time athlete? What I heard was would you like some purpose in your life again?
“Yes. I’m up for it,” I said to Coach Mustilli, quietly at first, and then I repeated it again to convince the coach, but also myself.
“Okay, Ibti,” Coach Mustilli said with a smile, “if there’s anyone I know who has the strength and determination to do this, it’s you.”
“Thanks, Coach,” I said, returning his smile.
“Don’t thank me, Ibtihaj, until you win. Until then, your life is going to be harder than it’s ever been before.”
CHAPTER 9
Don’t let the hand you hold hold you down.
—JULIA DE BURGOS
Once I committed myself to fencing again, my life became a nonstop hustle to support my training. Now that I had found a purpose, I had to figure out how to make money. Unlike a regular career where a person earned money, I had to spend money to support my fencing pursuits. More specifically, I needed a high-paying, flexible source of income. I knew it was time to rethink substitute teaching.
Being a substitute teacher not only paid relatively well, but it also allowed me to pick and choose assignments that worked with my training and travel schedule. Originally, I registered to teach in my own school district, but my mom informed me that I could make more money in the Newark public schools, despite its record number of failing and struggling institutions. I quickly landed a long-term sub position teaching art history at the Malcolm X Shabazz High School in Newark. This school had recently been assessed as “one of the country’s most troubled high schools,” but I was willing to give it a try.
On my first day on the job, I walked into my classroom and tried to present myself as an authority figure, someone confident and intelligent, but inside I was a nervous wreck. The thirty kids in the classroom—all juniors and seniors—were only a few years younger than me, and I was afraid they wouldn’t respect me. I had precisely one minute to prove my worth. After taking attendance, I asked the students to read in their textbooks, per the instructions that their teacher had left. Half of the students didn’t even bother to open their books and simply took up the conversations they were previously having. When I asked one girl to please take out her book, she snapped, “I’m not reading anything in this class, and don’t ask me again!”
I was shocked by the student’s blatant disrespect and, honestly, I was a little bit worried too by the naked hostility emanating from these teens. I knew this job was going to be challenging, but I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for what I confronted in the classroom. No one wanted to do any work. The students wouldn’t listen to me, and I felt like I didn’t have the tools to make anything better. But I was committed to making it work. Teaching was a means to an end, and I had to figure it out. I talked to the principal, and I talked to my mom. I consulted with other teachers and quickly realized that I wasn’t going to be teaching as much as I would be making sure the students stayed in the classroom for the forty-five minutes they were supposed to be learning art history with me. Sometimes I called my job glorified babysitting. Sometimes I felt like I was letting everyone down, but this was what I was given, and I didn’t have a whole lot of other options.
My parents bought my sister Asiya and me a car to share so that we could get ourselves to our respective jobs and school without having to rely on public transportation. I went to wor
k at my teaching job, then hopped on a train to Manhattan to work out at the foundation. Three days a week I’d train from five to nine p.m. On the days I wasn’t at the foundation, I’d be at the gym, doing exercises to improve my speed and agility. On Saturday mornings, I would teach young kids at the foundation, and Saturday afternoons were dedicated to more training and private lessons. I was hustling like a pro, but the only problem was that I didn’t exactly know what I was hustling for. I couldn’t visualize the prize because I didn’t exactly know what the prize was. A spot on the national fencing team? Qualifying for the Olympic Games in 2012? These were ideas I got from random conversations with the coaches at the foundation, but I didn’t really understand how it all was supposed to work, and no one stepped up to lead the way.
Even though Coach Mustilli told me he believed I had what it took to make it all the way to the Olympics, my path to becoming a world-class athlete didn’t suddenly materialize. I felt like I did my part in that I gave myself over to fencing 100 percent. I stopped looking for corporate jobs, and I put law school farther down on my list of priorities. I arranged my life so that I could afford to travel and compete on the fencing circuit, but there was a key detail missing. I didn’t know what part of my training or fencing to change in order to get better.
I’d been grinding like a workhorse for months but didn’t have much to show for it. I hadn’t broken through on the domestic circuit yet, so my national ranking was barely worth mentioning. And my family and friends all thought I was crazy for focusing so much on fencing when I had a degree from one of the nation’s top universities. I was beginning to doubt my plans, too. And having Sam as my coach again at the foundation wasn’t helping. Sam had me doing the same workouts I’d been doing in high school. He barely changed my training schedule. I asked Peter if there was another coach I could train with, but he said Sam was the only saber coach with Olympic experience. He was the saber coach at the foundation.
“But I need something more,” I said to Peter as we sat in his office. “I want to go all the way with this.”
“There’s no one standing in your way. If you want to go all the way that’s on you,” Peter replied.
“But I’ve been working with Sam for almost six months now, and every lesson is the same,” I said. “I just feel like I’m stagnating, and it’s pretty obvious Sam isn’t interested in my development.”
“How old are you?” Peter asked, squinting at me as if he were seeing me for the first time.
“I’m twenty-three,” I said, trying to keep the defensive tone out of my voice. By my age, most athletes who were considered to have any real Olympic potential already had cadet, junior, or even senior national teams under their belts. Meanwhile, I knew my name wasn’t even on the radar for the foundation coaches. But Peter had never let age stop him from competing.
He pursed his lips and tented his fingers in front of him. “Ibtihaj, you do remember that we urged you to stay here instead of going off to Duke. I’m not saying you can’t do it, but you’ve made it hard on yourself. No one here is going to stop you from chasing your dreams, but I don’t know if it’s a realistic goal for you.”
My heart sank. My hero was telling me that it might be too late to follow my dreams. The truth was out. He didn’t believe in me. The foundation didn’t believe I could make it. They looked at this pursuit as a joke. Here I was doing everything I knew how to do, but I needed something else. I needed someone else to be able to look at what I was doing and then tell me how to do it differently or better. Part of me felt angry at Peter and Sam because they knew I wanted to get ahead, yet they wouldn’t take the time to focus on me. Maybe I was too old? If I really had the talent to be successful in the sport like Coach Mustilli said, why wasn’t the foundation taking my effort more seriously by helping me get to the top? I considered leaving the foundation in search of a new coach, but I felt a deep loyalty to the foundation and to my teammates there who had become more like family. Leaving the foundation would have repercussions beyond losing the support, camaraderie, and good will of my friends—I felt like I’d be considered a traitor to the unspoken brother/sisterhood of Black fencers. When participating in a sport that is so overwhelmingly white like fencing, it did make a difference to have a strong support system made up of Black fencers who understood the rules and nuances of the sport and could help a younger fencer navigate the game both on and off the strip. So I wasn’t going to leave my fencing home. But I knew something was going to have to change in my life, because I felt like I was putting in all of the work and only getting grief in return.
The grief wasn’t only happening at the foundation.
“You talk white!” The accusation was hurled like an insult, and that’s exactly what it felt like. Even though I was standing in the front of the classroom as the teacher, a student named Deliah Jones had taken me all the way back to the hell I’d experienced as a kid.
“Yeah, Ms. Muhammad, you sound all proper when you talk,” a boy named Terrance, who actually looked mixed race to me, said. “Is your daddy white?”
I closed my eyes and drew in a deep breath. “No,” I said through gritted teeth. “The fact that I speak grammatically correct English doesn’t make me white.”
“Dang, she do talk white!” another kid called out, and then the room erupted in laughter. They didn’t have much to say about their schoolwork, but just about everyone in the classroom had something to say about me and how “white” I really was. I so desperately wanted them to know that I wasn’t their enemy, that we had a shared history in common, that they had descended from greatness and didn’t have to shun their education, but every attempt I’d made to get them to really listen to me had failed.
“Okay, you guys, when you’re finished having your fun and you’re ready to get back to work, let me know,” I said and I retreated to my sanctuary behind my desk. There I plopped down, took my book out of my bag, and tried to read while my students tried their best not to read. I scanned the words on the page, but couldn’t drown out the sound of the students’ giggles and snide remarks. I wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing me upset, but it took a lot to do so. For probably the hundredth time in less than a week I had to remind myself that working at this school served a purpose besides a paycheck.
One of the main reasons I continued to show up every day to Malcolm X Shabazz High School was because my father’s mother, Louella, had moved back to Newark, and her home was only a five-minute drive from the school. At the urging of my father, sometimes on my lunch break, I would drive over to check up on her, make sure she was doing okay, because she was now in her eighties. On the days I didn’t have to go into New York after work for fencing practice, I’d sometimes stop in then, too. Soon, I grew to look forward to those visits as the highlights of my day. My grandmother was beautiful and full of life. People always said we looked alike, which always made me feel like we shared a special bond.
My grandmother always had wonderful stories to tell me about her childhood and what it was like raising twelve children alone. Abu rarely spoke about his childhood, so these stories were all new to me, and I loved hearing about where I came from and what my father was like as a child. For instance, even though my grandmother wasn’t Muslim, she told me that Abu had actually first become intrigued by Islam, not by his brothers joining the Nation of Islam, but from watching his favorite childhood movie, Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas! I never knew that, and it made me feel even closer to my dad.
Unfortunately, my grandmother got really sick during this time and refused to go to the hospital. She was from a generation of Black people who avoided hospitals like the plague—she birthed all twelve of her children at home—and nothing I said or did would convince her to seek medical treatment beyond visiting her primary care doctor, who could only offer palliative care. I supported her the best way that I knew how, by continuing and even increasing my visits. It was crushing to watch my grandmother slowly die, and yet it felt like I had been divinely
placed there by Allah to take care of her. I was so grateful I had the privilege of being nearby so we could spend her last days together.
On some of my weakest days, when I wanted to give up on those loud, rambunctious kids, or when Sam pressed all of my buttons and I just wanted to quit everything, I would witness firsthand my grandmother’s resilience and strength, and it made me dig deeper into my own reserves of strength. Watching her struggle inspired me to press on with my own challenges. It put everything I was going through in perspective. I didn’t like to complain to my grandmother, thinking she didn’t need to worry about my problems on top of her own, but she knew I was having a hard time. She could see it on my face, she said. Sometimes I’d tell her a bit about what was going on in my life, including the temptation to quit everything.
“You’re going to be okay,” she’d say. “But you can’t give up, because the minute you do, it all comes crashing down. I promise you, if you get up every day and put one foot in front of the other, and don’t give up, that’s the answer. How do you think I managed by myself all these years, with all those kids? Did I know everything was going to work out? No, I just never stopped.”
I smiled. “You’re so strong, Grandma.”
“And you have my same spirit, Ibtihaj. You just keep moving forward and don’t take any mess from anyone who tries to tell you different.”
Visiting my grandmother’s house every day and watching the strength she carried even when she was in pain made me take her words to heart. If she could carry on, so could I. I just had to remind myself that all the work I was doing to become a better fencer would eventually come to fruition.
The problem was, whether I wanted to admit it or not, what other people thought bothered me. No one thinks a career in sports is a “real thing” unless it involves the NBA, NFL, or a big paycheck. People thought I was crazy for choosing an obscure sport like fencing in the first place and then crazier for sticking with it. I could ration off some of the blame to my parents or my religion about why I’d picked up fencing in high school, but the decision to keep going at twenty-three years of age was my weight to carry alone.
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