Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  In this case, Ed had the usual narrow, fragmented, and, in some ways, completely false understanding of Malcolm X and his contribution to this country and the world. Ed suggested Malcolm X was a fire-breathing radical who more than distrusted white people—he hated and despised them.

  “Are you kidding? Malcolm X was ten times worse than my friend!” Ed laughed. “Didn't he call us all blue-eyed devils? Didn't he want nothing to do with us?”

  “So you don't think Malcolm X would have a daughter like me?” I asked.

  Ed shook his head hard. “No way!” he said. “No way.”

  I like to tell that story because it says so much—not only about how deeply and sadly Malcolm X is misunderstood in America today, but also about how that misunderstanding often casts its shadow upon my sisters and myself.

  Being the daughter of Malcolm X and Dr. Betty Shabazz is a gift for which I am forever grateful. Malcolm X was a man absolutely committed to changing the way people of African descent viewed themselves, one another, and their place in world history. He attempted to destroy the psychological scars and racial barriers that kept a people from reaching its full potential. He gave African Americans one of the greatest gifts possible, the gift of self-respect. He is my hero and my mother is my heroine. I wouldn't change that for anything in this world.

  Yet growing up as the child of two such astonishingly strong and determined people wasn't always easy. When people hear the name Malcolm X they tend to have a strong reaction, either quite positive or very negative, like Ed. Each reaction carries its own weight.

  Mommy did a remarkable job of shielding my sisters and me from all that when we were children, but she could not shield us forever. In my adolescence and early adulthood, the expectations of those who knew and admired my father and mother became a heavy burden. How could I possibly be as forthright or as smart or as disciplined as my father? How could I be as strong or determined as my mother? Why were people surprised—and sometimes disappointed—when they learned how normal my childhood was, how mainstream and privileged and integrated and utterly American?

  I rarely tell people whose daughter I am when meeting them for the first time. But in the case of Ed of Chicago, I decided to break my rule. For some reason, it seemed important to make a point.

  “Ed,” I said, “Malcolm X is my father.”

  Had his mouth dropped open any wider Ed would have been able to swallow the entire party buffet without pausing to chew.

  From my earliest days I have only fragments of memory: a blue-and-white rocking chair, pink tights I didn't want to wear to preschool, the sound of my sisters laughing at bedtime.

  I remember one day waking up and finding no one home but the housekeeper. I don't know how old I was then, two, maybe three, but old enough to wonder where my mother was, where my sisters had gone. I toddle to the dining room window and look out into the street, searching. I'm so big for my age anyone looking back at me must wonder why a five-year-old is running around in baby clothes with a bonnet on her head. I put my hands on the blinds and pull them apart and put my face there, too, searching for Mommy and my sisters. I feel scared and very alone.

  My clearest early memory is of Mommy. I remember being three or four years old and looking up at her and thinking how beautiful she is. No doubt all young children cast their mothers in the role of fairy princess, and I was just the same. Mommy was a striking woman. She had clear brown Egyptian eyes and a stately Masai carriage. My father, who was so fair he had once been nicknamed Red, loved my mother's smooth, mahogany skin. He called her his Apple Brown Betty and Brown Sugar.

  I remember one day looking at Mommy and thinking, “Wow!” She was wearing sailor pants, cut full and flowing at the hem, decorated with heavy black buttons and made of a thick and luxurious material. She had on slender, black patent leather boots with square toes and a long black coat that danced around her legs when she moved. Her hair was swept up off her face, showing off her beautiful eyes and her incredible cheekbones. She was going into the cleaners, leaving us in the car with the baby-sitter while she did what she had to do. Watching her cross the street I felt my breath catch in my throat. She looked so lovely and so majestic that I wanted to clap my hands and laugh. People checked her out as she passed; she was such a heart-stopper I almost expected them to hail her as she walked, to toss rose petals beneath those boots. It was clear to me and it was clear to the throngs along the avenue: Mommy was an African queen.

  “I didn't sleep for three months after my husband's death, because every time I would try to sleep, I would see him falling.”

  —MOMMY IN AN EBONY MAGAZINE INTERVIEW, 1968

  God only knows how Mommy made it through those first weeks and months following my father's death. My father was not only her husband, he was the great love of her life. To have witnessed his violent death must have seemed more than she could bear.

  To make matters worse, Mommy was now homeless; the fire-bombing and the Nation of Islam's eviction had taken care of that. She had little money; my father had always believed the Nation would take care of his family should the need arise, and so he never sought to enrich himself, only the organization. He didn't even have life insurance because by the time he knew he needed it, no insurance company would touch him.

  Nor was Mommy soothed by an outpouring of public support, in the way Jacqueline Kennedy and Coretta Scott King were when their husbands fell to assassins. The major press considered my father a fire-breathing, white-hating maniac who'd been cut down by members of his own strange and subversive cult. Some considered his death poetic justice. The New York Times editorialized him as “a twisted man” who turned “true gifts to evil purpose.” Carl Rowan, then director of the United States Information Agency and later a columnist for the Washington Post, dismissed my father as an “ex-convict, ex–dope peddler who became a racial fanatic.”

  Mr. Rowan was not the only prominent African American who kept his distance. The same middle-class, integration-minded blacks who had disavowed Malcolm X in life wanted nothing to do with his widow. I have been told by people who were there that bells of alarm went off in certain Mount Vernon circles when word got out that Mommy had purchased a house in that enclave of upwardly mobile, aspiring African American professionals. Whose widow? Living here? We don't want any trouble. Guess who's coming to the neighborhood.

  And, of course, the people my father had counted on to care for his family should anything ever happen to him—the Nation of Islam—were the very ones who conspired with government agencies to assassinate him. We had no contact with them or they with us. Even after all my father did for the Nation, we were basically left to fend for ourselves.

  (We did, however, continue to root for one particular member of the Nation—Muhammad Ali. My father had known Ali when he was a rising young boxer known as Cassius Clay, before he became heavyweight champion of the world. In fact, my whole family visited Ali at his camp in Miami when he was training to fight Sonny Liston for the championship. My father wrote he would be forever grateful to Ali for the invitation. It was the first real vacation Daddy and Mommy had had together because my father was always so busy working for the cause. It also came at a painful time, just as the depth of my father's estrangement from Elijah Muhammad was becoming clear. Daddy had just been silenced by Mr. Muhammad for commenting on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and “death-talk” against him was filling the air for the first time. My father was reeling, not from fear for his life but from the agony of betrayal. He had loved and admired Mr. Muhammad so deeply. “My head felt like it was bleeding inside,” he wrote in the Autobiography. “I felt like my brain was damaged.”

  Meanwhile, in Miami, the odds were against Ali. Most people, including Nation of Islam officials in Chicago, gave him little or no chance of winning the fight. But Ali was a student of my father's; they shared a special bond. On the night of the fight my father told him, “Do you think Allah has brought about all this intending for you to leave the ring as anythin
g but the champion?” Together they prayed to Allah before the fight.

  The rest is history. Ali won, told the world he was a Muslim, and announced his new name. He and my father parted friends that day, but later on, after the split, Ali refused to talk to Daddy.

  In his mind Ali was being a faithful Muslim and a dutiful son. Elijah Muhammad had forbidden all members of the Nation to associate with my father and Ali obeyed, though surely it broke his heart. I know Daddy understood and even admired Ali's sense of commitment and loyalty. Still, it hurt him to lose his friend, a man he thought of as a younger brother. Daddy loved Ali and so did Mommy. So did we all.

  So whenever Ali was fighting, we girls and Mommy watched and cheered and screamed and rooted him on. Watching Ali dance across the ring was not like watching anyone else; we felt as though a member of our family was up there beneath the lights, getting his face smashed. Or smashing someone else's face. It was scary and painful and, most of all, exhilarating when that final bell rang and he lifted his gloved fist into the air. Between rounds, my sisters and I would run to the study where the Qur'an sat elevated on a special wooden holder and say a few quick prayers for his success.

  Ali would, in time, come to regret the stand he took against Daddy. He would tell me himself how much he loved Malcolm X.

  But my mother did have her supporters; among the most steadfast of them was Percy Sutton, who had become my father's attorney about six years before his assassination. Mr. Sutton, along with his brother and another attorney, helped my mother raise the money to buy our new house. Actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis gave tremendous support, both financial and emotional. The Wallace family generously housed us for about a month after my father's assassination. After that, we moved, for a brief time, to a hotel, then to the home of Sidney Poitier and his wife at the time, Juanita Poitier. They were friends of the family, activists, and supporters of the movement, and they must have wanted to help my mother in whatever way they could.

  I remember the Poitier house; it was big, absolutely huge. The outside property was lush and beautifully landscaped; it seemed like a magic garden to me. I would wander through the maze of shrubs and flowers, feeling enchanted and free. But one time I got lost. I was petrified because it seemed like everything engulfed me and I couldn't find my way out. It must have been Easter, because we were having an Easter egg hunt. I remember because, when they found me, I was choking. I'd found an egg and was busy chomping through the shell. Why, I don't know. It must have looked like candy to me, magical candy. I must have thought I could stuff the whole colorful egg in my mouth and have it dissolve on my tongue like the sweetest cotton candy.

  There were other friends, too: Maya Angelou, the novelist John Oliver Killens. And much, much later, when we girls were grown, my mother became close to other famous widows of the revolution: Myrlie Evers-Williams and Coretta Scott King. That fact may come as a surprise to people who like to cast my father and Martin Luther King Jr. as the black hat and white hat of the civil rights movement and, therefore, diehard enemies.

  It's true they had their differences. It's true my father, especially during his early days with the Nation of Islam, disagreed with Dr. King's philosophy of nonviolent resistance. My father did not advocate violence, but he believed completely in the right of African Americans to defend themselves against violence and hostility just like anyone else. It's true my father went to Selma during Dr. King's sojourn in that city and said it was ridiculous for African American men to turn the other cheek when their women and children were being attacked by dogs and injured by fire hoses. It's true he called the March on Washington “The Farce in Washington” after whites became deeply involved in the planning of it, even to the point of censoring speeches and signs they viewed as too militant. It's true he scoffed at Dr. King's speech, saying, “Even he says it's a dream.” That was Malcolm X.

  While my father may have disagreed with Dr. King, he respected him. He knew they were both fighting the same fight, both completely and utterly dedicated to improving the political and social welfare of their people. Then, too, my father was a shrewd man, capable of operating on several levels at the same time. In Selma, after belittling Dr. King's nonviolent boycott for the newspapers, my father pulled Mrs. King aside.

  “I want Dr. King to know that I didn't come to Selma to make his job difficult,” he said. “I really did come thinking I could make it easier. If the white people realize what the alternative is, perhaps they will be more willing to hear Dr. King.”

  Two months before his death, my father told a group of Islamic students in Manchester, England, that he would say nothing against Dr. King. “At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, an extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.”

  It is vitally important to me that African Americans understand the special bond between the Shabazz and King families, because it is vitally important that we understand it's not a matter of Malcolm versus Martin. We do not have to fall into that trap and we do not have to choose. Americans aren't asked to choose between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—both sacrificed for their country, and both are remembered for that sacrifice. Likewise, African Americans do not have to choose between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Both were great men who did not hesitate to die because they loved us so.

  What's interesting, too, is that while the popular refrain is that Daddy was changing his views at the time of his death, moving closer to the ideals that Martin preached, no one ever mentions that when Martin Luther King was struck down he was shifting his beliefs closer to the ideals my father preached. King was coming to see the plight of African Americans not only as an isolated civil rights issue but as one part of an international struggle for human rights. That is a conclusion to which Malcolm X had come many years prior.

  Mommy and Mrs. King understood that their husbands were great men aiming for the same goal. They eventually became close friends, as did Mommy and Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of Medgar Evers. They were known as “The Three Ms,” the widows of three proud and dedicated African American soldiers. Our families remain close to this day. Not a holiday passes that I don't get a package from Auntie Coretta.

  There were many people who helped my mother through that horrible time. She told her friend the Reverend Willie Barrow, “They came to my rescue and worked with me and worked with me and worked with me and worked with me!” I thank God for them. But I know, too, that in those early days, those days and weeks after my father was slain, no amount of friendship or support could ease the loss. My mother was a young African American woman with six babies to care for in a nation whose climate was anger and chaos and fear. Surely she felt terrified and alone.

  It was somewhere in here that Mommy made her hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. The hajj is a journey every Muslim makes at least once in his or her lifetime if he or she is able. It is a religious obligation, a duty dictated by the Holy Qur'an. It is also a privilege and a joy.

  My father had made his hajj in 1964, after his break with the Nation of Islam, after the death warrant had been issued against his life. He came home from Mecca refreshed and renewed, with a new name—El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz—and, more important, a new understanding of orthodox Islam. He returned with a new sense of himself and his ministry, and an evolved attitude toward America's racial problems. In a letter to my mother he wrote, “Never have I witnessed such sincere hospitality and the overwhelming spirit of true brotherhood as is practiced by people of all colors and races here in this Ancient Holy Land, the home of Abraham, Muhammad and all the other prophets of the Holy Scriptures.”

  My father had been planning a second trip to Mecca at the time of his murder. The people who were to accompany him asked my mother to take his place. They were offering her a trip to a place where she could immerse herself in contemplation and prayer, a place where she could be closer to the ancestors, closer to her husband, closer to God. She was a
grieving new widow, the mother and sole support of four young girls, and pregnant with twins. To save her soul and her sanity, she said yes.

  Later, Mommy said of her hajj, “It made me think of all the people in the world who loved me and were for me, who prayed that I would get my life back together. I stopped focusing on the people who were trying to tear me and my family apart.”

  One of the most important parts of the hajj experience, and the ritual that was nearest and dearest to my mother's heart, is the reenactment of the trek of Hajar, or Hagar as she is called in the Christian record. Hajar was the slave of Abraham's wife, Sarah. Abraham and Sarah were very old and childless when Abraham had a son by Hajar and named him Ishmael. But then God blessed Sarah and she had a son in her old age and named him Isaac. One day Sarah saw Isaac playing with Ishmael and said to her husband, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” So Abraham rose early one morning and took bread and water and gave it to Hajar and sent her away into the lonely desert.

  When the last of their water was gone, Hajar wandered the earth in search of water for her child. In her crisis she called out to Allah. And Allah saved both her and her son. Later, Ishmael, along with Abraham, built the Kaaba, the shrine in the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. For followers of Islam, the Kaaba is the most sacred place on earth.

  And so all pilgrims to Mecca remember Hajar's journey by running, full of sorrow and loss, between the hills of Safa and Marwa. For Mommy, just the mention of Hajar's name was enough to reduce her to tears. She had a profound affinity for her spirit and the significance of her story. Like Hajar, my mother was cast out, banished from American society in the 1960s and left to care for her children on her own without the love and support of her husband. Like Hajar, my mother trekked from one mountain of issues to another, searching for strength and relief, calling out to Allah for guidance and help. And like Hajar, my mother was greatly blessed because of the strength of her faith and the perseverance of her conviction.