Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  Classical music was the hardest of all; I just didn't have the musical sophistication to appreciate it. It was so much boring-if-pretty noise to me; I would have been happier just playing in our backyard. I would fidget in my seat, stare up at the glass chandeliers, shove my sister's elbow from the shared armrest, search the other faces in the audience, look pleadingly back up at whatever action was occurring onstage, all the while silently begging whoever controlled such things to let the torture end. How much longer is this going to last?

  Going to the mosque every Sunday was such a routine part of our life that it never occurred to me that it was different, in some ways, from what most of my friends did on that day. When I was older, my friends asked why I prayed to Allah instead of God. I had to tell them that Allah was simply the Arabic word for God, that Allah is God, and then I realized we were something of a minority in this regard. But it was a good minority, an abundant one because we could attend and enjoy both mosque and church, whereas most of my friends only attended church.

  My sisters and I all took our cue from Mommy, who, although a devout Muslim, never stressed the differences between Islam and Christianity, especially not among friends and family. As the Reverend Willie Barrow wrote, my mother used to say to her: “Girl, don't start talking to me about these sects and orders. Yeah, I'm a Muslim and you're a Church of God, but I'm going to the same place you're going.”

  Still, there are very real and significant differences between Islam and Christianity. As a child I was not aware of these deep, theological schisms, but I was aware of something else: Christians celebrated Christmas. We did not, but that didn't make us immune to the relentless marketing of that holiday. I'm sure we asked our mother more than once why we would not be receiving bunches of presents on Christmas Day like all our friends. And one year my three younger sisters and I decided to test the Santa Claus theory for ourselves.

  My mother just happened to have in the house a three-foot-tall Christmas tree made out of porcelain. I think it was either a gift or a decoration for the day care center in which she was involved at the time. At any rate, on the night before Christmas, Gamilah, Malikah, Malaak, and I snuck out of bed after Mommy was asleep, found this tree, and pulled it from its box.

  We set the tree up in the living room and surrounded it with the most Christmasy stuff we could find—decorations we'd made in school or cards people had sent us or anything. We found four sweatsocks and hung them on the fireplace. Then we went back to bed. Early the next morning we all jumped up and ran into the living room, expecting a Christmas wonderland. But there was no change. We were all so disappointed. I don't remember if we cried, but I know that was the last mention of Santa Claus in our house.

  For us, December meant Qubilah's birthday. Birthdays were very special in our house. On our birthdays we always had cake and ice cream, balloons and presents, parties or a special dinner out. Even after we were grown and out of the house, Mommy continued to make our birthdays special. During my first year in college she drove up with the twins for my birthday party, bringing with her flowers wrapped with a beautiful ribbon on which was inscribed, Ilyasah's Birthday, July 22, 1979.

  But for a Muslim child the most notable observance of the year is Ramadan.

  Ramadan is the holiest month of the Islamic year, a period of introspection and prayer that recalls the receiving of the Qur'an. During Ramadan, able-bodied adults and older children fast during daylight hours, from dawn to dusk. It is a time of communal prayer in the mosque and the reading of the Qur'an. It is a time for conscientiously refraining not only from food and drink during the day, but also from all kinds of immoral behavior—lying, cheating, hurting other human beings. Still, Ramadan is less a period of atonement than an obedient response to God's holy commandment. It is a time for forgiveness of sins.

  During Ramadan we rose each morning before the sun to have breakfast. The Qur'an says eating and drinking are permissible only until the “white thread of light becomes distinguishable from the dark thread of night at dawn.” And so after sunrise we fasted for the remainder of the day. Because we were children we were allowed to drink water when necessary.

  After sunset every evening we would say special prayers before breaking our fasts with dates and water. Then we would have dinner, plates and plates of healthy, delicious food like lean meats, sweet potatoes and other vegetables, salads, fresh fruits, and plenty of fresh-baked breads.

  At the end of the thirty-day period we would celebrate with the festival of Eid Mubarak, the Feast of Fast-Breaking. One of my favorite Eid celebrations took place when I was ten or eleven. All the African American families from our mosque gathered at the home of a family named Kareem. We arrived before sunset to prepare for our evening prayers and then the feast began. There was so much food my stomach roared just looking at it.

  By the time I was old enough to realize that many of my neighborhood and school friends did not observe Ramadan, it was so much a part of our life, so firmly established a routine, that it didn't seem like any big deal. Fasting did not make me feel different from other children and I neither dreaded it nor fought it. On the other hand, not being able to eat our housekeeper's delicious cupcakes sure wasn't anything I looked forward to.

  My mother raised us as Muslims, but she also wanted us to have respect for the Christian beliefs held by members of both her adoptive and real families. The Malloys, her adoptive parents who lived in Detroit, were strong, solid Christians. Mommy's biological father, Shelman Sanders, with whom she remained close, and his family were likewise devoted Christians and churchgoers in their Philadelphia community. One of my mother's half brothers, Uncle Stanley, eventually had his own church.

  Whenever we visited my grandparents in Philadelphia during the summer, we would get up every Sunday and go with them to Friendship Baptist Church. My sisters tolerated these Sundays, but I reveled in them. I loved church, loved everything about it. I loved sitting in the pews, watching the women stream down the aisle in their Sunday finery. I loved the praying and the testifying and the joyfulness. Most of all I loved the gospel music and the spirited singing and clapping that went on in church. It seemed to me a living, breathing manifestation of all the African American history my mother made certain we learned. I would sit in the pews, swaying to the music, lost in a reverie about my ancestors, all those strong people of African descent who survived the terrors of slavery through the sheer strength of their own will and created the gospel hymns. I loved it so much I'd sometimes close my eyes and try to get the spirit myself. I wanted to feel whatever powerful force was causing all of these people to sing and clap so heartily. I never did catch the spirit, but I always kept the hope.

  After services, we would all return to my grandparents' house for Sunday dinner and rest. Later on that evening, when my grandmother asked if any of us children wanted to accompany Uncle John or Uncle Stanley back to church for evening service, I always volunteered. My sisters thought I was crazy. Going back to church? Voluntarily? They shook their heads and rolled their eyes and giggled and called me Christian girl. But I didn't care. I got to dress up and be with my southern kin. I got to hear the power of my people transformed into song.

  Among the other African American families at our mosque were the Yobas, whose son Malik is now an actor, best known for his starring role on the television series “New York Undercover.” There was also a family named Kareem; their son, Gamal, was my first boyfriend. We met when I was six years old. He was about the same age as I and looked like Michael Jackson, who, at the time, was my idea of a dream date. All the girls liked Gamal, but for some reason he chose me to be his girlfriend. Not that being his girlfriend entailed very much—the occasional shared piece of chocolate or affectionate pop in the arm.

  Then one day, when I was eleven years old, Gamal apparently decided it was time to take our relationship up a notch. During a break at the mosque, he began chasing me and, not knowing what else to do, I ran. I headed for the ramp linking the top of the mosqu
e to the bottom. It was a long, curving ramp, something like the one at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. By the time we ran all the way down I was exhausted, and not even sure what I was running from. But then Gamal caught up to me and kissed me on the cheek. It was my first kiss of any kind from a boy, and I wasn't ready. I told Gamal we were finished. He took it with aplomb, and a few weeks later he had a new girlfriend, a friend of mine named Suhailah.

  One day we heard the Kareems were going to Africa. Now, despite my mother's educational efforts, we were still average American children. Meaning we watched Saturday afternoon television like everyone else, we saw those movies of Tarzan swinging through the jungle like some loin-clothed superhero while the Africans ran around with bones in their noses, scared of their own shadows, trying to catch some poor defenseless white woman and boil her for lunch. Africa did not seem like the safest place to be. So when I heard the Kareems were going there, I ran to my mother, alarmed.

  “Mommy! The Kareems are going to Africa!”

  “I know. Isn't it exciting?”

  No, it wasn't exciting. It was scary. Africa was full of vicious lions and bug-eyed folks with spears. And worse, there were no grocery stores. “Will the Kareems be able to eat chocolate?” I asked my mother. This was a big concern of mine. Chocolate was very important to me.

  “They'll be able to eat chocolate if they want.”

  “Where will they live? In huts?”

  “No, they will not live in huts. They will live in a house.”

  It wasn't as though I was completely ignorant about the motherland. My father, of course, had traveled the continent extensively before his death, and even said that were it not for his commitment to the struggle at home he would have stayed in Africa. My mother had filled our home with books about Africa, with paintings and fine wood carvings from that continent. We had, probably more than most black children of my generation, a sense of Africa as a noble, enlightened place of great history, not as the third world but the first world, the place where civilization began.

  Still, there were those Tarzan movies. There were those skillfully created images of Africans running through the forest like bugeyed madmen that had been indelibly etched into my mind. And once those images are present inside your head, they are hard to erase. Especially if you're eight years old.

  “Yes, sweetheart,” my mother said gently. “The Kareems will have plenty of clothes in Africa, beautiful clothes made of elegant fabric like you've never seen.”

  This is about the time we began having tutors.

  I don't mean to make it sound as though my mother suddenly woke up one day and realized she needed to steer our educational course very closely. That's not true at all. Education was always an important part of Betty Dean Sanders Shabazz's life. Her adoptive mother was a schoolteacher, her adoptive father a college graduate and owner of a shoe-repair business, who often said that it was education that enabled him to carve out a comfortable middle-class existence despite the Great Depression. Like so many African Americans of their generation and before, the Malloys—both graduates of Tuskegee—viewed education as vitally important for black people. It was the key to financial security and independence, the cornerstone of self-respect and dignity, the means of lifting a people from oppression and poverty. And unlike fame or favor or even wealth, education was immutable. Once acquired, it could not be taken away.

  Likewise, my father believed strongly in the importance of education. One of my greatest concerns about the way my family's history is told is the distorted picture that is given of my father's early years and his family, especially his mother. Many people believe she broke down under the weight of family responsibility because she was a fair-skinned, fragile West Indian woman. They think that before Malcolm Little went to prison and discovered Elijah Muhammad he was an illiterate thug who could barely sign his name. Even I had this impression as an adolescent.

  To some degree, the Autobiography itself is responsible for this myth. My father, remorseful about his criminal behavior and grateful and utterly devoted to Mr. Muhammad, downplayed his own intelligence and his family's educational and moral influence.

  But the truth is, the Littles were dignified, professional, and up-standing citizens, and it was they who instilled their values in young Malcolm. The Reverend Earl Little was a Baptist minister who helped organize Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. His mother, Louise Norton Little, was an educated woman from Grenada who spoke five languages and served as recording secretary for the United Negro Improvement Association. As a young mother, she filled the house with language and culture and the love of education, teaching her children to sing the alphabet in French and having them read to her from newspapers produced by Garvey and a fellow Grenadian, Theophilus Albert Marryshow. She kept a dictionary on the table where her children did their homework, and if they mispronounced a word, she made them look it up. It was Grandmother Louise and Reverend Little who sowed the seeds of insight, discipline, educational values, and organizational skills in my father, not Elijah Muhammad. Mr. Muhammad cleared away the weeds and allowed those seeds to flourish and grow.

  My father himself was president of his all-white seventh-grade class. His teenage letters to his sister Ella in Boston show an articulate, charming, and intelligent young man with excellent writing skills. As a youth, Malcolm Little aspired to a career in the law— until a white teacher discouraged him, saying black people were more suited to menial jobs.

  That discouragement led him to drop out of school, which in turn led to a life of petty crime. Society taught Detroit Red how to debase himself. When he ended up in prison at the age of twenty-one, and had time to reflect, he returned to the moral principles of his youth because his favorite brother, Reginald, told him of a “Black Messiah,” reminding him of the seeds his parents had planted. He resumed a lifelong program of self-education. He fed his hungry intellect with newspapers, magazines, biographies, histories, the dictionary, the encyclopedia—anything on which he could get his hands. After he joined the Nation of Islam, his reading became more directed but no less voracious. He had a wide range of interests: the classics, anthropology, African history, the origins of religion, anything by or about people of color. He could polish off weighty tomes in three hours, and easier ones in one or two. He was so widely read and so brilliant that people, later, would not believe he had never graduated high school. “Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights,” he said. “It is the means to help our children and our people rediscover their identity and thereby increase self-respect.” He also said, “Education is our passport to the future,” and that “tomorrow belongs to those who truly prepare for it today.”

  So there was never any question in our house but that we girls would receive the broadest and best education possible. As it turned out, that education took place in schools that were predominantly white. Not so long ago I was talking to a friend who, reflecting upon this aspect of my childhood, shook his head in surprise. “You know, Ilyasah,” he said, “it's almost a contradiction for you and your sisters to have gone to predominantly white schools.”

  It wasn't the first time I've heard such a sentiment, and it probably won't be the last. But it just goes to show how some people don't understand what Betty Shabazz stood for. And it just goes to show how some people do not understand Malcolm X and his message. I wonder what these people who were surprised by my having attended private schools think Mommy should have done. Should she have enrolled us in some underfunded public school where too many of our children are having their bright minds dulled by watered-down academics and low expectations? To do so would have been contrary to my father's legacy.

  My mother worked hard to send her daughters to the best schools she could find: We attended Montessori schools in the elementary grades; Attallah, Gamilah, and Qubilah attended the United Nations International School in Manhattan; and Malikah and Malaak were sent to the Thornton-Donovan School in New Rochelle. After primary
school, I went on to the Masters School in Dobbs Ferry and Hackley Preparatory School in Tarrytown. All this effort on Mommy's part had nothing to do with social status. It had nothing to do with wanting to be around white people. Mommy did what she did because she knew we had to be one step ahead both educationally and culturally in a society that had been historically unjust. She believed arming us with education and self-knowledge was a necessity if we were to have sound and fulfilling futures in America.

  But Mommy knew, too, that just sending us to good private schools was not enough. She knew she would have to supplement our education in the areas where these schools were sadly deficient: the history and importance of Africans and African Americans. My mother wanted us to grow up with a love of the motherland, with the knowledge of how Africa gave birth to thriving civilizations, with a deep sense of pride in our family, our culture, and our people of the African diaspora.

  This, after all, was the effort to which my father had dedicated his life: self-empowerment; opening the eyes of black Americans to their own true greatness. This was my father's greatest gift to people of African descent in America, this liberation from the self-loathing branded into our souls by four hundred years of racism and oppression. It's easy to forget now, but in 1952, when my father left prison and joined the Nation's Temple No. 1 in Detroit, black was not considered beautiful. It was, “If you're light, you're all right. If you're brown, stick around. If you're black, get back.” That was the way far too many of us viewed ourselves.