Growing Up X

by Ilyasah Shabazz

  At first I thought I must have misheard her. But then I felt the room go silent and still and when I glanced up, I saw everyone except Liz was looking at me. She was still caught up in her fit of pique.

  “Those niggers should be arrested. I wish there were something I could do.”

  Nobody said anything, nobody breathed. After a few moments, Liz must have realized something was wrong. She followed every-one's glance and found me, finally seeming to remember I was in the room.

  “Oh, Yasah, you know I don't mean you,” she said with a smile.

  I was nearly too stunned to speak, but I managed to say, “I don't like that word, Liz.”

  “But those guys were niggers,” Liz insisted. “You know they were. But you're not. After all, you're not black-black.”

  I didn't know whether to laugh, yell, or stand up and walk out. I was not hurt, not in the way so many of us can be hurt by the use of that word, because I knew the true history of Africans and I knew that word was an attempt to obliterate that proud history. What I couldn't figure out was why Liz was using it so casually? She was a nice girl; I had never seen even the trace of prejudice in her. She was, I thought, my friend.

  Confused and surprised, I tried to explain to Liz why what she was saying was wrong. But she dug in her heels, insisting the word was okay when used for the kind of people who would break into cars. Over and over she repeated that it didn't refer to me because I wasn't “black-black.” Whatever that meant. How she even knew the person who had smashed her father's window was of color was never established. After awhile someone steered the conversation in another direction, much to the relief of all concerned, and everybody pretended the incident never happened.

  But things weren't the same between me and Liz after that. We still smiled and said hello when we met in the hallway and even still hung out with the same group of friends sometimes. But I looked at her differently now. I wasn't angry and I did not dislike her, but whatever true, human connection had once been between us was gone. And she knew it.

  Sometimes I'd catch Liz looking at me when she thought I wasn't looking. Maybe she was ashamed of her behavior or guilty. Maybe she was thinking I had turned out to be, in fact, “black-black.” I don't know what she was thinking because I never asked. She looked at me and I looked at her and then, eventually, one of us turned away.

  C H A P T E R N I N E

  Boys

  When I was a young girl I didn't think of myself as pretty. I didn't think of myself as ugly either—no one had ever made me feel unattractive in the slightest way. It was more that I just didn't think of myself as a girl, per se. I was Ilyasah, daughter of two, sister of five, friend to many. The whole concept of attractiveness and its importance in one's life took some time to be borne upon me.

  There were plenty of girly things that I enjoyed. I liked pretty clothes and sharp outfits, just like the rest of my sisters. I doodled with the best of them, decorating my notebooks with flowers and stars and fanciful drawings of my name or the names I wished I had: Cookie, Pumpkin, Angela. I liked having my hair combed and styled, and when Attallah cut my first bangs I was thrilled; I drew a picture of myself as the famous Marlo Thomas, with the signature bangs and that feisty little flip of the hair. I certainly knew that beauty existed—Mommy was beautiful and Attallah was stunning, her golden-brown Afro waving proudly as she strode down the street with her distinctive strut. But it never occurred to me to apply the measuring stick of beauty to my own face.

  Once, when I was about fourteen, my sister Attallah drew a picture of a girl with long, black hair and almond-shaped eyes and nice lips. “Wow, who is that?” I asked. “She's so pretty.”

  “That's you, silly,” Attallah said.

  I think at least part of the reason for my state of suspended animation lay with my reluctance to jump feet first into the whole confusing world of boys. As I entered adolescence the male body was like some vast, unknown country to me, not only unexplored but largely unseen. There were plenty of male role models circling the orbit of my life—my grandfather and uncles and the fathers of close friends—but my home world was all female.

  I knew about breasts because Mommy had them and so did Aunt Ruth and Attallah sprouted hers when I was about eight. Later, I begged Qubilah to show me hers but instead she drew a picture, pretending they had hair and pimples on them. She made it sound so terrible I declared I didn't want “those things” growing on me. I slept in a bra, thinking that would help.

  But I knew nothing about the anatomy of boys. Ellis Hazlip, a family friend and host of the television show “Soul” in the late 1960s and 1970s, sometimes visited our house with the singer-songwriter Curtis Mayfield. Mr. Hazlip liked to wear tight pants that left little to the imagination. Qubilah and I would stare at the strange bulge below his belly in astonishment. What the hell was that thing, anyway? Had he swallowed something enormous? Did he have some kind of growth? We would giggle so hard we had to leave the room.

  Mommy never talked to me about the birds and the bees, never explained the sexual workings of the human body, probably because she was too busy attending to more pressing needs. Had I asked, I know she would have patiently sat me down, but I never asked because I never thought to. Why should I? What was there to know? I'd had a “boyfriend” since I was six, a relationship that largely consisted of speaking to one another at the mosque. No big deal.

  But as I entered high school, I sensed a change in this state of nonchalance between the sexes, and I knew I was not ready for whatever was to come. I was nearly two years younger than most of the girls in my class at Dobbs, and much more naive than many of my friends or the girls from the south side of Mount Vernon who came to hang out in our neighborhood. Boys began teasing me about my stiff, unsexy walk. I was perplexed; I walked the way I had always walked.

  “Girls are supposed to roll their hips,” they said. “Be like Attallah.” Attallah was tall and stately and self-assured and had a walk so sexy it made boys want to sit down and cry.

  For her part, Attallah tried to help by handing out advice on crucial activities like the fine art of French kissing. She demonstrated the proper technique by making an “O” with the tips of her thumb and index finger, then sticking a piece of chewing gum to her pinky. You were supposed to put your mouth to the circle of your fingers, then reach for the gum with your tongue. The idea made my head swim.

  Parties, in particular, worried me. All those teenage hormones flying around somebody's hot, sweaty basement; I didn't know what to do with myself. I went to one with Qubilah, whose friends all attended the United Nations school and were into David Bowie and The Police and were mostly white. While she danced and socialized the night away, I spent the evening in a chair, just gazing around.

  At another party, this one thrown by my friend Robin Johnson, the lights were turned down so low all the bodies on the dance floor looked like one, big gyrating blob. Whenever a boy asked me to dance, I shook my head. “No, thanks.” There was no way I was getting out there in the darkness. After awhile the boys stopped asking, which was fine with me. I spent the evening sitting on the steps with two much younger girls, weaving potholders with brightly colored skeins of yarn.

  When I was fourteen a boy named Edgar gave me my first real kiss. Edgar looked like Tupac. He was cool and sexy, with shiny black hair. He lived with his mother in Harlem but visited his father, stepmother, and older brother Leon in Mount Vernon on weekends. Edgar would come to my friend Tony's house, where Michael Peeples and I would be practicing our hustle routine. After awhile people began calling Edgar my boyfriend. I didn't mind. Edgar was handsome and sweet to me and he gave me a gold ring with a huge, pale blue stone in the middle. I was thrilled, until the band began to change colors. Then I panicked, thinking I had somehow ruined a perfectly good gold ring. I put it away in my dresser, hoping Edgar wouldn't notice. He never did.

  Edgar and I were good friends as much as anything, there for each other during the tough times as well as the good.
I used to talk to his mother on the telephone; she was very sweet. And when Edgar's brother Leon went off to serve a stint in the armed forces, we all got together to say good-bye and to comfort Edgar. We knew how he felt because Leon was like a brother to us all; the idea of him leaving and breaking up the group was hard. I think we all sensed that the little family we'd created would never be the same, that eventually, one by one, we would all head off on different paths. After we said our good-byes, I went home and spent the entire evening in my bedroom, looking out my window at the summer trees, crying like a baby at the thought of losing him.

  But we kept on hanging and kept on hustling. One day, after my friends Jackie Grant, Simone Davis, Lisa Anthony, and I had hustled all afternoon at Tony's house, Edgar offered to walk me home. As we were leaving, Edgar announced that he was going to kiss me. He said it so matter-of-factly he might have been discussing the weather and I responded in the same vein.

  “Okay,” I said.

  We walked outside and Edgar turned to me. He wasn't a short boy but I was tall for my age and so had at least four inches on him. “Wait a minute,” he said, leading me back to the stairs. He walked up two steps, pulled me toward him and leaned in.

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  I did and felt something warm and soft pressed against my lips. Despite Attallah's instructions I had no intention of opening my mouth. We pressed lips for a few minutes, then Edgar walked me home and I pretty much forgot about it. Edgar and I went out for a few more months, then we drifted apart.

  And yet, as naive and wary of boys as I was, I knew very well the words of adult encounters. I knew the word sex and several of its slang counterparts. I knew the names of the pertinent body parts. More important, I knew the word love and what it was supposed to mean. And I knew the word rape.

  I remember being as young as twelve and warning my girlfriends at St. Joseph Montessori School that if anyone ever tried to rape them, they should go along with it. Better to be raped than be killed, I said sagely. Where I got this information, I don't know. Maybe I saw it on TV. Maybe one of my female relatives whispered it into my ear, though that I doubt. Whatever the source of this knowledge, it had lodged in a back part of my brain.

  There was another girl in my class at St. Joseph's. Her name was Carla and she lived in the northern Bronx, in a towering housing complex. We were friends; her mother took me, Lisa, Monique, and Kim to Madison Square Garden to see the Jackson Five in concert. We kept in touch even after leaving St. Joseph's, and so it was that she invited me to a party when I was fourteen.

  My mother drove me, Gamilah, and my friend Lisa to Carla's house and dropped us off. It was early in the evening; the party had yet to begin, but the boy who was going to be the DJ was there. He said he had to go home to get his records and he asked me to come along. It didn't occur to me to say no.

  He told me his records were at his sister's house and we started to walk. It seemed to take forever to reach the house, and when we got there, no one was home.

  “Don't you have a key?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “Let's go to my friend's house. He has some of my records there.”

  We walked some more, to another house. No answer there either. By now I was starting to get a little tired and I wanted to get back to the party, but I had no idea where I was. I didn't know the Bronx and I couldn't just wander off by myself.

  “One more stop,” he said. This time it was an apartment building. We started climbing stairs and then, all of a sudden, the stairs stopped. There was only a heavy metal door before us. He pushed it open and the next thing I knew we were standing on the roof.

  “Pull down your pants,” he ordered, no longer the smiling boy I'd first met.

  My heart seized. I wanted to scream but fear caught the sound in my throat. My mind reeled back and forth like a drunk, confused, unsure. I didn't know what was going on but something told me to do what he wanted, just go along and get out alive. I had seen no one else as we climbed the stairs; for all I knew we were alone in the building. Alone in the world.

  He put his hand over my mouth and pushed me up against the door. I lay beneath him, stiff and dazed. When it was all over, he pushed himself off me and zipped his pants. I pulled myself up straight and stood there, too stunned to think or move or pull up my pants. “Come on,” he said roughly, trying to pull me back down the stairs. I stumbled.

  “Pull up your pants,” he ordered. I did. We started down the stairs, but it was hard for me to walk. The inside of my thighs burned in a way I had never felt before and something wet trickled into my panties.

  “I'm bleeding,” I told him.

  “Shut up,” he said. “That's sperm.”

  Somehow we stumbled out of the building and made our way back to the party. We didn't speak as we walked and my mind would not consider what had just happened. I just kept wondering if he was going to get the records, but he never did.

  Back at the party Lisa asked me why I was walking funny. I made up some story and got through the night. What happened after that, I don't remember, except I do remember going home and calling my friend Tony to tell him I wasn't a virgin anymore. I told him I hurt. He told me to sit in a tub of warm water to ease the pain and so I did. I didn't cry or try to purge myself the way some rape victims do because I didn't know that what happened to me was, in fact, rape. I didn't blame myself or the boy, just sat in the tub trying to still both body and mind. Was that sex? Was that what it was supposed to be like between a girl and a boy? I was very confused.

  I never told Carla or my sisters. I never even considered telling Mommy because I didn't know how she might react. All I wanted was to forget that moment on the roof had ever occurred. I didn't want to focus on it; I wanted that night eliminated from the corners of my mind and, for the most part, I succeeded. But, every now and then at Dobbs, when the girls were all sitting around talking about sex, I would think of that night on the rooftop. What had happened to me had not felt like “making love.” It hadn't even felt like having sex, but sometimes I pretended it had been because pretending made it easier to take. So I pretended and tried to fit in and impress the other girls with my maturity by laughing and chiming in to the conversation. Talking about my man and his “thing.”

  Around about this same time I fell in love for the first time in my life. His name was Howie. He was a pretty boy, a singer and performer who did not mind that he was nine years older than me. In fact, Howie decided it was his job to teach me the ways of a sophisticated adult. He was the first man who made love to me, I think. He told me I shouldn't wear white tube socks with black shoes. He showed me off to his friends. He used to sing “Chocolate Girl” by the Whispers to me. He gave me my first drink. We were at his house, sitting in the living room listening to Isaac Hayes and Barry White and holding hands. He got up to make himself a drink and came back to the couch holding two screwdrivers.

  “You know, you really should begin to acquire a taste for this,” he said.

  “I'm ready,” I said and took the glass. I had never tasted alcohol. I had tried pot once, but I didn't like how sleepy and paranoid it made me feel and decided it was for losers. But if Howie thought I should acquire a taste for cocktails, I was willing to try.

  I drank the whole glass, fooled by the taste of the orange juice, and promptly got sick as a dog. Howie drove me home, probably scared as all hell, and put me into bed. Luckily my mother wasn't home—that time. But later, when she found out about Howie, she hit the ceiling. She forbade me to see him, which, of course, just made me want to see him more. I was in love; I thought Howie was the man for the rest of my life. I naively assumed we would get married someday. That was how these things happened, wasn't it? You went to college and made a career so you could be a good partner, a contributor who had something to offer a man. Then you met the man, you fell in love, you married him and stayed together for the rest of your lives while you both contributed to society. That was how my parents had done it, and that was
my template. Being still in high school, I was a little ahead of the curve with Howie, but I thought the game would be played out the same way.

  Howie could not come to my house when Mommy was home. But Mommy went away on a long trip to Africa and Aunt Ruth was less concerned about these things. Howie came over and we sat in the living room on the couch, kissing and talking and holding hands. After awhile, we fell asleep. I woke to Qubilah's urgent shaking.

  “Wake up!” she said. “Mommy's home!”

  It was too late. Mommy walked into the living room just as I was wiping the sleep from my eyes. Later she told me she took one look at that twenty-four-year-old man wrapped around her fifteen-year-old daughter and saw red.

  “Get out of my house!” she yelled. “She's a child! You're a grown man! You should be ashamed of yourself !” Mommy chased Howie out of the house and down the stairs to the street.

  But I kept seeing Howie, despite what Mommy thought. I was in love and I didn't care. We dated for nearly two years, seeing each other even after I had gone away to college. We dated until one day a friend told me Howie was seeing another girl on the side.

  I was devastated, completely devastated. I cried for days and wandered through my school hours in a daze. Walking home through the woods, I looked to God, wondering how such a thing could happen, feeling as though someone had punched into my chest and grabbed my heart with his fist. I felt as if my whole life had ended at the age of seventeen and there was nothing I could do about it. I knew in my heart I could not be with Howie anymore, though it was painful, because he had cheated on me.

  He came to my house to try to persuade me not to end the relationship.

  “You're like my right arm,” Howie said. “If I lose you I feel like I'm losing a part of myself.”

  I thought that was the most profound thing anyone would ever say to me, and it made me cry so hard I couldn't breathe. Howie pulled me into his arms and it felt so safe there, so warm and secure, I wanted to remain forever. But I pulled myself away.