Growing Up X Read online

  While in Mecca, Mommy traveled with the traditional escort, a woman who not only looked after her physical well-being but her emotional and spiritual needs as well. It couldn't have been an easy job. The hajj is an intense spiritual journey and an arduous physical one. My mother came from a solidly middle-class background and she was not accustomed to physical hardship. Plus, she had just lost her husband to assassins and she was pregnant with twins. She wasn't pleased with the water, the crowds, the uncushioned furniture, or the seating arrangements, which involved carpets tossed onto the sand. She wasn't pleased that a man who saw her faint against a wall as she walked around in the intense heat simply walked past her without offering to help. (She understood that from the man's perspective a woman was not supposed to be walking around alone with her head uncovered, but she needed help!) She was exhausted and struggling, pregnant and unbalanced, and so she got frustrated and complained. “Why didn't that man help me? Why do we have to sit in this tent on the ground? Why can't we have a little comfort here?”

  Looking back on it years later, she felt bad about her behavior. But I can't imagine anyone who knew what she had been through—and what she still had to face—held it against her.

  When she returned from Mecca, Mommy, with Mr. Sutton's help, found a house for us in Mount Vernon, a city in Westchester County less than a thirty-minute train ride from New York City. Part of the down payment came from the royalties from my father's autobiography. Sidney Poiter, Ruby Dee, and others also helped out, holding fund-raising parties in our family's honor. My mother also helped make ends meet by working as a nurse when she could. But with six young daughters to raise, meager savings, and no life insurance payout, she struggled financially. My father had $600 to his name the day he was assassinated.

  We lived on a tree-lined street in what is called Mount Vernon Heights, in a house that once belonged to Bella Abzug. The house was a lovely brick colonial. It sat up high on a hill; you had to climb two sets of steps to reach the front door. The landscaping emphasized graceful shrubs and ivy and a few flowers and an impeccably manicured lawn. I know it was manicured because we had to help manicure it every Saturday; my mother had the three oldest of us get out there and pick weeds. It was not an activity I enjoyed, and I didn't understand why we had to do it since we had a gardener. Now I realize Mommy was probably trying to keep our heads on straight. She worked hard to give us every advantage a child could have in this country—private schools, language lessons, summer camp—but she didn't want us growing up thinking we were too good to get down in the dirt and pull weeds.

  I loved our neighborhood. Even though we lived on the corner of East 5th Street and Cedar Avenue, it was not like a regular intersection; Cedar Avenue dead-ended into the woods. This cut way down on traffic through the area and our mother felt comfortable letting us play in the cul-de-sac. I can remember hundreds of games of tag, kickball, Mother May I, red light–green light, hot peas and butter, and other childhood games.

  When you walked in our front door, the first thing you saw in the foyer was a wall-sized mirror on the left and an olive green wall-to-wall leather bench on the right. Above the bench hung an ebony-framed painting of Cinque, the brave African who in 1839 led a revolt of captured slaves aboard the ship Amistad and later won his freedom before the U.S. Supreme Court. I loved to look at this painting and imagine myself standing proudly beside that king, which is probably just what Mommy intended. She filled our house with beautiful art by and about people of the African diaspora. Another one of my favorite pieces in the library was an ebony statue my mother got in Haiti. It was a six-foot-tall ebony carving of a woman with a fruit basket on her head and her child walking by her side.

  Next to the painting of Cinque hung framed examples of our own artwork: a thought-provoking selection of neon triangles painted by me, a provocative handprint transformed into a turkey by Malaak, and other artistic creations by the rest of my sisters.

  Our house was decorated tastefully and traditionally with a seventies palette. Olive green carpeting. White walls. A long blue-and-gold sofa in the living room, L-shaped and very comfortable. Behind the couch was a picture window that spanned two walls, and the drapes floating down to the floor were white. The lamps standing guard at the windows had those hanging crystals; my sisters and I used to hold them up to our ears and pretend they were earrings.

  Above the piano hung a huge oil painting of my father. It was a vivid painting, done in shades of fiery red, yellow, orange, and brown, and showed him in four poses, including the famous one with his chin propped up by a hand wearing his crescent and star ring. The biggest was of him looking very serious and pointing his finger up and outward. I love that painting.

  In 1969, Mommy told Ebony magazine it took her two years before she could hang a photograph of my father in the house—that's how painful his death was to her. But I can recall reminders of him everywhere: photographs in nearly every room, his briefcase and suits in my mother's closet, his hat way up high on a shelf in the breakfast nook, books about him in the library, especially the Autobiography.

  The Autobiography was a special presence in our house. Long before my younger sisters and I had any adult comprehension of the book, we played with it. We'd read parts aloud, make up little skits about our father and his family. Sometimes we would flip to the pages with the pictures and I'd smile and say, “There's Daddy.” Or I would turn to certain pages and point and say, “There's the man who was mean to Daddy.” I didn't really know what I was talking about. It wasn't until years later that I realized it wasn't “the man who was mean to Daddy” but Daddy himself, in a prison photograph, but since my audience was usually my three younger sisters, I was rarely challenged on facts.

  I'm not sure how much I really remember of my father. My mother and Attallah shared so many stories with us that I honestly don't know if I remember him or if the memories I have exist only because they kept him so alive.

  They both spoke about him as if he had just gone out for a newspaper. Mommy talked about him when we were at dinner. She always called him “my husband.” My husband this, and my husband that. Or, Your father. Or, Daddy. She told me how he would call me with authority, calling “Ilyasah!” and how I would jump! He was the only person I reacted to with such complete obedience. If my mother called me I would continue doing whatever it was I was doing, but with my father it was, “Yes sir.”

  I have a memory in which I used to come downstairs in our house and open the venetian blinds to look for my father. When I heard him coming, I'd go running for the door, and he'd open it and swing me up, up, up, high into the air for a big hug, then catch me under his arm like a big sack of potatoes and together we'd take the oatmeal cookies Mommy used to make and go watch the evening news.

  I'm a cookie fanatic to this day, and I sleep with the news on all night long. But I'm not sure if that's a real memory. Do people really remember as toddlers? Or do they, at the age of sixteen or twenty-five or thirty, simply want to?

  She kept him so alive for us.

  Mommy did a heroic job of attending not only to our physical and material needs, but to our psychological ones as well. She worked for us and prayed for us. She fought for us and thought for us and sometimes spoke for us. She buffered us from life and pain as completely and as long as she could, and that was a long, long time in my case. She spoiled us, really, but she did so out of love and the desire to compensate for all that we had lost. And compensate she did, so utterly that I scarcely realized my family was incomplete. Not until I was a teenager and spent time with a friend's father did I even begin to really feel my father's absence. And not until I was a young woman and heard people talking about “single-parent households” did I realize I had, in fact, been raised in one. As a child it never occurred to me that I was part of a social phenomenon. I never felt deprived or abandoned, I never felt insufficiency or emptiness or despair or any of the things experts say children in single-parent households are supposed to feel. As far as I was conc
erned I had a mother and a father and a family, just like everybody. Never in my childhood did I consciously feel fatherless.

  C H A P T E R T H R E E

  Lessons

  There were African Americans who called themselves Muslims in 1930s Detroit, but Betty Dean Sanders didn't know about them. My mother grew up sheltered in the perfectly conventional, solidly black, middle-class, firmly Christian household of her informally adoptive parents Lorenzo Don and Helen Malloy. There was no talk of black nationalism, no discussion of Islam as a viable religion for African Americans, no talk even of the pain and damage and anguish of racism. The Malloys, like many loving black parents of that time, thought the best way to arm their only child against racism was to teach her to ignore it.

  Even after my mother graduated from high school and prepared to leave home to attend Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a deeply southern and notoriously racist state, the Malloys could not bring themselves to speak the unspeakable. It wasn't until the day of my mother's departure that Grandmother Malloy finally tried to speak about racism. “My mother was at the train station … trying to mumble something,” Betty said later. “Whatever she was trying to tell me, she was not very good at it and I laughed to myself. She was [usually] a bundle of confidence, and here she was just tripping over her words.” Grandmother Malloy never managed to find the right words to prepare her daughter for what lay ahead.

  “But the minute I got off that train, I knew what she was trying to say,” my mother said. “She was trying to tell me in ten words or less about racism.”

  What exactly happened to my mother in Alabama, I do not know. Probably it was simply the everyday, routine degradation of finding oneself a second-class citizen in the greatest democracy on earth: “colored” water fountains and waiting rooms, divided towns and restaurants, lowered eyes and casual epithets, and beneath all interaction between whites and blacks a current of tension and hostility and fear. Whatever it was, the experience tilled the soil of my mother's imagination for the seeds my father would later sow in her mind.

  After a year at Tuskegee my mother reconsidered her surroundings and plans to teach. She decided that nursing was her true calling and, with the blessings of her parents, transferred out of the south to the Brooklyn State Hospital School of Nursing, a Tuskegee-affiliated program in New York City. It was there, during her junior year, that a nurse's aide who worked at the hospital one day invited her to dinner at her apartment. The food was delicious, more complex and highly seasoned than anything my mother had tasted back in Detroit. After dinner, the friend invited my mother to attend a lecture at what was then called Temple No. 7 in Harlem. It would later be called Mosque No. 7.

  “Now, how are you going to sit and eat all the food and say no?” my mother wrote in Essence magazine years later. “So we went to the lecture, which I hoped would be over any minute. The woman wanted me to meet her minister, but he was not there that night.”

  My mother's friend wanted her to join the mosque, but my mother was not enthusiastic about the idea. “Number one, I was not familiar with the philosophy, and number two, my parents would kill me if they knew I joined another religion and gave up being a Methodist.”

  But she was enthusiastic about her friend's cooking, and because she wanted to sample it again, she felt she had to go hear her friend's minister. So she returned to Temple No. 7, and this time the dynamic young minister was present. His name was Malcolm X. Betty Dean Sanders was impressed. At another meeting some weeks later this man would be the first person to help my mother understand the discrimination she had experienced in Alabama. Less than two years later they were married. And along we came.

  When my father left the Nation and converted to orthodox Islam, my mother converted, too. Together they deepened their study of the Qur'an and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad. They realized that what they knew of as Islam from the teachings of Elijah Muhammad was really a stew of orthodox Islam, black nationalism, fanciful science, and fanciful history. They decided to pursue the Islam practiced by billions of people all over the world and become Sunni Muslims.

  The basic creed of Islam is brief. There is no God but Allah, who is compassionate and just, and Muhammad is the prophet of Allah. Islam means surrender or submission. Muslims are those who have submitted themselves to the will of God in the name of peace and accept and proclaim the oneness of God.

  When my father was assassinated, some people might have expected my mother to return to the Christian faith of her youth. Instead, she moved deeper into the faith of her choice. My mother was a devout Muslim; not many people realize that because she was extremely private about her faith. She did not proselytize. She did not wear the hijab—the traditional headcovering—in her everyday life, though she dressed modestly as the Qur'an instructs and was always appropriately covered in the mosque. My mother insisted on approaching Islam in a conservative manner. She did not believe Islam required women to be passive creatures locked away in a house somewhere. She believed she had the support of her religion in doing what she had to do—go out into the world and achieve for herself and for the sake of her family, just as millions of Muslims around the world do. And as she did so, she strove to fulfill the five pillars of Islam: she was conscious of Allah, she prayed, she fasted, she made hajj, and she gave generously, to individuals and to charity. I cannot count the number of stories I've heard about my mother leaving an envelope full of cash with someone in need, or a bag of clothes or goods with someone else. Mommy was also modest, she was a good person, and she stood up for her beliefs. She kept the Qur'an in a place of honor and reference in our home.

  Islam was a shining, powerful force that sustained my mother through the darkest periods of her life, and she wanted her daughters to grow up with that same sustenance. So every Sunday, rain or shine, we went to the mosque.

  It didn't matter what we'd done the night before—spent Saturday busy with lessons, gone to someone's party, or stayed up late watching movies on television. It didn't matter if we clung to our blankets and moaned and begged and whined to stay home, Please, Mommy, please, just this once. It didn't matter at all. My mother didn't even argue with us; that we were going to the mosque was just understood. She would rise and set about making oatmeal in the kitchen while the six of us dressed and combed our hair. As required, we dressed modestly and conservatively: ankle-length skirts, pants, or dresses, loose blouses, coverings for our heads.

  When we were very young, we would be ferried into New York, often in a limousine. I'm sure some people at the mosque saw us piling out of that limo and thought we were rich, but during those first years after my father was assassinated, my mother was understandably cautious about driving herself and her six children into the city alone. Later, as years passed and fears eased, we would simply pile into my mother's car for the trip to the mosque. We all had our assigned seats: Malaak and I sat up front with my mother. Since I was older than Malaak, the window was mine. Qubilah had the driver's side window in the back and Attallah claimed the other window, with Gamilah and Malikah in between.

  We attended the mosque at the Islamic Center, first on West 72nd Street and Riverside Drive and later, when the community moved, at East 97th Street and Third Avenue. The congregation was mostly foreign-born—people from the Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, the Philippines, or elsewhere in the world who had come to New York seeking a better life like so many immigrants before them. Our family was one of only a handful of African Americans who belonged to the mosque, but it was never an issue for us—or anyone else that we knew of. True Islam teaches the brotherhood of all people, and that's the way my mother genuinely raised us.

  The first thing we did when we arrived at the mosque was to remove our shoes and head upstairs to Qur'anic studies, a kind of Sunday school for Muslims. For the first hour of class, we studied the Qur'an; in the second hour, we learned how to read, write, and understand Arabic. At 12:30 p.m. we were allowed a break, especially if we were going to be a
t the mosque the whole day. We'd burst forth from the doors like wild horses unleashed and race across the street to the park or up to the corner store for candy. My mother, as a rule, did not allow us to have much candy. Being a nurse and a Muslim, she was extremely health-conscious and carefully monitored what we ate. But on Sundays we could sometimes sneak a few pieces of candy from the store.

  After the break, the muezzin would sound the call and we would head back inside to perform our cleansing before beginning congregational prayer. Prayer began with the Imam, our prayer leader, standing at the front of the mosque facing toward Mecca, the holy city of Islam. We all lined up in rows behind him, men in front, women behind them, and children at the back. We tried as hard as we could to concentrate on the service, but as the prayers went on and on—standing, kneeling, lying prostrate—we sometimes let our attention wander. One thing I know: It's hard to be a child facing row upon row of bare adult feet with their accumulated bunions and corns and stubby toes and not giggle a little bit.

  After mosque my mother would take us out to eat; this, for me, was the best part of the day. New York was and is a smorgasbord of possibilities, and my mother wanted us to sample as many as possible. We might have bagels and lox in a deli on the Upper West Side, dim sum in Chinatown, or dinner at an Indian or Ethiopian restaurant. After eating, if it was still early enough, she would take us to a concert or to Broadway to see a play.

  Now, of course, I understand that she wanted us exposed to the world of fine arts, wanted us to learn to appreciate theater and performance and music of all kinds. And I enjoyed some of the cultural events. I loved seeing the beautiful dancers in the Alvin Ailey company fly their way across the stage. I liked the circus and I enjoyed magic shows. I liked musicals; I remember seeing The Wiz and feeling exhilarated by the soulful music and energetic dancing. And plays could also be interesting. Though once, when I was eight or nine, we went to see The River Niger. I remember having only a vague idea of what was going on—there was lots of cursing and sexual grunts—and after awhile my mother simply stood up and led us from the theater. We looked like ducklings, the six of us, dutifully following our mother duck all in a line. Poor Attallah must have been about thirteen and so tall and terribly embarrassed, but I was just as happy not to have to sit and listen anymore.