Growing Up X Read online

  My father used to say the biggest difference between the parallel oppression of the modern Jews and of blacks was that “Jews never lost pride in being Jewish.” They knew they made a significant contribution to the world, and they vowed never to forget. They teach their children history and culture at a very young age, because they know the knowledge of one's history is absolutely critical.

  Don't believe it? Why then do goverments spend millions upon millions of dollars building monuments? Why did the apartheid government of South Africa lie to generations of indigenous South Africans, teaching them they came from the Netherlands as slaves to the Dutch? My father said, “It is the process of mis-education that inhibits the full potential of a nation.” History grounds a people. It reminds them of their past and encourages belief in their future. History is empowerment, and we as a people should want to empower ourselves.

  We should teach our children their history and not rely on anyone else. But to do that, we have to first know who we are. At a time when African Americans were full of confusion and self-loathing about the color of their skin and the curl of their hair, Malcolm X stood up and declared that we were not Negroes but that we were first and foremost Africans, people of African descent. And we should be proud of that fact. Our heritage was stripped from us—if Italian Americans go to Italy and German Americans go to Germany, where do Negroes go? Negroland? Blackland?—but we could reclaim it. We must reclaim it.

  “Just because you take a zebra and put it in France, that doesn't make it French,” Daddy used to say. “It's still a zebra.”

  So, on Wednesday afternoons, Brother K. Ahamad Tawfiq came to our house to teach us Arabic and to lecture us about the Qur'an and Africa. He was a sheik, the Imam of the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood in New York, and a wonderful storyteller. We would sit on the floor in the dining room, after carefully writing out our Arabic lessons for the day, and listen as Brother Tawfiq wove stories of ancient kings and queens and great kingdoms. Before I learned about Dick, Jane, and Spot, I learned about Marcus Garvey, Nat Turner, and Frederick Douglass. Before I learned about the American Revolution, I learned about how Toussaint L'Ouverture and the slaves of Haiti overthrew their oppressors and claimed their freedom and their land. I learned about King Tut. I learned about the true ethnicity of the great Egyptian pharaoh Djoser and the brilliant architect, astronomer, and physician Imhotep who built his tomb.

  I learned that four thousand years before the birth of Christ, the civilization of Nubia, Sudan of Ethiopia, gave rise to the nation of Egypt, which in turn gave rise to the great civilization of Greece. We learn all about Greece in our history lessons at school, but little about Egypt and nothing about Nubia.

  Through Brother Tawfiq, Mommy addressed the institutional notion that one ethnic group was superior to another. Because any time we are taught that Cleopatra resembles Elizabeth Taylor as opposed to Lauryn Hill, or that Moses resembles Charlton Heston as opposed to Frederick Douglass, Benjamin Banneker, Tupac, or any young African American man walking proudly down the street, then we know our education is denying us opportunity for growth. Such teaching denies America's children self-love and prevents collective respect for human life and achievement. It is a disservice to humanity.

  Listening to Brother Tawfiq, I learned my true heritage. And so I was armed when presented with a white-washed view of history.

  Once, when I was about nine years old, one of my teachers at the St. Joseph Montessori School began a history lesson about Christopher Columbus. With a warm smile on her face she told us how, in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered this great land of America. All the other children nodded but I raised my hand. I was confused, and my mother had taught me to ask questions when I felt that way.

  “Miss Hawthorne? How could Columbus discover a place where people were already living?” Miss Hawthorne smiled but did not address my question. She said we were following the text.

  History lessons at school often left me befuddled. At home I was learning about a place called Africa, a land that was beautiful and colorful and grand in the full sense of the word, a proud and ancient continent of thriving societies and happy people. In school, the only thing I learned about Africans or African Americans was that George Washington Carver invented the peanut and Martin Luther King had a dream and wanted black kids and white kids to hold hands. There was no grandeur, no sense of achievement or accomplishment at all. The version of history I learned made my people seem very, very small.

  When my teacher began talking about the first columns and the first arches and how architecture began in Greece, I just stared at her. How could those Greek buildings, as pretty as they were, be the first great architecture when there were these other magnificent structures, these great stone pyramids rising up along the Nile thousands of years before? When I asked these questions of Miss Hawthorne she ignored them.

  “We're going by the text,” she said.

  But Brother Tawfiq did not ignore my questions. He told me the truth of my heritage. Sitting on that dining room floor I envisioned this beautiful place called Africa, a land of peace and culture and dignity and great happiness. Brother Tawfiq and his stories left me with a great sense of imagination and pride. And I can still read and write Arabic.

  But our after-school activities didn't stop with black history. We studied French, with Attallah and Qubilah quickly becoming fluent. We took lessons in yoga, ballet, and African dance. We studied music, as my father would have wanted. He loved all kinds of music, from classical to soul, and he believed the study of jazz, especially, taught precision, poise, timing, and coordination. Not to mention pride.

  My mother also got us involved with the local chapter of Jack and Jill. Jack and Jill of America is an organization founded by Marion Stubbs Thomas, a music teacher, and a group of other African American mothers in Philadelphia in 1938. The mothers were seeking to provide a wealth of cultural, social, and recreational experiences for their children in a segregated and often hostile world. News of this new organization spread fast and chapters developed in nearby cities. Jack and Jill of America was incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in 1946.

  The organization soon came to mean not only cultural and social opportunities, but community service. With the goal “to seek for all children the same advantages we desire for our own,” chapters to this day adopt projects, conduct fund-raisers, and contribute to organizations such as the Children's Defense Fund and the NAACP.

  What all this meant for us was bake sales, ski getaways, raffles, and parties with other middle-class African American children. I remember one of the first events I attended was a party at some-one's house in Bronxville. The family was very wealthy and the house was beautiful. When we arrived the parents were all milling about upstairs. We children were ushered downstairs into the basement, a beautiful recreation room decorated in black and white. Music was playing on the stereo and the children, teenagers older than myself, were dancing closely on the dance floor. I stared at them in awe.

  Some people consider organizations such as Jack and Jill elitist. Attallah, for one, wasn't interested in the group; she didn't care for the emphasis on social standing and the way some members displayed a kind of colorism snobbery.

  But Mommy, who was mahogany brown and proud of it and far from a snob, wasn't in it for that. The truth is she was very active in social causes. The people who join Jack and Jill want their children to play with other children for whom education and ambition haven't been made “uncool.” Also, I believe Jack and Jill is important because when you are a person of color growing up in an affluent community, nine times out of ten you don't come into contact with other African Americans. You either start thinking you're better than less affluent African Americans or you simply don't think of yourself as black at all. You start recalling the fifth-generation Irish and Native American bloodline—anything except the obvious African. Jack and Jill helps counteract those beliefs.

  At the same time, Mommy belie
ved in the ability of organizations such as Jack and Jill to channel the talents and resources of middle-class African Americans toward uplifting the race. You didn't just join the Links, an organization of African American women, to party, you funded scholarships and mentored children and affected policy. Together you reached back and pulled up, locally, nationally, and abroad. And in doing so you not only made a solid contribution to society, but you served as an inspiration and role model. It's good for African American children to see people who look like them helping them.

  That was why my mother brought me into the Links in 1992. I'll admit that at first, seeing all these society women in their big hats and bigger cocktail rings, I was unsure about becoming a member of such a group. But when I heard them really talking about issues and offering possible solutions, I realized that these were people who were clearly capable of helping others, and that's when I said I wanted to join.

  In many ways my sisters and I lived a life of privilege, and I suppose we took it for granted, as children will. I grew up largely unaware of that other world of black America in which children study no music and attend deteriorating public schools and live in cramped apartments in violent neighborhoods. My mother neither went out of her way to show us this world nor tried to keep us from seeing it. She knew we would learn of our people's condition soon enough. Our job was to prepare ourselves.

  People often ask me what it was like to grow up in a house full of girls. It's hard for me to answer that question, since I, of course, don't have any other upbringing with which to compare it. The best I can say is that it was the absolute greatest. We had lots of fun, my sisters and I. We had it all, at home—all the friends anyone would wish for, plus more friends in our neighborhood, at our mosque, at the homes of our relatives. There was never a lonely moment in our house. Attallah and Qubilah hung out together and the four youngest girls did everything together. Growing up in a house full of women prepares you to get along with other women, and teaches you how to be a good friend. That's something all women need.

  Attallah, whose name means “Gift of God,” is the firstborn. Being the oldest child gave her a certain weight and responsibility. She was bright, assured, observant. At five she taught our twelve-yearold baby-sitter, Gail, a prayer in Arabic, drilling Gail until she got it right.

  Attallah was also the comedian in the family, the entertainer, the dramatic one. (She was also the one who people thought looked most like my father, because her sandy hair and cafe-au-lait coloring is the same as his. But Mommy would say Attallah really looks more like her, while Malikah and I look most like our dad.)

  Attallah would come into our room in the mornings, after our housekeeper had tried and failed to wake us, and perform her own one-woman show. She'd come to the door of the bedroom I shared with Gamilah and knock.

  “Who is it?” Knock, knock.

  “Who is it?” Knock, knock.

  Feigning exasperation, “Who is it, I say?!”

  Then she'd swagger into the room, hitching up her pants like John Wayne. “It's me, pilgrim. I come to fix the sink.”

  “What sink?”

  “The sink you said was clogged, pilgrim!”

  “I never called about a sink! I don't know what you mean.”

  “Oh Duke! I'm the one who called!”

  And on and on, switching voices, gesturing wildly until Gamilah and I were rolling on our beds, convulsed in laughter, fully awake. Sometimes Attallah would include, in the middle of her show, a breakdancing routine. She knew all the latest dances—the funky chicken, the bump. She could get down with the best of them, dancing there before us, her big, sandy-colored Afro waving in the breeze. Rerun had nothing on her. It was Attallah who got us into the ritual of watching “Soul Train” every Saturday morning. Afterward my sisters and I would gather in the kitchen and perform an enthusiastic dance routine while singing the Sister Sledge song “We Are Family.” I was always Kathie Sledge.

  Qubilah is the second oldest; her name means “Mother Nature.” Qubilah is the brain of the family. As a child she loved science and nature and finding out why things worked the way they did. She was the one who thought making a volcano from baking soda and vinegar was cool. She liked to gather my younger sisters and me into the hallway, close all the doors so that it was very dark, then chomp on wintergreen Lifesavers and make sparks fly out of her mouth while we looked on in awe. She seemed to me a stone-cold genius; everything she did was so smart. She often tried to help me with my homework, explaining why it was that x equaled y plus 2, but I'd just look at her in amazement. Half the time I had no idea what she was talking about.

  One time she brought home a shoe box full of strange items that looked like dried weeds or large, hairy mothballs. She put them in her nightstand, near her pet turtle, and went on about her way. It turned out the “weeds” were really cocoons and a few weeks later we had all manner of insect life hatching in our house. Our mother was not amused.

  Gamilah (“Beautiful”) Lamumba was probably the most popular among us. She was the one all the kids in the neighborhood liked, the one everybody wanted to be friends with. Gamilah was always down.

  Gamilah was also our living TV Guide. She liked reading and read every book in our study, but she loved television, especially Saturday morning shows like “Abbott and Costello,” “Little Rascals,” and those old spaghetti westerns. If you wanted to know what was on television at any given moment, all you had to do was ask Gamilah. Even if she wasn't allowed to watch a program, she somehow knew about it.

  Gamilah and I shared a room in which everything was identical. We had the same beds, the same dressers, the same teal-and-blue comforters. The only difference was Gamilah did not often keep her side of the room up to my standards of orderliness. She wasn't sloppy, just more casual than I about hanging up her clothes and picking up her things. I was a fanatic about orderliness.

  One day I just got fed up. My mother and older sisters were out of the house somewhere, and although my mother had not actually put me in charge, I assumed the position anyway. When Gamilah announced that she was going outside to play with her friends, I shook my head.

  “Not until you clean up your side of the room,” I said.

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  My sister crossed her arms and tossed her head. “Who died and made you king?”

  I ignored her and gestured at the rumpled bed. “You need to pick up your clothes and make your bed and straighten up the place. Then, maybe, I'll let you go.”

  Gamilah laughed. “Are you kidding? I'm going out.”

  She began walking toward the door but stopped when I blocked her path. I was always big for my age, and Gamillah was almost two years younger than I. She was not going to challenge me directly and we both knew it. All I had to do was approach her and she would back down onto the bed and kick her feet in the air with a girly grin.

  “Clean the room,” I said, using my most authoritative voice. “Then you can go out.”

  She fussed and fumed for a while but I just turned and left the room. And to make sure she stayed inside and did as told, I locked the door. “I'll let you out when that room is clean,” I called to her. Feeling pretty proud of myself, I went downstairs and busied myself in the kitchen or the living room or something. Maybe fifteen minutes later I decided she'd had enough time and went back up to our room.

  “Are you finished?” I called through the closed door. No answer. Gamilah was still sulking like a child. I opened the door. Gamilah was gone.

  For a moment I just stood in the doorway, too stunned to think straight. How could she have gotten past a locked door? Did she have a key I didn't know about? Then I noticed one of the windows was open. I broke all speed records running across that room, already envisioning my sister's crumpled body thirty feet below in the backyard. But Gamilah had tied several sheets together, tied the end to the cast-iron window frames, and climbed down the improvised rope. I was both furious and relieved to look out that
window and see no sign of her down below. I don't remember what happened when she finally came back from playing with her friends. Probably our mother was home by then and so I let it go.

  Then there were the twins, Malikah (“Queen”) Saban and Malaak (“Angel”) Saban, born six minutes apart, seven months after my father died. I adored the twins as babies. They were like little dolls to me, dolls that could open their eyes and shove their fat little fingers into their mouths and stick their butts in the air when they slept. I thought they were so cute. They were always “the twins,” always together and always dressed alike.

  My mother, in her wisdom, paired us off, informally assigning each younger girl to an older girl for all-around watching, nurturing, and bonding. Malaak was Attallah's baby. Malikah was Qubilah's. They got to hold them, comfort them, give them their bottles, change their clothes. Gamilah was supposed to be “my baby,” but she was only two years younger than I and seemed decidedly un-doll-like to me.

  As they grew older, Malikah was very sweet and smart, a real whiz. She was also a bit of a tattletale until we taught her not to be that way. We never told on one another. Malaak was the younger of the two and those minutes made her the baby of the family. She was a demure, angelic, timid little girl, the one we sang songs to and looked after more than anyone else. Even though the twins each had their “assigned” big sister, it was really the four of us youngest who hung out together while Attallah and Qubilah were off doing their big-girl things. And that made me the oldest, the one in charge. I always thought I was in charge. I was the self-appointed mother of the younger three.