Growing Up X Page 7
Attallah and Malaak shared a room, Qubilah and Malikah shared a room, and I shared a room with Gamilah. Our room was upstairs and had probably served as the maid's quarters when Congresswoman Bella Abzug lived in the house. It had its own bathroom and an enormous closet where Gamilah and I hung the posters of whoever we were in love with that month—the Silvers, James Brown, Chaka Kahn, the Jackson Five.
The others were passing fancies, but Michael Jackson held my heart all through childhood. I was a Michael Jackson fanatic. I remember sitting on the couch with my mother as she knitted a hat for me. We were watching the Ed Sullivan show when suddenly Michael Jackson and his brothers came on. I jumped up and squealed so loudly my mother almost had a heart attack. When I was eight or nine years old it occurred to me that Michael would probably love me back if he just knew I was alive. I decided to write him a letter. I told him my name and where I lived and how old I was. I told him my father was Malcolm X and my mother was Betty Shabazz; I figured that would at least get his attention. I wanted to know if I could come see him and become his friend. I mailed the letter with high hopes, but I never got a reply.
Being the third of six girls, I suppose I could be considered the middle child of the family. But middle children are supposed to be the lost ones, the daughters overlooked between the excited anticipation of the first child and the relaxed and joyful gushing over the baby. Middle children are supposed to wonder about their identity, their role in life. They're also supposed to be the peacemakers of the family. I'm not sure how much of that applies to me.
What I can say is that I was a rambunctious child, the kind who needed constant distraction in a restaurant to keep her from running into the kitchen and getting underfoot. I was feisty and tough, big for my age, with a deep voice to match. “You didn't let anybody push you around,” our baby-sitter Gail said. “If I heard Gamilah crying, I knew it was you.”
If I needed a hug or a kiss from Mommy, I went right up and took it. I had no qualms about making demands and asking questions and sharing my innermost desires and dreams with my mother.
There is a well-known photograph of my family with Muhammad Ali; they had to bribe me with candy for that picture, because I was not at all interested in sitting still. I exasperated my preschool teachers at the Headstart program by running around and generally ignoring whatever instructions they tried to give. If it was circle time, I wanted to go outside. If it was recess time, I wanted to sit in the doorway and play with my coat. If it was story time, I wanted to run laps around the room. I was so defiant I would get a spanking nearly every day when I came home.
My mother said the only person I ever listened to was my father; anyone else was just making noise in my ear. Even my mother had a hard time getting through. For example, I sucked my thumb until I was three years old. My mother tried everything she could think of to get me to stop. She tried demanding, she tried cajoling, she even tried hot sauce. But I just plopped my thumb into my mouth and sucked away, hot sauce or no. Everyone was amazed. They said I had no fear.
Looking back, I think I wasn't so much fearless or even defiant as grasping, trying to find my way. My mother did a superhuman job of cushioning us from the stinging pain of my father's absence. Daddy's death was never discussed. There was no therapy, no support group or books on death; we all had to find our own ways of dealing, even if subconsciously. Especially the three oldest of us.
Attallah, I think, dealt with it by being so much like my father: resilient, protective of loved ones, a natural and gifted leader. Qubilah coped by quietly retreating. Besides being so smart, she was, probably, the most sensitive of us. “If anyone was likely to get her feelings hurt, it was her,” said our baby-sitter Gail. Qubilah went inside herself, just lowered the blinds, and kept her feelings to herself.
But me, I was very bold about getting my needs met. If I needed a hug, somebody was going to give me a hug or hear about it. If I felt lonely, if I wanted affection, I found a way to let people know. Sometimes a child can vocalize her emotions, put words to her needs; sometimes she can't. So she knocks over a lamp or makes a loud noise or drives the teacher to distraction. Either way, the cry is the same: Please pay attention to me. Every child needs and deserves as much love and presence as the adults in her life can muster up.
C H A P T E R F O U R
Camp Betsey Cox
Betsey Cox was a settler in pre-Revolutionary Vermont who had the misfortune of one day being kidnapped by a raiding party of local Indians. The kidnappers were reportedly accompanied by a disaffected white colonist, an American whose sympathies lay with the French. Their plan was to grab Betsey and her sister, Sarah June, take them over the border to Montreal, and ransom them off.
But things soon went awry. Sarah June escaped her captors and made her way into town to sound the alarm. The villagers responded with guns. The kidnappers found themselves with the entire village on their trail—and a large and possibly pregnant Betsey on their hands—and decided the better part of common sense was to abandon ship and Betsey, too.
For some reason, it was Betsey, and not the feisty Sarah June, who became famous afterward for surviving the raid. It was Betsey who was remembered, Betsey who had a mountain and a street named in her honor. And when my mother announced that Gamilah and I would be attending a summer camp in Vermont, it was Betsey Cox, and not the feisty Sarah June, whose name fell from her lips.
There's something to be said, I guess, for just living to tell the tale.
Of course, I had never heard of Camp Betsey Cox; I was seven years old and had scarcely heard of the state of Vermont. Certainly I had no real understanding of what a summer camp meant, namely that I would be spending weeks away from Mommy and sleeping with strangers for the first time in my life. I certainly didn't realize Gamilah and I would be the only black people in sight.
But who cared? It sounded exciting—marshmallows around the campfire, all the swimming and boating and arts and crafts you could stand. My mother had enrolled Attallah and Qubilah at the Farm and Wilderness Camp in another part of Vermont, so we were all caught up in the coming adventure.
On the appointed day my mother drove the four of us up to Vermont. She must have dropped Attallah and Qubilah off first, but I don't remember much about their new summer home. I was far too nervous. By now the reality of being separated from my mother for weeks had set in and I wasn't pleased with the notion. More than any of my sisters, I was a Mommy's girl. My mother was always the most important person in the world to me; I told her so from the time I could talk. Mommy, I love you. Mommy, you're the most important person in the world to me. Mommy, if anything ever happens to you, I'll just crumble. As I got older, my mother tried to gently redirect some of my intensity. “Yasah, you need to focus on yourself,” she would tell me.
Camp Betsey Cox is built on the site of an old hill farm near Pittsford, Vermont. Surrounded by the Green Mountains, the property spans acres and acres of lush green meadowland and cool, dark, pine-needled woods. There are tennis courts; grooming stables and horseback riding paths; a huge vegetable patch; and a springfed lake. That first day, as we pulled off the main street and began traveling down the long, white gravel road, I could not believe my eyes. Gamilah and I were not in Mount Vernon anymore.
The cabins were named after Vermont mountains: Lincoln, Pico, Killington, Mansfield, Camels Hump. We were assigned to Sugar-bush. It was pretty rustic, with rough, pine-board walls, canvas bunks, and a huge stone fireplace. The showers and toilets were outside, a few yards away, in a wash house. We shared the cabin with six other girls and two counselors.
The counselors had names like Marci and Laurie and Chicky and Bess. They were all pretty white college girls with bare feet, long hair, and earnest smiles, and almost immediately I felt comfortable among them. They approached Gamilah and me with warmth and openness. There was one in particular whom Gamilah and I came to love. Her name was Jenny, and she paid a lot of attention to us, seeking us out during the day or sitting with us a
t vespers after dark. Jenny had long, curly black hair and beautiful copper skin that darkened easily beneath the Vermont sun. I assumed, without ever really thinking about it, that Jenny was black. Later on we found out she was Jewish and lived in New York, not far from our mosque.
It wasn't until I became an adult that I learned some of the counselors were, in fact, quite nervous about our arrival that first year. They heard that the daughters of Malcolm X were coming to camp and some of them panicked. But Mike, the camp director and an admirer of my father's, reassured them that we were just kids, that there would be no fiery stares across the breakfast table, no name-calling in archery class, or fingers pointed accusingly across the campfire at night.
Part of their apprehension was just a sign of the times. It was the early seventies, and the country was still reeling from the sixties, with its wars and protests and political assassinations. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, and young African American activists, angered and frustrated with the slow pace of change, were growing more militant. Stokely Carmichael was preaching “black power.” Out in Oakland, California, Bobby Seale and Huey Newton had formed the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, taking my father's teachings as the basis of their philosophy. Eldridge Cleaver, who said he had “washed his hands in the blood of the martyr Malcolm X,” had rocked mainstream white America with his groundbreaking prison memoir Soul on Ice. And America and the world had watched in shock as sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood on an Olympic medal stand in Mexico City and raised their black, gloved fists defiantly in the air.
These were tense, suspicious times between black people and white, and the counselors of Camp Betsey Cox could not possibly have been immune. It wasn't as though they had a lot of practice integrating black children into the camp, even black children who were not the daughters of outspoken and slain black heroes. Gamilah and I were among the first African American children to attend Betsey Cox, despite its long history. Whether this was due to the camp's failure to make itself known to black families, or the natural suspicions of black folks—You want me to send my child where? To be watched by who?—I don't know. Probably some of both.
But my mother was an educated and deeply spiritual woman who had faith in human kindness despite all that had happened to her. Plus she was a martyr's widow raising six girls on her own; the truth is, she needed a break and wanted to keep us busy. So she found the two best camps she could, negotiated a payment plan, trusted in Allah, and sent us off. I believe she chose well. In all my years at Camp Betsey Cox, I felt nothing but warmth and respect from the counselors and staff. So welcoming were they, and so sheltered was I from the racial turmoil of the times, that I did not even fully absorb until I was older, probably fourteen, the fact that Gamilah and I and a few other girls were the only black children at Camp Betsey Cox. In fact, the only racial incident I recall happened not at the camp itself, but in town.
It was the Fourth of July and all the girls at camp got dressed and went with their counselors into Pittsford to participate in the local parade. It was a big event, as parades in small towns often are. There were balloons and streamers and crowds. People lined up on either side of the main street, flags in hand, to watch the bands and high school floats and aging veterans march proudly past. We were all cheering with everyone else, when I noticed that some of the townspeople seemed to be staring at Gamilah and me and our friend Lisa Stroud, who is the daughter of the brilliant singer and performer Nina Simone. Now, of course, I realize that we were not just the only black faces in sight, we were probably the only black faces some of the townspeople had ever seen. But at the time, I had no idea what was going on. All I knew was that people were staring, grown-ups were staring, and they weren't supposed to stare. I squirmed a little, trying to inconspicuously check my clothes to make sure my underwear wasn't showing or my hair wasn't sticking up. Then the counselors seemed to notice. They moved closer to Gamilah and Lisa and me and put their arms around our shoulders. One of them muttered something under her breath. Then, out of nowhere, I felt a hand on my head. Someone from the crowd behind us had reached out to stroke my hair. By the time I turned around the hand was gone and I couldn't tell to which of the white faces behind me it had belonged. They were all staring; not wanting to stare back, I probably smiled. But over the fading music of the marching band, I heard a voice say “It's soft!” The voice sounded unashamedly delighted with itself, and completely surprised.
At Camp Betsey Cox, everything was done by the bell. Rising bell sounded at 7:30 A.M. to wake us up and set us on our sleepy way to washing up at the wash house. The breakfast bell rang at 8:00, right after we assembled to say the Pledge of Allegiance. The morning activities bell was at 9:30, the lunch bell at noon, and on and on throughout the day.
But in spite of all this bell-ringing, Camp Betsey Cox was surprisingly unregimented. The camp was started by a Christian Scientist who believed in the basic perfectability of mankind and in each person's ability to solve her problems by applying the right mental effort. The prevailing philosophy of the camp was that freedom and choice equals responsibility and growth. Within certain boundaries, we were allowed to create our own daily schedules. If we wanted to spend every day practicing archery, we could. If we wanted to play tennis or ride horses until we dropped, that was our prerogative.
I loved it all. I loved just walking up the hill at the back of camp and into the woods, cool and fresh-smelling and quiet, with even the sound of my own steps cushioned by the pine needles beneath my bare feet.
Among the most popular activities was woodcraft, which theoretically meant learning how to survive in the woods and practically speaking meant learning how to cook all kinds of food outdoors in preparation for our overnight hiking trips. We learned how to boil down sap for maple syrup, how to identify edible berries and roots, how to roast hot dogs in an outdoor pit. Gamilah loved woodcraft. She'd head straight to it after breakfast, cook and eat all morning, then go to lunch. After a few weeks at camp she'd get to the point where the buttons on her shorts were having trouble connecting.
Our only obligations at Camp Betsey Cox were to follow camp rules, take swimming lessons, and contribute to the community by taking our turns with certain camp jobs—setting the table for breakfast, sorting mail in the post office, weeding the vegetable patch. One year my job was to pick up and sort the mail. The sorting was great, but picking up the mail from what we called the Big House could be an exercise in terror. That was because the owners had a dog, a huge German shepherd named Notcha, and you never knew where he might lurk. One day my friends Lori, Kathy, and Lisa went with me to get the mail. But Notcha was tied up outside, and when we came near he began to bark. We were terrified. It took forever for us to work up the courage to dash past him and grab the mail. Once we did, we hauled ass out of there, giggling hysterically with fear.
Lisa Stroud was one of my best friends at camp, and she lived at our house, off and on, from the time she was seven or eight until she was about ten. I think Mommy, in her eternal generosity, must have thought raising seven girls could not be much harder than raising six, so when Miss Simone asked if Mommy could watch Lisa while she was on tour in Europe, Mommy said yes. It was great for me—Lisa and I were the same age and it was like having a twin. We called each other god-sisters. We played together, went to school together, danced to Miriam Makeba together, traveled to camp together. We shared my bedroom and took yoga classes together. She was a member of the family.
Sometimes Lisa and I played at her house under the care of her very young, very blonde housekeeper, in a backyard so verdant and lush it seemed more like a tropical jungle than a garden. The yard had one of those tire swings on which we would fly around and around and around, or else we'd shoot Silly String at each other, later getting into trouble because we were not supposed to let it stick to the outdoor furniture. And when Miss Simone came home she would sit at her great, black piano with a glass of wine and sing great, touching, soul-felt revolutionary song
s like “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” in her amazing voice. And Lisa and I would sing along.
In the evenings at Camp Betsey Cox, the whole camp would walk over to Blueberry Field for vespers. We all sat in a big circle, looking out over the valley with the Green Mountains slowly disappearing as the sun went down. The counselors would try to lead us in earnest discussions about President Nixon or the Pentagon Papers or the war in Vietnam, but to most of us girls those things seemed as distant as the stars appearing in the sky above our heads. We just wanted to sit there in the gathering dusk, feeling all warm and sisterly, and sing “Kum Ba Yah” or “Country Road” while somebody strummed along on the guitar.
On Saturday nights we would have square dances or socials with the boys from neighboring Camp Sangamon.
Sometimes my mother would drive up to visit us during the middle of camp. It was always so exciting when she came. I remember once she brought us new dresses to wear to the square dances the counselors organized with the boys from Camp Sangamon. The dresses were ankle-length, with puffy sleeves and piping around the front and ruffles around the hem. Gamilah and I put them on and thought we were the most fashionable girls on the East Coast. My mother laughed and hugged us as we beamed. Then she put us in the car and drove us over to see Attallah and Qubilah at their camp, and the five of us spent the whole afternoon together. It was one of the best days of my young life.
But as much as I loved summer camp, I always missed my mother. Not being with her was the one sorrow in the otherwise idyllic world of Camp Betsey Cox. My mother was always the most important person in the world to me, and in times of stress or pain, I thought of no one else.
During my second summer at camp I was climbing a tree one day when I had an accident. It appeared a cat had been climbing the tree before me and had left behind a little present, into which I stepped and which made my foot slip so that I fell from the tree and landed on my arm. For one, long, unending moment I lay on the ground, silent and disbelieving, unable to even breathe. Then the pain came roaring in and I screamed. One of the girls with me shook herself from her stupor and went yelling for the camp nurse. Gamilah, who had also been climbing the tree but missed the cat poop, leapt down beside me and burst into tears. “Yasah! Yasah!” she sobbed, nearly as hysterical as I was. “Help! Help!” she yelled, but I couldn't hear her over my own screams.