Growing Up X Read online

  Ms. Hopgood and Ms. Thomas were sweet, loving African American women, sisters, from the South. Both were probably in their late fifties or early sixties, though adults always seem older to children so I can't be sure. Ms. Hopgood was a full-figured woman, with beautiful thick gray hair that she wore long and pulled back into a braid. Ms. Thomas was more slender than her sister, with softer features and a softer disposition to match.

  They both wore white uniform dresses whenever they were at our house, but Ms. Hopgood liked to snazz hers up by wearing a pretty pink apron on top. Ms. Thomas did most of the cooking; cupcakes were her specialty. Following Mommy's instructions, she would make them from healthy batters of wheat germ and whole-wheat flour and shredded carrots or mashed bananas and then frost them with fluffy pink icing that made our little stomachs jump with joy and our hands itchy with anticipation. But there was no sneaking early cupcakes with Ms. Thomas around. She could be nowhere in sight when I tiptoed into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door, and just as my hand was reaching that pink treasure I would hear, “Get your hand off my cupcake!” I was always surprised and impressed; I thought Ms. Thomas must be some kind of special woman with the ability to see through walls. It never occurred to me that from her room next to the kitchen she could hear the refrigerator door open and guess the rest.

  Ms. Hopgood took care of cleaning and managing the house. She was forever sweeping or mopping or dusting or picking up, trying to keep ahead of the household chaos that comes with six children. She would shoo us away from the kitchen after she had mopped. “Don't you girls track dirt onto my clean floor!” I always found what she said odd because I knew it wasn't her floor. The sisters Thomas and Hopgood were a possessive pair.

  Of the two, Ms. Thomas was the more loving, the one more likely to grab a hug or dispense a quick kiss on the cheek. But they were both sweet, wonderful women who treated us as if we were their own. I don't know why we tortured them so, other than the fact that we were kids and they were not our mother.

  Most of what we did was just the normal, house-wrecking stuff of high-spirited children at play. One time we were walking through the woods at the end of Cedar Avenue and came across a teenaged girl and boy kissing. We hounded that couple like they were criminals, chasing them through the woods and screaming at the tops of our lungs, “Kiss! Kiss! Woo, woo, woo!” We made a mess in the basement by playing around with the stacks of canned goods my mother kept for emergencies. We watched a “Little Rascals” episode where the rascals climbed a magic beanstalk into the sky and got chased by a giant, and it looked so exciting, so magical, that we immediately went down into the basement and grabbed one of my mother's silver, industrial-size cans of beans. We removed the top lid, grabbed a handful of beans and planted them all over the backyard. For weeks Gamilah, Qubilah, and I watched those beans, waiting for them to sprout overnight and grow into the sky. They never did.

  We stumbled upon the cans my mother used to collect money for UNICEF and thought we'd discovered a secret treasure of our own. Malaak, Malikah, Gamilah, and I popped open the cans and shook the money all over the floor. Then we gathered it up and hiked miles into town to a local restaurant called Wesson's where we gorged ourselves on the greasy hamburgers, french fries, pickles, and ketchup our mother did not allow us to eat at home.

  But sometimes our horseplay was directed straight at the housekeepers. One night my sisters Gamilah, Malaak, and I were upstairs in our bedroom, playing around when we should have been asleep. We had the television on and the chess- and checkerboards out. I was playing checkers with Malaak. She kept winning and laughing; I kept demanding a rematch because everyone knew she was much too young to beat me at anything.

  Suddenly we heard Ms. Hopgood climbing the stairs and decided to play a little joke. We jumped into bed and pulled the covers over our heads. When she opened the door, we jumped out of bed and ran into our bathroom, pretending we had just woken up and thought it was morning. “Gotta get to school, gotta get to school!” we called as we ran around like maniacs, washing our faces and pulling clothes from our drawers.

  Poor bewildered Ms. Hopgood didn't know what to do.

  “Girls, girls, please!” she called from the doorway. “Please, get in bed! It's nine o'clock at night!” It's amazing we didn't give her a heart attack.

  We were so high-spirited we actually drove one housekeeper away. Her name was Patricia, she was from Trinidad, and she was tall and tough and no-nonsense, a woman who'd had to make her own way in a difficult world. Still, for all her toughness, Patricia was at a complete loss as to how to rein us in. Whenever she took us out to eat at the local diner, we would all sit together in a booth, ignoring her and giggling and saying our names fast— AttallahQubilahIlyasahGamilahMalikahMalaak—to make people think we were speaking a foreign language. If we spoke to Patricia, we'd say her name very loudly because we didn't want anyone to think she was our mother. “Patricia, please pass the salt.” “Can I have french fries, Patricia?” “Will you please pass the jelly, Patricia?”

  The one thing about our house that gave Patricia pleasure was the colorful and beautiful hats my grandmother Sanders from Philadelphia wore whenever she came to visit. Patricia admired the hats so much and so often that my grandmother offered to send her one when she returned home to Philadelphia. Patricia was overjoyed with the idea. Every day she watched the mail, waiting for that hat.

  But one day she must have finally gotten fed up. We were real terrors that day, bouncing off the walls, ignoring her pleas to do our homework, sit down during dinner, pick up our toys. That evening, Patricia casually asked Attallah when the last bus for New York City left town. Not thinking anything about it, Attallah told her it was some time around 11:00 P.M.

  Patricia put us to bed early that night. The next morning, we got up and went downstairs to her room where she slept. The bed was empty and made. Patricia was gone. Later that afternoon the mailman arrived, bearing Patricia's hat.

  After receiving her bachelor's and master's degrees from Jersey City State College, my mother decided to pursue her doctorate. Her friends were supportive, but even they wondered how in the world she would manage such a thing. How could a single mother of six even hope to find the long hours and uninterrupted time needed to write a doctoral thesis? But my mother was determined. Anything she put her mind to, she would accomplish.

  My mother had been given the name of Dr. Norma Jean Anderson, a dean at the University of Massachusetts, who was known for her aggressive and successful efforts in bringing African American and Latino students into the undergraduate and graduate programs at UMass. It was Dr. Anderson who advised and guided both Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille Cosby, as they earned their doctorates. In fact, Bill Cosby was just finishing his doctoral program when my mother began hers.

  When Mommy called Dr. Anderson she asked if the dean knew who she was. Dr. Anderson said she did.

  Then Mommy told her, “What I really need is to come there. I think now is the time for me to go to school.”

  Dr. Anderson said, “Great. Come on.”

  I think my mother chose UMass not only because of Dr. Anderson, but because she thought that in the quiet, secluded college town of Amherst, far from the media frenzy of New York, far from the city her husband loved, she could find some peace. Her presence at UMass caused some buzz and drew some attention, but with Dr. Anderson's support my mother did not let it bother or distract her from the work at hand. In Norma Jean Anderson Mommy found not just a mentor but a dear friend. Sometimes when my mother drove to Amherst to attend classes, she would stay in a hotel. But many times she stayed at the home of Dr. Anderson and her husband, the Reverend LaVerne W. Anderson, a minister in the Church of God in Christ, and their three children. She and Dr. Anderson shared many lunches and long, long talks about child-rearing, spirituality, marriage, and love. “We'd talk,” Dr. Anderson told me. “We'd talk about joyful things, the possibilities, the way to live life and live it gracefully.”

  For
my mother, who craved people who would treat her as a human being, not as an icon, I'm sure the three-hour commute each way seemed like little enough in exchange.

  Mommy arranged her schedule so that she would leave for Massachusetts on Sunday evening. Before leaving she would always take us to the mosque and some kind of cultural event, then come home and do our hair. That was her personal time with each of us, the time she spent washing, brushing, and lovingly braiding six heads. It would take her hours, of course, but she always took her time. “I want to make my baby pretty,” she would say. Then she'd pack up and leave that evening, or sometimes early Monday morning, and make the drive up to Amherst in her blue Oldsmobile. She would stay in Amherst until Wednesday, then return home to us.

  My mother kept us from missing her too much by keeping us busy. We were on such a routine—Monday, charm school or drama class; Tuesday, music lessons; Wednesday, African history tutors— that the early part of the week always flew by, and before we knew it, it was Wednesday night and Mommy's blue car was pulling up the drive. “Mommy's home! Mommy's home!” we would call to one another excitedly. We were always so happy to see her, and she was happy to see us. We would fall into her arms and she, tired but energized by her mission and by us, would eagerly return the hugs. On Thursday night she'd take us all out to dinner where we would order chicken and vegetables and talk about the week just past. It was just a local diner, but my mother's regal presence made us think we were dining in the fanciest of restaurants.

  Back home for four, short days, Mommy concentrated on giving each of us the attention we needed, on making sure the house was running smoothly, and on her coursework, which was substantial. Some days she had so many books and papers and pamphlets that she would move from her desk to the dining room floor, spreading her work around her like a quilt. She would spend hours like that, reading and making notes. Watching her study filled me with awe. Boy, college looked hard. In fact, it looked so hard I made up my ten-year-old mind not to go.

  But I think my mother was deliberate about letting her girls see her work hard on her doctorate, because she wanted us to know that perseverance and doggedness would prevail in the end, despite any obstacles. And prevail they did for Mommy. In 1975, after three intense, hardworking years, Betty Shabazz was awarded her doctorate from the University of Massachusetts. She wrote her dissertation on the Organization of African Unity, especially the organization's educational component. The OAU is the organization after which my father was modeling his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the time of his death.

  I was thirteen when Mommy received her Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. It was such an exciting time. She talked about it for weeks, and we all got new dresses for the occasion; the ones Gamilah and I wore were navy blue with light green piping across the shoulders and down the sleeve. We all piled into the car and drove up to Amherst with Mommy, seeing the campus for the first time. I thought the graceful buildings and lush green lawns were beautiful, like something out of a fairy tale. When they called my mother's name during the ceremony we all stood up and cheered our heads off. Mommy looked up at where we were sitting and waved. She made it feel as though the ceremony was our ceremony, too, as if we all were graduating, which, in a way, I suppose we were. We were graduating into a new life.

  C H A P T E R S I X

  Played

  My mother was a private and cautious woman; under the circumstances in which she found herself, that fact comes as no surprise. The late 1960s and early 1970s were a time of deep suspicion among activists involved in the black nationalism and civil rights movements. Many African Americans at the time (and before, and since) developed a healthy paranoia to keep themselves aware of the routine threats to themselves and their families. There's an old saying about suspicion among African Americans, quoted by Maya Angelou in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: “If you ask a Negro where he's been, he'll tell you where he's going.”

  Few people had more cause for that kind of caution than Mommy, who lived not in fear, because fear is the opposite of faith, but certainly in apprehension that the people responsible for my father's brutal assassination would one day attempt another venomous strike.

  Friends of my mother have told me that Mommy knew, probably even before my father, what was happening to them during those first, turbulent days of separating from the Nation of Islam. My father had dedicated twelve years of his life to building the Nation, and build it he did, from a handful of followers to an organization that numbered, at its height, in the tens of thousands. The Nation did not make Malcolm X. Malcolm X made the Nation, and he did so at great personal sacrifice because he believed so deeply and so completely in Elijah Muhammad, and because he knew that for African Americans to truly overcome, they must first be liberated from the myth of their own self-hate and inferiority. Mr. Muhammad was trying to do just that.

  Still, my father idolized him. So complete was Daddy's faith that when he learned Mr. Muhammad had broken his own moral teachings and fathered four children out of wedlock by two of his secretaries, then tried to cover it up, Daddy was truly shattered. “I felt as though something in nature had failed, like the sun or the stars,” my father wrote. “It was that incredible a phenomenon to me— something too stupendous to conceive.” Even then he still could not believe that Mr. Muhammad and the top ministers of the Nation would turn on him the way they did.

  But my mother saw how the other ministers lived, in nice homes and with nice cars, while my father rejected personal gain. She felt the jealousies and hostilities simmering as her husband became more and more famous, more and more dedicated, more and more certain of his mission, as he became the Nation of Islam. My mother was smart and intuitive. She knew even before the threats, the phone calls, the firebombing that almost took all of our lives. “No one believed him,” my mother told reporters in February 1965 after identifying my father's body at the New York medical exam-iner's office. “They never took him seriously; even after the bombing of our home they said he did it himself !” She was helpless to stop the martyrdom of her husband, but she was determined to protect the rest of her family. From that day at the Audubon when she heard the shots and threw her body atop our own, my mother never stopped shielding her six little girls.

  In 1966 three men, all African Americans and all members of the Nation of Islam, were convicted of my father's murder. One, Talmadge Hayer, was the man who was chased from the ballroom and shot in the leg by an armed member of my father's security force. Hayer, surrounded by an angry crowd that day, was rescued by two police officers who happened to be cruising past in a patrol car. Hayer confessed to the shooting, saying he and two other men— not the two convicted—had been hired to kill Malcolm X. He refused to say by whom.

  My mother wasn't worried only about the followers of Elijah Muhammad. Although she believed in her heart that the group was responsible for my father's assassination, she knew there were other forces at work during those last, terrible months. Neither she nor my father believed the Nation could have been responsible for all the intimidation and all the threats made against my father's life. My father was a key architect of the training received by the Fruit of Islam, the security and self-defense arm of the Nation. He knew how they were taught to think, believe, and act. He knew what they could and could not do. Nor could the Nation have had my father declared “an undesirable person” by the French government and asked to leave the country a few weeks before his transition.

  There's no question Malcolm X made the U.S. government very nervous. When my father traveled abroad in April 1964 he was greeted enthusiastically by world leaders and private citizens alike. Prince Faisal, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, granted my father an audience and made him a guest of the state. He addressed the parliament in Ghana and spoke at the prestigious Ibadan University in Nigeria. When he returned to Africa later that same year, my father met with President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, President Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, and President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania.
By October 1964, Malcolm X had met with eleven heads of state. Here was a man, an African American man, being received like a world leader, yet he was not an elected official, not a representative of the American government, and, in fact, like all African Americans, was not afforded even basic human rights in America. The Johnson government could not have been pleased.

  What's more, throughout his trip to Africa, my father decried the mad rush by multimillion-dollar American corporations to exploit Africa's mineral resources just when the continent's emerging democracies most needed their own wealth. Was that seen as a threat? He also gained the support of more than thirty heads of state in his bid to take the United States before the United Nations on an accusation of denial of human rights. Was America being censured by the world, like South Africa or Angola, an image the government would have enjoyed?

  Then there was the persistent and malicious charge that my father was fomenting violence among African Americans. Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Never, not once, did Malcolm X ever advocate violence for violence's sake. Never, not once, was he ever involved in a violent racial episode.

  My father's message to African Americans was not violence, but self-respect, self-assurance, and, if necessary, self-defense. He did not believe in turning the other cheek, but insisted we as a people had as much right as anyone else to defend ourselves if attacked, whether by white people carrying lynching ropes or white sheriffs wielding fire hoses. He said, “It is a miracle that 22 million black people have not risen up against their oppressors—in which they would have been justified by all moral criteria, and even by the democratic tradition. It is a miracle that the American black people have remained a peaceful people, while catching all the centuries of hell they have caught here in white man's heaven.” For this, the FBI branded him a threat to the American way of life.