Carrying the Burden of Her Father’s Fame

In her mind, Ilyasah Shabazz’s father is a montage of blurry, black and white photographs and grainy newsreel. She did not know the man that some called a savior and some called a devil. She did not know the sound of his voice, the feel of his hair, the look of his hands. To find him for herself, she has to navigate through other people’s memories. She must try to locate her family’s truth in the shifting albums of history.

Now Shabazz, who was 2 when her father, Malcolm X, was assassinated more than 37 years ago, is offering her stories to the world in an intimate look inside her family. Her memoir, “Growing Up X” (One World Books), picks up the family’s story where history books and political analyses of the Muslim leader who preached black empowerment leave off. It is an up-close portrait of the house full of girls to whom the larger-than-life activist came home each night: the family that basked in his light when he lived, the family that struggled, often alone, when he was gone. In many ways, their struggle continues today.

Shabazz, 39, said she wrote the book partly hoping it would inspire others who are struggling with life challenges. But she also called it “therapeutic” to revisit the events of her life--and, in particular, to try to make her peace with the expectations that she has faced for as long as she can remember.

“The expectation is the burden--the burden! Here you have great parents, and now you’re expected to be better than, or to be them!” she said. “It’s awful, it is awful. It just tears you up inside.”

She has finally learned, she said, that she “cannot save the world. Just let it go, let it go.”

The book’s cover photograph depicts an image at once commonplace and incongruous--Shabazz as a toddler held affectionately in the arms of the man the FBI, the CIA and, eventually, the Nation of Islam reviled. She wears a baby bonnet; he sports his trademark goatee and horn-rimmed glasses.

“Growing Up X” tells of a childhood that was simultaneously average--she and her five sisters attended private schools in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., and square-danced at summer camp in Vermont--and unique--at age 9, she began challenging teachers on the facts of black history and, as a college student, she absorbed her classmates’ harsh judgments because she was not a political activist.

As hinted at in the family’s public scuffle in recent weeks over the threatened auction of Malcolm X’s personal papers, Shabazz’s story reflects the ongoing, personal reverberations of one man’s political journey and his violent death. It is a story of perseverance in the wake of bitter loss.

The book, which relies on the accounts of family friends to fill in details Shabazz was too young to remember, reflects the burdens, confusions and joys that often befall the children of famous people. But Shabazz’s story has an added dimension in that, unlike the child of a film star or sports champion, she must negotiate the volatile terrain of racial politics.

For much of his political career, Malcolm X, who later took the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, vilified American culture and values and promoted the separation of blacks and whites because, he said, whites were incapable of living equally with blacks. In the last years of his life, however, having made a religious pilgrimage abroad and observing people of all colors living harmoniously, his attitudes shifted. He increasingly stressed black empowerment and the common bonds of all races.

“I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red,” Malcolm X told an interviewer a month before he was killed, according to “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which he wrote with Alex Haley.

A few weeks ago, Shabazz unveiled her book at a reception here in Harlem. Despite the swank environment complete with jazz band and hovering waiters, the scene had the echoes of grim history: Shabazz has lived as long as her father did--he was 39 when he died--and the book event was held at the Audubon Ballroom, where he spoke his last words.

“Malcolm was killed right about ... here,” said Manning Marable, a historian at Columbia University, gesturing in the direction of the jazz band. “There was a stage here. He was standing, speaking. They came in from over there,” he said, indicating the room’s only entrance 65 feet away. The men scuffled and yelled to distract from the gunmen who shot him 14 times. (Two Nation of Islam members served prison time for the murder.)

Shabazz, a tall woman with mahogany skin, her father’s square jaw and a fashion model’s presence (she once was one), stood before a massive mural depicting her father’s life and, in her deep, smoky voice, told the crowd of about 300, “Coming to the Audubon, there was so much beautiful energy here. I felt so much peace.”

After the event, she said the place “doesn’t have negative meaning for me. My father gave his life for a cause. I can’t live [thinking], ‘Why me? Why us? Why did he have to go?’ The bottom line is this is what’s happened. So how do we live, how do we grow? What’s the purpose, what’s the point of it all?”

Although she grew up much like a typical suburban child, life after her father’s assassination was, Shabazz writes, in many ways excruciating. A year before his death, Malcolm had split rancorously with the Nation of Islam. A week before the killing, the family’s house had been firebombed. When he died, the family had no home and no support from the religious community they had relied on for years. Malcolm had $600 in his bank account.

“The New York Times,” Shabazz writes, “editorialized him as ‘a twisted man’ who turned ‘true gifts to evil purpose.’” When a prominent friend helped them find a home in suburban Mount Vernon, N.Y., many in the conservative, black middle-class community clearly did not want them living down the street. Shabazz, who works as public information officer for the city of Mount Vernon, rarely tells new acquaintances who her father was.

Each of the Shabazz daughters--including Attallah, Qubilah and Gamilah and twins Malikah and Malaak--joined local social organizations and attended college. Today, some, including Ilyasah, have advanced degrees.

Shabazz’s book sometimes reads more like a loving memorial to her mother than anything else. Indeed, though she had some prominent benefactors such as Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier, the late Betty Shabazz managed the seemingly unmanageable, raising six girls and getting her PhD at the same time. She became a professor and college administrator and was long a revered activist in and around New York. Shabazz says her mother insulated her family from the world, including the media.

But she never discussed the assassination--the facts of the day or her feelings--and she did not seem to encourage her children to reflect on their feelings about it. There were no therapy sessions, no books on death and grieving. Betty Shabazz spoke reverently of her late husband--in the present tense. “Malcolm says ... “ and “Malcolm thinks....”

So, although pictures of Malcolm filled the house and the “Autobiography” was a constant presence, the girls’ upbringing seemed to have been marked by a persistent silence and, beneath that, unresolved grief. That silence prompted Shabazz, once in college, to read the “Autobiography,” visit her father’s grave for the first time and take a course on him.

It was at once a difficult and exhilarating experience for her, Shabazz said. “It was this professor,” she wrote, “who helped me really understand my father’s philosophy and his enormous contributions to our people and to humankind.” When the professor, who did not reveal Shabazz’s identity to the class, asked who among them would be ready for the revolution, she wrote, “all hands shot up, as did mine.”

“Imagine how [that history] impacted her and the rest of them,” said Terrie Williams, a lifelong family friend and founder of the New York-based Stay Strong Foundation for troubled youth. “It’s extraordinary that this woman was able to get this story out, because this family is in a lot of pain.”

That pain erupted again in 1995 when second-oldest daughter Qubilah Shabazz was arrested on charges of plotting to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan because she believed he played a role in the death of her father. (Farrakhan, once a protege of Malcolm’s, has never been linked to the killing.) Charges were dropped when she agreed to counseling and substance-abuse treatment.

Two years later, Qubilah’s troubled son, Malcolm, then 12, unhappy that he had been sent to live with his grandmother in New York, set fire to Betty Shabazz’s home while she slept. The matriarch suffered burns over 80% of her body and died three weeks later. Malcolm pleaded guilty to the juvenile equivalent of second-degree manslaughter and second-degree arson and was in detention until recently. Now 17, he still struggles with behavior problems but has completed high school and lives with Ilyasah in New York, she said.

More recently, the family, though intensely media-shy, has been in the news again, this time in connection with the handling of their father’s papers--including historically valuable diaries, speeches and letters to his wife.

News reports indicated that Malikah Shabazz, unbeknownst to her sisters, took the papers when she moved from the family’s Mount Vernon home to Florida in 1999. She stored them in a rented locker but fell behind on the rent payments, and the papers were sold. The family became aware that the papers were missing when an auction house in San Francisco publicized the upcoming sale. (Butterfields canceled the sale after receiving a letter from the family’s attorney that raised questions about the chain of ownership of the documents. The auction house arranged the transfer of the papers to the Schomburg Institute, a branch of the New York Public Library dedicated to African American research.)

The family now is working with Marable, a Malcolm X scholar and director of Columbia’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies, on a project that will archive and annotate the facts of Malcolm’s life. They are also working to launch a historical center at the Audubon Ballroom, which Shabazz said she hopes will be in operation before the end of the year.

The sisters don’t seem to be close. They live in various states throughout the country, with Attallah on the West Coast. Though Shabazz admits tension arose among them over the handling of her mother’s medical care after the fire, she recently said tersely, “Everyone is fine.”

Through her family’s turmoil, past and present, Ilyasah Shabazz has recovered and, in many ways, flourished. She is now working on a book about her parents’ relationship, due out next year.

As her mother often instructed, Shabazz has found a way to “find the good, and praise it.”

Ilyasah Shabazz will read from “Growing Up X” tonight at EsoWon bookstore at 3655 S. La Brea Ave., Los Angeles. For more information, call (323) 294-0324.