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GHOSTS OF HISTORY
AUGUST 4, 1997TRANSCRIPT |
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Essayist Richard Rodriguez discusses the death of Betty Shabazz.
ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Now, our Monday night essay. Later this week, the court will decide what to do about the grandson of Malcolm X, accused of setting the fire which killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz. Richard Rodriguez, editor of the Pacific News Service, considers her death.
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ: To put it bluntly, the death of Betty Shabazz in late June is now old news. Such is the pace we live. The headline on the morning's commute seems dated by the time we drive home.
I did not know Betty Shabazz, had no idea what had become of her after that gray winter afternoon in 1965 in the Audubon Ball Room in Harlem when her husband was killed by three black gunmen, allegedly members of the Nation of Islam. What survived in all the years since was the memory of what Malcolm X preached to black America--the importance of taking control of one's own life.
When I was a teenager, I remember watching Malcolm X give a speech. I remember his military bearing at the podium, his elegant severity. There was something so self-conceived about him, there, in the spotlight, his stiff white shirt, his dark suit. He reminded me of a convert.
Though Malcolm X remains one of the most revolutionary of black intellectuals, something about him was characteristically American. Aren't we Americans, after all, famous for our desire to take control of our individual lives, to stand against fate, against history? If in Malcolm X's determination to stand against history there is a deep American wisdom, there is in his family story another reminder. Generations are interconnected. An event in a great grandfather's life can play on a child's life many years later. The Ku Klux Klan torched the house of Malcolm X's father. Almost a century later, the grandson of Malcolm X confessed to torching his grandmother's house.
It is as though the match held by the Klansman at the turn of the century prefigured the black child's match 90 years later. To see history this way is to see history the way a novelist might. The great novels often teach us that to tell a story of one generation, you need to tell a story of several generations. The great novels are often family sagas. And to that extent, they violate an American faith in the individual's ability to cut himself off from his father or his grandfather's tragedies.
If only we knew how t tell the story of America as a novel, instead of as headline news, we would recognize that this land we all claim for our future is haunted. There are many ghosts on the landscape, terrible stories, among them the massacre of Indians and African slavery. Our American genius has been to turn away from the troubling past. In my lifetime I've seen Americans reject the anti-black racism of generations earlier.
The change has been dramatic, but already now one hears a white impatience with lingering black resentment. What troubles me now about the death of Betty Shabazz is the suspicion that one generation cannot simply walk away from the sins of an earlier generation, though we also must.
As an angry young man, Malcolm X was a hustler, a con. He abused women. He abused himself. Then he changed--underwent a conversion. He would not allow himself to be strangled by the terrible past. Malcolm X's daughter, Qubilah, was four years old when she saw her father gunned down. In 1995, she was indicted on charges of plotting to kill Nation of Islam Leader Louis Farrakhan in retaliation for the murder of her father.
It is Qubilah's troubled son, 12-year-old Malcolm, who set the fire that killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz. We are faced with a paradox. To make a new life, we must put history behind us.
But closing our eyes to the past may leave us fatally innocent of how it is a black child named Malcolm found himself in handcuffs in 1997 within the great American novel.
I'm Richard Rodriguez.
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