eZine

4th Ward, Atlanta:
Fourth Panel - The Dance
by Louis Delsarte
5' x 7', acrylic on canvas
© 2003, Fulton County Mural Commission

Featured Columnist

Sonsyrea Tate

Million Family Reflections

Twenty years ago, I had donned the official Muslim Girls Training (M.G.T.) uniform for little girls - pantaloons, a knee-length matching jacket, and a shoulder-length scarf, rounded at the edge - while my grandmother wore her grown-up one - a hat, matching long jacket and ankle-length skirt. In class at the Muslim school, I had stood, soldier-like, reciting venomous rhetoric about who the white man was and where, when and how he must meet his demise. I'd studied the universe and my own anatomy and come to understand what it meant to be Black and destined to rule, and what it meant to be a woman and destined to serve.

The years following my Nation of Islam - and subsequent Orthodox Muslim upbringing - found me reeling from too many conflicting philosophies, an overload of do's and don't's, and bitter disillusionment as the hypocrisy of religion and religious folks came to light. I'd all but given up on organized religion altogether, clinging fiercely to the single belief that there is a God. I believe it was such a force that led me to the march, which I had planned not to attend. I was encouraged to go by a dear friend, Dr. Clifton Marsh, who has been writing the history of the Nation of Islam in his books, "From Black Muslims to Muslims 1930-1990", and "The Lost-Found Nation of Islam in America", both by Scarecrow Trade. He said this would be an historical event, which I, as another chronicler of the Nation of Islam's history, could not afford to miss. So I went to do the dutiful thing. I went to get comments and color just for the record, but my own soul would be touched to begin healing in the process.

I approached a young woman sitting on a blanket surrounded by children and two other young women. As she began explaining that they came from Detroit for this celebration of family, her husband, Harum Muhammad, 28, dressed in the NOI trademark dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, approached. He and his wife, 29, agreed to stand for a family photo, and gathered their children Harum, 9, Sunasia, 5, Rashid, 8, and Sakinah, 3 next to them, holding their 12-day-old daughter, Sadiyah, between them. This Muhammad family - and there are lots of Muhammads, Nation of Islam families who adopt the name of their spiritual father, Elijah Muhammad, who had himself in 1930 adopted the surname of the founder of Orthodox Islam, not to be confused with Nation of Islam Islam as the two are distinctly different - was among tens of thousands who gathered on the National Mall on Oct. 15 to commemorate the historic Million Man March.

"I sold drugs from 14-19. I could tell you a whole bunch of stories. I been shot at many times. I had dropped out of school back in the eighth grade. Went back after joining the Nation. Then I did a semester at Henry Ford Community College," he began. "The Nation actually saved my life. People were trying to kill me. It helped me shape my family."

His wife recently graduated from the Detroit College of Business, and all his children are two grades ahead in school. Of this,

Muhammad grew up in the Nation of Islam in the 1970s. His mother died when he was four, his father remarried the following year and raised the four children under the strict guidance of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the young man explained. So, how did he go from that strict upbringing into a life of crime?

He sighed and shook his head.

"I know," I told him. "I grew up in it, too. That transition was rough!"

"You grew up in it?" he asked.

"Yeah. My grandparents were pioneers. I was in it from the time I was three until after Elijah Muhammad died and everything changed," I said. "A lot of people got messed up through that transition. A lot of us didn't make it."

He nodded knowingly.

"I could tell you stories," he said.

"Yeah. But nobody wants to hear it. People are loving the Nation now because it had a successful Million Man March, and that success feels great for everybody," said. "Now folks want to go back and rewrite history like they were loving it and supporting it all along. You know how isolated and alienated we were when the Nation collapsed." He nodded. We'd set ourselves apart from the people in the communities where we lived and in many cases we had strained relations with our family members who were not in the Nation. Parents who raised their children to be Christian had major fits when those children grew up and joined the radical, at that time anti-Christian, all-black group. Family relations were strained, and of course, the littlest "x"s felt it.

I still get that way when I start talking about the "good old days", but talking about it takes the edge off. It's the best way I know to let go. I have moved on. Really, I have. I look back now with more appreciation than regret, appreciating much of the strong moral and spiritual training I received in the Nation. (I am in no way claiming to be anybody's model of a good, pure Muslim woman. I'm not.) But I learned many very valuable lessons - from mundane domestic skills that help me maintain a clean home and nutritious diet, to greater spiritual disciplines, which allow me to feel connected to a source much greater than myself.

"Yeah, the pain was real alright."

Something about being taught that the white man is the devil and God a black man named W. Fard Muhammad and believing it wholly the first ten - or 15 or 20 years of your life - then learning you had been divinely deceived that is deeply painful. Something about that tears you up worse than finding out Santa Clause was a fake. And who can relate accept someone else who walked that road with you. Not your parents or grandparents who walked it in front of you, their complex motives more personally and socially desperate than that of their children. Not your baby sisters and brothers who came up enough years behind you to miss the intensity of fear of sin made real by whippings with extension chords and rulers at school, or cramming your head with facts and figures that would prove inaccurate or untrue when you got out into the real world when you need information to survive and to pass. Who could understand the trauma of the debriefing of children who would have to be debriefed in order to survive.

Boys, raised in a nation where they truly believed women were put on earth to serve them and that the rest of the world should bow to them because they were the "makers-owners-cream-of-the-planet-earth-god-of-the-universe" as we'd recited in school, would be in for a rude awakening out in the world. Girls, raised to believe that men were here to provide for and protect us, would get an awakening even more rude. Realizing that not every boy who asked for our phone number wanted to marry us and that not every boy we kissed - or went farther with - could be forced to marry us, was a harsh jolt of reality for some of us.

Now, here I was, struggling with mixed emotions as I watched tens of thousands of families gathered on the National Mall at the urging of Louis Farrakhan to celebrate the traditional family structure, and, unwittingly or not, adding to his credibility, with which, by his own account he is accountable to no one.

How could so many people be tricked and bamboozled, I wondered.

Then I ran into a woman who was an adult in the Nation when I was just a girl. Cynthia is a strikingly gorgeous woman, whose independence had put her at odds with many in the Nation. I was surprised to see her at the March with her daughters and a grandbaby in a stroller. She's been divorced from her Muslim husband for years, and if anyone knew this family thing being espoused was a hoax, out of reach for many, too high an ideal even for some of the folks in the Nation of Islam, it would be her. She knew that a lot of those Muslim marriages hadn't worked out. So, why was she here supporting this farce?

"I want to show my girls what's possible," she said.

It was possible for whole African American families to show up together. Possible for the Nation of Islam to rise above its previous position of race-based rhetoric. Possible for families of various races and faiths to come together - even if for a fleeting, symbolic moment. Possible for me, a former Nation member, to publicly criticize the organization and its leader and live to come to terms with it all.

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