Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.wpost From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: Betty Shabazz on 'Malcolm X' Betty Shabazz on 'Malcolm X' When Betty Shabazz, the widow of Malcolm X, finally got up the courage to see the film about her husband's life, she was amused at how she was depicted. "I was not as self-assured as she was," says Shabazz. "This young lady became a part of the movement, saw Malcolm and decided that was who she wanted. She went straight to the bull's-eye. ... I was Malcolm's choice, and I thank God for that. The thing is had I been that assertive I probably would never have been Mrs. When I saw that, I said, 'Oh, wow, isn't that great!' I have al- ways wished and dreamed that I could be that smooth." While she's tickled and wistful about her own portrayal, she is apprehensive and torn about that of her husband. She is probably one of the few people who thinks the film, at better than three hours, is too short. A longer, fuller version might have given viewers a more complete understanding of him, and given her back the Mal- colm she knew. "I felt as if I was going to see my husband and I wouldn't be able to bring him home. I had a great sense of anxiety," she says. There's a catch in her strong, rolling voice, evidence of a struggle between sounding despondent or romantic. She decides on the sentimental. She had to prime herself for the screening, telling herself fi- nally that she "was a big girl." She left an Upstate New York fasting retreat with her carton of apple, beet and carrot juices for the drive to Manhattan. "I thought maybe I needed a glass of wine. ... But I came on and saw my husband. I was trying to do deep-breathing exercises, trying to remain calm," says Shabazz. Her reservations, however, were eased by maternal satisfaction. As her third daughter, Ilyasah, sat beside her, Shabazz thought of the years she had to protect her children. Now the tables were turned, and Ilyasah provided the comfort. "I thought, 'Isn't this cute?' She was soothing me. At one point, it got too much for me; I felt both hands going above my head, and she grabbed one of my arms and said, 'It is all right, honey, I'm here.' I thought this was too sweet, isn't it?" Despite the decades of distance, the worst part still was watch- ing the assassination. She was in the Audubon Ballroom that day in 1965 with her daughters. When the first of 16 bullets hit Mal- colm X, she threw her four children on the wooden floor and covered them with her body. "It was the realization that I couldn't take him home," she says of the replay of that finality. "Mentally you do understand realistically that he is dead, dead for 27 years and not coming back. Instinctually your wish to take him home is stronger than reality." Shabazz, a nursing stu- dent when she met Malcolm X in the late 1950s and now a college administrator in her fifties, carries herself with the friendly wariness of many political widows who must protect the legacy, give back a piece of the lost life and establish their own iden- tity. In addition, she has had to deal with the massive commer- cialization of her husband's image, as well as the continued in- tense debate over his words, meaning and impact. A sturdy woman with clear brown eyes, Shabazz pulls a blue-, brown- and white-patterned shawl around her shoulders as she talks. When she releases her rumble of a laugh, her face col- lapses into a composition of brown dumplings. The movie has cap- tured her husband, she says, in "a compressed, fleeting way. What can you show in three hours? The man's experiences far ex- ceeded the experiences of an ordinary human being. You have to be informed before you go so you can understand. Never was he bro- ken; the whole world opened up to him." She served as a consul- tant on the film project, talking to director Spike Lee and send- ing him notes on the script. "I have seen plays over the last 27 years; some project him strongly, some project him kind of moderate," she says. "I just wanted him to be able to come off ... not looking like some wimp." After ordering a lunch of spinach and mushrooms, she sits back and talks about her own Malcolm, the man she saw become a nation- al leader of the Nation of Islam and later of his own organiza- tion, and a faithful follower of orthodox Islam, the man she left three times, the man who knew that his views would probably lead to his death. She grew up in Detroit in a home that revolved around school and the African Methodist Episcopal church. She started her education at Tuskegee Institute and then moved to New York. Through friends she was invited to attend several lectures at a Nation of Islam temple, and there she met Malcolm X, who had joined the movement when he was in prison for burglary. As was the Muslim custom, their dating was chaperoned. On screen their meeting has a sweet electricity. "Oh yes, indeed, and he succumbed, didn't he? ... She knew exactly what she wanted, and she almost felt he was hers by right," she says of actress Angela Bassett's interpretataion of herself. "I do feel, however, that Malcolm and I were destined to be and he always felt that way," she says. When he proposed, in life and in the movie, he called from a phone booth. They were married for seven years, and together had six daughters, includ- ing a pair of twins born six months after his assassination. In some of the scenes Shabazz and Malcolm, played by Denzel Washington, match wits in discourse and intellect. "In that movement you could not have a woman who obviously led you around. So I would have been dissed. After we were married, he gave me authority to do this or that, which meant it was my right to. In the end he felt if a woman was more gifted to handle one part of their lives rather than the other, whether it was tradition or not, whoever was more gifted in handling the components of their lives should handle it," says Shabazz, now an administrator at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y. But at some points his control, and the work that kept him away from the family, was overwhelming for her. When she would walk out on him, it was for "never more than 48 hours," she says. "It was probably (because of) his control and probably my mother who had sent me to school, and now she saw my being relegated to hav- ing babies as oppression ... probably the fact that my mother never quite gave up on getting me back home." Her parents balked at the religion she adopted, as well as the philosophy of black separatism. They saw this as rejection. "My father cried and he said, 'What have we done to make you hate us so?' Loving my hus- band was leaving them rather than having their lives enriched by my differences," says Shabazz, who is now a Sunni Muslim. Often Malcolm's message fell on deaf ears, she recalls. "We must also understand that a lot of black people had bought into a white agenda. Here this man is coming along talking about an agenda for the African diaspora. Black people who had already bought into the white agenda said this is nonsense," she says. She slips from the personal to the political easily. "But actual- ly during that era anyone who talked about security, safety, solidarity, liberation, equality and parity, they were bad. It is always a good thing for society when ethnic groups are allowed to enter the family of human-rights advocates and know that they can investigate their history and not be considered hate, that they can love their people and not be considered hate." In the film, Malcolm X, who has visited Mecca and taken the name of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, is killed by black gunmen while under surveillance by government agents. "The film gives a hint that it was a combination of forces," says Shabazz. "There was talk he was interfering in American foreign policy ... and raw material markets. He said to me ... 'It would be this government with the support of the Nation.' " To provide for her family, Shabazz returned to school, adding graduate degrees in education and public health education to her nursing degree. Her family received royalties from "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" as told to Alex Haley, on which the Lee film is partly based. She has been associated with Medgar Evers College since 1976. Right after the assassination, Shabazz would often put on her husband's hat. "When I was going through all this trauma, I somehow felt vibrationally Malcolm was with me," she says. So she understood when his image began appearing everywhere, adopted by people seeking comfort, as well as identity and direction. "For my children that was extremely helpful," she says. "My children were reared on a picture of Daddy. A lot of people have Daddy at home. When they prayed that God bless them and everybody, Daddy was a part of everything. When we would have dinner, someone would make a little joke and say, 'I don't know if Daddy would like that.' " His new popularity is reassuring to her. And to a generation. "If they feel weak, disconnected and want a piece of Malcolm, they should be allowed to do that," she says. Yet in January Shabazz hired a licensing company because she thought she needed to exert control over the marketing of his im- age. "It had gotten out of hand," she says. The items, from the "X" cap and T-shirts to coffee mugs, are expected to gross $100 million this year. What she wants, she says, is for people to learn from Malcolm X, as he learned from his ex- periences, as she learned from him. She thinks about one way in which they helped one another. "I used to read books and give him reports that he would read on the plane. He was an avid reader and forced himself into speed- reading. Let me say if Malcolm could do it, anybody could do it. That is truly why he can be a metaphor for an entire generation. Those who might perhaps think that they do not have redemptive qualities can understand that human beings can change."<02:18 11-18C9999----- Copyright 1992, The Washington Post. This story is from the Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar- chived or redistributed. For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor- poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)