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You think you have heard the story before -- her story. She's one of Malcolm X's daughters, but which one? The eldest? The middle? Perhaps you think you know some small measure of her loss. Some of it has been quite public and chronicled off and on in the media for years. At other times, the family's pain has been shrouded in privacy. The truth is, the lives of Malcolm's daughters -- like most families -- fall somewhere in between the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Ilyasah Shabazz's Growing Up X is a memoir, the first written by a member of Malcolm's immediate family. She is the third of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz and Dr. Betty Shabazz's six daughters. The four oldest -- Attallah, Qubilah, Ilyasah and Gamilah -- were catalogued in Malcolm's Autobiography, coauthored with Alex Haley. The two youngest -- the twins, Malikah and Malaak -- were born after their father was killed. All the sisters bear the unusual blessing and burden of being symbols of the struggle for a generation of African Americans. Yet without alluding to the gravity of her parents' legacy, Ilyasah says without irony, "It is just a book about [my] life."
In the prologue to Growing Up X, Shabazz recalls the phone call she received early one June morning in 1997. "It was a stranger's voice, and she identified herself as a nurse calling from Jacobi Hospital in New York. `Your mother has been in afire,'" writes Ilyasah.
The description is a fitting introduction to Shabazz's story since tragedy has marked her life. Though there has been more than enough turmoil -- her troubled nephew who set the fire that claimed Betty Shabazz's life, and her sister Qubilah, who tried to have Louis Farrakhan killed in retribution for her father's assassination -- 39-year-old Ilyasah Shabazz details a surprisingly idyllic experience.
Initially, the book was to have a different spin, says Shabazz. "Anita Diggs [her editor] offered a book deal, and at first it was going to be about my parents," she says. "I thought, `What the heck...