Still, Ilyasah acknowledged in an interview that the death of her parents was 'very emotional' for herself and her siblings _ Attallah, Qubilah, Gamilah, Malikah and Malaak. They were tutored in Arabic, the Quran, achievements of black leaders and studied French, ballet, yoga, music and African dance.īetty Shabazz, who Ilyasah calls 'Mommy' throughout her book, 'did a superhuman job of cushioning us from the stinging pain of my father's absence.'

She and her sisters were sent to private schools, and to a New York mosque every Sunday. Yet, 'I wanted to see him and whatever was happening to him.' As a girl, she could never look at the photograph of her dying father on a hospital stretcher 'without half-covering my eyes,' she writes. Ilyasah was 2 when she saw her father shot at a Harlem ballroom she does not remember the event. Ilyasah, a 39-year-old public affairs director in Mount Vernon, N.Y., says in her book _ written with novelist Kim McLarin _ that people are surprised when they learn 'how normal my childhood was, how mainstream and privileged and integrated and utterly American.' 'If you sit back and just look at yourself as a victim, your life will just pass you by,' said Ilyasah, author of a new memoir, 'Growing Up X,' out in stores this month. Yet one of the six children of Shabazz and Malcolm X, Ilyasah Shabazz, says she and her five sisters don't want pity and, in fact, had a sheltered upbringing.

Horrible tragedies and lesser _ though still public _ troubles seem to have followed the daughters of Malcolm X from his 1965 assassination down to the present, with the family at odds over a trove of the black nationalist leader's writings that were nearly auctioned off. Thirty-two years later, she would die in a fire set by her grandson, Malcolm's namesake. Their mother, Betty Shabazz, pushed them to the floor and covered them with her body.

Their father, Malcolm X, died in a hail of assassins' bullets.

Growing Up X by Ilyasah Shabazz