Russell Rickford Interviewed by Maya Trotz for Jouvay.com. January 2004.

Jouvay.com: We're sitting with Russell Rickford the author of Betty Shabazz, A Remarkable Story of Survival Before and After Malcolm X...

Russell Rickford: I hope I don't have curry in my teeth.

JC: Curry egg at that. I just read this book this weekend and I thought it was truly a remarkable story, not just the material that you covered, but the way in which you covered it. The way in which you see Betty Shabazz as a woman is quite lovely. And I am sure it comes from your background and the family that you come from and I'd like us to talk about that because it's not very often we see the reverence that you give this black woman in novels.

RR: Dr. Shabazz died in the summer of 1997 and I started doing the research in the following year. Initially I did not really realize the extent to which it was distinctly a woman's story. I think I kind of approached it from a very masculine perspective in that I was and am a great admirer of Malcolm's. Like many people, one of the main things that draws me to Malcolm is his manhood. Obviously I was not looking for that in the life of this woman, but those were some of the motivations that were bringing me to try and unearth her story. In beginning to explore her life I discovered that her struggle was very different from the archetypal civil rights or black liberation struggle. She had to deal, like many women of color, and in particular black women, had to deal with many layers of oppression. Oppression that came from both within and without the family and the black community throughout her life. As I started getting deeper into her story I realized that they were certain themes that were emerging. Themes of struggle, survival, family, themes of loyalty, both loyalty and betrayal. Obviously it is a sympathetic portrait. People say she was a heroine. I think many elements of her struggle were heroic, but you can't just use her life as a template for survival. This is how Dr. Shabazz made it through her experience of violence or widowhood. You have to really look at it as a unique situation even though they are elements in her story that can be universalized to many single women and certainly to many women of color. Ultimately I think her story is about perseverance. I think one of her friends called her a long distance runner. I think that her example of being able to keep sticking in and remain true to certain principles, even though I as a biographer do not always agree with those principles....

JC: What are some examples?

RR: Well, first of all her politics. She did not have a militant indictment of the system that Malcolm did although she certainly had her indictment of the system though it was much more subtle and much more accommodating, and much more nuance. But necessarily so in some ways because of the situation of having to deal with the responsibility of these children. That's one thing I kind of realized. Many brothers don't realize some of the repercussions. Thank God we had Malcolm and Martin and Medgar and people like that who made the ultimate sacrifice, but we really have to look at the situation that the women were left to deal with.

JC: Right. And her main concern was with protecting her children.

RR: Yeah, and just how profound a struggle that is in itself. So it's a woman's story and it took me a while to come to that and once I did I started to pay her her due or started to reckon with her as her own entity. I kind of approached her as a Strong Black Woman. Capital SBW, a certain mythical figure that I talk about a little in the introduction. Certainly no one can deny the kind of fortitude that she exhibited throughout so many crises. What I am arguing for is that there is real suffering that comes along with that sort of sacrifice and the suffering has short term and long term effects. I am no psychologist, but i think i was able to recognize some really deep trauma in the life of this woman and I think it reflects the everyday trauma that women of color go through in dealing with relationships, an oppressive society and in dealing with child rearing and the family. I hope that this book is a call to society and in particular the black community to really... I don't want us to stop celebrating black women, but I want us to start celebrating them in a different way. It is not enough to say you sisters are so strong and you did this during slavery and you did this during the civil rights movement. That's great, but when you say that and you recognize how great those sacrifices were you also have to try and create spaces where black women can heal. I did not know Dr. Shabazz, but I talked at length to many people that she was close to. It would seem that she was not able to, in any kind of substantial way, purge that trauma that had accumulated and it was passed onto to the generations and continues to ricochet. I see that as a symbol of what happen in the lives of many black families and many black women. I don't even know what I mean when I say we have to create places for black women to heal, for black women to express their hurt and for us to listen in a real way that is free of all of the pathologies of white supremacy and racism and sexism and heterosexism and capitalism. We need to find a way to create a really humanistic space for our sisters to heal so that we can begin to rebuild our families. Hopefully this book is a step in that direction.

JC: The family was important to her throughout the book and it's pretty sad what happened in the end. Have you spoken with all of her daughters?

RR: I really talked with one of them at length. I talked to at least four of them at some length and two of them I did significant interviews for the book. It's not a happy story. There are real tragedies that you can see in the lives for instance of the King kids. In one way it's part of the course that the children would have to be revisited with these kind of pressures. It seems to be somehow compounded in the case of Malcolm's family. And I almost think that one of the reasons that is is that Malcolm throughout his exemplary public life was so much a symbol of the crises of the black masses, the working people, the anonymous people, the humble people, the poor people. He represented them in such a profound way that it almost seems as though the crises that continued to haunt that same constituency continued to haunt Malcolm's survivors including his late widow, Dr. Shabazz.

JC: Their upbringing is pretty far removed from..

RR: Yes they grew up very middle class and very sheltered. For instance, Illyassa, the third daughter talks about growing up X. Some people were shocked by the petit bourgeois upbringing that she had. Some of Dr. Shabazz's more nationalist or ideological friends tease her about that, but her position was very clear. She was going to give them the best and that was her interpretation of the best. Here was a woman who had largely been forgotten by the American mainstream and definitely by much of the movement itself. It was not the case as Mrs. King in '68 when Martin died and Mrs. King was universally embraced. For Betty there was very little support financial and otherwise. There was a cadre from among her husband's disciples and the more ideological members of the black establishment and some of the black entertainers.

JC: And there was a housewives league that helped.

RR: The concerned housewives was a group started by Ruby Dee and Juanita Poitier and Betty Lomax and other society women. It was ironic of course because these were pretty much middle class people and it was ironic that they were the ones to come and mount the most effort to relieve the survivors of this man. Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis had these radical ties and were close to Malcolm and were comrades of his. The ironies don't even begin there. Her life becomes really fascinating after Malcolm dies and she comes back into her own and goes back to school. And as you know, being a recent Phd, this incredible feat of finishing her doctorate is no easy thing. And she went back to get her doctorate with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 children whilst commuting between Mount Vernon, NY and the University of Amherst.

JC: I know. I think I cried then too.

RR: That's a real struggle.

JC: All complaining PhD students should read that part.

RR: Those elements of the book are heroic, but as I also say in the introduction Dr. Shabazz was not a superwoman though she comes across that way. She certainly had glaring faults that I hope come across even though it is a sympathetic biography. She certainly made mistakes and could be brusque, but there is a spirit of determination and sacrifice and commitment that I found very familiar having to associate with the women of my family. And to have grown accustomed to almost expect that kind of love and that love power that comes from black women. But I really only understood its profundity in exploring those elements of Dr. Shabazz's life.

JC: How did you start on the book?

RR: I don't know. I sat down in Dr. Arnold Rampersaud's living room and sat down and he being a very established black biographer gave me a few pointers and that's where I started.

JC: How did you even get on the project?

RR: Well she had died in 1997 and there was a publishing company in New Jersey that was looking for a biographer. My agent got in touch with me and knew I was interested in Malcolm. I subsequently turned in the proposal, and got the contract. It ended up going to another house, Source books. And I did not know too much about her at all other than she was Malcolm's wife. And that was by design. She lived very privately throughout her life, fiercely privately. I think those sensibilities come from the older black generation and they kind of handled crises. Real family crises that got buried and I think that the repercussions of that are still plaguing the black community, people of our generation.

JC: One could argue that she lived privately just from what she went through to see her husband gunned down and what she had to endure just living.

RR: Yes. I mean the FBI and CIA watched her for years after Malcolm died. Then there were his other enemies with skin that looks like yours and mine. Yes, as one of Malcolm's biographers said, "It was a legitimate paranoia."

JC: Then you started doing research?

RR: Yes, the research took about three and a half years. The writing then took two years.

JC: So a five year project. But you had experience before with Spoken Soul.

RR: Yeah, Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English which is the title of a book I did in 2000 with my dad, Stanford Linguist John Rickford, about black english, really celebrating black english or ebonics and recognizing the expressive qualities of this dialect. While we acknowledge in the book that black children, like anyone else in America need to be proficient with standard english we do not deny the beauty and relevance and continuing significance of black english.

JC: For which you got an American Book award. Let's go back to the biography. How did you select what to cover?

RR: With the topic of this scope and covering this time period you could continue to do research, but the publisher keeps hollering for the product. They want to get it on the shelves and understandably. There comes a point where you just kind of know intuitively when you have enough. One thing that was important for me as a first time solo writer was understanding the scope of what I was trying to do. In the beginning I had no idea what the parameters were. For people who are working on longer writing projects, as soon as it is possible try and delineate the parameters. What is the scope? And more so, what are the dimensions of this thing. You say, "this is the material I want to cover this is how I want to do it and this is what's going to go in it and what's going to be left out." That gets refined as you learn more, but that would have helped me alot.

JC: The book is close to 550 pages of text and you took two years to write it. And you came back to Palo Alto to write.

RR: I got here in January of 2001.

JC: And how much was written then?

RR: None. And I left to go to school in September of 2002.

JC: And how much of it was written then?

RR: 95%.

JC: So, what kind of discipline you used to get that done?

RR: Alot. I did not go out except to attend the Jouvay.com. events. I did attend several of the Jouvay events and I have to say that the Jouvay.com crew really kept me anchored socially while I sloughed through this project. So, let me give my props to the Jouvay.com crew.

JC: We will have to send you T-shirts to wear on your book tour.

RR: There you go.

JC: You came up on times when you were blocked?

RR: Yeah I did, but then it became I don't want to say clockwork. I hope the language is expressive because....

JC: It's beautifully written.

RR: Thank you. I learned not to be a perfectionist which is hard for me because I am a virgo and I used to agonize over the prose, but you can't. Tell the story and tell it honestly. I think honesty is one of the most beautiful things in writing, the arts and in life. There were times I got blocked. I think I should have gone to a few more Jouvay events.

JC: Stuff would have flowed. What are your plans after this?

RR: I am in my first year in the history PhD in NY at Columbia University. I am focusing on US history black radical tradition and black radical politics. I am trying to articulate the dissertation topic right now. It would basically look at what kind of visions for alternative education have black radical politics in the US in the 20th century produced. So that's what's next. It's PhD and hopefully the next book will be the dissertation and ultimately I want to start a school somewhere in the urban Northeast.

JC: When do you start your book tour?

RR: I am not really going on tour. I'm doing one at Stanford.

JC: You'll probably hit the college circuit in February.

RR: I don't know about hit the college circuit. I'll be hitting Stanford, but I'll let you know. The jouvay.com audience.

Russell reads at the Stanford Bookstore at Noon on February 13th, 2004.

BECOME a JOUVAY.COM SPONSOR NOW !!!

Contact us if you're interested in sponsoring one of our events.