Thirty-two years after Malcolm X was gunned down in a New York City auditorium, his widow would still speak of him at times in the present tense. "Malcolm thinks," Betty Shabazz might say. Or, "Malcolm's advice is..." On May 19 she attended celebrations to mark what would have been his 72nd birthday. "This has been the greatest day of my life," she told friends later. "Everywhere I went, I heard his voice on tapes." But after her husband's death, Shabazz didn't exactly linger in the past. She got a doctorate in education administration, eventually became director of public relations at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, N.Y., and raised the six daughters he left behind. Sometimes she also helped raise the grandson named after her slain husband, because life so often proved too much for his mother. Life was never too much for Betty.
Or almost never. Last week three generations of the Shabazz family were bound into a single knot of misery. In a New York City hospital, Shabazz was in extremely critical condition with third-degree burns over 80% of her body, the result of a fire inside her Yonkers, N.Y., apartment. Police say the blaze was set by her grandson, who had lived with her for most of the past two years and returned in April after a brief, rocky stay with his mother in San Antonio, Texas. Friends and neighbors say Malcolm, 12, wanted to live again with his mother Qubilah, who had been briefly in the news in 1995 when she faced charges for plotting to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
Though never as visible as Coretta Scott King, Shabazz, 61, is likewise revered as the widow of a martyred black leader. As news of her condition spread last week, King and the poet Maya Angelou rushed to her hospital room. Jesse Jackson called from London. President Clinton faxed a message. But because of her age and the extent of her burns, doctors were pessimistic about her chances for survival.
Of all the Shabazz children--just before his death, Malcolm X took the name Malik El-Shabazz--it was Qubilah who was marked most deeply by the traumas of her early life. When her father was shot, the four-year-old girl was close by with her three sisters and pregnant mother. A week earlier the family's home in Queens, N.Y., had been fire-bombed. Later Qubilah would say she wished her father had worked in a grocery store. "I was always angry he left me behind," she said. "If he were a simple store clerk, he would still be here."
Though Qubilah attended Princeton University, she dropped out to move to Paris, drifting through small jobs and rooming houses. Her son's father has been described as a Nigerian she met at school. In time she and Malcolm landed in Minneapolis, Minn., where she thought about killing Farrakhan, a man her mother believed had conspired in her father's death. The government's case against Qubilah rested on taped conversations in which she talked about the plan. But the tapes were provided by a dubious witness, Michael Fitzpatrick, a former schoolmate of Qubilah's who was also an FBI informer. Farrakhan himself was among the many who eventually labeled the whole affair a setup, charging that Fitzpatrick had pushed Qubilah into the scheme so he could turn her over in exchange for leniency on drug charges he faced.