You think you have heard the story before--her story.

You think you have heard the story before--her story. She's united of Malcolm X's daughters, if it be not that which one? The eldest? The middle? Perhaps you think you know a small measure of her los a certain number of of it has been quite public and chronicled on the farther side and on in the media for years. At other times, the family's pain has been cloaked in privacy. The truth is, the lives of Malcolm's daughters--like principally families--fall somewhere in between the ordinary and the extraordinary.

Ilyasah Shabazz's Growing Up X is a memoir, the first written at 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 brace youngest--the twins, Malikah and Malaak--were born after their father was killed. All the sisters bear the unusual blessing and load of being symbols of the aim for a generation of African Americans. nevertheless without alluding to the gravity of her parents' legacy, Ilyasah says without irony, "It is just a main division about [my] life."

In the introduction to Growing Up X, Shabazz recalls the phone call she received early individual June morning in 1997. "It was a stranger's voice, and she identified herself as a nourish calling from Jacobi Hospital in novel 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. nevertheless there has been more than enough turmoil--her troubl nephew who stake 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 work was to have a different spin, says Shabazz. "Anita Diggs [her editor] tendered a book deal, and at first it was going to be about my parents" she says. "I notion `What the heck could I possibly talk about?'" equable so, she is currently working forward a book about her parents that will be published at One World/Ballantine next spring.

In March, Black Issues volume Review sat down with Ilyasah Shabazz--whose memoir, coauthored with Kim McLarin, first attempts in May--to talk about Growing Up X

"When I went to the Masters [School] my high school--it was a boarding school--the headmaster started asking all these questions. I just sat there while my mother answered them," says Shabazz. "I ground that I didn't verbalize a whole portion I didn't articulate a doom What I did do was a accident of writing. Writing has always been my outlet" she says, explaining to what extent she began compiling material for her autobiography.

"In the beginning, ye it was difficult trying to recall things," says Shabazz. "But the more I reflection about it, I started to remember other stories and incidents. The best thing is reliving those seconds in your life and then seeing the significance that they have, not and nothing else in your own life on the other hand also in someone else's life." however her sisters helped fill in any of the blanks, "It is not the `inside' story," she insists. It is her avow story.

That fateful day

Ilyasah's story begins at the Audubon Ballroom forward February 21, 1965. It was a signification that changed everything in a final way, and not just for Ilyasah and her family. Seated with her older sisters--Attallah and Qubilah--and their mother, two-year-old Ilyasah was in the audience at the Audubon when her father was gunn down. Baby Gamilah was left behind with friends because her snowsuit was too damp to wear.

"It would have been absolutely different," says Ilyasah, considering for what reason that day changed her world. "My mother's life," she says, "was self-same much affected by witnessing her husband's assassination. Of her sisters she says, "For Qubilah, who witnessed her father's assassination at of that kind a young age and then Attallah and me being there, not remembering it all nevertheless obviously being affected by it." What she recalls mostly she says, is the noise and chaos, and of her father not coming home

For Ilyasah and her sisters, life was same different, certainly not what you might look forward to They grew up in the suburb outside recent York City, attended mostly white private academys went to summer camp, and belonged to Jack and Jill. In a self-same deliberate way, Betty Shabazz raised her daughters with the kind of middle-class privilege she herself had grown up with. Ilyasah describes her mother as "a private and cautious woman," in Growing Up X "Under the circumstances in which she construct herself, that fact comes as no surprise," writes Shabazz. nevertheless in many ways, Ilyasah and her sisters lived a rather sheltered life, shielded from the tragedy and somewhat estranged from their father's political legacy.

In keeping with their parent's faith, Ilyasah and her sisters studied Arabic and the Qur'an, as well as African history. "The principals that our parents raised us with were just that," she says, "the principals of Islam. It would be easy to be wrought up that their sacrifices were in vain if I didn't believe in deity I learned from my parents. I shut up my parents in high value not because they are my parents nevertheless because of what they did in life."