The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Old habits are said to die hard, and the same is apparently true for traumas. Beginning in earnest in 2016, the nation has been in a renewed fight against old themes and updated gaslighting techniques, reopening former wounds that had previously been sloppily sutured over. There was the target on Muslims preventing them from entering the country in 2017; the nation’s formal child-separation policy in 2018, which removed children from parents; and in 2020, the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement because of the constant police killings of Black people. I watched wearily as we moved from one crisis to another. Decades before all of this, I was acutely aware of what it meant to fight for freedom and belonging, and to lose a family at the same time. These traumas are irritatingly unhealed because they are cyclical, because this is not the first time that race has intersected with the systemic breakdown of families and the abuse of children.

Researching York’s movements, I learned that he went from teaching his brand of Islam in Bushwick to moving his congregation to the Catskills in upstate New York in 1993 before heading to Georgia that same year as a cowboy, then as the Chief Black Thunderbird Eagle of the United Nuwaubian Nation of Moors, and ultimately as an Egyptian god and interplanetary citizen. I pondered the fact that more than twenty years after my mother and I left Ansaaru, York still had enough supporters to fill a small town. His teachings seemed to change as much as his name and location, but antiwhite hate and Black nationalism were the threads he needled wherever he went.

The first woman wouldn’t tell me her name, but she spoke fast and clear with a slight squeak. She was about seventeen years old. Her mother had followed York from Brooklyn, where they had been devotees since she was young. She said York had an appetite for girls, and mothers sent daughters to his house to procure food or whatever they needed that they didn’t have. This girl said her mother handed her teenage sister over to York as a gift. She said she knew she was in a cult, knew that York just made things up to maintain control and feed his god complex. As was the case in Brooklyn, the teenager said the Nuwaubians had a daily quota of twenty-five to one hundred dollars to fill and faced expulsion if they came up short. She argued that York’s shape-shifting philosophies were proof he was a charlatan, and she couldn’t understand why the adults didn’t see it. I remember telling her that adults can be selfish. And stupid, she interjected. She explained how they were supposed to be Muslims when stationed in New York but Native Americans who were waiting for UFOs to rescue them by the time she and her mother had moved to Georgia. Dressing the part didn’t make it so, she explained.

“My husband is a believer, but I’m not,” she said. “It’s a cult. I believe York molested all those children like they say he did. I’d hear stories about him taking them when they started their periods. Mothers giving daughters as gifts for special privileges. Just like he did in Brooklyn, he rationed everything here. There are about a hundred of us on this compound, and it’s like we’re living in the 1800s. There’s no heat. Sometimes no electricity. We never leave the compound, and guards are always at the gates. I want to leave. The only reason we’re still here is because my husband is a stone-cold supporter, and he’s not alone. Many here are still trying to maintain York’s teachings, hold down the compound, even though he’s in prison. You can’t tell these people he’s wrong. His followers will hurt you if you do.” “What will you do?” I asked her. “There’s nothing I can do but pray my husband doesn’t learn I’m not a believer,” she said. “If my husband knew I was talking to you, he’d kill me. But someone has to tell the story. I can never tell more than I’m telling now.”

My mother’s words ricocheted alongside those of the raging man from the train. Things happen for a reason. As a journalist, I needed to understand the innate, universal emotion of desperately wanting to belong and to feel free. As an individual, who was once a child forgotten by her own self until the memories of that ghost resurfaced, I had to know how York was able to amass power from so many parents, including mine. Were my parents honestly looking for Islam and naively fell into York’s sweet-sounding narrative that, through separatism and the religion he taught, Black self-empowerment was ours? Did they take the devotion bestowed on York by other Black people at face value, without researching the group’s background? Or was it enough to be a member of an exclusive group who bucked the system and created their own customs?

After witnessing four years of a presidential administration that heightened racial tensions, created a policy to separate children from their parents, and banned Muslims from traveling to the country, all while amassing a cult following that led to hundreds of white men storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, under the guise of having been disenfranchised, I saw too many parallels to the world of York. York was in prison for life, but the kind of desperation he fed on for decades remained. Many who agreed with Donald Trump’s staunch stance against immigration argued that parents deserved to lose their children because that was the policy. I didn’t think it was that simple, as I finally understood what made my parents separate from me and from each other in the late 1970s. Today, four decades after leaving the Community, I have since learned that the need to find the good in something is universal, even when what is found has devastatingly harmful effects.

I didn’t know why, but I was afraid of these silent women. They felt different from the ancient aunts Ummi took me to for day visits, who practiced the words “french fry” with me until I got them right, even though I had more teeth in my head than they had in theirs. My young, their old, my matriarchs entertained me through sometimes mumbled, toothless stories of fights with ex-husbands and ungrateful children. I was at home among those older versions of myself who removed all masks and waved off sobriety once together. In the Community, however, there were no howling elder women who wore their hair in huge puffs or with sleek middle parts and who dangled cigarettes from their mouths while they swirled dark liquid in a glass of ice held haphazardly in a delicate hand. In this Community, there were no toys, no noise, no color.

“Azim, where is my mattress?” Ummi asked my father when she saw him three days later. “I’ve been sleeping on the floor on a pile of blankets the Sisters gave me, and I can’t do it anymore. Where’s my mattress? Do you have it?” My father replied in the negative and told her he also slept on the floor in a room crowded with mice and men. “Well, it’s somewhere. We sent it. And I want it back,” Ummi said. For Ummi, it wasn’t so much about the loss of her mattress as it was about her feeling undignified. A rodent bigger than it should have been jumped out of a cabinet at her one day when she opened a door in the kitchen, and sleeping on the floor felt like being robbed. No daughter, no husband, and now no mattress. In all fairness to my father, she knew she was in over her head but was too proud to back out so soon. Plus, the thought of losing her family, of my father not standing with her, terrified her. Her upbringing had imprinted her with an unwavering belief that family was everything and anti-Blackness was everywhere, which meant that family had to stay together no matter what happened. These are the puzzle pieces that got my mother to agree to the Community, the belief that she would be able to make something whole.

Black power was my father’s belief system; love was my mother’s. Yet a decade later, in 1978, when my father came home and told her about this place called the Ansaaru Allah Community, that he had been taking Islamic classes in Bushwick and had finally decided to share his books about Muslims with her, Black power and love were the exact two motivations that turned them toward the Community’s gates, albeit for different reasons. My father talked about changing his name, and my mother knew she had to hold on to that vision alongside him, for his eyes had become myopic, focused as one is when seeing blood on white tiles.

all adults worked but only a few were free to leave without questions. If they weren’t doctors, lawyers, or nurses, anything that required them to go into the world, the women concentrated on childcare, cleaning, cooking, or working in the mailroom. Otherwise, it was to see a doctor, cash a welfare check, make welfare appointments. To get back inside, everyone had to show identification and a pass. Ummi’s two-sided identification card showed two black-and-white versions of her. One side presented her dressed all in black with her veil down and the other with her veil up, which is what she would show the guards who weren’t supposed to see the face of a woman to whom they weren’t married. Unless a woman had a powerful connection in the Community, most sat like sardines in a can waiting to be plucked out by someone for something.

As far as Ummi was concerned, when it came to the Community, my father had gotten everything when she agreed to move in. Yet she swayed on the tax return and gave him a fifth of it when she cashed the check during a quick doctor’s visit. She didn’t know why she wanted to keep it, as there was nowhere to spend it. That night when she went to sleep with the money under her pillow, she awoke the next morning to nothing. “If I had that money, it wouldn’t have gotten stolen,” my father said. “I would’ve used it on something worthwhile.” “Like what?” she asked. “What do you need to buy, Azim?” “A gun. I would have bought a gun.” “A gun! What in Allah’s name do you need a gun for?” “To protect us. We must be ready for a war, Aquila, at any given moment. You know the white man doesn’t want us to have anything, especially freedom or the right to bear arms.” Ummi felt sad. We’d entered the Community to safeguard against harm, but inside they were buying weapons. It seemed too violent for a simple group of people who wanted to be good Muslims. My father told me once that all the Brothers had guns because a lot of people wanted to harm them. While probably true, the idea of a gun-toting Muslim seemed counterintuitive to the very idea of being a Muslim. The way people said “Hello,” we said, “May peace be upon you.” Carrying a piece wasn’t synonymous with seeking peace. The rumors that Imam Isa acquired his real estate by terrorizing the original homeowners or incinerating the homes if ...

To many of the Sisters and Brothers, Imam Isa was a prophet. If he never said that we could live, many of us would have died. Women wanted to be with him, and men wanted to be him. If he said we were supposed to fast for three months and three days, we would have starved until he told us to eat. Ummi swore Imam Isa’s nose could sniff discontent when spirits sank. She said it was then, in addition to salat, when he would emerge from his fortress and mingle. One day he started a water fight between the men and women. Another time, they had a flour fight. All of them, dressed in the few clothes they owned, threw white powder back and forth, laughing and screaming as though they had forgotten how fun fun was. They were children again, but their laughter was a strange sound in the house. Even to Ummi’s own ears, her happiness sounded odd. Everyone had a good time that day, but after all the mess was made, the women were left to clean the fine dust off the walls and from between the wooden floorboards, handwash their garbs, and panic over what to eat that night since they wasted all the flour on child’s play.

The air was porous with infection and want. I saw Ummi twice a day during tifl time—a four-Um-supervised forty-five-minute visit. My first one, the Ums made me scrub down until it hurt, dressed me in my cleanest, and filled my belly. When I knew ahead of time that I was seeing Ummi, I paced and practiced my Arabic. I looked out the window for a sign my mother would say, Enough. As Ummi crossed the threshold from the hallway into our room, looking like she was floating across the wooden panels, I noticed how her towering figure seemed to tower for only a second. It was brief, but I noticed it. Upon seeing her, my Ums’ eyes narrowed and their bodies stiffened. In return, Ummi scanned the room before resting cautious eyes on the women who stood with their backs against an opposite wall. There was something kinetic in the air. It lasted a second, but the moment felt frozen in time. Then with a few strides, Ummi’s legs carried her to the women, to the Ums I felt exuded so much power and control that Ummi looked as if her straight back curved and her shoulders secretly stooped, tricking the eye to make her shrink several inches in their presence on purpose.

Some days in the Community I awoke thinking I would never see Ummi again, have a lollipop, or chew bubble gum until my jaws hurt, which Imam Isa forbade, saying it contained pork. I wanted to watch cartoons in a living room with my parents sitting behind me on a sofa. I wanted her to say she loved me loud enough for the Ums to hear. But Ummi didn’t say I love you out loud, which made me think those words were meant only for me. Her eyes watered during this meeting, turned into a well of emotions that trapped something helpless. This sorrow, this drowning, became the way we communicated.

I listened as she told me that because she couldn’t speak to me, she spoke to the babies instead. With them, she didn’t have to worry about English or Arabic or asking a question and getting nothing back but the blank stares she sometimes got from me. She invented her own language and spoke nonsense to them while they babbled back in the same nonsensical way. As a mother, she knew working with the babies caused resentment, and she empathized. For her own sake, she was terrified of becoming pregnant in the Community and then having to hand her baby over the way these moms did. As soon as new mothers left the hospitals, their babies went straight to her. From newborn to six months, Ummi was the Um they knew. Their mothers were only allowed to nurse them. When these discarded mothers did come, they greeted Ummi with glacial glares. Many mothers fought for peace with their babies because they had become strangers, and they blamed Ummi. Some even accused her of mental kidnapping. I asked Ummi how that made her feel. “I admit if I had been told I couldn’t work in the Infants’ Quarters anymore, I would have lost it,” Ummi recalled. “I would have clawed and screamed, snarled and bit until that person understood the infants and I were inseparable. If I couldn’t be near my own baby, I wasn’t going to miss out on being around babies altogether.” I was too stunned to say anything, too emotional. She found solace in taking care of other people’s babies instead of her own, even as those...

I was tired and finally afraid of these women and this place. I wanted out. I didn’t know what I had to do, how many more of those punishments I’d have to endure before my mother came to her senses and packed me and the remnants of our lives into a neat package and got us out, with or without my father.

Just as my memories don’t always jibe with my parents’, theirs are just as selective. Throughout the years I have asked Ummi in various ways if she knew about the tension between the Ums and me, and she always gave a different response. Once she said she didn’t know what I was talking about; she’d never heard about abuse. Another time she said there were rumors some of the children were being beaten by their Ums, which is why she kept a close eye on me. Then one day she said she heard about my beatings specifically, heard I talked too much and asked too many questions about seeing her and it infuriated the Ums, but she hadn’t heard that I was ever thrown outside. Finally, she admitted she knew I was put out as punishment but that it wasn’t long; it was meant to tease a smidgen of fear into me. She also said we left because of the abuse, that she learned the Ums discarded me like a trash bag, but I eventually discovered that was only a piece of it. My father, on the other hand, seemed oblivious. He once said he thought I didn’t speak because I was angry with him; Ummi would’ve told him if something was wrong. He tried to assure me. “We would’ve been out of there so fast and I would’ve turned that place upside down had I known you were being beaten.” Maybe he would’ve. Or maybe Ummi did tell him, and years of guilt obliterated the memory.

Grandma was no taller than five foot three in size 6 heels and a pillbox fox hat that complemented her round eyes, wispy, gray-flecked hair, and skin the color of cooked caramel. Her petite frame was a distraction to the bad-to-the-bone kind of woman she was, which was someone who had no qualms saying what was going on beneath that dead fox of hers.

“I knew from seeing how you changed that I didn’t want to have another child inside,” she said. “I couldn’t bear the idea of giving birth to a baby, then giving him up to only see him to nurse. I couldn’t accept having my son giggling, playing, and drooling on other women who didn’t go through the journey of carrying him for nine months, doubling over with contractions, and twelve-plus hours of labor pains. I wasn’t going to push him into a world I didn’t know how to defend myself from yet. It was bad enough I lost you in the Community. I wasn’t sacrificing another child.” She wiped at a tear. “Wow,” I said, unable to keep my surprise to myself. The tone deafness of Ummi’s statement struck me hard. It was one thing for me to have felt like a sacrifice for a belief, a desire, a vision, and another to hear the person who sacrificed me admit it. I felt a wave of confirmation roll over me that my brother had dodged a religious bullet, as I had long thought. New to my understanding, the dodge was intentional. My heart began to beat a little faster and my stomach twisted. While Ummi took me into the Community with intention and purpose, she summoned the same energy into making sure Sulaiman was never there. Ummi was looking off, somewhere far. She hadn’t heard my “wow” or the indignation I exhaled.

I didn’t know what kind of Muslim Ummi thought the Community would make her, but I imagined she thought it would help strengthen her family, make her husband a focused father, a more humbled better half. Instead, my father leaned into the patriarchal, self-pleasing parts of Islam that Ummi wasn’t interested in. I thought about the teenage girl whom I had interviewed after York’s arrest in 2002, and her statement about adults and parents, how selfish they can be, and I still agreed. My parents and others within the Community forgot that in their quest for knowledge, guidance, a community, they sacrificed a child or children in the process.

“There was an odd ritual we women had, that when one Sister left, the Sister closest to her would physically try to stop her,” Ummi said. My mouth flew open. “Yes, I’d seen this happen many times.” Badly wanting my mother to have been one of those fighting women, the kind of woman I had never seen in her, I imagined she somehow transformed, stood taller and bolder, and then tackled.

Like the formerly imprisoned, who are happy to be released from captivity but unaware and afraid of how the world has changed, we interacted cautiously and rarely with people who hadn’t experienced the Community. Ummi said they were all kafirs, non-Muslims, and not as connected to God as we were. When I asked her if that meant my grandmother and Ninie were kafirs also, she said yes. “They might be our family, but they are different from us,” Ummi told me. She was teaching me the lessons she had learned from the Community. As we had done in the Community, we didn’t discuss our feelings but continued as we had done over the two years when we were inside—unrolling our prayer rugs to make salat five times a day and adding Arabic to our speech the way people peppered meals to fill in what was missing.