The Community

by N. Jamiyla Chisholm

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. —Martin Luther King Jr.

You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul. —Swami Vivekananda

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.

Before becoming Imam Isa, he was rumored to have been a calypso singer with a voice that hypnotized.

Regardless of the vehicle, they were fascinated by the message and the execution. York was seen as a defiant man who taught Black people that they were descendants of Sudan who could govern themselves and one day would return to the nation, our rightful home, to do so.

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.

York claimed complete control over the lives of his congregation.

Twenty weapons and $280,000 in cash were uncovered. Agents also reportedly found ten guns and $127,000 in cash in York’s two homes in Athens and Milledgeville, Georgia.

hardly anyone would go on record or speak on the phone about York. The people I found said they didn’t want to be perceived as talking to the press, selling out, or dishing their filthy family business to outsiders and spectators. Very few trusted I’d honor their stories. Even fewer believed I understood the betrayal they felt, except for two very scared yet brave women.

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.

She said she knew she was in a cult, knew that York just made things up to maintain control and feed his god complex.

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.

“My husband is a believer, but I’m not,” she said. “It’s a cult.

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,

You can’t tell these people he’s wrong. His followers will hurt you if you do.”

“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 learned that even after York’s arrest, many of his followers dug their heels deeper into the compound’s foundation and the idea that an unlawful conspiracy had taken place against him and them.

After York initially argued that he could not be held in court because of his Native American heritage, he eventually pleaded guilty to child molestation charges in January 2003 and the following year was ultimately sentenced to 135 years for molesting countless boys and girls under the age of sixteen.

“This is exactly how the government keeps us separated,” he erupted. “You can’t be a lamb in this wilderness, sista! They do this all the time, trying to break up the flock ’cause somebody’s trying to teach us the truth! They did it with Waco, they did it with Jim Jones, and they did it with York .

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.

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.

When I asked why she gave her boss that answer, she said she thought about the few friends she had and their repeated whys, she heard the husky voice of her gruff father calling her stupid for following a man he didn’t like into an unknown world, and she couldn’t stand to give anyone any more ammunition to judge her.

When she left the apartment with me trailing her, she walked away from her Christian name, Nancy, and the name—Nicole—she’d called me for the past two years. I, too, became a different person with a different name.

With the little means of comfort they could spare, the Sisters did their best to alleviate her discomfort, and she loved them for it.

These girls didn’t smile either.

That night, a sticky feel and plasticky smell were what I slept on, in a labyrinth of feet to faces and knees to backs, all of us girls huddled together like newborn kittens. We had blankets but no pillows and instinctively used each other for comfort. Their body language confirmed there was no mousehole for any of us.

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.

How deep was the hole my father felt when his beloved Malcolm X was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom on a cold February shoulder of a day, forsaken by men who looked like him? Surely he was forever changed.

When I awoke in the morning, and every morning thereafter, I realized my dreams were wistful imaginations, ghosts from a life I was barely remembering anymore but knew was real because it was.

I fell in place with the other girls in my group, behind the man known as Imam Isa—behind the men, behind the women, behind the boys. Last in line,

Like me, they might have been focused on surviving, unaware of when a new girl arrived because leaving was most important. To my quiet comrades, I very well could have been another pawn in a chess game none of us could ever checkmate.

Not only did it feel as if the Community was trying to hide us from the world, it taught me that girls and women were not to be acknowledged except by other women or male family members.

I wanted to tell Ummi I would be happier, would smile more, if she let me sleep wherever she slept, even if it was on the floor.

“You really need to get out of that,” she said. “Do you hear anyone else asking for her Um? Anyone else looking sad all the time? You’re not the only one missing somebody around here. Don’t you think I miss my child?”

With white paper and black ink, Ummi said she tried to answer their questions but felt like a fraud. We had been there a few months at this point, she had prayed more than she ever had, yet she was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. A guard was always close by, and there was one man who knew everybody’s everything. What more was she going to tell anyone about the freedom of Islam? She knew that she knew nothing about freedom or Islam.

Trying to write the letters, Ummi thought of how she always worked and couldn’t imagine my father standing in the street behind a cheap fold-up table selling for another man when he seemed unwilling to hustle a job for his family.

Once Ummi realized my father would never be expelled if his God-brother was a mujahid and he made his numbers, she learned survival wasn’t about what one knew but who they knew. The skillful received extra provisions from Imam Isa or the mujahids, and if a woman was lucky, she could eat a queen’s meal if Imam Isa summoned her to dine with him. There was also the rumor if an Um had a pretty daughter close enough to womanhood, she could use her as collateral, an offering to the prophet.

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.

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.

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.

This sorrow, this drowning, became the way we communicated.

Ummi put down two cups of steaming lemon tea and said it was hard for her to remember, talk about, admit the Community happened.

One day, after noticing the left side of my mother’s mouth was swollen because her back teeth were growing in—she had never been to the dentist—Ms. Noel paid for the dental visit. My mother didn’t visit a dentist again until she was a teenager and paid for it herself.

Wherever she lived, she slept in the living room and learned to pack in ten minutes.

She would ask herself, Why did she love him more than herself? She didn’t have an answer.

We were our fathers’ unseen supporters, their women were their veiled mascots, and just their simple act of walking across a crowded street in silence was enough to make us feel like we were down with the most important movement in the world. It was easy to lose ourselves in this exact moment as our pride swelled and overflowed to the brink where we could almost drown ourselves in it.

The Ums used to say the main problem with me, why I had a ruler as my namesake, was I asked too many questions. I couldn’t sit and make salat. I wanted to know why things were done the way they were. I remember thinking how I could ask Allah for anything I wanted, but I couldn’t actually have it;

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.

The only boy in the family, my father had carte blanche when it came to my grandmother. He would complain, roll his eyes, suck his teeth, talk back, and she never seemed to get genuinely upset; she never one-upped him to show she was more powerful. Grandma hesitated to upset my father, and I believed he knew this.

Standing in front of my grandmother and mother, my hopes evaporated and rendered me speechless. I felt adults were not to be trusted no matter how gentle their words and sympathetic their eyes. If I was able to remember who I was before the Community, I might have thrown myself at my grandmother’s feet. But I was no longer that girl. Breaking the spell and her assault of questions, Grandma straightened and asked, “What’s wrong with this child? What happened to my granddaughter?”