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.

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.

Like the dozens of other people who were said to reside there, my mom’s neighbor lived in a trailer on 476 acres of packed dirt—surrounded by ankhs, obelisks, sphinxes, and other Egyptian motifs—that the residents called Tama-Re and that, after York’s arrest, the media dubbed “Egypt of the West.” In articles, some people said the then fifty-six-year-old York claimed complete control over the lives of his congregation. He rationed their food. Women weren’t allowed to leave the compound. Sometimes there was no electricity. Soon there was talk that five children, as young as four years old, said he’d molested them, which was what finally led someone in York’s inner circle to call the law.

The purported five children ended up being hundreds, and on May 8, 2002, about two hundred FBI agents and eighty sheriff’s deputies dropped onto Tama-Re. 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.

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 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.”

“Before you can officially move in you have to fill out this personal profile application and have your photo taken for your ID card,” Um Aaliyah explained. “You must wear your ID always. Just call my name when you’re done with the form, and I’ll come get you.” Remembering the form, Ummi said she paused at intimate questions asking how much money they made on the outside, what professions they had before, and how many times she and her partner had sex. Alarms went off as she flipped page after page of the two hundred inquiries until she decided to move through them as if she were asked such things daily. Oddly, it wasn’t relinquishing care of her daughter to strange women or answering dozens of demeaning questions that caused her heart to drop to her stomach. It was when she was shown her spot on the floor in the building next to mine that she thought to leave.

I said I wanted my mother. Words like lasers shot at me the instant I closed my mouth. Fingers clenched my chin and pressed into my jaw. “Stop that nonsense this minute. We’re your Ums now,” the tallest one said, fingers squeezing. “Look around,” she said, sweeping her sharp machete arm around the room, slicing through the stillness in the air. “Do you see anyone else asking for her mother or crying? No. You. Do. Not. And we won’t have you being the one to do it either. Understand me?”

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.

I imagine my father was most drawn to participating in a separatist Black society because it promoted and promised Black self-sufficiency and Black man as king, neither of which were new concepts.

hard against my back and butt. Ummi put down two cups of steaming lemon tea and said it was hard for her to remember, talk about, admit the Community happened. She remained standing, holding on to the top of a chair with both hands, the bejeweled rings on her fingers gleaming. I shifted in my seat, pulled a knee close to my chest. Ummi opened her mouth to speak but said nothing. The sun was setting a crimson orange across the Manhattan skyline and shot sunlit darts into the room that cut narrow shadow lines across her face.

“My lack of understanding shouldn’t get in the way of me experiencing love.”