My Ma was a 19 yr old kid when I was born in Nov 1970. The
majority of my memories of my young mother were of a beautiful, passionately
volatile, belt-wielding Baby Boomer who didn’t take any mess from ANYBODY, and
certainly not from her first born sons. Life
was a delicate balance between trying to have as much fun as possible while
trying half-heartedly not to trigger Ma’s last nerve as she would say (I don’t
think science works like that, but whatever – I wasn't going to argue with her).
Ma identified as a Muslim, and became a devout follower of
Warith Deen Mohammed after he took over the original
Nation of Islam group founded by his father, the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, and converted it into an orthodox Islamic organization, but also dedicated to the liberation and empowerment of the Black American descendants of slavery. Both Ma & Dad took Imam Mohammed's teachings to heart, and decided sometime during the late 1970s to break away from the inner city and establish an independent/self-sufficient Black American Muslim community with limited success.
Ma was also fun and learned. In her later life she would
spend years in school, closing in on a Doctorate. Ma genuinely enjoyed academia
in general, having built her formal schooling on top of decades of a solid
foundation of fleshed-out concepts of a true polymath. I always loved listening
to her connect the dots of her research and even form new concepts and I’m glad
I got to do so a couple more times in these final two years she had left among
us.
I’m proud I got to honor my mother during my adult life as her son — the oldest of her nine children — and I pray Allah has mercy upon her colorful soul.
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