Rules for becoming

No doubt it’s hard to imagine how a disciplined and even rigid doctrine can still produce a sense of self-worth and personal courage. Sonsyrea Tate’s Little X: Growing up in the Nation of Islam presents us with an atypical childhood: We follow a little girl who is bound by a thousand codes of conduct. She attends a special school in a special uniform and cannot play with non-Nation children for fear of impurity. From her earliest years, she observes a multitude of contradictions: Her brother runs off to play, she prays or cooks or cleans; her grandmother stays true to the Nation, her mother moves to the spirituality offered by Orthodox Islam, her father retreats to the basement with his music and sometimes his drugs. She alternates between feeling superior and resentful while following the strictest rules of hair and clothes and decorum in public. Somehow, Little X absorbs just enough regimen to develop her own view of the world. In reading about her, we may better see how Malcolm X, another disciple of the Nation of Islam, found a method for his many reinventions.