In the Name of the Father

WHEN A LITTLE GIRL IS FOUR, HER father is God. He is the leader of her private nation. Should he also happen to be a real-life leader, invited to stand before microphones and talk to great cheering crowds, that too would seem appropriate, consistent with his place in her young universe. But what if one day, while she is watching, he is blown from the dais by five thugs -- a grotesque reversal of the nature of things, a wiping out of the sun? Can her spirit survive it? Can she avoid being twisted by it? Can it be overcome?

Last week a federal prosecutor in Minnesota suggested that it could not -- that, in the words of one little girl's father, chickens will come home to + roost, that violence must beget violence, that the world is a tragedy in a continuous loop. Minneapolis U.S. Attorney David Lillehaug charged on Thursday that Qubilah Shabazz, 34, had for seven months negotiated with a hit man for a murder and had in fact moved to Minnesota to make a down payment on the crime. Her alleged target: Louis Farrakhan, the bitter rival of her father Malcolm X, who was murdered in 1965.

It was a seductive premise: the violence Malcolm saw as a tool of liberation had degenerated into the internecine violence that killed him, and now into a senseless blood feud. But by the weekend the case's lessons, and its prospects, looked less clear. The man expected to be the prosecution's key witness seemed to be more impeachable, at least on character, than anything yet seen at the O.J. Simpson trial. And the state's allegations had achieved what the passage of years had failed to do -- drawn the Shabazz family and Farrakhan into apparent agreement on at least one belief: that the Federal Government so dislikes black activists that it will pursue them recklessly unto the second generation.

The prosecution's case, should it ever reach trial, will inevitably conjure up the carnage that took place at New York City's Audubon Ballroom 30 years ago next month, as Malcolm X, former con man and thief who had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI) while in prison and become the foremost spokesman of its fiercely proud and racist party line, played out his final political incarnation. After revealing that his mentor, Elijah Muhammad, had fathered several illegitimate children, Malcolm had split with the Nation. He had founded a splinter group, traveled to Mecca, adopted a more tolerant political philosophy (along with the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) and begun to believe he was marked for death -- correctly so. One conspirator distracted his bodyguards' attention; another pulled a shotgun trigger, creating, in the words of writer Marshall Frady, "a perfectly circular seven-inch pattern of holes over his heart." For insurance, the killers shot him again with the shotgun and pistols.

All this within yards of his pregnant wife and four young daughters.

"They never actually saw what happened," Betty Shabazz told reporters of her children. At the first shot, she threw them under a chair and herself on top of them. But her oldest daughter Attallah contradicted that in interviews of her own: "She's yelling, 'That's my husband they're killing!' And a kid wants to look and see. Her husband means it's my father. So I keep looking. I see the men. I see it." Qubilah, the second eldest, presumably saw it too.