At PNS we feel the death of Betty Shabazz, widow of Malcolm X, is one of the most important stories of the decade -- and one of the most difficult to get a handle on. For that reason, we are continuing to run commentaries on the subject, although the stories may not be current by conventional formulas. PNS editor Richard Rodriguez, author of "Days of Obligation: An Argument with my Mexican Father" (Viking-Penguin), is a contributing editor of Harper's and the Los Angeles Sunday Times.

BETTY SHABAZZ, WIDOW OF MALCOLM X, DIED TODAY OF BURNS SUFFERED IN A FIRE ALLEGEDLY SET BY HER TWELVE YEAR OLD GRANDSON.

To put it bluntly: The death of Betty Shabazz, in late June, is now old news. Such is the pace we live, the headline on the morning's commute seems dated by the time we drive home.

I did not know Betty Shabazz, had no idea what had become of her, after that winter afternoon in 1965 when her husband was assassinated in Harlem, in the Audubon Ballroom, by three black gunmen -- suspected members of the Nation of Islam. What survived his assassination was the lesson that Malcolm X preached to black America -- the importance of taking control of one's own life.

When I was a teenager, I remember watching Malcolm X give a speech. I remember his military bearing at the podium, his elegant severity. There was something so self-conceived about him -- there in the spotlight, in his stiff, white shirt, the dark suit -- he reminded me of a convert.

Though Malcolm X remains one of the most revolutionary of black intellectuals, something about him was characteristically American. Aren't we Americans, after all, famous for our desire to take control of our individual lives -- to stand against fate, against history?

If in Malcolm X's determination to stand against history there is a deep American wisdom, there is in his family's story another reminder: generations are interconnected. An event in a great-grandfather's life can play on a child's life many years later.

The Ku Klux Klan torched the house of Malcolm X's father. Almost a century later, the grandson of Malcolm X confessed to torching his grandmother's house. It is as though the match held by the Klansman at the turn of the century prefigured the black child's match ninety years later.

To see history this way is to see history as a novelist does. The great novelists have always taught us that in order to tell the story of one generation, you need to tell the story of several generations. Great novels usually are family sagas, and to that extent they introduce a theme foreign to our American faith in the individual's ability to cut free of his father's or his grandfather's tragedies.

Maybe the reason we Americans are so struck by the Godfather movies or the Kennedys is that we do not normally read a life story as a family story.

If only we knew how to tell the story of America as a novel, instead of headline news, we would recognize that the land we all claim for our future is haunted. There are many ghosts on the landscape, terrible stories, among them the massacre of Indians and African slavery.

Our genius has been to turn away from the troubling past. In my lifetime I have seen Americans reject the anti-black racism of generations earlier. The change has been dramatic, but already now one hears a white impatience with lingering black resentment. Why can't blacks get on with it?

What troubles me now about the death of Betty Shabazz is the suspicion that one generation cannot simply walk away from the sins of an earlier generation. Though we also must.

As an angry young man, Malcolm X was a hustler, a con. He abused women. He abused himself. Then he changed, underwent a conversion. He would not allow himself to be strangled by the terrible past.

Malcolm X's daughter, Qubilah, was four when she saw her father gunned down. In 1995 she was indicted on charges of plotting to kill Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in retaliation for the murder of her father. It is Qubilah's troubled son, 12-year-old Malcolm, who has admitted setting the fire that killed his grandmother, Betty Shabazz.

We are faced with a paradox: To make a new life we must put history behind us. But closing our eyes to the past may leave us fatally innocent of how it is a black child named Malcolm found himself in handcuffs, in 1997, within the great American novel.