While the World Watched

by Carolyn McKinstry

  Thank goodness! I thought. The last thing I wanted was to be late and upset Mrs. Shorter, the church secretary. She would have been working in the office and answering the phone all that morning. Mrs. Shorter and I worked side by side in the church office on Sundays.

  “Come on, Wendell, Kirk!” I called to my younger brothers. “We’ve got to go!”

  Now that my oldest brother, Samuel, was a freshman at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, that left my sixteen-year-old brother, Chester, as the oldest child at home. He had just gotten his driver’s license, and Mama asked him to drive us to church. Chester was excited to have permission to drive the family car that morning. He sat up straight and proud behind the steering wheel of our 1960 royal blue Chevrolet Impala.

  “Bring the car right back after you drop off your sister and brothers,” Mama called to Chester. “Your dad needs it to drive to work.”

  * * *

  My dad was well educated. He had earned a master’s degree in applied sciences, and he taught physics and chemistry during the weekdays at the all-black George Washington Carver High School in North Birmingham. Prior to that, Daddy had taught at Industrial High School, which later became A. H. Parker High School—the first high school in Birmingham built specifically for black students. In the evenings and on weekends, in spite of his intelligence and education, he worked a menial job. He waited tables at the elite, white-members-only Birmingham Country Club in prestigious Mountain Brook, a city with old money and deeply ingrained segregated ways. It proved a lowly position for Daddy, but he did what he needed to do to feed his family and keep the roof over our heads. He couldn’t eat at the Birmingham Country Club, of course—people of color couldn’t. But they worked there cooking, serving, and cleaning up. My parents had dreams that each of their children would graduate from college, so Dad earmarked the money from this job for college savings for the six of us kids.

  Before Daddy left home in the evenings and on weekends, he’d slip into the club’s waiter uniform, a short white jacket trimmed in green cord around the sleeves and neck, with BCC embroidered on the front. After he arrived, he would pull on freshly bleached waiter’s gloves and begin his work. My father would occasionally speak to us about his experiences and interactions with the customers at the BCC. He did his job well, responded with the mandatory “Yes, Sir” to diners’ demands, and pretty much just kept his mouth shut. He never spoke about his education or teaching position while he was there, not wanting his employers or customers to call him uppity and take away his job.

  Daddy never told us what he overheard around the country club tables he served. I guess he didn’t want to frighten us—he always tried hard to protect us. He wasn’t alone in his approach. In those days, adults in the black community didn’t talk to their children about painful happenings. They just kept quiet about those things and tried to move on, in spite of all that was going on around them. But I have no doubt that during the thirty years he worked there, he learned much about racist Birmingham. I suspect he occasionally heard conversations from Klan club members that caused his heart to miss a beat. But when such remarks caused him additional fears and concerns, he just enforced new rules upon his children—hard-to-follow, strict rules. He was very much a disciplinarian, and he regimented our coming and going. He expected complete obedience to whatever rules he laid down at home. We understood, and we usually obeyed to the letter. If we decided not to listen, we knew harsh punishment would follow. It was years before we realized that his unwieldy rules were designed to protect us from the evil possibilities of the mean-spirited world around us.

  “You children aren’t to go near the railroad tracks going toward the pipe company,” Daddy ordered us. He gave no reason. He didn’t have to. As strict as he was, we knew Daddy was just and fair. We knew he loved us and wanted what was best for us.

  Daddy often warned my older brothers, “Samuel and Chester, you protect our ‘girl-child’ and walk to school together.” Daddy rarely called me by my name, Carolyn. He referred to me as the family’s “girl-child” or “Caroline.” It wasn’t uncommon to hear Daddy demand, “If three children leave this house together, then three children must return to this house together!” We had to know where each sibling was at all times. We were definitely our “brothers’ keepers.”

  As Birmingham grew increasingly violent in the 1960s, Daddy’s list of nonnegotiable rules grew longer from year to year. We knew he meant business, and we knew better than to question him. I sulked when Daddy insisted that I, his girl-child, be escorted almost everywhere I went. I didn’t mind so much when my older brothers walked with me down the streets of Birmingham or accompanied me to neighborhood parties. But I felt terribly embarrassed when Daddy made my two younger brothers go with me. Because of Daddy’s tight leash, I also wasn’t allowed to spend the night at any of my friends’ homes or babysit for children in the community. About the only place he permitted me to go alone, unescorted by my brothers, was church. It was a safe place, and I had certain responsibilities there. I escaped to the church as often as I could.

  When we occasionally disobeyed a rule, Daddy enforced punishment that we would long remember. Sometimes he grounded us or put us in temporary isolation if we got out of line. The boys got their share of spankings, but my father hardly ever spanked me. Instead, he’d take away Sunday afternoon movie privileges or not let me talk on the phone or tell me I couldn’t go to club meetings with my friends. He believed discipline and rules were a must for children, especially young boys—and especially those growing up in Birmingham, Alabama.

  Daddy also imposed a five-minute limit on the use of the bathroom and the telephone. If we exceeded our five minutes, particularly if someone else was waiting to use the phone, Daddy simply unplugged it. He also made strict rules about hitting a girl-child. My brothers knew not to hit me or my little sister because if they did, they could expect to be in a lot of trouble. Daddy believed in respecting and protecting women. We knew we needed to show Mama utmost respect—showing Mama disrespect always, without fail, meant severe punishment. If my dad thought we had even looked at my mother in a disrespectful way, we faced big trouble.

  Sometimes we unwisely tested Daddy’s rules. One day when Chester was fifteen, with a learner’s permit but no license, he slipped away with the family car. According to reports from the neighbors, boys ran alongside the car, holding onto the door handles from the outside, while my brother drove really fast. But in the course of this showing off, one of his buddies fell to the ground and ended up scraped and scratched. Soon enough the boy’s father paid Daddy a visit. My dad became really angry, and he not only whipped Chester but took away his learner’s permit for three whole months. Chester learned his lesson. He never did that again!

  Wendell, my mischievous brother, was always in trouble. Daddy enrolled Wendell in the ninth grade class at Carver High School, where he worked, even though it lay outside our school zone. For the sake of convenience, teachers were allowed to enroll their children where they taught. But Daddy had an additional reason for wanting him there.

  “I can keep an eye on this boy if I take him with me,” Daddy said.

  I remember when Wendell, shortly before his high school graduation, grew a little beard on the bottom of his chin—just a few hairs that formed a goatee. But Carver High School said it wouldn’t graduate any student who had hair on his face.

  On graduation morning Wendell decided to be clever. He put Band-Aids over his chin hair and told his teachers, “I cut my chin when I shaved off the hair.”

  As far as the school was concerned, he had gotten away with it, and he graduated with his class—and his Band-Aids. But he didn’t fool Daddy. Not a bit. Daddy was so upset with Wendell he wrote a letter to the dean at Knoxville College, where Wendell had been accepted for the coming fall.

  “It appears that I have not yet taught my son the meaning of character and integrity,” Daddy wrote. “He has not learned to be a responsible member of society. For this reason,
I am canceling Wendell’s acceptance to attend your college in the fall semester.”

  Wendell was shocked when he read the letter. He begged Daddy to reconsider, but my father refused. Wendell had to be punished.

  Daddy never mailed the letter, even though he made Wendell believe he had. Later, a month before the fall semester was to begin, Daddy pretended to have changed his mind and told Wendell he could attend after all. But for most of the summer, my brother thought all his friends would go without him to Knoxville College, and he would have to get a job and stay home. It was quite a lesson.

  When we entered high school, my father would make us take the same tests he prepared for his high school students. He worked us hard. If he didn’t like our grades on his tests, he made us study and retake the tests until we made better grades. His rules proved a real source of aggravation for me. I thought we had the strictest father in town.

  Daddy liked things organized and efficient—a place for everything and everything in its place. He knew where things were: socks in the top dresser drawers, toys in the bedroom closets, skates and bikes on the back porch, and pots and pans stacked neatly in the kitchen cabinet. He arranged the kitchen in a certain way, and he made sure we put things back in their designated places. No doubt these habits were a carryover from his mother, whose name was Sweet. She died when my dad was sixteen, but in that relatively short amount of time she taught him to cook, sew, iron, and make his bed. Sweet was not formally educated, but she trained Dad well in the practical aspects of life. Daddy’s time in the U.S. Army no doubt influenced his orderly lifestyle too. As an Army cook, he’d learned to live a strictly regimented routine. It wasn’t unusual for Daddy to wake us up at three or four in the morning after he got off work at the BCC and walk us to the kitchen to look at what we’d failed to clean properly before bedtime.

  He’d stand us all in front of the kitchen counter and ask, “Whose week was it to do the dishes?” After he determined who was responsible, he’d point to the less-than-perfect kitchen and ask, “What’s wrong with this picture? What didn’t you do here?”

  Before the guilty child could return to bed and go back to sleep, Daddy made him or her scrub down the kitchen—as he or she should have done earlier. Daddy insisted that the kitchen be clean and ready for his use in the morning. He had enough challenges each morning—waking us, feeding us, and making certain he arrived at work on time. After a long night of working at the club, he saw no reason why he should have to come home to a dirty kitchen.

  Early in their marriage, Daddy and Mama created a special arrangement involving family responsibilities. Daddy cooked breakfast every morning for the family, and Mama cooked supper each evening after she got home from her school-teaching job. Mama proved just the opposite from efficient, organized Daddy. She had a laid-back, unassuming personality. Totally unorganized, she didn’t care if we never washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. Nothing upset her. The house could burn down around her, and I don’t think she’d pay much attention to it. I guess Daddy knew that if he didn’t establish some order and organization in a house with six growing children, chaos would rule.

  * * *

  As Chester drove Wendell, Kirk, and me to church that fateful Sunday, I thought about my best friend, Cynthia Wesley. Her father had been my elementary school principal at Finley Avenue Elementary School, and Cynthia and I were in the same Sunday school class. We talked on the phone almost every day, and we were both members of a small all-girl community club called the Cavalettes. The group of about fifteen black Cavalettes got together mostly to socialize, eat cookies, drink punch, talk, and dance to records we played on the portable record player. We had just had a club meeting the week before, and we had another one scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, September 15. The upcoming meeting would be particularly exciting for us because we had placed an article in the local newspaper about it. The announcement simply said, “Cavalette Club to meet Sept. 15 at 3 p.m.” I served as our president, and I had told everyone to bring three dollars that Sunday to pay for the matching gold caps and shirts we had ordered from Fred Singleton’s, the downtown Birmingham sporting-goods store. Our first names would be printed in black letters on the front of the shirts, and the letter C for Cavalettes would be printed on the back. We could hardly wait to get them the following week.

  The Wesleys had adopted their only child, Cynthia. They lived in a beautiful brick house in Smithfield, an area of Birmingham better known as “Dynamite Hill” because of the routine Klan bombings there. Back in 1948, the year I was born, several black families had crossed the “color line” that separated white homes from black homes in the Smithfield area of Birmingham. The Klan responded with random bombings for almost two decades. Several well-known Civil Rights activists lived in Dynamite Hill at the time, including Angela Davis, whose family had a house at the top of the hill on Center Street, and Arthur Shores, one of the first blacks to practice law in Alabama. The Klan bombed the Shoreses’ brick ranch house on two different occasions. Fortunately, neither he nor his family was injured either time.

  I wondered what Cynthia would wear on that Youth Sunday. Her mother sewed all her clothes because she could never find anything to fit Cynthia’s petite size-two frame. Mrs. Wesley made beautiful clothes for her daughter—dresses just the right length and color and that perfectly fit Cynthia’s tiny waist.

  * * *

  Chester pulled the car to the side of the street in front of the church. My little brothers and I stepped out of the car and walked into the church’s lower-level door, which opened to the basement. The children’s Sunday school classes met each Sunday in the lower auditorium. The adult Sunday school classes met upstairs—each one in a corner of the large main sanctuary or in the balcony between the two great stained-glass windows. In one window, Jesus tenderly held a lamb in his strong arms. I sometimes pictured myself as that little lamb, so safe and secure and loved in my Shepherd’s hands. In the other window, my favorite one, was the kind-faced Jesus, poised with his hand in front of a large wooden door. I could almost hear him knocking softly, respectfully, on the door . . . again and again and again. His face showed a tender pleading for the person inside to open the door and let him in. I came to learn that the door represented a lost person’s heart—a heart Jesus longed to enter and live within. I studied those windows closely every Sunday, and each one permanently etched itself in my mind. On both sides of the sanctuary, the stained-glassed images of Jesus comforted me and brought me great peace and joy.

  The children’s Sunday school classes were already in session when I sat both boys in their metal folding chairs. I walked upstairs to the church office and found middle-aged Mabel Shorter unusually flustered as she laid down the telephone receiver.

  “What’s wrong, Mrs. Shorter?”

  “All these phone calls!” she said. “People have been ringing the phone all morning. But when I try to get more information, they just hang up.”

  “Who are they? What do they want?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “But they seem more like threatening calls than just prankster calls. The callers say they are going to bomb the church.”

  Mrs. Shorter was the nervous type. I felt she might be overreacting, so I mentally dismissed her comments.

  I didn’t think any more about the threatening phone calls. I just felt so proud Reverend Cross had asked me to be the Sunday school secretary on Sunday mornings. I’d held this job since the seventh grade. I would man the office, listen for the phone, open the week’s mail, greet guests when they came through, and compile the morning’s Sunday school report. I would also record the attendance and the amount of money contributed to church that morning. I felt so grown up.

  After the Sunday school lesson, the classes would all gather together in a large assembly before the morning service began. I would read the report summary out loud to everyone and make some necessary announcements before the superintendent dismissed everyone at 10:45. During those fifteen m
inutes before the next worship service, church folk would talk with one another, admire the babies, purposefully compliment and encourage the youth, and visit the restrooms.

  My friends and I would slip out of the church between Sunday school and the 11:00 a.m. worship service to drink Cokes at Mr. Gaston’s motel restaurant. This was a black-owned restaurant, the only place in the area that served blacks and allowed us to sit in a booth and have a waitress bring us a cold drink. We felt so grown up when we sat at a table; said, “Coca-Cola, please”; and waited for our drinks. We would each pay our thirty-five cents and then hurry back to the church.

  Some nine years before, Mr. Arthur George Gaston, the grandson of slaves and a popular self-made millionaire, had built the A. G. Gaston Motel on the edge of Kelly Ingram Park—across the street from the church—on some land he had bought years earlier. The motel provided a place for black Civil Rights leaders to stay, as well as other visitors to the city. No other motel in Birmingham would allow black visitors to eat or sleep there. Before the A. G. Gaston Motel opened, they had to stay in the homes of church members. Mr. Gaston hung a large Z-shaped sign from the top of the two-story part of the brick building. It read simply,

  A. G. Gaston MOTEL

  Air-Conditioned

  Before long, Daddy found out about our visits to the Gaston Motel restaurant, and he put an abrupt stop to them.

  “When you go to church,” Daddy said, “you stay at church until you leave to go home.”

  It was just another rule he added to the already long list of restrictions. So I didn’t leave church anymore and order Coca-Colas at the Gaston Motel.

  * * *

  I left the flustered Mrs. Shorter in the church office, distributed record books to each of the Sunday school classes, and then quietly slipped into my own classroom. Around 10:20, after I had collected all the children’s records, I headed toward the steps leading to the sanctuary to collect the adult Sunday school records. I paused and lingered a minute at the door to the girls’ restroom.