A Mighty Long Way

by Carlotta Walls Lanier

  “Aunt Hannah Mae,” I retorted, “the minister obviously didn’t know Grandpa.”

  She smiled. We both knew the well-intentioned reverend had either made up the sweet story or significantly cleaned up the language he attributed to Brother Cullins.

  The next day, I headed back to Denver and to school at Colorado State College. I was determined to do whatever it took this time to get my college degree without having to ask for my parents’ help. They had done enough for me, and I felt I owed it to them and myself to finish. With the savings from my job at Rocky Flats, a low-interest bank loan, a $300 loan from Big Daddy, and two scholarships—from the NAACP and the United Methodist Church—I was able to cover the first two quarters without having to work. That allowed me to focus on school and get back into the groove of studying and performing well.

  With school back on track, I treated myself in spring 1967 to a golf exhibition ticket for a matchup between Arnold Palmer and Art Wall at the Cherry Hills Country Club. While there, I ran into my uncle Byron and his son, Joe. At thirteen, Joe had developed into a talented all-around athlete, but he looked sick. He had complained to his father that he wasn’t feeling well, and Uncle Byron was holding Joe’s wrists under some cold running water to cool him down. Over the next several weeks, I called and stopped by periodically to check on Joe, but his health didn’t seem to improve. I was shocked over the summer when my young cousin was diagnosed with nephritis, a potentially fatal kidney disease. Joe’s health continued to slide downward, and he would pass away in November of the following year.

  I had grown close to the entire family while staying with them, and it was tough watching Joe suffer at such a young age and seeing the helplessness in the eyes of my aunt and uncle. I delved into my studies to take the focus off my own pain. When I sat down with a school counselor to figure out the most direct route to graduation, I settled on a double major in social sciences and recreational administration. My major mattered little to me at that point. I just wanted to finish. After the second quarter, I had to get two part-time jobs to pay my tuition. Each morning, I drove my Volkswagen Bug fifty miles to school in Greeley, Colorado, returned to Denver in the afternoon, and went to back-to-back jobs. I was taking a full load of at least twenty hours each quarter, so I spent most of my downtime studying.

  Graduation was just a month away when I turned on the television before heading out to school one morning in April 1968 and heard an astonishing news report: Dr. King had been gunned down on the balcony of a Memphis hotel. By then, I had moved to a Denver apartment within the boundaries of one of the top junior high schools in the state so that my sister Tina could attend, and she stayed with me during the week. The two of us stared, aghast, at the television screen as the announcer reported that King was dead. I didn’t want to believe my ears. I felt great sadness for the country, but even more for Dr. King’s wife and children, whose loss would be the greatest of all. Racial hatred was still burning wildly across America, and now it had consumed a giant.

  I graduated in May from Colorado State. Mother and my two sisters attended the ceremony, but Daddy had to work, which was fine with me. I had not invited anyone else and was in no mood to celebrate. I had finally achieved my goal, but taking so long to do so seemed to strip away some of the sense of accomplishment. I was just relieved to be finished. Now I could move on, knowing at least that I had completed what I set out to do.

  But the assassination of Bobby Kennedy on June 6, less than a month after my college graduation, deepened my angst. Another fighter for freedom and justice was gone. Anger seemed to be spewing from every corner of the country. The white supremacists seemed determined to silence the strongest voices for racial equality. And new, defiant black voices like the Black Panthers were emerging, finding converts in urban neighborhoods impatient with the pace of change. I had watched from a distance as my people burned down their own neighborhoods after King’s death. D.C. burned. Baltimore burned. Cleveland and Chicago burned. I understood their rage. I’d even found myself at times trying to explain it to white schoolmates. But anger plus anger equals only more anger. I wondered if the country could ever find its way to true peace.

  Amid all of the national chaos, I applied for a newly created position at the Metropolitan Denver YWCA as program administrator for teenagers, but I was surprised during the interview process when one of the black board members challenged me. I had moved to Lakewood, Colorado, a largely white suburb, and the board member wanted to know whether I would be able to relate to and create relevant programs for the black teenagers who lived in mostly black neighborhoods in northeast Denver. The tone of the question unnerved me. I felt as though my blackness was being challenged. It might have helped in that moment to mention that as a fourteen-year-old black girl in Little Rock, I had risked my life to go up against a once segregated school system and that I had persevered through hell to get the education the Supreme Court said I was due. Surely I understood what it was like to be a young black girl trying to navigate her way in the world. I didn’t need to live in a certain neighborhood to know what it was like. But I had told no one that I was one of the Little Rock Nine, and it didn’t even occur to me to mention it then. I’ve never wanted to use my experience in Little Rock to gain any kind of advantage. I wanted people to like me, to accept and respect me, for me, not because I had been some national symbol. So I kept my cool, explained that where I lived wouldn’t be a problem, that I would be able to relate to teenagers wherever they lived, and that I would try to create programs relevant to their needs.

  I got the job and went to work for a wonderful woman, Polly Bullard, the executive director, who over the years would become a friend and mentor.

  The following September, I married my boyfriend of three years, Ira (Ike) LaNier. We had a small ceremony in the chapel of my church on Friday the thirteenth. I joked that if it didn’t work out, we’d have something to blame. We had met for the first time at a house party on Thanksgiving night in 1962. He had just finished college and was working as a substitute teacher, and I was still at Mountain Bell at the time. He likes to tell a story about how he had scoped me out—“the tall, lanky one”—from the moment I walked in the door with a couple of my friends. He declares he had noticed me a month earlier on the public bus route we both took to work but that I had gotten away before he had a chance to make his move. Now at the party was his chance, he says, so he arranged for his roommate to play a certain slow Temptations song as he walked over and asked me to dance. Instead, his roommate decided to play a joke and dropped a James Brown hit. By then, Ike says, he had already asked me to dance and was doing his best to mask his now very public flaw: He couldn’t dance a lick, at least not fast. According to him, I grew bored within a few seconds, waved him off, and preened off the dance floor as he stood there, thoroughly embarrassed, watching his friends cackle with laughter. Of course, I don’t remember things that way at all. I don’t even remember meeting him at the party.

  When we met again in March 1965, Ike had just returned from military service after having been drafted a month after we’d met the first time. His roommate—the same guy who had played the joke on him—was having a house party and invited me and some of my friends. Ike says that when he heard I would be there, he was furious and finally agreed to just ignore me—“that woman,” he calls me in the PG version of his story. But after having a couple of drinks, Ike says, he walked over, reintroduced himself, told me what I had done when we’d first met, and was preparing to give me a piece of his mind about my rude, arrogant manner when I stole his thunder. He says I told him that I didn’t remember the party but that if he remembered the events of the night that way, it must have happened and that I was sorry for treating him so badly. I’m not exactly sure that’s how that night went down, either. But apparently I was different from what Ike had imagined: kinder, more considerate. And we discovered we had some things in common, particularly golf.

  I drove Ike home after the party. He didn’t eve
n have a car, but every time he tells this story, he complains about how I scared him half to death in my “raggedy” Volkswagen Bug. True, there was a little problem with my brakes, but as Ike recalls it, I had to turn the car off a few blocks away and coast down the road to his house. Anyhow, he invited me in with a promise to cook breakfast and put some jazz on his new stereo. His roommates and their girlfriends soon joined us. Ike says he was trying to impress me during our hours-long conversation in the wee hours of the morning when he asked if I liked golf. He had been a caddy in his hometown of Columbus, Mississippi, and he was hoping to introduce me to the sport. I told him simply that I enjoyed golf. He invited me out to play right then, about five-thirty a.m. I accepted, and by the time we drove back to my place to pick up my clubs, City Park course was preparing to open. Of course, I whipped him, even after refusing to tee off on the ladies’ tee. He says I had purposely left out that I was a member of the East Denver golf club and had been winning tournaments. In any case, I wanted to give him a chance to finally beat me, so the two of us began playing golf together every day. We also found that we both liked other sports as well, and it apparently amazed him and his buddies that I could talk as much football as they could. Some of my friends from Michigan State were playing with the Green Bay Packers, and I could analyze the game with the best of them—why a certain play didn’t work, who was out of place, which coach had to go. I was even the first girl allowed to “infiltrate” the regular Sunday morning football gathering of Ike and his boys. Anyhow, I won Ike over.

  He won me over, too. First thing, he was taller than me (a must). Then, he was a southerner with Mississippi roots. I’d always heard that a southern boy makes a good husband, one devoted to taking care of his wife and children. I realize that’s a stereotype, but it’s a good one that stuck in the back of my mind. Most of all, he made me laugh. He still does. Nobody can spin a story like Ike.

  I don’t think I ever really told him that I was one of the Little Rock Nine. He says a friend mentioned it to him—how a friend would have known, I don’t know. But, growing up in Mississippi, Ike remembered watching television footage of my eight comrades and me. He said that when his friend mentioned my background, he remembered the television footage he had seen as a teenager, and it made him furious all over again. It also made him want to protect me. But I never mentioned my experience at Central, so he didn’t either. More than a decade would pass before circumstances would force us to have that conversation, and by then we were parents.

  Our firstborn, a son, Whitney, was born June 25, 1971. He was six months old when Polly, my supervisor at the Y, gave me the task of renovating an old house that had been left to the Y by a wealthy doctor in his will. Because the house was empty, I was able to bring Whitney with me to work while Ike was away for long spells in an executive training program for IBM, where he now worked. I outlined what needed to be done to transform the house and set up a committee of volunteers to make it happen. I was involved in every step from design to construction to decoration, and I discovered something about myself: I thoroughly enjoyed this kind of work. I began reading real estate manuals and decided to get my real estate license. About the same time, Polly retired, which left a huge void for me. I believed I had done all I could do for the Y, resigned from my job, and went to work for a woman-owned real estate company near my house.

  My real estate career worked well with my family life, especially when our second child, a daughter, Brooke, was born in 1974. I found that I knew more than I realized about housing construction after having spent so much of my life around men who had made a living in the industry. I spoke their language, which surprised more than a few of the men I encountered in the then male-dominated real estate and construction industries. This was the age of Barbara Walters, who had just become the first woman co-host on the Today show and one of the more visible symbols that women were bursting into careers considered nontraditional.

  My life was stable and happy, and then the bottom fell out.

  In late February 1976, Daddy came down with what appeared to be the flu. He had been healthy for most of his life, but like many men, he didn’t go to the doctor regularly. In recent months, I’d noticed that he seemed tired all the time. Once, when I stopped by my parents’ home, I found him on the driveway, barely able to catch his breath after shoveling snow. Daddy was hospitalized one February day after his temperature shot up to 106 degrees. He also complained of muscle aches. But he still looked healthy, so I figured he would be back on his feet once the illness ran its course. I visited Daddy at the hospital every day. When nearly two weeks passed and he didn’t seem to be getting any better, I grew worried. Then came a frightening diagnosis: Daddy had leukemia. The prognosis looked grim, but Mother tried to keep a positive attitude. Everything would turn out okay, she assured herself and me. But Daddy seemed resigned, too tired to fight.

  “I won’t be able to work,” he said to me, still in disbelief after his doctor advised him to retire.

  Daddy asked me to do him a favor and look into buying some property in Phoenix. I knew he was thinking of Mother. She had wanted the two of them to join some of their retired friends there, but he had always resisted. He wasn’t ready to live the life of a retiree, he’d told her. He still wasn’t. Something about his manner told me he was giving up. That hurt. Daddy had always been a fighter. We were from a long line of fighters. I would just have to fight for him. Maybe he could undergo a blood transfusion, or we could look into the experimental treatments in Houston that his doctor had mentioned.

  I called Loujuana, who was living in Pennsylvania, and she came back to Denver right away. I decided at first against telling Tina, who was in her junior year at Mills College in Oakland, California. I knew she would worry, and I didn’t want to pull her away from school unless it was absolutely necessary. We could beat this. I was sure of it. But despite my best efforts to protect her, Tina learned by chance from a friend that Daddy was in the hospital, and she called home. I decided to level with her. My best friend, Horace, the former pro basketball player, was living in California and helped to look after her. Tina spoke to Daddy on the telephone, and Horace bought her a plane ticket to return to Denver. But just before she arrived, Daddy slipped into a coma. As shocking as it was to see him lying there, unable to communicate, he looked as if he were just asleep. That gave us something to hang on to. He hadn’t lost weight. His color looked good. We all remained confident that he would pull through.

  On March 2, I spent the entire day at the hospital, mostly just sitting quietly with Daddy and chatting with other family members as they came and went. I left for the night about nine p.m., made it home, and peeked at my sleeping toddler and preschooler. I was just about to climb into bed about an hour or so later when I received a call from the hospital. Daddy had experienced unexpected complications, and doctors were not able to save him. The blood suddenly rushed through my body. I felt weak, but my mind rebelled: I’d just left Daddy; I was planning to see him again in the morning; I didn’t even say good-bye; what do you mean he’s gone? Suddenly, I was that heartbroken little girl again, longing for her daddy to come home.

  I could have stayed curled in my bed forever. But through my tears I saw Mother, scarcely able to comprehend burying the fifty-three-year-old love of her life. My sisters were no better. And things needed to get done. Somehow I pulled myself together enough to make the arrangements. Mother wondered whether we should return to Little Rock to bury Daddy, but I knew he wouldn’t want that. He had told me once that he couldn’t understand why people carted their deceased loved ones all over the country just to return them to hometowns they had long since departed. We decided to bury him near us in Fort Logan National Cemetery in Denver.

  A spring snow covered the ground as my family and close friends gathered at Fort Logan for the military burial. White headstones, aligned in neat rows, marked the path where thousands of families had trod before. The Denver sun, usually present even after a snow, stayed tucke
d behind heavy gray clouds. Daddy would have appreciated the dignity of the service. Crisply dressed military men firing their rifles in a unified three-gun salute. A bugler hitting every mournful note of “Taps.” And the U.S. flag folded to perfection and presented to Mother.

  Time stopped there for Daddy and me. And then I faced the most difficult moment of my life: turning away and walking into the rest of my days without him.

  CHAPTER 15

  Finding My Voice

  Soon after Daddy died, I received a letter from Elizabeth Huckaby, the former vice principal for girls at Central. She was working on a book about that tumultuous 1957–1958 school year, and she wanted some input from my eight comrades and me. I read the letter and put it aside. Those memories were buried deep in my past. I didn’t want to think about them. I didn’t want to relive them. I never responded to Mrs. Huckaby’s letter. It had nothing to do with her. I just couldn’t.

  I didn’t hear any more about the project until 1981, when I heard advertisements for the made-for-television movie Crisis at Central High. The movie was based on Mrs. Huckaby’s manuscript, which had not yet been published, and it was about to air on CBS. By then, Ike’s job had relocated us to Atlanta, and the children were in school there. Just days before the movie was scheduled to air, I talked to Ike, who agreed that we needed to have a family meeting. Whitney was in the fourth grade then, old enough to understand; Brooke was just six. We sat down together as a family, and Ike and I talked to them about the Little Rock Nine, my role, and the movie that was about to air. On the night of the movie, we planned to watch it together, but I couldn’t sit still. I was washing and folding clothes, and I kept leaving the room to start a new load, put away a bundle, and push down any old emotions trying to resurface. Ike was teary-eyed. Whitney heard my name.