by Owen Thomas
“Hmm?”
“1954. Brown versus Board of Education was decided back in 1954.”
It is a conditioned reflex for me to correct history misremembered. A twitch of my training. A fidelity to the past that I can never seem to let slide. I don’t mean to be an asshole. So perhaps I should not have barked it at him.
“Mmm…1952, I think.”
“Dad, trust me.”
“Mmm…okay, history teacher.”
He smiles wryly at Cait and nodding his head back in my direction in a get-a-load-of-smarty-pants way. She smirks, although I cannot tell at whom.
“I think it’s 1952, but… Doesn’t matter. No big deal. Anyway, in the late Fifties, the Cleveland School District tried to address the over-crowding problem by implementing what became known as the Relay Program. Under the Relay Program, the black students in the over-crowded east-side schools were required to show up in shifts. So, half the students showed up for classes in the morning and the other half, afternoons.”
“Ugh.” Cait shakes her head. “Those poor kids.”
“Think about the teachers,” I add. “That’s double duty.”
Dad nods. “Yep. Bad idea. Parents of these black kids rightly did not understand why their children were having to double up in poorly maintained over-crowded schools while the white kids on the west side of town were learning things in newer, mostly empty buildings. So a group of these parents got together and began protesting the program. They called themselves the Relay Parents.”
It is sounding familiar. I should know all about the Relay Parents. At one point I’m sure I did. History is my turf. But only the name is familiar. This fact does not stop me from crossing my arms and nodding as though this is all basic background that I am enduring on the expectation that he will soon begin telling me something I do not know.
“Now, back to Minnie Watson. She attended Hazeldell Elementary School in East Cleveland. This school was a big, overcrowded mess. Two-thousand-something students. And Minnie’s parents were among the Relay Parents pushing for reform. It was an ugly battle that sure did nothing to improve race relations in Cleveland, which were to get a whole lot worse before they got any better. But the Relay Parents won that round. The School Board eventually abolished the relay program.”
Ben appears suddenly in the back of the vanbulance. My mouth is open, but before I can say anything, he is hugging Cait around the back of her shoulders. After jolting to attention, Cait is patting his forearms.
“Hey there ambulance driver,” she says casually, craning her neck around so she can see him. “Save any lives out there tonight?”
Ben nods.
“Bet you’re tired, huh?”
Ben nods.
“Then go on and hit the sack. Whatchu waitin’ fo, mo-fo?” Cait pats the cot behind her. Ben’s face lights up and he practically springs sideways for the cot. He lays down and closes his eyes, rolling to one side, then the other.
Dad and I exchange glances. I sense that we are both thinking about Mae. About how differently that exchange would have been had it been Mae rather than Cait. The awkwardness. The shrieking. The flowering contusions. There is a secret mirth here, suddenly, between us. A glint in the eyes that betrays an inkling to smile. A tiny, whispered urge to laugh and to let all the rest fall away.
Dad turns back, breaking the connection. Ben is making an over-the-top production of settling in, pulling his knees up into the rising-falling dough of his belly and folding his hands under his cheek as children will do in old movies to tap the iconography that belongs to the innocent and utterly content. He is the littlest Von Trapp, dreaming that the Baron will one day marry the guitar-slinging postulant governess.
Ben is finally still. Cait’s attention has refocused. Dad continues.
“Anyway… the school board replaced the Relay Program with a busing program that caused even more controversy. The plan was to temporarily relieve the overcrowding in black schools by busing some black students to the few all-white east side schools. You can imagine how well that went over with the white parents.”
“Wait,” says Cait. “They bused them to white schools on the east side, not the west side.”
“Right. Convenience and political muscle lined up on that issue. Too much influence was looking out for the west side of town. The school board was going to fix an east side problem with an east side solution, and that solution was a temporary integration of white east-side schools until new schools could be built. Of course, this was hardly integration. The black students couldn’t use the gymnasiums, or participate in the same activities. School assemblies. Any of that. They had to wait for one particular time of the day to use the bathroom.”
“One?”
“One. Kids were peeing in milk bottles because they weren’t allowed to use the bathroom. The white kids were merciless. The name calling. The bullying. It was ugly. Now I came up in the Columbus system, all of us did. Me and Stinky Daniels and Alice and Naughty Dillon, we were all here in Columbus, which had its own problems, but nothing like Cleveland. Cleveland was a real mess.”
He nods his head to himself, tracing a groove in the tire with the side of his shoe.
“A real mess. A real mess.”
Nods. Knocks the side of his foot against the tire.
“Yessir. Cleveland was a mess.” He pulls the folded receipt out of his pocket. Almost opens it. Nods. “Yep”. If he fucking says it one more time…
“So the busing was a disaster and people were upset, many of the folks that had once formed the Relay Parents fired up all over again as the PHA, which was, wait…PHA? No, it was the HPA, the Hazeldell Parents Association. HPA. And Minnie Watson, who was by that time in high school, her parents, particularly her mother, whose name was Gladys… no, Grace, Grace Watson, she was very involved in the HPA. In fact, Grace Watson was involved with a lot of the civil rights groups that were working in Cleveland at that time. There was CORE, which was Cleveland Organization… no Congress of Real Equality, or Cleveland Congress, or something like that.”
“Congress of Racial Equality,” I say calmly.
“That’s it. And there was the UFM. The United Freedom Movement. I remember that one. And there were others. In fact, I think that Minnie’s mother was the sister of the president of CORE or the UFM. One of them. Anyway, they were well connected in those circles. And Cleveland started to see lots of demonstrations and picketing of the school board. And then early in 1964, January or February, maybe March, there was a protest outside an elementary school in Little Italy. You know Little Italy?”
Cait nods.
“People carrying signs and walking back and forth. And a crowd of several hundred angry white people – so, a lot of angry Italians – who did not like the idea of their schools integrating, started to gather around these protesters. And one thing led to another and a riot broke out. Guns and knives and bottles and rocks. The protesters were seriously out-numbered and some of them were injured, including Grace Watson. She got it in the face with a rock or a bottle and she had to go to the hospital.”
“Where were the police?” Cait asks.
“Oh, there was no shortage of police. There were plenty of police. The protesters begged for help. But the police were of the firm opinion that the protesters should have known better than to march up and down Little Italy Cleveland for desegregation.”
“So they stood and watched.” She looks at me, shaking her head.
“They stood and watched.”
“Unbelievable. I mean, I know this shit happened, but it’s still not real.”
“MmmHmm. It was real. Very real.” He nods gravely, as though this is a haunting personal memory. “It was… very… real.”
“So, what happened?”
“More of the same is what happened. Grace Watson got out of the hospital and the next month participated in a protest at the school board headquarters with a lot of others, including her daughter, Minnie, and her husband, I don’t remember his name, and a couple of dozen
other protesters who were trying to convince the school board that isolating black kids inside white schools like they have the plague and then making them pee into milk bottles was not really what the Supreme Court had in mind.”
He seems to like the way that came out and he pauses to let it sink in. We wait.
“So they all showed up at the Board of Education headquarters and conducted what was known as a sit-in. Now, a sit-in was a form of protest or demonstration…”
“Dad,” I say, scolding. It draws him up short. He looks at me and then over at Cait, who is trying not to laugh.
“You know what a sit-in is,” he says matter-of-factly. I nod.
“Well, good. Good. That’s very good.”
He winks at Cait as if his only point was to push my buttons. To see me puff out my chest over something trivial. Cait laughs into her hand. Dad puckers his mouth and rocks back on his heels, throwing her another sly look, this one with an eye-roll flourish. She laps it up. They now have a secret bond.
“Okay,” he says. “Good to know. So, a group of them gathered at the Board of Education headquarters for the sit-in and they do their thing. The police showed up. They ordered the protesters out. The protesters would not leave. So the police started to clear the building and they were not very professional about it. Grace Watson was literally kicked and thrown down three flights of stairs. Broke her arm and a couple of ribs and banged up her face pretty bad. She asked to be taken to the hospital but they insisted on arresting her for obstructing justice and assaulting a police officer. They took her to jail and booked her before worrying about her injuries.”
“Oh, God. She died, didn’t she?” asks Cait. “They killed her.”
“No. Didn’t kill her. But they sure made her mad. She and others eventually filed a lawsuit against the police department. Well, there were two lawsuits actually. One was against the police department and several specific officers for the abuse at the sit-in and for looking the other way at the Little Italy riot. And then she helped put together another lawsuit filed by CORE or UFM or, come to think of it, maybe it was the NAACP, on behalf of a bunch of school children, charging the school board with pursuing an illegal policy of segregation. And Minnie Watson was one of those school children.”
He falls silent, looking up into the sky as if his attention has been carried off in the talons of another passing night bird, now circling lazily up into space. Someone who had not grown up listening to the rhythm of my father telling stories, someone less accustomed to watching him fish for first impressions, might think he had finished. Might think that this is where the story ends. The narrative line suddenly goes slack and she – for it is usually a she – ceases to feel the hook. So, inevitably, she gives the line a yank.
“Did they win?” asks Cait.
“Mmm?” He floats back down to earth. “Did they win? Nah. Cases went nowhere. Not much of a chance of winning. Not back then. But they made a big splash. The Watson family became fairly well known in the Cleveland civil rights community.”
“And in the Cleveland law enforcement community. Right? Which is why they were so willing to lock up Naughty Dillon. He was consorting with the enemy.”
Dad looks at me, jerking a finger over at Cait. “Not too shabby, this one,” he says raising his eyebrows. Cait beams. “Not too shabby. Yep, the cops were standing up for their own. Grace gave them all a black eye to match the black eye they had given her. So they were going to teach young Naughty Dillon a lesson. Not to punish him, but to save him. They were gonna save him. At the request of his father, they locked him up to show him the errors of his ways. The errors of his associations I guess I should say. They let him sit in jail for five days.”
“Unbelievable. Did it work?”
He gives a soft snort and shakes his head.
“People didn’t call him Naughty Dillon for nothing. That boy made a beeline from the jail cell to Minnie Watson’s front door. Locking him up was the worst thing Old Man Knotty could have done. She opened that door and it was like the heavens opening up for Dillon. It was all they could do to restrain themselves. Back then even her family would have taken issue with Minnie seeing a white boy like Dillon. Probably for a lot of reasons, with violence at the top of the list. She was young and they were protective. So Dillon really had to suck it up. So did Minnie. They had to pretend they were just friends and that he was just dropping by to get work on the protest.”
He is laughing and shaking his head as if he had never seen such a thing.
“How do you know this, Dad?”
It is a tone of incredulity from a lifetime of stories that are too conveniently entertaining. A lifetime of eye rolls from my mother forced to bear in silence a burden of inconvenient fact and unspoken killjoy corrections. I want to slap the look of rapturous attention from Cait’s face. I want to ask her if she finds it strange that in the course of ten minutes the length of Dillon’s incarceration has more than doubled from two days to five days. I want to ask why it should make any sense that the ill-fated road trip up to Shaker Heights was in the middle of a hot dry summer, if Naughty Dillon and his friends were all sitting in the police station with their coats on. I want her to be immune. I want her to see deeper than the glossy patina of charm.
Just the same, I am instantly ashamed of my pettiness. I remember all of the times that I felt scorn for my mother who always seemed to be looking too hard for opportunities to prove that my father was just making shit up.
He smiles, as if to himself, as if there is something humorous about a smudge on the concrete that he kicks with the toe of his shoe. A moment passes. Then another. This time the silence is for me. And it works. It always works. He is still and I am instantly unnerved, fearing that I have caused the offense I intended. I rush to fill the void, but only with more of the same.
“I mean does Dillon have an autobiography out there, or…”
“Well, I know, David,” he says with extra patience, “because Dillon called me when they let him out of jail. I drove out to that jail every day to visit him. I went mostly out of guilt. I went because I felt so bad that I had told Dillon’s father about Minnie Watson. So when they finally let him out, I took him where he wanted to go. And Minnie Watson’s front door is where he wanted to go. So that’s where I took him. And that’s the first time I met her. Mmm. She was something, too. She was sure something.”
“It was never about going to a party, was it?” asks Cait.
“Hmm? When?”
“You and the others on the road trip up to Shaker Heights. It wasn’t a party.”
He smiles. Shakes his head. “No.”
“It was an organizational meeting.”
“Yes.”
“CORE? UFM?”
“A bunch of them. We didn’t know. We thought it was a party, and it probably was a kind of a party. I mean I’m sure there was food and drinks. In fact, we were bringing some of those drinks, but they went to the police, who I’m sure enjoyed them. But you’re right. It was more of a meeting than a party.”
“And Dillon just thought you would go along with it?”
“I think he thought that once we were all the way up there, without a ride back to Columbus, we would get to know people, like Minnie and her parents. And I think he thought that once we got to know people we would give in to pressure to help them out. They needed people.”
“For what?”
“Freedom Schools.”
Cait waits for an explanation, but nothing comes. He pulls out the receipt, now a talisman for the story, no longer surprised to find it. Cait gives in. “Freedom schools?”
“MmmHmm. Our resident history professor can tell you all about those.”
He gives me the floor with a slight tilt of his hand. I have no idea. I probably should know. I probably did know at one time. It’s in my head someplace, but fuck if I can pull it out. And somehow, he knows that I don’t know. I hold up my hands.
“Really?” he asks.
I shrug.
“Oh, Freedom Summer,” I say, looking to save face. “Sure. That was Mississippi.” But I have missed my chance. He lets the sound of my voice dissipate, then continues to give me, of all people, a history lesson.
“It actually began as a voter registration drive in Mississippi that spread throughout the Deep South. Thousands of civil rights volunteers – lots of white college kids, many of whom were trained and organized about two hours from here, down in Oxford, over at Western College – all of these white kids flooded into those southern states to get Blacks registered.”
“I’m with you now,” says Cait. “Freedom Summer I know. I just don’t think of it as an Ohio thing.”
“Right,” I say too eagerly. “You think Mississippi Burning, not Cleveland Ohio.”
Cait nods sympathetically. My father does not.
“Mississippi Burning?” His brow is deeply furrowed in confusion. The space between his eyes is pinched to a fine point of concentration because, he is telling me in the timeless language of his face, he has no idea what the fuck I am talking about. Or, rather, he wants to have no idea.
“Mississippi Burning? Gene Hackman? Willem Dafoe?”
“Mmm. I don’t watch television much.”
“It’s a movie, dad. Remember?”
He shakes his head.
“Mom rented it after Tilly finished Peppermint Grove. Remember? Gene Hackman was in Peppermint Grove and so mom suddenly went on a Gene Hackman binge and had to rent all of his movies so she could, you know, marvel at what kind of company her daughter was keeping?”
He shakes his head. His face has gone slack, his expression placid with his famous, nothing to do but wait until the noise stops indulgence.
“You watched it.”
“Mmm, no. Don’t think so. Anyway…”
“Frances McDormand? You thought she was the only one who could act?”
“Mmm. Don’t think so. I don’t get my history from Hollywood.”
His head is bowed as he kicks softly at the driveway, waiting for me to shut up. I can see a large oblong abrasion glowing red through the thinning forest of gray.
