Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  The students sent to McCrory’s were arrested as soon as they arrived. At Woolworth, the president of the White Citizens Council (which, as far as I’m concerned, was a racist group no different from the Ku Klux Klan), Homer Barrs, was leading a mob of armed whites who had assembled to prevent more students from entering the store. The students had been stopped in their tracks, so they stood and shouted, “No violence! No violence! No violence!” Their voices rang against the other downtown storefronts, but all the while the specter of violence was gazing into their faces. The police officers on the scene refused to do anything about the knives, baseball bats, and axe handles being brandished by the angry whites. It looked like a recipe for a free-for-all.

  We went back to campus to inform the students about what was going on. We got the word out to everyone who would listen and made placards in support of our arrested students: NO VIOLENCE. WE WILL NOT FIGHT MOBS. WE ARE AMERICANS, TOO. GIVE US BACK OUR STUDENTS. Standing on the steps between the stately columns of Jackson Davis Hall on FAMU’s campus, I bared my heart and soul to my fellow students as I described the arrest of our classmates, and the students responded. Before long, our number had swelled to one thousand strong. With our placards painted and our spirits buoyed, we began a peaceful march, walking in pairs that stretched in a seemingly endless line.

  I was proud of my fellow students. The feeling of impending change was so obvious on that day. With so many unified Negro students full of energy and determination, we could almost feel victory in the air. We were going to help bring about change. Finally, we were no longer going to sit and be intimidated. We began the two-mile walk from FAMU’s campus, intending to reach downtown.

  We never made it.

  In Tallahassee, as in many cities, the railroad tracks serve as the line dividing the white town from the colored town. Near the Tallahassee railroad tracks dozens of police officers were waiting for us, forming a barrier all along Adams and Monroe Streets. The very people we had tried to reach to negotiate with had, apparently, prepared instead for a different sort of confrontation.

  The teargas bombs began to fly. Officials later maintained that we had a three-minute warning,17 but I remember no such warning. All I remember is that what had begun as a peaceful march turned to havoc.

  I will never forget how one police officer, who apparently recognized me as one of the student leaders, stood directly in front of me and said, “I want you,” before lobbing a tear gas canister into my face, point-blank. The thick, bitter chemicals filled my eyes, nose, and mouth. I coughed and choked, flailing and blinded, as other students around me screamed and fled. For a terrifying instant, I could not breathe at all. My eyes were afire.

  They say all of us meet a guardian angel sometime. Most times, we never know who it is. I certainly met my guardian angel that day. A man grabbed my arm and pressed a handkerchief against my burning eyes. He began to lead me. “Don’t touch your eyes. Don’t rub them, or you’ll just rub it in more. I was in the Army,” the man told me.

  The world was all darkness, but I could hear screams, shouts, and the pounding of running feet around me. “I can’t see!” I told the stranger.

  “I know. Your sight will come back. Just don’t rub. Give it time to wear off.”

  With those reassuring words, he led me to a nearby church—I don’t even know which one—and sat me in one of the pews. To this day, I do not know who he was, but I truly hope he will read this book and make himself known to me. His kindness still means a great deal to me.

  The inhumane event, captured on film by local Negro freelance photographer Steve Beasley, appeared in Ebony magazine. It was also recorded by Virginia Delavan, editor of FSU’s Florida Flambeau, who was later jailed herself for simply talking to Negroes involved in the protest.18 Most of the students involved had not been civil rights activists before that day. They had never been to a CORE workshop to learn to deal with harassment, or attacks, or violence. They had never made the inner vow that they would risk their lives in this battle. Even with all my training and resolve, I had not expected what happened that day. How could they?

  All around me, as I sat blinded in that church, I heard my schoolmates straggling in, sobbing. Their clothes reeked of tear gas. Many were treated for burns and other injuries at the FAMU hospital, rescued from the scene by faculty members. Later, I heard reports that the police had actually blocked the path of students trying to run back toward the campus during the tear gas attack. Thirty-five demonstrators were arrested, although the police did nothing to punish the armed whites who began using violence against the students. Clearly, the Tallahassee authorities considered it their job only to protect the interests of segregationist whites, not the interest of peace. Our own nation, it seemed, was at war against us.

  All I could do was keep that handkerchief pressed to my face and grit my teeth against the stinging of my watering eyes. Though more than forty years have passed since that tear gas incident, I have felt so much sensitivity to light ever since that I have to wear darkened glasses even in a movie theater. The condition has only worsened with age. It is rare that I will drive at night, because even streetlights bother me, but dark glasses make it nearly impossible to see at all. All these years later, just as I did in March 1960, I have been forced to keep my eyes covered.

  But I didn’t know my future then. As I tried to recover in the church that day, I sat in silence with a pounding heart, feeling stunned, waiting until I could once again see the light.

  Six

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”

  —Zora Neale Hurston

  “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier! Hey, hey, U.S.A.…”

  It was the 1970s, and my sisters and I walked in a purposeful circle with a handful of other protesters with hand-written placards in front of the Dade County federal building in Miami, chanting loudly in opposition to U.S.–backed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. I was about eleven, my sister Johnita was nine, and Lydia might have been seven. All of us wore our hair in neatly combed pigtails, and we pumped our placards in rhythm as we walked. “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier!”

  It was just another day in the Due family. Our parents gave us ballet lessons, drama lessons, piano lessons, etiquette lessons—and life lessons. From a very young age, we were taught that there were injustices in the world and that we could have a role in rectifying them. During the forty-five-minute drive to that protest from our home in Southwest Dade, our parents explained to us that Haiti was a very poor country, that most of its inhabitants were black, and that the United States government discriminated against Haitian refugees who tried to come here for a better life while refugees from Cuba were welcomed. Worse, we were told, the United States was supporting a terrible Haitian dictator named Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was corrupt and violent.

  That was all we needed to hear. We joined the adults in the small picket line in front of the federal building, proudly brandishing our signs, chanting with youthful abandon. Passersby stared at us, but we did not feel shy or self-conscious. We had a message to spread, and we wanted people to hear it. “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier!”

  Roughly two years separate Johnita and me, and two years separate Johnita and Lydia, so often we recall different childhood occurrences because of our age gap. While I remember a fairly regular barrage of racial epithets from white children after we first moved into Point Royal, Lydia, who is four years younger than I am, was bracing for that but got none. For Johnita and Lydia, most of their torment was from the mouths of other black children who called them “Oreo” and tried to pick fights, believing my sisters’ careful diction and dedication to school must be proof that they considered themselves superior.

  My sisters and I share slightly different memories of our family experiences. But the day we marched for Haitians’ rights has been seare
d into all of our memories.

  I felt strong, and free, and right. I felt like my parents’ child.

  For me and my sisters, childhood was about learning where we belonged in the world. We never questioned our parents’ activism. We took for granted that this was something they did because it needed doing. We knew other kids’ parents didn’t have their names in the newspaper, or have people calling from all over the state because they needed help. Other kids’ parents didn’t march for Haitian rights, and hadn’t been to jail. Perhaps, I thought, other kids’ parents weren’t quite so busy all the time, either, but that was all right, too. It needed doing, that was all. From time to time, when we weren’t in school, my sisters and I would do it with them.

  At meetings, my sisters and I usually sat in the back of the room. Our main job was to keep quiet. Once, my mother took us to a meeting in Opa-locka, a North Dade city (this was far, far away from our house, farther than downtown), with Mrs. Eufaula Frazier, an activist we knew very well, and we got a little too giggly during the opening prayer. That was one of the rare times my mother had to raise her voice at us in public. Another time, my father was hosting a meeting at the house. The only time people ever came over to our house was for meetings, and they came often and stayed late. My sisters and I amused ourselves by hiding just out of sight behind a big easy chair, giggling as we surveyed the visitors. That was one of the rare times we actually made our father angry, and he took us to the back of the house with swats on our behinds and a stern and firm good-night.

  In 1976, when I was ten, my mother asked me and my sisters if we’d like to take the morning off from school. This usually only happened on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, when we set out early in the morning for a quiet observance downtown that culminated with the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” followed by breakfast at Howard Johnson. The singing and the eating were my favorite parts.

  But this wasn’t Dr. King’s birthday. “You know who Jimmy Carter is, don’t you?” my father said.

  “He’s running for president,” I said, because I’d seen him on TV. “The peanut farmer.”

  “We’re going to meet Jimmy Carter. He wants to see prominent blacks in Miami, so we’re going to visit him at a hotel downtown.”

  Of course! Why wouldn’t a man running for president of the United States want to meet my parents? I considered this a perfectly natural turn of events. If anything, I probably wondered why we had to go to him instead of him coming to us. John Due and Patricia Stephens Due were very busy people, after all. My only regret was that I wasn’t already sitting in my classroom at R. R. Moton Elementary, where I could remark loudly to my classmates, “Oh, excuse me, I have to go. My family is going to go meet the man who might be the next president.”

  “Do we have to?” Lydia whined. At six and a half, apparently, a trip to a hotel to meet a peanut farmer did not sound exciting enough to miss school. Johnita and I shushed her loudly.

  Mom dressed the three of us in matching denim suits, and we set out for our appointment at the Konover Hotel on Miami Beach. I expected to find a zealous crowd of supporters waving red-white-and-blue streamers, but the setting was actually a very sedate hotel suite with only about a dozen people in sight. Lydia was the first in our family to spot him. “There he is!” she said, and we followed her pointing finger. People parted as Carter walked into the room. He was so soft-spoken as he talked to the people flanking him that I could barely hear the singsong of his Georgia accent until we were standing beside him. Since my sisters and I were too awestruck to speak, Mom asked him to sign autographs for us.

  To me, it was all a bit anticlimactic. Jimmy Carter was not a large man, towering over everyone in the room the way I had imagined a presidential candidate might. He had a slight build, and he wasn’t nearly as tall as Dad. We got a good look at his trademark smile, though. Carter posed for a picture with our family and Florida Representative Gwendolyn S. Cherry, my godmother and a close family friend. His hand rested gently on Lydia’s shoulder as we all grinned for the camera.

  “Hey, know what?” I said, making a sudden realization during the drive home. “If Jimmy Carter wins the election, we’ll have a picture with the president!”

  The three of us shrieked in delight, and a few months later, my prophecy came true. Johnita would meet President Carter again at a Democratic rally in Miami four years later, when his hair had gone white and the strain of his four years in office was obvious in the deep lines on his face. She showed him the picture he’d taken with us and asked him to sign it. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. The Secret Service won’t let me sign it now,” he said sadly, sincerely. “Mail it to me at the White House.” By then, they both knew that he might not be in the White House much longer. True to his word, shortly before the end of his term, President Carter signed our photo: With Best Wishes to the Due Family—Jimmy Carter.

  My parents’ lives were not separate from ours, and by taking us with them to so many places they went, my parents gave us a consciousness many children our age did not have. I remember, when I was about eleven, my mother gave us T-shirts printed with a giant “X” across the image of an electric chair when we were about to drive to a state NAACP meeting. END DEATH PENALTY NOW, the shirt said.

  “I can’t wear that,” I said.

  My mother paused, surprised. She wasn’t used to hearing objections.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m not against the death penalty. If someone kills you, they should die, too.”

  My parents patiently explained to me and my sisters that the NAACP was against the death penalty because it unfairly targeted blacks and other minorities. A disproportionately higher percentage of blacks who committed murder were sentenced to the death penalty than were whites, they told me. And blacks were more likely to be poor, so they couldn’t afford proper attorneys. They also told us the story of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who had spent twelve years in a Florida prison, nine of them on death row, only to be proven innocent of the crime. The NAACP was also trying to help Pitts and Lee win reparations from the state, they said. In addition to being carried out in a discriminatory way, the death penalty sometimes sentenced innocent people to die, especially if they were black or poor.

  “So you see?” my mother said. “I understand how you feel, but this is just another area where the system discriminates. And as long as that’s true, we’re against the death penalty.”

  As usual, my parents knew how to move me in a way that made their position crystal clear. There was justice, which is what my parents believed in, and there was injustice, which they were fighting against. It was as easy to understand as Superman and Wonder Woman outsmarting villains with the League of Justice on Saturday morning cartoons.

  My opinion on the death penalty was formed at that moment, and hasn’t wavered since.

  In May of 1978, when I was twelve, I saw government at work. I was selected to serve as a page in the Florida House of Representatives under Rep. Gwendolyn Sawyer Cherry, one of the state’s few black legislators. Rep. Cherry had received her law degree at the age of forty-four and was a forceful proponent of equal rights and reform on issues like the death penalty.

  Most of my days as a page were spent scurrying back and forth between the snack bar and the House floor for the representatives’ coffee, sugar, and nicotine fixes. During the brief moments between filling food orders, I heard snippets of the laws the legislators were debating. Most interesting of all was the question of whether or not to give former death row prisoners Pitts and Lee $75,000 apiece for their twelve-year ordeal. Mom and I attended an impassioned rally in their favor before the day of the vote, and I was later on the House floor to hear the cascade of loud nays that dashed their hopes in the Florida House, at least for that session.

  I think that’s downright disgusting, but they’re trying again next year, and they’re going to keep trying until they get it, I wrote in my diary. Twelve years is as long as I’ve been alive. Pitts and Lee are asking fo
r $75,000 mere dollars for all of those years of agony. I just can’t imagine a government that would be so unfeeling to deny these two men not only their freedom … but justice.

  I didn’t know it then, but I would be a grown woman—with a newspaper career behind me, and two novels published—and it would be on the eve of my wedding day before Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee would finally receive $500,000 apiece from the Florida legislature in 1998, after the tireless urging of Florida’s black legislators. Pitts and Lee had been pardoned by Gov. Reuben Askew in 1975 after spending twelve years in prison, but they battled for decades to win compensation for those stolen years. After the police beat a confession out of them in 1963, Pitts and Lee originally were convicted by an all-white jury. Another man confessed to the murder they were charged with only a year after their sentencing, yet they sat on death row.1 How can anyone calculate a price for such an invasion of one’s life? And why did the state take so excruciatingly long to provide even that meager compensation?

  Johnita was selected to serve as a page a couple of years after I did. She served a state representative from Jacksonville, Dr. Arnett E. Girardeau, a dentist who was a former NAACP vice president in Jacksonville. He later became one of the first black state senators in Florida since Reconstruction. (Lydia also later served as a page under State Rep. Humberto J. Cortina.)

  Johnita’s page experience had an ironic twist: Because Mom was working, she could not stay in Tallahassee with Johnita the way she had with me. So Johnita was hosted by Rep. Bill Flynn, a white Democrat from Miami, and his wife, Elizabeth. Between the Flynns, Dr. Girardeau, and especially Rep. Carrie Meek, Johnita was very well taken care of. But the decision to let Johnita live with the Flynns turned out to be controversial for my parents. Bill Flynn had been a strict segregationist in the 1960s, and my parents had two activist friends, William Miles and Odell Johns, who remembered Flynn threatening them with a shotgun in his South Dade barbecue restaurant because they wanted to be served. But Rep. Flynn begged my parents to entrust their daughter to him, saying he’d had a change of heart, and once Mom was certain it was all right with his wife, she agreed. “I just felt that this was what we were working for—change—so we could say, ‘All right, you’ve changed,’ ” Mom said, explaining the decision. But when the news spread in the black community that the Flynns had offered Johnita a room and a bed in Tallahassee, my parents got a couple of nasty phone calls, and some of their civil rights friends didn’t speak to them for some time. One of the activists, Clarence Edwards, brought it up again years later at a civil rights reunion my parents hosted in their home in 1997, “The Gathering.” He said, “I forgive, but I don’t forget.” Johnita had no clue she was in the thick of a controversy. She only remembers that the Flynns treated her with kindness.