Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Despite my disappointment with the treatment of Pitts and Lee in Tallahassee—or perhaps because of it—my experiences at the state’s capital helped inspire me to run for office myself.

  My first elective endeavor was to run for president of the student body at Cutler Ridge Junior High School. I decided to run at the last minute, mostly because I saw an opportunity to make a speech, and I loved making speeches. I’d been winning oratorical contests for years, even though I found out later that my junior high school had refused to display my first-place countywide Kwanzaa Oratorical Contest trophy in the school trophy case, when the mostly black junior high schools across town did so proudly. My mother had kept this from me, so I had no reason to believe I could not be voted student-body president at my school. As I wrote my speech, I gave myself instructions to “gaze out at the audience awhile before speaking.” The way I remember it, my speech was a huge hit; it left the auditorium roaring as my topics veered between humor and fire while I impressed upon my classmates how much I cared. What a great feeling! My slate and I swept the vote after my speech. It never occurred to me back then to wonder about it, but I was the first black student-body president at Cutler Ridge.

  I learned that I enjoyed winning elections. Soon after that, I ran for president of the Greater Miami NAACP Youth Council. Now that we were older, my sisters and I had meetings of our own to attend, and not just the Girl Scouts. I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade when my mother first began taking me to monthly meetings of the Greater Miami NAACP Youth Council, which met in the NAACP office in Liberty City. The group was never very large, but the same steady number of people attended each time. Some were very young, like me—brought, too, by their parents—and others were teenagers in high school, or perhaps just beginning college. They were young, but they were focused. They acted a lot like grown-ups, planning voter registration drives and other community activities. (As a sixth-grader, Johnita was crowned Miss NAACP for the Greater Miami Branch because she raised $3,000 for the organization.)

  Honestly, I don’t know why I ran for president. I pushed myself to try it, just to see how it felt. Maybe I believed my parents expected it of me, or maybe I really felt inspired to help make a change through public service. I won that election, too. It probably didn’t hurt that my sisters could vote for me, and I might have been running unchallenged. In any case, I had become an NAACP officer. With guidance from the adult membership, and strictly adhering to Robert’s Rules of Order at our meetings (“Yes, the floor recognizes Johnita Due.”), the Youth Council set its sights on voter registration in the black community. The 1980 election was approaching, and Jimmy Carter was facing a formidable challenger in Ronald Reagan.

  One sunny afternoon, I set out to make a speech with zeal, summoning my best suburbanized preaching voice as I held a megaphone to my lips: “You know, friends, there are some people out there in this day and age who don’t understand the importance of—”

  “Tananarive, what are you doing?”

  I was riding in a car with Dr. William Perry, the president of the Greater Miami NAACP branch, and he’d given me the megaphone to shout out messages about voting while we drove slowly down Seventh Avenue in Liberty City, one of the centers of Miami’s black life. I liked Dr. Perry’s wit and commitment, but I didn’t like being cut off in mid-sentence.

  “Telling people to go vote,” I said, annoyed.

  “When were you going to tell them?”

  “I was about to tell them, Dr. Perry.”

  Dr. Perry laughed at me. “Girl, if you go on like that, we’ll be at the next block before you finish what you’re trying to say. Give me that thing. Let me show you.” With that, the more seasoned activist began making choppy proclamations, with emphasis on all the key words. “The election is Tuesday. Please don’t forget to vote.” Then, he handed the megaphone back to me. “Do you understand now?”

  I sighed. Where was the creativity in that? When could I mention the marches of the 1960s? Or the suffering of generations of slaves who had never been permitted to vote? Still, despite my dissatisfaction, I imitated Dr. Perry’s choppy, to-the-point phrases, keeping all my far-flung thoughts to myself. “The election is Tuesday.…”

  I remained an NAACP Youth Council president for a while when I began high school. Then we started a new branch in South Dade. My father was the president of the adult branch, and my mother was the South Dade Youth Council advisor. Janet Reno, who was then Dade County’s state attorney, occasionally came to his branch banquets and other events. Johnita and Lydia served as South Dade Youth Council presidents after me, focusing on voter registration in the area. Lydia even enlisted the help of her high school social studies teacher, Barbara Brown, in organizing her phone-bank campaign. Students from Ms. Brown’s social studies class worked the telephones for Lydia during the campaign.

  But I had already begun to lose my enthusiasm for leadership.

  One day, my mother spotted a mural that outraged her, and she suggested that we needed to make a complaint as a youth council—which, as far as I remember, consisted of mostly me and my sisters, and perhaps a few others. A car detailing company with a prominent building on South Dixie Highway had a mural on its wall depicting a black man and a Hispanic man in a playful exchange, with stereotypical dialogue attributed to them. Something like “Yo, man, ya’ll got the good deals? Qué pasa, homey? You got that right!” The black man had a big, gleaming gold tooth. No question: The mural was cartoonish, maybe even offensive. Mom wanted us to set up a meeting with the management to complain, but I was feeling slightly squeamish, though I had the cause of justice on my side! This would be my first experience with an actual one-on-one confrontation.

  The meeting was set up, and one day Mom and I marched over there to talk to the owner. I steeled myself and voiced our youth council’s concern as articulately as I could. The unshaven owner listened quietly, impassively, occasionally fidgeting with irritation as I spoke. I knew that the NAACP’s name carried weight. If the NAACP was angry about something, it made the nightly news. At annual NAACP conventions, all the presidential candidates came to speak because they wanted to curry that organization’s favor. No one wanted the NAACP on his tail, so I figured this man was irritated because he knew he was going to have to repaint his wall. I could understand that. That would take time and money.

  When I was finished, the man shrugged and stubbed out his cigar in his ashtray. “Yeah … well … listen … we’ve been in this neighborhood for years, and nobody’s complained. It’s just supposed to represent the people who live around here, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”

  “But it’s offensive.” Suddenly, my voice sounded very tiny in my ears.

  “To you, maybe. Sorry. Lighten up.” He shrugged, having nothing more to say.

  So much for my first confrontation. My mother was muttering about writing letters to the newspaper, but my insides had shriveled. First, I’d felt bad about bothering the guy, but then I was angry that he was planning to so thoroughly ignore me. No, not me—he was going to ignore the nation’s oldest civil rights organization! There wasn’t a single part of that conversation that had felt good to me, even airing my concern, because what if, after all, the mural wasn’t offensive? What if it was just offensive to Mom, and she’d passed her indignation on to me?

  I never pursued any further action on the mural, although the adult branch did. Eventually, some time later, it came down, but that experience remained with me.

  I haven’t run for office since.

  “Come on, girls, put on your scarves,” my mother said on February 23, 1980, after a flurry of telephone calls. “We’re going to the Dade County jail.”

  My sisters and I were watching Family Feud when the news came that Dr. Johnny L. Jones, the first black schools superintendent in the county’s history, had been indicted for grand theft and was ordered to surrender himself at the jailhouse. To my parents, Dr. Jones’s indictment was just another attempt to discredit a black man in
power, something that happens with curious frequency in Miami. Dr. Jones had been charged with misusing school funds to buy gold-plated plumbing for his home. When Mom had first seen the newspapers implicating Dr. Jones in what became known in the media as “The Gold-Plated Plumbing Caper,” she’d been very upset. Something else? It could not have come at a worse time.

  Based on a series of bad events, Miami’s black community was already in a slow, churning boil. A black insurance executive named Arthur McDuffie was in the news. He’d died after a police chase in December, and police had claimed he’d died from injuries sustained when his motorcycle crashed. The Miami Herald had recently disclosed that the whole thing had been a cover-up. He’d actually been beaten to death. In another debacle, police had charged into a black schoolteacher’s home and beaten everyone present, only to discover later that they had raided the wrong house. The Miami Herald also reported that a white Florida Highway Patrol officer had molested an eleven-year-old black girl and received virtually no punishment for his crime, not even a notation in his personnel record.2 Was it open season on black people in Miami?

  In 1979, in the midst of all this turmoil, Mom had been named coordinator for the 1980 NAACP national convention to be held in Miami Beach that summer, at the behest of Charles Cherry, the president of the Florida State Conference of NAACP branches. It was an immense event for which the city was ill-prepared. Mom had been working very long hours away from home, her stress level was high, and her mood was snappish. The tension in our home then was already thick, and now the most powerful black man in the county, in my mother’s mind, was being lynched by the media. It was time for action.

  Mom worked the telephone, calling Dr. Jones at home to ask when he was going to the jailhouse, then rallying volunteers to provide a human shield for him so he would not be mobbed by the waiting media. Johnita, Lydia, and I were going to be part of that shield. Dad was at a meeting, so he could not go with us.

  I had a headache that night, but I didn’t complain. We were part of a regiment, like the National Guard. When duty called, the Due family responded.

  Dr. Jones and my parents were not friends. In fact, my mother had butted heads with Dr. Jones over parental involvement in the schools in her role as chair of the Dade County Title I Parent Advisory Council, when he asked her to buck proper procedure by signing off on a document without reviewing it first with her board. When she refused, he’d found a way to remove her from office. Personal feelings aside, my parents applauded Dr. Jones’s efforts to improve education for children in general, being especially sensitive to the needs of poor and black children. My parents also considered the treatment he was receiving an outrage, and they were convinced the situation would have been handled very differently if Dr. Jones had been white. The Dade County School Board had made an unprecedented move, meeting on a Sunday to remove him from his position as soon as the allegation surfaced. Dr. Jones had not yet been tried, but his peers had found him guilty.

  The one question that nagged at me as my mother drove me and my sisters toward the jail was What if Dr. Jones was guilty? I’d asked my parents that question when the news first broke, and they said absolutely not, but I still wrestled with that question. (Dr. Jones was convicted later that year, but in 1986 the Florida Supreme Court threw out the conviction because there had been no blacks on the jury. There was not enough evidence for a second trial. Dr. Jones died in 1993, never having fully recovered from the ordeal.)3

  Once we arrived at the jailhouse, I hesitated briefly again as we passed the cluster of reporters waiting outside with their news cameras and notepads readied, waiting for Dr. Jones to appear. I was in the ninth grade at the time and was beginning to think I might want to be a reporter myself someday. Could that have been me standing out there, waiting to cover a story? Whose side was I on? Johnita, surveying about fifty supporters waiting for Dr. Jones to appear, had a different reaction, as she described in a school English essay: I could feel the support in the air, and it made me feel self-satisfied.

  I chose my side. I decided there was a conspiracy against prominent blacks in Dade County, and the media was part of it, even if the individual reporters were not to blame. Dr. Jones deserved the privacy and dignity of being able to walk to his car without harassment after meeting with police.

  We went inside the jail building and marshaled protectively around Dr. Jones with the other supporters, all adults except for me and my sisters. I gazed at this man I did not know except from watching televised school board meetings, noticing how red and glassy his eyes looked, how he strained to smile at his supporters. His smile looked tight; he was too tired and dazed to try to look like a composed politician that night. Introductions were made, and I shook his hand, holding tight to let him know I felt badly about everything that was happening to him. His attorney made a couple of dry jokes to ease the tension, and then it was time to go back outside to the waiting reporters.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” someone said, and we were on our way en masse toward the exit.

  At first, the reporters were caught off guard because they didn’t see Dr. Jones in our midst. I was standing directly behind him, telling myself I would keep my eyes on his brown coat so he would always be in sight. We went outside to whatever was waiting for us.

  I wouldn’t remember any details about that night if I hadn’t written an essay about Dr. Jones later that same year. Even then, I could recall so few details—to the point where I wondered if I’d gone at all, or if only Johnita and Lydia were there—and today I can’t help wondering if I was slightly traumatized by that evening. Perhaps my experience was buried by the horror of the events in Miami that soon followed, making a February trip to a jailhouse seem trivial. Whatever the reason, my essay preserves details from my memory, at fourteen, that would otherwise be lost by now:

  There was one urgent shout, and suddenly the reporters were upon us. That’s when I first saw the ugliness. It seemed like everyone was talking at once amidst the bright lights and confusion. The pushing … the shoving … I was confused by all of it as I struggled to stay in back of Dr. Jones and keep my balance. It sounded like there was a fight going on, and I had a vision of us all being thrown in jail, but there was no fight. The reporters were standing in front of us, blocking our way as they tried to get good film, but we still walked forward, the ones in front shouting repeatedly for them to get out of the way. One of the cameramen, a large black man, kept saying over and over, “Come on, man … gimme a break … gimme a break.…”

  I felt so disgusted with him, I wanted to tell him how ashamed he should be and that he had no business here bothering us, but I didn’t say anything. They tried to get pictures of Dr. Jones as he got into his car, but all of us held up our arms to block their view. The car drove off, his attorney driving.

  For once, we had won. Perhaps it was a small victory … but we had won.

  It’s not a coincidence that Johnita and I both wrote essays about that night. She concluded by writing My family went to our car and my sisters and I had relieved smiles on our faces. Johnita’s was for a class, and mine was longer, a researched essay detailing Dr. Jones’s life, the conspiracy against black officials, Dr. Jones’s trial, and how that night my family went out to shield him from the cameras and lights. Our emotions were raw, and writing the essays helped us order and settle them.

  Because I could always find refuge in writing, nothing ever happened to me in vain. There was no such thing as utter uselessness or hopelessness. No matter what it was, or how bad it felt, I could write about it. And if I could put what I was feeling into words, I could at least give it all some kind of meaning.

  By then, I really understood better what my place in life would be. I was not the bold firebrand who could confront anyone with ease, like my mother. I also did not live in the realm of philosophy, sociology, and law, like my father. I was a writer. I could escape through writing. I could teach through writing. I could air shared emotions through writing. I could tell people
what had happened—exactly how it had happened—through writing.

  As long as I could write it, people would know.

  Seven

  PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE

  “Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

  —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

  Try to imagine a trial in which you and your attorney are openly called “niggers” during testimony. Or a trial in which the judge insists that the charges against you have nothing to do with race—when, in fact, the charges are only about race.