Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  I have to admit, when those Negro publishers and journalists called me in to explain my love for a white man, I did walk away feeling more confused. How could I really love White John when I was getting so attached to Black John?

  To complicate matters further, John B.’s parents were distraught when they heard about our engagement. He was from Fort Dodge, Iowa, and his father was a respected entrepreneur in the dairy business. He told his son that if he married a Negro woman, it would destroy him. Further, he made it clear that if John B. married me, he would no longer be his son, and he decreed that if anyone else in the family attended our wedding, they too would be cast out.

  John B.’s mother tried a more gentle approach, but she was also very opposed to our union. She wrote letters to me directly, hoping to appeal to me woman to woman. She said she wasn’t prejudiced, that she had Negro friends. She told me she knew I must be a person of high caliber if John was interested in me, but she pointed out that although John B. was a few years older than I was, he was very inexperienced socially. Under any other circumstances, she said, she would be delighted he had found someone he wanted to marry, because he had never paid much attention to women. But in the end, because she knew her husband’s attitude, she said, “Please don’t marry our son. This will ruin our family.” And, she reminded us, what would become of our children?

  I did not feel any anger toward John B.’s parents, especially his mother, whose letters were so passionate and sincere. Naturally, though, I would not have been swayed by a mother’s plea if I really believed John B. was the person I was destined to marry. Ironically, it was John B.’s own reaction that gave me pause. “Pat, I’ve been financially independent for years,” he said. “I’m going to marry you, and if my parents don’t like it, that’s just unfortunate for them. Even if they disown me, it wouldn’t matter to me.”

  On the surface, those words might have sounded romantic, but not to me. I wondered why John B. wouldn’t at least consider reasoning or negotiating with his parents in some way. I could not fathom having such a cold attitude if my parents had been in such emotional turmoil. A voice in the back of my mind said, “If he could be that cold to them, could he be that cold to me someday?”

  John B.’s mother eventually decided to defy her husband and attend the wedding if we were determined to marry, and one of his brothers was also planning to attend. His family was literally being split over the question, and I found myself forced to do some deep soul-searching. How could I marry John B. and potentially destroy his family if I wasn’t sure how I felt about him? And how could I marry one man when I knew full well that I was still attracted to another?

  Unfortunately, Tallahassee’s lunch counters were still segregated in 1961, a year after our jail-in. Henry Steele had been briefly served at a lunch counter at the Neisner’s department store the previous June, when he dined with a group of FSU students, but that turned out to be a fluke. A group of white ministers had also become involved, forming a biracial committee to encourage downtown merchants to bring about integration without further direct-action protests. That effort had failed, in part because merchants had received no assurances of police protection in the face of the public outcry they expected from whites.3 National CORE was concerned with the lack of momentum in Tallahassee, and although I wasn’t on the campus during that time, Priscilla and the other students were hoping to breathe new life into the organization.

  I had already served my jail time because of the sit-in arrest at Woolworth, but our attorneys appealed our convictions all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Tobias Simon and Alfred I. Hopkins, two of our lawyers, held that no arm of the state government—in this case, Tallahassee’s mayor—could use its power to impose racial discrimination against a private citizen. In 1948, the Supreme Court had ruled that real estate covenants designed to prevent Negroes from moving into certain areas could not be enforced in court, so why should our arrests at a lunch counter on the sole basis of race be any different?

  In March 1961, a year after our initial arrest, the Supreme Court made a decision: It would not overturn our convictions.4 Apparently, in the eyes of U.S. law, it was perfectly legal for a town mayor to enforce Jim Crow policies. I was not surprised by the Supreme Court’s decision, but I was disappointed. Whatever progress had been made during our speaking tour and fund-raising drives, it seemed, could be negated with the stroke of a pen. If the law wasn’t on our side, then what was our hope?

  Since we weren’t going to tolerate discrimination any longer, the laws would have to change. Period.

  We might have been considered only kids in those days, but clearly it was going to be up to us to help change the laws.

  Twelve

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “Sometimes a person has to go back, really back—to have sense, an understanding of all that’s gone to make them—before they can go forward.”

  —Paule Marshall

  One of the most extraordinary experiences I’ve ever had while researching a book was in 1999, when I was writing The Black Rose, a historical novel fictionalizing the life of self-made black beauty tycoon Madam C. J. Walker. I was at the Indiana Historical Society, searching through old microfilm of Indianapolis Recorder newspapers from the early 1900s, and my eyes were peeled for any references to Madam Walker, her husband C. J. Walker, or her attorney, F. B. Ransom (whose son, Willard Ransom, was one of my father’s mentors). I was in a particular hurry because I hadn’t realized the historical society was closing early that day, so I had two hours less than I’d planned. It was my last day in town, I still had a lot of film to go through, and I had to leave in twenty minutes.

  Suddenly, a name jumped out at me from the screen: John Due.

  The newspaper was from April 25, 1912. The name topped the “Society Gossip” column, which chronicled weddings, births, deaths, illnesses, parties, and any other events in the black community that the social editor deemed newsworthy.

  The reference was tiny, but it stilled my heart: Mrs. John Due is seriously ill at her home at 112 Emmett Street, it said. Alongside the notice, a real estate salesman’s ad proclaimed BOOKER T. WASHINGTON ADVISES HOME BUYING. Beneath that was an ad for a laundry company that delivered its clothes with a horse and buggy.

  Here was a snapshot of my family’s history, right before my eyes.

  After being immersed in the world of Booker T. Washington and horses and buggies for so many months while I wrote The Black Rose, the sight of my forebear’s name made me feel as if I’d been sucked into a time portal. Suddenly I could imagine my feet touching those historical streets, as if some part of me had been walking there all along. It was a feeling of deep connection on the level of spirit and ancestors, which is rare during an era when we all routinely scatter so far from the places of our roots, and when we often don’t learn who came before us.

  I asked my father about it, and he told me that the Mrs. John Due in the newspaper was his great-grandmother. I had stumbled blindly onto a reference to my own great-great-grandparents while doing research on a book that had nothing to do with me.

  After floating on a surreal cloud of elation after the chance discovery, I remembered that I’ve always known my father’s roots in Indiana go deep. Even my reasons for agreeing to write The Black Rose—a book based on the research and notes of Roots author Alex Haley and therefore not a project entirely of my own creation, unlike my other novels—were entangled with the story of my father’s family in Indiana. Mom was the first family historian in my life, but my father and my great-grandmother Lydia Graham (my sister’s namesake and the woman who raised my father) told me stories, too.

  I did not know Grandmother Lydia well or see her often. My only real memory of spending time with her is that she had emphysema and asthma, so when I once spent the night with her in her room, I lay awake terrified that I would hear her labored breathing come to a sudden stop. I do remember her as a cheerful woman, I enjoyed our telephone conversations, and when I was eleven she wa
s a voice of history when I needed her help on a school project I called “My Own Roots.”

  It was 1977, in the wake of Alex Haley’s book and the miniseries that had kept the entire nation captive, and I was electrified by the idea of learning my family’s history—not only the 1960s sit-ins and arrests I’d heard about, but from Before. From slave times. After seeing Roots, I was obsessed with images of Kunta Kinte, Kizzy, and Chicken George, and I started writing a piece of fiction I called Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free, about a young African girl’s experience with the Middle Passage and slavery. I was thirsty for a feeling of connection with black people from that time, imagining how they’d suffered—thereby giving the circumstances of my own life deeper resonance. I was developing a long-term perspective.

  I asked my father if he knew any stories about his ancestors.

  “There sure is a story,” my father said, his face lighting up. “Did I ever tell you about Lyles Station?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, I’ll tell you about it, but we should call Grandmother Lydia, too.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. My father was eager to share an unknown part of his life with me! And I was lucky enough to have a great-grandmother who could tell me where I’d come from. I didn’t realize it at the time, but Alex Haley’s Roots and my school assignment had inspired me to honor my ancestors in a way that would never cross most children’s minds. To my ears, my father’s story revealed itself like a glorious, unwritten chapter of Roots. I was not disappointed.

  “Way back in the 1800s, not long before the Civil War,” my father began, “a slave master in North Carolina decided to set his slaves free. He’d decided he didn’t believe slavery was right. But he also knew there was a lot of prejudice against black folks to prevent them from making a good life for themselves, so he bought them a parcel of land in Indiana under his own name. He did that because there was a law in North Carolina that required him to take responsibility for his slaves after they were free. Now these freed slaves had somewhere to go, land where they could build their own houses and start their own farms. So they packed up everything they owned and drove in a wagon train all the way from North Carolina to Indiana.”

  My eyes widened. A wagon train! The scene unfolded in my imagination, the dust kicking up under their wheels, the jouncing of the wagon, the sounds of “Yee-haw” as the driver coaxed his horses to go faster. I could see grandfathers and fathers and mothers and children, free for the first time in their lives, savoring every sight that came before their eyes.

  “When they arrived,” my father went on, “they began to farm the land. Now, these slaves knew the land, they knew farming, and the ground was fertile, so they had bumper crops, better than they expected. In town they sold what they grew, so they were not only feeding themselves, but they were earning money. And they were so prosperous, they started attracting attention to themselves. The white farmers who lived around them started getting jealous. And this came at a time when a lot of folk in Indiana were putting pressure on the governor to make it a slave state. Indiana was a free state, you see. And people who already wanted Indiana to be a slave state were very unhappy to have to compete with these freed slaves. They started thinking, ‘Now who are these niggers making all this money?’ Poor white folks didn’t like to be shown up by black folks. That’s when trouble always started.”

  Uh-oh, I thought, beginning to realize I might not like this story. I had heard stories like this before, about the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings and burning crosses. I’d heard stories about trouble. Stories like those didn’t have happy endings for black people.

  “Well, sure enough,” my father said, his voice dropping to give the story drama, “one night after it was dark, the neighbors of those freed slaves came in a surprise attack. The freed slaves were sleeping in their beds when the shooting started.”

  Yep, I thought, here it comes. This is where all the black people die.

  “But these freed slaves did something that was very smart: They had thought about what to do in the event of something just like this, so they all ran to what’s called a ‘round house.’ That was a big, sturdy building where they stored their farming equipment. They had their rifles in there, too. Once they were all gathered inside, the men passed out the rifles and shot at their attackers through the narrow windows of the round house, while the women climbed up into the loft and reloaded the guns. Back in those days, guns could only fire once and had to be reloaded. That’s why they had worked out a system. But even with all of them shooting, they couldn’t keep all of the whites from getting to the round house. The whites started to break down the door, and the blacks knew that once they got inside, they would try to kill everyone.”

  I might as well have been inside that round house, too. I could see myself crouching behind bales of hay in the loft while I covered my ears to block out the sounds of shooting and shouting below. I could imagine their faces hardened with determination, and the terrified beating of their hearts as they fought for their lives.

  “What happened?” I asked, nearly breathless.

  “Suddenly, the door came crashing down. The armed white farmers began swarming inside. But again, the freed slaves were ready for them. They had lined up on either side of the door with battle-axes raised high over their heads. When the farmers broke in, they swung those axes down. And they kept swinging until all those jealous farmers were dead.”

  “They won the fight?” I said, hardly daring to believe it.

  “They won the fight.”

  “But what happened to them? Did they get in trouble?”

  “Well, it caused a big problem, of course. Even the governor had to get involved. He didn’t blame the freed slaves for what happened—they’d been attacked on their own land—and he knew he would have to take some precautions to keep the peace. He helped them move to a settlement called Lyles Station. Freed slaves from all over came to Lyles Station to settle in a place where their neighbors wouldn’t bother them. They built a thriving community. And my grandmother was born in Princeton, Indiana, which is near Lyles Station. They still have family reunions at Lyles Station.”

  Did the story really happen? I may never know. I should point out that I haven’t been able to verify my father’s story with the Lyles Station Historic Preservation Association, which is actively working to preserve both the oral traditions and buildings of the Lyles Station settlement in Indiana. But as Jeanne Killebrew, the association’s founder, pointed out to me twenty-five years after my father first told me the tale, Lyles Station is full of stories, and not all of them are known. Settled in the 1840s, she says, Lyles Station is the only incorporated black town in the state of Indiana. The definitive book about Lyles Station, written by Dr. Carl Lyles (a descendant of one of the original founders), is entitled A History of Lyles Station, Indiana. There is also a children’s book based on Lyles Station by Scott Russell Sanders, A Place Called Freedom. My father still stands by his account of the attack and relocation. It’s a story his grandmother told him, and her mother told her.

  While I was researching my school project, my great-grandmother wrote me two letters to add her knowledge to our family’s history. We still have the letters, which she wrote painstakingly in her shaky script: I have been looking for papers giving names and dates of the family. When I find them, I will send you some history of your roots. I will have to write it because I have no tape, and my eyesight is poor so you will have to be patient with me. Grandmother Lydia related that the families who had come from North Carolina and other slave states to take up territories in the wooded lands included the Hardimons, who were “Irish and Negro.” They settled in Gibson County, among others. One man, John, had eight sons, and one of his sons, Alexander, married Lydia Walden, a girl from a large family of mixed white and Indian blood. In 1857 a daughter was born, Alice; in 1860 a son, Horace. In 1861, when the Civil War was declared, young Alex, then nineteen, was drafted, leaving a wife and two babies. They lived in a thick woods,
in a one-room cabin. They stayed in this wooded place, which was three miles from the next log cabin, all summer—but as fall came, they were afraid, for most of the white people were very mean and there were only pig paths to travel. Lydia Hardimon, then seventeen, took her two children and went to live with her parents, who lived ten miles farther into civilization.

  Grandmother Lydia listed names and little-remembered facts that she had culled together from papers I would have no idea how to find today. William Henry Stuart, who was called “Colonel,” also came from a large family of mixed races. His father escaped from an old wicked slaveholder who sold his wife and some of the children and sent them away. He and three of his boys were helped by some good white people who gave them some shoes and clothes, also a sack of food. They helped them to a free state.