Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Because the church deacons wanted to curtail Rev. Steele’s civil rights involvement both inside and outside of Tallahassee, they attempted to restrict so-called “outside groups” from holding meetings at the church. They also tried to limit the number of times Rev. Steele could ask a guest minister to take his place on Sundays. When Rev. Steele had disagreements with the deacons, he took up the matter with the congregation, and the parishioners supported him, but the deacons controlled the church finances and punished Rev. Steele’s disobedience by refusing to give him raises and by not providing monies to make repairs to the parsonage.15 The penalties were not put in place by whites, but by other Negroes. This is the other side of the civil rights movement many young people are unaware of today. Even on the threshold of so many important changes, often some of our most difficult battles were with our own.

  When I moved in with the Steeles in the fall of 1962, I believe the money I paid them, however little, helped ease some of their financial burden. I got up and hitchhiked to my 8:00 A.M. class on FAMU’s campus, which was several miles away. Mother and Daddy Marion had divorced, and Mother’s relationship with Mr. Sears had already ended (she had bought a house in Miami), so it was comforting to spend time in a family situation during that time, eating at the dinner table together and such. Although Henry was four years younger than I was, we had both spent time in jail after the Woolworth sit-in. We both had a playful streak, and we’d sit outside overlooking accident-prone Highway 90, guessing which cars would crash.

  Most memorable of all, I think, were the long conversations I had with Mrs. Lois Steele, often while she cooked in the kitchen. She enjoyed having another woman to talk to, and she confided many of her frustrations to me—frustrations that, in time, I would learn on a more personal basis. One thing I loved about Mrs. Steele was that she wasn’t a traditional minister’s wife, nor was she traditional in any way. She was a free thinker, which meant that she didn’t even always go to Sunday services to hear her husband preach! And she said what was on her mind.

  Mrs. Steele told me how frustrating it was to have a husband who was often traveling, and how when he was at home, he was swept into the needs of his church and community. Mrs. Steele thought the community was largely ungrateful for the sacrifices Rev. Steele and his family had to make. “You know, Patricia,” she told me many times, “family has to come first.” She impressed the point upon me further, but I already knew that I wanted life to be different for my family. When my time came, I would have to find a way to balance both activism and being a wife and mother.

  That became my vow, and it was a vow I never forgot.

  By December 1962, I’d had enough of John Due’s aloofness. I wanted to pay attention to my studies and the Movement, but I was too distracted, in emotional limbo. I decided I would leave FAMU. As much as I hate to go, I thought, if I want to get my education and do other things, I need to get away from here.

  I told John I was going to New York. I had already arranged a ride with a male student I did not know. “Oh, no, you can’t do that, Patricia,” John said.

  “Well, I’m going,” I said adamantly.

  “Okay, I’ll drive you,” he said. “But first, we’ll have to stop in Indiana.”

  Naively, I agreed. I should have looked at a map, because Indiana is nowhere near New York. Indiana was where his mother lived, and that was where he wanted to take me. While we drove, he suddenly looked at me and said, “Patricia, let’s get married.” This time, I did not laugh. I had been waiting more than a year to hear those words again! But I was still surprised. I asked him why he’d been treating me so nonchalantly.

  He sighed, staring at the roadway. “Well, I hadn’t wanted to get involved with you because I want to finish law school and carry out my civil rights work. I didn’t want a wife, a family. I’m not the marrying kind. But when you said you were leaving, I knew that meant I’d never see you again. Well, I didn’t want that to happen.”

  John took me to Indianapolis, Indiana, to meet his mother, Lucille Graham, a very tall and fair-skinned woman who had been certified by the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture in 1941. She had studied at Indiana State Teachers’ College for eighteen months, but she left college because she needed to make a living to support her baby boy. She had later worked for a company that made supplies for the United States Navy. Mother was fair, but John’s mother was even lighter.

  “Well, Mother, we’re getting hitched,” John announced, hooking his arm around me.

  Getting hitched? That term sounded so funny and country to me. I noticed his mother’s gaze upon me, and I could nearly read her mind: She thought I was too dark. John B.’s parents had not wanted to accept me because of my race, and now another Negro woman did not approve of my complexion. She did not want to say anything to offend her son, but her reception was cool. (As the years passed, my relationship with John’s mother was just fine, and she apologized to me for her earlier coolness. She even lived with us for a short time toward the end of her life. She died in 1992.)

  I was thrilled about our engagement. John Due and I would be married! I would have a partner in the civil rights struggle, someone who would understand my dedication. I would never have to worry that my husband might disapprove of what I was doing and try to convince me to stop. To me, we seemed like the perfect match.

  I called Mother and told her we would get married in April. She had met John once, so she knew a bit about him even if she didn’t yet know him well. She trusted me, telling me that I should get married if that was what I wanted, but she wanted our wedding ceremony to be a Baha’i wedding, within the Baha’i faith she had adopted.

  Mother never completely abandoned her Christian roots, but she adopted the Baha’i faith after some friends introduced it to her and she studied it. Founded in the Middle East in the 1800s, the basic tenet of Baha’i is that humanity is a single race, and that God has ordained that it is time to eliminate prejudice and build a peaceful global society.16 Mother took the best of the religions’ offerings and molded them to fit her life. I did not understand the Baha’i religion, but Mother introduced me to a white couple who hosted many meetings at their home on Star Island, and I thought they were very good people. Their religion seemed to embrace many of the same ideas I believed in. I never thought about becoming Baha’i myself, but I didn’t have any objections to being married according to their customs.

  John stayed in Indianapolis for a while to visit his relatives. I went to New York, where I stayed with William Larkins (a former Tallahassee activist who was an aspiring actor) for a time because Priscilla was out of town and had forgotten to leave me the key to her apartment, but I took ill with tonsillitis and Larkins called John to come retrieve me. In late December of 1962, during our entire drive back to Florida, we talked about our wedding plans. Once we got back to campus, we told the FAMU housing authority that we would need married housing for April, but things weren’t done that way. “When you show me that piece of paper, that’s when you can reserve an apartment,” said Mr. Matthews, who was in charge. He was actually a family friend, but that made no difference. Rules were rules.

  “Well, gosh,” we thought, “if that’s the case, if we’re not certain we’re even going to have a place to stay, we might as well go and get married now.”

  That was on a Friday. We called Thomasville, Georgia, which was about thirty minutes away from Tallahassee, to find out if we could get married. We’d heard you could get married there without a waiting period. The woman on the phone asked, “Well, is it an emergency?” In my mind it was, although I guess she was asking if I were pregnant. So I said, “Yes, it’s an emergency. We need to get married. Is it possible to get married there?” She said, “Yeah, well you can come tomorrow.”

  Needless to say, we did not have a very traditional or a Baha’i wedding. I called my mother that Friday night and said, “Mother, John and I are getting married tomorrow. Can you get here?” Of course, Mother couldn’t get there. I said, �
��Well, we’re going to do it anyway, and then maybe we can have another ceremony later.” John’s mother couldn’t come, either. Since we didn’t have family members there, we brought our friends in their stead. Three men from the law school stood up for John. One was Edward Rodgers, who is Judge Rodgers now, another was Ike Williams, and one was John Moss, a law professor. With Priscilla in New York, I didn’t have anybody there for me. It was January 5, 1963.

  I tell you, the woman conducting the ceremony spoke so rapidly, I don’t remember anything she said except “I now pronounce you man and wife.” And I told John, “It doesn’t feel like we’re married yet.” Right after we left Thomasville, we went back to Tallahassee and asked Rev. Steele to marry us in his church. Again, none of our own family members were there because of the sudden timing, but at least he spoke slowly enough that we could feel that something was different. I just wanted to feel as if it were official. (Derek Steele, about eighteen months old, was the Steeles’s youngest child and kept chanting “Spook, spook!” at our wedding ceremony. I guess he had heard the word so often, leveled against his father and the other activists, that he’d adopted it into his vocabulary.)

  That was how John and I began our lives together. We had joined not only as man and wife, but as a combined force for change. The fact that we had such a scaled-down wedding ceremony, that we had no honeymoon—even that we’d had very little of a traditional “courtship”—demonstrated our mind-set at the time: The civil rights movement came first. In time, that way of thinking would become very trying for me.

  But in the beginning, John Due and I both had only freedom on our minds.

  Fourteen

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “A man must be at home somewhere before he can be at home anywhere.”

  —Rev. Howard Thurman

  In my novel My Soul to Keep, my protagonist, Jessica, lost her father at a very young age, when she was eight. In one scene, where Jessica is remembering her admiration for her father when she was young, I wrote, “Jessica had known he was a genius before she really knew what a genius was. She’d always looked forward to the day—maybe in fourth grade or fifth grade, she’d thought—when she could sit down and impress her father with how smart she was too.”

  When I wrote that, of course, I was thinking about my own father. I remember vividly how I used to watch my father scribbling in his legal pads, or marking pages in the sociology, philosophy, and history books that always littered his bathroom, waiting for the day when I would be smart enough to truly engage him in a conversation. “What I did in school today” was not good enough for my father, I believed. His attention would drift, and his eyes would glaze as a thought flew into his head and took him somewhere else, to the words of Frantz Fanon, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thurgood Marshall, or W.E.B. Du Bois. There’s a line in the Des’ree song “You Gotta Be” where the singer advises, “Read the books your father read.” That was exactly what I wanted to do, when I was old enough. So we could really get to know each other.

  In the meantime, though, Dad was somewhere else. Oh, he lived with us, to be sure, and we saw him every day, but his true existence was always elsewhere, enmeshed in the Struggle.

  We both happened to go to the NAACP convention in New Orleans the summer of 2001. I was there with my fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Nicki, whom I’d brought with me while I served as a playwriting judge and presenter for the national ACT-SO competition, and Dad was there for a legal workshop. Dad and I both had hectic schedules, but we were able to carve out a couple of hours to share a traditional New Orleans meal not far from my hotel.

  At dinner, after I talked to Mom on my cell phone so I could feel like we were all sitting at the table together, I remarked to Dad that he had a very good memory for details of the events in the 1960s. I’d been listening to the tapes of his interviews Mom and I had conducted over the years and, I said, I was impressed.

  “Well, yes, because it was my life,” he said. “Unlike with Patricia, it was my whole life.”

  “I’m sure Mom might take some issue with that one,” I teased him. I thought he was feeling a surge of competitiveness.

  He shook his head. “No, it was my life. Patricia’s always talking about that, how it’s my whole life,” he said. Yes, I’d heard Mom say that many, many times, usually when she was frustrated. Charity begins at home, Mom was always reminding him. “That’s all I wanted to do.”

  Suddenly, I realized what he was saying, and I sat with his words for a moment.

  Civil rights was all he’d wanted to do.

  There was a time, I’m sure, my chest would have swelled with rage to hear him put it so baldly: Yes, nothing was more important to me than my civil rights work. But I didn’t feel rage. All of us knew that about him. Dad’s life was in the garage, in his stacks of papers that sat in towering columns all around his desk. When he wasn’t at meetings, he was always hidden in his papers in the garage, and from what little I could gather, he’d been that way most of his life. When I spent my Thanksgiving or spring breaks from Northwestern University with Grandmother Lucille in Indiana, she used to say, “Oh, you like to close the door, too—just like John.”

  And I gained insight from her words. I was closing my door because I was visiting a set of grandparents I didn’t know nearly as well as Mother because of our distance. When my conversations and meals with Grandmother Lucille and Grandpa George were over for the night, I closed the door to my room to relax back into myself and grow accustomed to my new surroundings. I have never slept well in new places, and privacy gives me my bearings.

  But why did Dad close his door? I remembered how Mom used to be so adamant about not allowing us to close our doors when we were children, to the point where we once petitioned her for the right. As an adult, I realized she’d spent years facing Dad’s closed garage door, and she sure as hell wasn’t going to allow herself to get the closed-door treatment from her three children. For whatever reason, Dad’s door has been closed.

  Yet, when I hear him make jokes, I remember how I used to think he was just like Bill Cosby. And he’s a music lover, just like Mom. In fact, that summer in New Orleans, I put on a Miles Davis CD in my hotel room because he doesn’t make time to listen to music and I knew he would enjoy it. He loves music, and he helped teach me to love it, too. (When I told him as a girl that I didn’t like country music because it was redneck music, he chided me, “Music is music. Music doesn’t have a color. All music is for everyone.”) I can understand his missing movies and watching little television except the History Channel and CNN, but how can my father keep himself away from something as magical as music?

  His work is more important to him than music. More important than laughing and making jokes. When we were younger, it probably seemed to us that it was more important than his three daughters. His work is everything. It’s his whole life, as he said.

  “Wasn’t that funny?” I said to Nicki after Dad made a joke in New Orleans, then excused himself to find the men’s room. “My Dad has always had this great sense of humor, but he doesn’t share it much. He’s always so serious. He’s trying to save the world.”

  “One piece at a time,” Nicki said, intuitively.

  “Yes. One piece at a time.”

  What makes someone that way? Mom tempered her life to make room for us, and thank God she did, because we needed her so badly, and she gave us so much of herself. But Dad could not. He stayed with us, and he got a job to pay for his activism, but he would have done it for free. He was going to be working to help people his entire life, and that was that. He was going to attend meetings and draw up proposals and write briefs, and do it for no money if that was the way it was, because that was what he must do.

  It was no surprise to me, then, when Dad mentioned during our New Orleans visit that he was considering trying to get into a seminary after he retires. Really, in some ways, my father has been a monk his entire life.

  John Dorsey Due Jr. was a lonely child. He was the only child of a s
tately, attractive woman named Lucille Graham and a charismatic entrepreneur, John Dorsey Due, who had his own shoe-repair shops in two cities and a shiny Buick while his mother was a student at Indiana State Teachers’ College during the Depression of the 1930s, no small feat. His parents divorced when he was only five, so he and his mother moved in with her parents in Terre Haute, Indiana, while she worked in the Madam C. J. Walker School of Beauty Culture for her certification, which she received in 1941. When Dad was seven, his mother moved seventy-five miles away to Indianapolis to work in a defense factory and run a beauty shop from her home, so Dad only saw his mother on weekends, or less frequently. He referred to his grandmother as “Mom,” his biological mother as “Mother,” and his grandfather as “Gramp.” He didn’t see his father for years after John Dorsey Due Sr. was drafted to serve in World War II, and he saw him only on weekends after that. Next to his grandfather, the most constant male figure in my father’s life was Glenn Graham, his mother’s brother. My parents share similarities in their early upbringing, having been born into broken homes and having grandparents step in to assist while their mothers worked at a distance and lived apart from them. That arrangement hadn’t lasted very long with Mom, but the living arrangement lasted for Dad until he graduated from high school. His mother remarried when he was about eighteen, but he and his stepfather didn’t get along.