Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  One person I wish I’d had the opportunity to know better was only a high school student when I met him, about seventeen years old, much younger than I was, but old enough to stand up for what he believed in. His name was Calvin Bess.

  I met Calvin in the most unlikely of places: I was teaching Sunday school at Rev. Steele’s church, Bethel Missionary Baptist Church. During the time I had lived with the Steeles, Rev. Steele had always tried in vain to coax me to come to his services each week, despite my argument that I overheard him rehearsing his sermons each Sunday morning anyway. I had been raised African Methodist Episcopal, not Baptist, but that wasn’t the reason I stayed away. Rather, Sunday was one of the few days I could sleep in, and I cherished my peace. Rev. Steele’s coaxing hadn’t stopped when I moved out of his house, but he figured out how to intrigue me when he offered me a chance to teach. He wanted to baptize me, but I adamantly refused. I simply could not see myself being submerged in water when I had already been sprinkled with water in the AME church.

  So there I was, an AME girl teaching Sunday school in a Baptist church. I always felt tickled when I imagined what the other members of his church would think if they knew. Not only did I teach Sunday school, but I took particular pleasure in leading a youth group of older students who met at my apartment once a week to socialize and to discuss current events. We called it the Young People’s Progressive Club, and our first meeting was held in January 1963. Naturally, with the prominence of the local and national civil rights struggle, our conversation often turned to Jim Crow and the Movement. I was only a few years older than these young people, and I was invigorated by their energy and idealism. These youngsters truly believed they could have a part in helping to change life in America forever.

  Of course, some students were more interested in civil rights than others. As I look back at the minutes of those meetings, the young people voted to host a party just like any other young people would. But one thoughtful, bright, and serious-minded young man stood out to me. He was a bookish seventeen-year-old with a slightly reddish complexion and a shy smile, the son of a long-haul trucker and a schoolteacher. His full name was George Calvin Bess, but everyone called him Calvin. He had very careful diction and carried himself with dignity. Like many Negroes in Tallahassee, this young man came from a struggling family, but he was dedicated to his studies, and became just as dedicated to civil rights. After learning more about CORE through the Young People’s Progressive Club, he took an interest in Tallahassee’s theater demonstrations and decided, on his own, to take part. I never put pressure on anyone, no matter how old or young, to participate in demonstrations if they were uncomfortable about it. But even though I could not acknowledge his presence in the midst of the hectic protests, I was happy to see Calvin. At one point, he was arrested at a theater demonstration.

  His involvement didn’t end with the theater demonstrations, either. Rubin says he remembers that Calvin was hesitant to leap headfirst into activism the way Rubin himself had, but despite what Rubin recalls as some reticence on Calvin’s part, they spent a lot of time talking about civil rights. Calvin was willing to accompany Rubin to meetings. At one meeting in Lake City, Rubin says, Calvin came to an AME church where Rubin was waiting to make a civil rights announcement. Rubin had already appeared at the church and pleaded with the membership to be supportive, even if it was in terms of donations, but so far the church hadn’t responded. He had come to give it another try, awaiting his turn to speak. When it was time for announcements, Rubin raised his hand and waited to be acknowledged. The preacher ignored him, he says. So, being assertive, Rubin stood up and began speaking anyway. The preacher went on, ignoring Rubin, trying to drown out his words. At this, even the congregation felt sympathetic to Rubin. “Let the man talk!” some members complained. But the preacher persisted, grabbing Rubin’s hand to forcibly remove him from the sanctuary. If not for the presence of a bishop that day, Rubin says, that preacher looked mad enough to hit him.

  Suddenly, Calvin stood up and began to speak in Rubin’s place, his voice filling the room, and all eyes turned to him. “To me, that was an act of bravery on his part, because Calvin was not bodacious like me,” Rubin says. “Calvin stood up. And he really gave me the impression that he didn’t want to be part of the group. Yet, on the other hand, he was irresistibly drawn to it. I think after that night, Calvin became a radical.”24

  In addition to being socially active, Calvin was so brilliant that he eventually won a graduate scholarship to Harvard University, but he never had the chance to take advantage of it. I couldn’t have known it in 1963, but four years later, Calvin and another young man would be found dead in a car in a Mississippi swamp. They had been trying to register people to vote with the SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Calvin died at the age of twenty-two, leaving behind a son he had never known he conceived, and leaving his family, especially his mother, in emotional shambles. Ironically, Calvin’s family lived on Liberty Street.

  Even many years later, his mother couldn’t find joy in her heart when Dr. King’s birthday finally became a national holiday, recalls Calvin’s sister, Cherrye. “I don’t want to celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday,” their mother told her. “Nobody celebrated my child’s birthday. He worked just as hard as Martin.” A few years after Calvin’s death, when Cherrye was twelve, she walked into the kitchen and found her mother standing with a knife, poised to hurt herself. “She’d be talking to Jesus, I reckon,” Cherrye says.25 Mrs. Bess’s grief over her only son’s death remained with her until she died in 1997, the year after we found Cherrye and her father and interviewed them. Mrs. Bess was too ill for me to interview her that day, and I think it’s best I didn’t force her to dredge up bad memories. I’ve learned the hard way, in researching and writing this book, that old hurts can overwhelm when you dig them up. Mrs. Bess was so angry after Calvin’s death, as John reminded me not long ago, she came to our house after it happened to tell me to my face that it was my fault. And I’ve asked myself since: Was it?

  When I first met Calvin Bess in 1963, and those young people in the club were busy planning their party, Medgar Evers was still alive and those four little girls at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham thought they had their whole lives ahead of them. Most of the civil rights casualties had not yet begun to mount, so Calvin understood even less than I did how dangerous his activism might be. Perhaps, as so many young people do, he thought he was invincible. Or perhaps, like me, he did not feel truly alive because his people were not free.

  I’ve often felt guilty about what happened to Calvin, as if those meetings with an impressionable young man eventually led to his death in the Mississippi swamp. But I have a feeling that even if I could have sat Calvin down and told him his future, he still would have wanted to fight. His father, like my parents, had taught him to stand up for his rights. He’d grown up on Liberty Street, after all. And as Rubin said, Calvin stood up in church that day.

  He stood up.

  Sixteen

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “No one can leave his character behind him when he goes on a journey.”

  —Yoruba proverb

  During my senior year in college, when I was bound for Lexington, Kentucky, to earn school credit by working as a reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader, my family’s code dictated that a young black woman did not drive alone through the South. So, although I was twenty years old and had worked at the New York Times and the Miami Herald in summer internships, my parents decreed that my father would drive with me to Lexington, and my mother would fly out to Lexington at the end of the term to drive back home with me. Period.

  I was appalled at their plan, believing I was being babied. I tried to explain that times had changed, that the New South was the most integrated region in the country. They didn’t want to hear it. Years of civil rights training had taught them that.

  I tried to make the most of it. When my father took me to Lexington in the fall of 1986,
we enjoyed a rare visit together during the two-day drive through the mountains and farmlands of the South, admiring the trees as their leaves made their spectacular visual sojourn from green to yellow, rust, orange, and red. It was a beautiful sight. I don’t think I had ever spent that much time alone in my father’s company, with no distractions for either of us, and it was a good time, filled with easy conversation. I was always happy to have Dad all to myself, far from his meetings and responsibilities, when he could release himself to his sense of humor. My father has a loud, abandon-filled laugh, and I’ve often wished he’d given himself more freedom to laugh every day the way he does when his thoughts are away from the world’s troubles.

  When Mom came to drive me back home, it was a different story. I swear, sometimes I think trouble goes out of its way to seek that woman out.

  Although I could not have known it then, in many ways the drive home from Lexington with my mother was a prelude to numerous trips we would make in the years to come, researching this book together. At the time, although I’d heard many of the stories, thoughts of chronicling our family history were far from my mind. I was trying to finish my education, eager to launch my own career so I could move beyond the shadow of being John Due and Patricia Stephens Due’s oldest daughter and find out who I was. I wanted to be a novelist.

  By that time, I was glad Mom was with me for the drive. The unreliable Plymouth Horizon I’d been driving in Lexington had given me nothing but trouble, needing jump-starts from AAA on cold mornings at least once or twice a week. Mom, as usual, was behind the wheel. She couldn’t relax when I was driving, she said.

  The music stations faded in and out, and when they faded in, they were playing tinny-sounding country music instead of the Prince, Michael Jackson, or Tina Turner my mother and I would have preferred. Our only company on the road was a cheap plug-in CB radio my mother had given me as a safety precaution before I left Miami; it was powered by the cigarette lighter, and the antenna stuck on top of the car with a magnet. Its range reached the next few lanes and not much farther, but it was enough for us. With nothing else to do, we listened to that thing for hours, fascinated by the hidden world of the road and its mysterious language.

  But it got old. After hearing endless trucker chatter peppered with sexual exploits and the N-word, there were times I thought about switching over to the Oak Ridge Boys or Alabama on the FM stations. “That’s a shame,” my mother said when she heard truckers comparing women’s talents or warning each other about the whereabouts of Smokey Bear. But then, as if to prove my point about the change of heart in the South, we suddenly heard a white trucker rebuke a fellow trucker’s litany of racial hatred.

  “I don’t have to listen to this crap,” the man cut the racist off. “Why don’t you bug out?”

  See? I said, beaming at my mother. The New South.

  Still, there was no mistaking the hot stares we received at a small-town Tennessee diner, where the white patrons went silent when we appeared in the doorway. In that instant, I could relate to what it must have felt like when my mother first walked up to a Tallahassee, Florida, lunch counter in 1960 to order food, precipitating her first arrest. We were served twenty-six years later—and we defiantly took our time while we ate—but we did not feel welcome.

  Yes, it was time to get back home to the suburbs of Miami, I thought. We had entered some sort of alien territory where I did not understand the customs, and I’d had enough already.

  The car had different plans. A tire blew out at 55 miles per hour on the expressway, forcing my mother to steer over four lanes to the shoulder with her usual aplomb under pressure, face set hard, eyes unblinking. I thanked God several times that I wasn’t by myself. How would I have steered a car with a blown-out tire? Do you pump the brake or floor the brake?

  After we’d come to a stop, we left the car running and climbed out to examine the blown-out tire. Instead of stopping, other cars flashed their headlights and honked as they passed. “Wonder what’s wrong with them,” I said, bracing for some insults. I felt very self-conscious and exposed as we stood beside our car.

  My mother noticed the problem first: We were still in a traffic lane for merging, and cars were barreling toward us fast. “Let’s move!” my mother cried, and we ran back to our seats, barely taking the time to close our car doors as my mother scooted the car over about six yards to the grassy shoulder, finally clear of the roadway.

  Neither of us knew how to change a tire. My mother had learned during a driver’s ed class in the 1950s, but she’d forgotten. We were nowhere near a phone, in the days when mobile phones were still a novelty. We were in the middle of Georgia, but neither of us knew where. Unless one of us was going to stand by the roadway with a hiked-up skirt used to flag down a passing car—and my mother and I both had watched too many horror movies to want to do that—all we had was the CB radio.

  “This is, uh, Red Bird. We’re a … four-wheeler, and we just blew a tire,” I said uncertainly into the CB, exhausting the extent of the jargon I’d learned so far.

  “What’s your twenty, Red Bird?” a man’s voice came back.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Where are you located?”

  I read him the exit sign, and suddenly we were celebrities. The radio came alive with the talk of two ladies in a four-wheeler stuck with a flat. Really, it seemed like no time after our distress signal that a small panel truck pulled up behind us. A white man and his thirteen-year-old son hopped out and changed our tire, refusing any payment except our gratitude.

  “We don’t usually stop for motorists anymore,” the man confided. “Nowadays, people just aren’t grateful like they used to be.” Well, we were grateful, and we sent them on their way with friendly waves. Just people helping people. We were amazed at the truckers’ responsiveness to a plea for help. This was a side of road travel we had never been privy to.

  When my mother stuck her key in the ignition, Red Bird didn’t so much as chirp. Now it was the battery! That battery had beleaguered me throughout my internship, and now it was dead again. We were still stuck on the roadside, and the panel truck was long gone. We cursed and moaned, and Mom tried the ignition again. No luck. We went back to the CB.

  “Negatory, Red Bird, we can’t help,” a trucker radioed in apology after our new plea. “I’m an eighteen-wheeler, and I’m too big to jump you. I’ll give Smokey Bear a shout.”

  Good ol’ Smokey Bear. Truckers spent all of their days and nights trying to dodge the state highway patrol, but they knew how to contact Smokey if there was a problem. And Mom and I were very glad to hear it.

  “Thanks a lot, Good Buddy,” I said, meaning it in the most literal sense.

  About twenty minutes later, a state patrol car eased behind us. I saw a white trooper with large jowls and a western-style hat in the driver’s seat, his eyes hidden by reflective sunglasses. He sat in his car, scribbling notes. We waited for him to get out of his car, but soon it became apparent that he wasn’t moving anytime soon.

  I gave Mom a questioning look. “Guess I’ll go talk to him,” I said.

  I walked to the trooper’s car and leaned into his open window. “Thanks for coming,” I said. My voice sounded nervous to me, even though I had no idea why I should feel nervous. “This battery always acts up. We just need a jump and we’ll be fine.”

  The patrolman scribbled on, not looking up or speaking. Yes, now I was definitely nervous. I paused, waiting to see if there might be a delayed response, but there was none. Okay, I told myself, time to just back off and go sit in the car with Mom.

  “What’d he say?” Mom said as I climbed back inside our stalled car.

  I shrugged. “Nothing.”

  So we sat and waited. Not talking. Not laughing. Just waiting.

  As we sat and endless minutes passed, I imagined the pervasive intimidation my mother, and others like her, had met in the South. I had never had a personal issue with the police, not even one. In junior high school, at the same time I knew
that Arthur McDuffie had been murdered at the hands of police, I was a member of my school’s “Future Police Officers’ Club” and anticipated visits from the club’s sponsor, Officer Rosendale. I did not fear police. I never connected those cops who’d killed McDuffie with Officer Rosendale, who obviously cared about children. But in those long moments on the shoulder of the expressway somewhere in Georgia, I realized what a helpless, infuriating feeling it was to be wary of someone designated to protect me, and to feel the gnawing of his quiet hostility when I was most vulnerable.

  How had my parents done it?

  Many years later, when I had become a novelist, I taught on the faculty of the Imagination creative writing conference at Cleveland State University, and I met a Native American writer who told her own story of an encounter with a police officer on a lonely road. She was near the reservation, in a very deserted area, when a police officer turned on his lights to stop her car. She saw the lights and stopped. When the officer strode up to her window, instead of citing her for speeding or a broken taillight, he said, “Would you step out of the car?”

  Get out of her car? Why? What was the problem? What had she done? There was just something in his tone. Something in his departure from procedure, which should have been to ask for a driver’s license and registration. Something about losing the protection of her car when there wasn’t another soul in sight, being asked to stand out in the open. She did not get out of her car. Instead, she slowly drove away. The police officer did not chase her. He let her go.

  I know there are many Americans who would never understand what prompted her to behave as she did. But I understood, based on what had happened to me and my mother in Georgia as we drove my car home from Kentucky. For some of us, usual rules do not apply.