Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  They had the perfect platform: In 1963, two years before the city’s 400th birthday, the city was seeking federal funds to celebrate its quadricentennial in style. With banquets and major events in the planning, Dr. Hayling outraged the white establishment by contacting federal authorities to insist that St. Augustine should not receive federal assistance because it was so segregated. National NAACP leadership urged Dr. Hayling to keep a low profile. The message: “Don’t rock the boat. Let these people have their celebration.”

  However, Dr. Hayling’s profile was anything but low. In response to fears that violent whites might retaliate for the effort to block federal funding, Dr. Hayling was quoted in the local newspaper as saying, “I and others of the NAACP have armed ourselves and we will shoot first and ask questions later.” Dr. Hayling denies that he ever said such a thing: “Anyone who knew me knew that didn’t sound like Dr. Hayling,” he says, dismissing the statement as a Wild West embellishment. (The accurate quote, he says, was that he’d said he would use “all the vim, vigor, and vitality at my command” to protect himself and his family.)15

  Dr. Hayling and other activists pressed, picketing and protesting, and it wasn’t long before sleepy, “tolerant” St. Augustine showed its true nature: “When we said we wanted to sit down at a restaurant or go to a hotel or motel, we uncovered a hotbed of Klansmen,” Dr. Hayling recalls.

  In September of 1963, soon after the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church tragedy, downtown St. Augustine was blanketed with leaflets advertising a large Ku Klux Klan rally in a cow patch about a mile and a half south of St. Augustine, where Dr. Hayling recalls that a large, towering cross had been erected and set afire. NAACP Youth Council members who had been picketing downtown came to Dr. Hayling with the flyers, and Dr. Hayling and three other Negro civil rights activists—Clyde Jenkins, Jimmy Jackson, and James Houser—decided to drive near the rally site to monitor it from a distance. “People have asked me, ‘Why did you try to go to a Klan rally?’ ” Dr. Hayling says, but he insists they never intended to attend the rally, just to spy on it.

  They would all get a much closer view than expected.

  As they drove, they noticed several cars parked on the shoulder. White men with shotguns posted on the side of the road saw them coming. The man driving Dr. Hayling’s retractable hardtop Ford sports car got nervous and said he thought he knew a side road, so he gunned the gas and veered off the highway, U.S. 1. None of them realized that ditches had been dug into the ground to keep intruders from sneaking close to the rally undetected, and their car got stuck. Before they knew it, they were surrounded by another group of men armed with shotguns.

  Niggers, get out that car.

  The four activists were searched, their wallets taken. Unfortunately, Dr. Hayling recalls, the foremost piece of identification in his wallet was his NAACP membership card. Not only had they stumbled into enemy territory, but they could not hope to claim ignorance. Suddenly, their lives were in real danger. “So much happened so fast, I don’t think we had time to be frightened,” Dr. Hayling says.

  Like prisoners of war, they were marched to the rally site. Dr. Hayling, remembering his military training, tried to maintain a psychological advantage by marching in a proud and authoritative manner, hoping to intimidate the group, but only moments before their arrival, a Klan leader had been berating the approximately 250 townspeople attending the rally, telling them that if they had any guts, that “nigger dentist” who was stirring up all the trouble would end up with a bullet in his head. Now, as if by script, Dr. Hayling arrived in person, and standing near the front of the crowd was a girl on whom he’d recently done some crown work, alongside her mother, and they both recognized him immediately. Instead of trying to defend him, they pointed their fingers and began shouting, “That’s the troublemaker! That’s Dr. Hayling!”

  With the women goading the men, the attack began. Dr. Hayling and the others were piled together “like a cord of wood,” Dr. Hayling says, and a barrage of blows from fists, feet, baseball bats, and axe handles began to rain down on them. Pounded across their heads, faces, chests, and torsos, the men grew bloody and semiconscious. Dr. Hayling heard someone say, “He’s a right-handed dentist!” and his attackers set out to cripple his hand with their blows. Have you ever smelled a nigger burn? Go get some gasoline!

  The racial tension in St. Augustine, as in many southern cities at the time, was like a noxious gas wafting through the air, and the poison was feeding upon itself at that rally. It was a recipe for death.

  Yet Dr. Robert Hayling was not to be martyred that day. By chance, he and the members of his party weren’t the only ones who had decided to monitor the much publicized Ku Klux Klan rally. Also in attendance, shocked at the violent turn of events, was a white minister from Daytona named Rev. Irvin Chene Jr. A civil rights sympathizer who recognized that a calamity was about to happen before his eyes, Rev. Cheney slipped away from the rally and found a telephone to call for authorities.

  He didn’t call local police, Dr. Hayling says; he knew full well that members of the St. Johns County Sheriff’s Department, including the sheriff himself, were Ku Klux Klan sympathizers, and a few were probably already in attendance. In fact, according to FBI files cited in Bearing the Cross, Sheriff L. O. Davis was friendly with Holsted “Hoss” Manucy, who was the Exalted Cyclops of the Klan in St. Augustine.16

  Instead, Rev. Cheney called the Florida Highway Patrol in Tallahassee and asked that officers from surrounding police jurisdictions be dispatched right away. When news of the police officers’ approach crackled across police-band radios in St. Augustine, Sheriff Davis finally stepped in to pull the crowd away from Dr. Hayling and the others. He arrested several Klansmen for assault, but Dr. Hayling and the others were also arrested for the same charge.

  Police drove them to the nearest hospital in St. Augustine, where they were treated for their injuries, but authorities didn’t think it was safe for them to stay there, so a local Negro mortician was enlisted to drive them to a Negro hospital in Jacksonville the next day, his hearses substituting for an ambulance. Dr. Hayling’s injuries included such facial disfiguration that he could not work for weeks, and there was damage to the muscles and ligaments in his right hand.

  “I still have indentations from sutures in my skull I’ll take to my grave,” Dr. Hayling says today of his violent encounter.

  Dr. Hayling’s car was destroyed by Klansmen, but a police search turned up a .25-caliber pistol in his glove compartment. Dr. Hayling had not reached for that weapon in self-defense when the armed Klansmen pulled them out of their car; he’d forgotten all about it, he says, and even so he would have known it was no match for shotguns. Putting their heads together to defuse a public relations nightmare, St. Augustine authorities told Dr. Hayling he would not be charged for illegal weapon possession if he and the other activists dropped assault charges against those who had beaten them at the rally. Still, in November, while the Klansmen went unpunished, a jury convicted Hayling for assault and the judge levied a $100 fine.

  Despite the odds stacked against his client, John had gone to St. Augustine to argue the dentist’s case. But at a time when life itself was so tenuous, justice was too much to ask.

  Contrary to the inspirational note I’d received from Mother not long before that awful November, very, very difficult days were ahead. Two weeks after President Kennedy’s death, his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, stood before Congress and proclaimed, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.”17 The eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—guaranteeing that Negroes could not legally be barred from employment or service in restaurants, hotels, and other public facilities on the basis of race—was President Johnson’s first priority. Many of us hoped the new law would bring a hasty end to the discrimination we had been fighting. But the civil rights movement was about to get bloodier than ever.

>   Eighteen

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “There would be no one to frighten you if you refused to be afraid.”

  —Mohandas K. Gandhi

  Two weeks after Hurricane Andrew devastated much of my parents’ neighborhood and vast portions of southern Dade County in August 1992, my family faced a standoff that made it difficult to remember that much time had passed at all since the 1960s. The police picked the wrong house that night.

  My parents still live in Point Royal, about a mile north of the shambled Cutler Ridge Mall, which President George Bush (the First) had visited just days before to declare South Dade a national disaster area. What was left of their community after the lashing dealt by that powerful, destructive storm bore none of the dignity of what had been a palm-lined residential neighborhood. All that remained was splintered plywood, crumbling concrete, littered streets, billows of smoke, uprooted trees, twisted street signs, and the silent anguish of collective loss. The backyard I’d known in childhood, I wrote in my journal, looked like the scene of a forest fire: All throughout the neighborhoods, dead trees baking in the sun have filled the air with a sharp scent of dry leaves and brittle timber.… Dade has been bombed out.… We have all lost so much, it is barely comprehensible.

  The hurricane had also wrought fear. Any storm clouds brought a new fear of the sky; and the loss of electricity, which lasted for a month or more, brought a new fear of the night.

  Because natural disasters attract looters, the National Guard had been called in to enforce a curfew. Nervous homeowners, camped out like squatters in the shells that used to be their homes, occasionally fired guns to ward off real or perceived intruders. Many homes posted hand-painted signs: LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT. Vietnam veterans unfortunate enough to live in the hurricane-destroyed areas would later report horrible flashbacks. How could they not? Soldiers were patrolling the streets, helicopters were constantly beating their propellers overhead, and the prolonged power outage left everything enveloped in a curtain of darkness for miles north, south, east, and west. At night, South Dade not only looked like a war zone, it was under martial law. Anyone caught breaking curfew was subject to arrest.

  All of my closest relatives in Miami, including my parents, lived in the midst of this. My Aunt Priscilla had spent the duration of the hurricane screaming in an upstairs closet while her house fell apart around her. My grandmother, who lived ten minutes northwest of her, fared somewhat better in her solid, concrete 1950s-era home, but it had still taken a battering, her roof and dining room badly damaged. My parents had structural damage, too, but there were no gaping holes—and with four bedrooms, they had the most space, so their house had become the family base. I lived thirty miles north, having moved to North Miami the year before from a Cutler Ridge apartment destroyed in the storm. My new neighbors and I, suffering only a few days’ loss of power and the uprooting of the frailest trees, were aghast at the video footage from South Dade.

  Out-of-state family members came down to help my family rebuild what we could, and they all camped at my parents’ house. My Uncle Walter, my mother’s brother in Atlanta, drove down with his teenage son, John. My cousin Muncko, who was a Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class based in Hawaii, flew in with his wife, Carol. During the day, life focused on roof repair, finding and preparing food, and salvaging what could be salvaged. At night, there was only the disabling, pervasive darkness and a wet summer heat barely diminished by the sun’s absence.

  My cousin Muncko, the only one in the family with weapons training, slept with a black Remington shotgun at his bedside. When there were unfamiliar sounds outside of the house, he investigated to make sure no intruders were on the property.

  At the cusp of midnight that fateful night, my mother heard a noise through the shattered, open windows. While everyone inside slept, the Chihuahua, Frisky, was outside barking furiously. Frisky wasn’t the sort of dog who barked out of boredom, or for attention. He barked at strangers, unlike the Great Dane, Samantha, who was untroubled by noises and sound asleep in my parents’ bed.

  Someone must be out there, my mother thought, climbing over the dog to get out of bed.

  Every time my family members sit around and talk about this particular night, we always remark how lucky it was that it was my mother, not Muncko, who heard the barking first. By the time Muncko and his wife stirred, they heard my mother opening the front door to go outside. Muncko and Carol had glanced out of the window a few seconds earlier and seen only darkness, but suddenly, from somewhere, came a glare of white light.

  A man’s voice came, shouting an order: “Okay, freeze!”

  The men outside looked like soldiers, but they were police officers, Florida Highway patrolmen. There were twelve of them, and their bulletproof flak jackets were on, their revolvers aimed. “We have you surrounded! Tell everybody to come out of the house!”

  Imagine, we always say when we remember, if Muncko had opened the door first and walked outside with his shotgun. Imagine how different that night might have been. If I had not heard a noise and investigated, they were going to storm the house, and someone would have died that night, my mother would write later in the black-owned Miami Times newspaper.

  My mother was outside wearing only the slip she’d been sleeping in. She had no idea why a small army was ready for combat in the front yard, rattling the fence, threatening her family, but she was about to find out.

  First, she, too, barked instructions to the people in the house. “Stay inside,” she said. She told Carol to get on the telephone to call me in North Dade, so they could establish contact with someone who was not in the house, a witness, which had been part of her civil-rights training. She told my uncle and father to stay inside. The instructions she rattled were second nature, self-assured, calm.

  Then she turned her attention back to the men with the guns. “What do you think you’re doing in my yard?” her litany began.

  The group’s leader, a white lieutenant, told her to be calm and asked to speak to the man of the house. My mother rejoined loudly, “I can handle this.”

  My father is a quiet intellectual, and I have never heard him raise his voice at anyone. But it was not merely because of personalities that my mother stood between him and the armed police officers that night; it was a common-sense tactic, as far as she was concerned. In an unfamiliar situation, when emotions are running high, you do not send a black man into the path of the police. Black men are the molded image of what America fears most; they are the robber, rapist, and drug dealer America sees on its television screens at night. And that night, despite my father’s clearly marked Metro–Dade County car parked inside our gate, it was the hunt for black men that had brought those police officers to our doorstep.

  Later, watching the John Singleton film Rosewood, I thought of my mother’s face-off with the police when Esther Rolle’s character, Aunt Sara, goes outside to reason with a mob gathered beyond her fence demanding that she send her son outside. The similarities were almost uncanny, and my mother, like Aunt Sara (who, incidentally, was shot—both in the movie and in real life), faced the police alone.

  “Listen,” the ranking police officer told my mother gruffly, “a black man in a white van with a Georgia tag was spotted stealing machine guns from the National Guard campsite. We need everyone out of that house right now.”

  Naturally, a white van with a Georgia tag—my uncle’s—was parked at the end of my parents’ driveway. “It’s still warm, it’s still warm,” one of the officers was saying, feeling the hood of the van as if to confirm that, yes, indeed, this must be the getaway vehicle.

  It wasn’t only National Guardsmen that had been assigned to Dade County’s streets. Hundreds of regular Army troops in South Dade were also enforcing the curfew, helping citizens remove debris, and coordinating public hot meal lines. Transport trucks loaded with soldiers rumbled up and down the streets day and night. Just days before, my mother had befriended a squad of soldiers who’d been wandering the neighborhood, and she�
�d offered them cold drinks in exchange for help clearing debris from the backyard. The photograph she posed for with them on our front porch—a woman in a purple housedress beaming a beautiful smile in the midst of the group of grinning, youthful men in camouflage uniforms, rifles slung across their shoulders—was a shocking contrast to the combative stance these police officers took that night.

  But my mother wasn’t concerned about being arrested, or about being shot. She was just full of rage. She was indignant. How dare these men disturb her household. My relatives, who watched the exchange from a huddle inside the dark house, say her tirade at the front gate lasted at least twenty minutes. She demanded to know their names, what agency they represented. She told them, in no uncertain terms, to whom she was about to report them first thing in the morning. She told them to get off her property.

  One patrolman, the only black man in the group, obviously annoyed she was speaking that way to his superior, felt obligated to step forward to chastise her. As soon as he opened his mouth, my mother tore into him: “Listen,” she snarled at him, “I got you this job.”

  I can only imagine how the irony must have made her feel. After all she and my father had sacrificed to see to it blacks could win police jobs, or any jobs, without being discriminated against, this man was going to stand here and try to scold her on her own property?

  Oh, no.

  That was the end of this brother’s contribution to the conversation. The rest of the night was my mother’s. All the armed men could do was listen to my mother’s verbal thrashing in a sheepish, uncomfortable silence. Her deep voice, which flows with a texture as dark and rich as molasses, can be soothing when she’s calm—on the basis of her voice alone, people often mistake my mother for Maya Angelou—but it’s a mighty weapon whenever she raises it in anger, and she brandished it like a torch that night.