Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  In a more important way, it was perfect for us. That trip was a symbol.

  It was 1996, and this was my first road trip with my mother since I’d taken a long-awaited leave of absence from my job as a newspaper reporter at the Miami Herald to help her write a book about the civil rights movement. My whole life, my mother had told and retold the stories about herself and the other activists she knew, vowing to write a book about those experiences one day. For years, in fact, she’d already been traveling throughout the state to interview people she’d worked with in the 1960s, hoping to preserve their stories before it was too late.

  I think I’ve known I would be the one to help her fulfill her vow ever since I began writing short stories as a child. Of my parents’ three children, I was the only writer. (My sisters Johnita and Lydia, who’d both written about her in school research papers, never pursued writing, becoming lawyers like our father.) In May of 1996, when my mother and I set out for that ranch, I’d sold two novels and finally had enough money to support myself during my leave of absence, so we were ready to get started. I had just turned thirty, my mother would soon be fifty-six, and we were about to become coauthors and chroniclers. We would transport ourselves from the 1990s to the 1960s.

  In some ways, I felt as if I’d been drafted. Six years earlier, in 1990, I’d been working for only two years as a full-time newspaper reporter at the Miami Herald and was miles away from the slightest inclination to start researching a book on my family history. I wanted to write novels and, based on the barrage of rejection slips I was receiving for my short stories, that would take some time. My priorities at that time were my fiction, my job, and my love life, and that pretty much covered it. I was in my early twenties, discovering life, trying to build a future.

  My mother called me one day and told me that my godmother, Judy Benninger Brown, was very sick. Judy and I had never been particularly close because of the distance between Miami and Gainesville, where she lived, but we had exchanged letters over the years, and she’d sent me a college graduation gift. Still, I knew that the most significant relationship with Judy was not mine, but my mother’s. My mother is a woman of few true friends, and Judy was one of them. In the 1960s, she and my mother had been soldiers together. Once, I’d been told time and again, Judy had saved my mother’s life.

  “How sick?” I asked her gently.

  “She must be very sick. She has a video crew to document the Movement, and she’d like you to conduct the interview,” Mom told me. It’s hard to deny a dying woman’s wish, and I was flattered to be asked. Besides, under the circumstances, I wanted to see Judy again.

  It was a hard, hard experience for me.

  Judy Benninger Brown was fighting cancer. The image of her constantly holding an ice pack to the raw nerves where her left breast had once been—a routine to cope with daily pain as natural to her as the way I wore my eyeglasses was to me—will never leave me. She was clearly tired and in great discomfort, and she sat with me and my mother under hot lights for hour after hour, day after day, reciting the stories. The theater demonstrations. The voter registration drives. Some of the stories I had heard from Mom, some of them I had not. Often, as I sat perfectly still beneath the hot lamps while the cameras rolled to preserve this brave woman’s legacy, the situation felt unbearable. I was fidgeting. I wanted to be away, to be anywhere else. I felt horrible about Judy’s suffering during the long taping, and I felt horrible about her suffering during the 1960s. I felt smothered by the weight of it all.

  Afterward, I wrote this in my journal:

  Where this will lead, I don’t know. Perhaps this journey will be the first of many. Or perhaps the moments of hardship and burden spent here will outweigh the advantages when I return to my cocoon and all its comforts.… I believe I am at a crossroads. I still don’t feel the genuine passion for this documentation like the politicos and activists and idealists who spent so many hours planning this weekend; but I have an unavoidable personal interest, and I feel a responsibility to see that this story is told. I will keep and treasure the videotape footage that results from these long hours of interviews, although I am not eager to view them again soon.

  A year later, Judy was dead. I did not know it then, but I would have to grow accustomed to hearing about the deaths of people we had interviewed. It would happen often.

  By 1996, as happy as I was that I had accomplished my goal of building a good career and then liberating myself from it so I could dedicate myself to working on a book with Mom, I was also scared to death. The memory of Judy’s interview sufficed to make me understand that the process would be full of pain. Mom and I both knew we had a lot of work, stress, and soul-searching ahead of us.

  The River Ranch Resort was our last chance for escapism before we dove into our real journey together, and we embraced our trip to the dude ranch with the enthusiasm of two college girls on spring break. My mother’s carefree college years had been cut very short by civil rights, and her inability to blink away from injustices in life has afforded her few real chances to be playful. Now, finally, she could be.

  We even dressed the part. At the ranch gift shop, I bought my mother a striking black cowboy hat ringed with steel studs, and she admired its stylish fit in the mirror. For myself, I’d brought along a fashionable Western-style shirt, my black riding jeans, and some faux cowboy boots. Neither of us had been anywhere near a horse in years, but we were determined to be convincing.

  I’ll never forget that weekend. There are probably few people—even my sisters and I—who have seen my mother as she was for those three days. My mother’s no-nonsense demeanor has been characterized as everything from cold to unnerving, depending upon the source. When we were children, my cousin called her a “drill sergeant” because he thought she was such a strict disciplinarian. And during the civil rights movement, my mother found out later, her own staff people tiptoed around her and kept secrets from her, fearing her reaction if she knew they were breaking the organization’s rules against dating and socializing with people in the communities they were there to help. But there has always been a reason for her demeanor: There was serious business at hand.

  My mother’s single-minded sense of purpose is what has enabled her to so effectively accomplish everything she has, whether it was standing up to Jim Crow or raising her daughters. There’s a time for fun, as far as she’s concerned, and a time for business. The line has always been very clearly drawn, even when she called weekly “family meetings” at home so we could all coordinate our busy schedules (my sisters, father, and I always rolled our eyes when she whipped out her notes from the previous meeting). It didn’t matter to her that we were all just sitting around the family-room table; to her, family issues needed to be discussed with the same purposefulness as a meeting of the board of directors of the Ford Motor Company.

  That demeanor vanished at the ranch. With her video camera, she bounced around our plush, two-bedroom “cabin” to tape our lodgings: We had a sunken living room, a screened patio, three television sets, a washer and dryer, central air-conditioning, and a full kitchen with a microwave and ice maker. “Yep, we’re roughing it, pardner,” was her recurring joke that weekend. My mother decorated the cabin with family photographs and copies of books she’d brought, including my novel The Between; she’d also brought a book on the history of CORE, just in case we ever found ourselves in a scholarly mood.

  We never did. We did, however, find ourselves at the rodeo, where the announcer instructed the audience on the fine art of shouting “Yeeeee-hawwwww” with the proper inflections. We both cringed during the cruel-looking cattle-roping demonstrations. As for the bull riding, we were secretly rooting for the bulls. And we made it to the horse trail, where my mother finally got her chance to ride. I took pictures of her sitting happily astride a tired-looking brown mare as she clopped behind the cowboy who guided us on the trail and chatted to him about the horses of her youth. She was girlish. For a few days, at least, there was no visible weight
on her shoulders. She was free to be herself.

  From habit, yes, we noticed that there were no other black faces at the resort. I thought I’d spotted a black child darting beneath the bleachers on rodeo night, but he’d vanished before I could point him out to my mother. However, once we adjusted to our solitary status and received nothing but smiles and politeness from everyone we greeted, race was no longer on our minds.

  Then, I went to the saloon. It was a true-life saloon with a wooden facade and a live country band inside. The fiddle player was burning up his bow with “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” and the dance floor was packed with cowboys and cowgirls fresh from the rodeo. The dance floor broke up into lines of synchronized movement, and I realized I was having my very first exposure to the intricate foot tapping of line dancing. I stood in a corner, feeling more self-conscious than I had since my mother and I had arrived. In fact, I felt like I’d stumbled onto the scene in 48 Hours when Eddie Murphy walks into the cowboy bar and everyone swivels around to stare. I didn’t actually notice anyone staring, but I felt like a foreigner. I didn’t know the music, for the most part. I didn’t know the dance steps. I’ve known whites my entire life, but this was a part of American life I had not seen. It made me wonder how much, as black and white Americans, we share a nationality but live in different worlds.

  Needless to say, I did not expect any dance invitations. And I received none.

  I left as soon as I finished my drink. It wasn’t until I was walking back toward the cabin to join my mother that I realized I’d felt uneasy because a lifetime of negative racial experiences had trained me to expect a glare, an uttered epithet, some outward sign of resentment. What are you doing here? You don’t belong here.

  Yet I had received none.

  “How was the saloon?” my mother asked, surprised I was back so soon.

  “I thought I’d better leave before I got lynched,” I said. I was only joking, but this was one of those moments that begged for reflection on how our life experiences, in some respects, had been so very different. In my mother’s day, I knew, I never would have crossed the threshold of that saloon. I could have expected a beating, or worse, for having the audacity to simply walk up to that bar and order a drink.

  That still seemed like a far-off bad dream to me, hard even to imagine. Yet my parents, and their parents, and their parents before them had been forced to live as this nation’s unwanted stepchildren every single day. Born and raised in the South, I was a part of the first generation of African-Americans who had grown up with sweeping laws protecting my rights and opportunities, even if those laws had not also miraculously changed everyone’s hearts or repaired the legacy of inequity. I was also part of the first generation who had begun to forget what life for most blacks had been like before, to lose sight of the magnitude of their struggle. I’ve heard my mother’s stories my whole life, as if they were milk from her breast, and still they didn’t seem quite real. At times, I could gaze at her as if she were a stranger.

  For that reason, the River Ranch Resort was a good place to begin our book. We knew we had a lot of pain to explore in the next year or two. In another way, I knew that we’d already spent a weekend experiencing one of the precious few instances in which, in the end, a lot of my mother’s real work has already been done. We’d been treated with respect in a place where many black people might have assumed they would not. We’d had a good time just being human.

  “This is the best vacation I’ve ever had,” my mother said into the video camera as we stood outside our cabin, ready to leave. Her grin beneath her cowboy hat stretched for miles.

  Twenty-One

  PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE

  “Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”

  —James Baldwin

  “It’s going to be a long, hot summer.”

  Those prophetic words were my concluding quote in a New York Times article in May of 1964, when a reporter interviewed me for a story about our voter registration drive in Quincy. In the article, I complained about the intimidation of local residents through their jobs and the constant, paralyzing police presence.1 That summer—which would become known by civil rights workers throughout the South as “Freedom Summer”—was going to be a deadly one. It was a summer many of us were lucky to survive, and I was no exception.

  By the summer of 1964, John and I had a long-distance marriage. In March John had been given a one-year Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship by the National Association of Human Relations Workers, a position based in Atlanta, and I was still living in Quincy. Assigned to the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council (headed by famous civil rights attorney Wiley Branton), John traveled throughout the South to do field research and send back reports on voting rights for Negroes. Because of John’s relationship with Branton and CORE General Counsel Carl Rachlin, he also ended up acting as backup counsel to local attorneys in Mississippi and North Florida. Sometimes John and I did not see each other for a month at a time, but we had always known that lengthy separations might be a cost of our activism. During that time, the needs of the Movement were much more critical to us than the needs of a young married couple.

  “Don’t you get lonely, what with your husband bein’ gone all the time? I could keep you company,” a grinning police officer said to me after pulling in front of my car to stop me on an out-of-the-way dirt road in Gadsden County. This deputy was one of my regular tails—going wherever I went, staying as long as I stayed—so I recognized him right away.

  “I know I’m always following you, but I’m not your enemy. I’m your friend,” he said. “Don’t you want some attention? I know women like attention.”

  I was very annoyed to be pulled over for such nonsense. This arrogance was common in the South, where some white men were brazen about sexual overtures toward Negro women in a way they would not dare with white women. By contrast, the slightest suspected overture by a Negro man toward a white woman could be deadly for the Negro man. “No, thank you. I can manage fine,” I said curtly. “You do your job if you feel you have to, and I’ll do mine. That’s the only reason I’m here.” And I backed up and drove away. He allowed me to pass, but he followed as usual.

  In the voter registration campaign, I knew that whatever resistance we were already meeting was about to get much worse. Since we had received a grant from the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council, we were going to expand our staff in the coming months, and we were going to have a much more visible presence in a wider area. In March, Judy and I had gone to a CORE meeting in New Orleans to train for a larger-scale voting campaign. We met at a motel for Negroes, the Mason Motel, which was willing to host an interracial group. When the day’s programming was over, the organizers suggested several places we might visit in New Orleans.

  As Judy told the story that day Tananarive and I interviewed her, she sat in the back seat with a Negro man from Southern University, and I sat in the front seat with the white male CORE field director who was driving. Like me, the white activist was married. The driver and I were speaking casually about issues related to the Movement. Frankly, I had never considered civil rights meetings a place to socialize or “date,” unlike many other activists who got on my nerves because they seemed to always be on the prowl. This was Judy’s first visit to New Orleans, and she was excited to see some of the famed spots she had heard about. We parked the car, she said, and went to nightclub after nightclub, only to be told we could not be admitted. To observers, she said, we appeared to be two interracial couples.

  “That’s how we saw New Orleans, by getting kicked out of all these famous places,” Judy said. “One or two o’clock in the morning, we found someplace that would let us come in and sit down. That was my first exposure to New Orleans.”

  I don’t have the same memory of having to go from place to place, although it may be possible. My recollection is that we knew which places would
admit us, and a group of us simply congregated there. I also thought the white activist’s wife had been with us, although Judy said she was not. What I know for certain is that the white man we spent time with that evening was very talkative, and he was obviously a dedicated worker. His name was Michael Schwerner. He called himself “Mickey.”

  Mickey Schwerner was based at the CORE-VEP office in Meridian, Mississippi, and I met him for the first and last time at that gathering in New Orleans as we were all preparing to go back out to our respective bases to fortify our voter registration campaigns. Three months later, on June 21, word came across the CORE grapevine that Mickey and two other workers in Mississippi—a Negro resident named James Chaney and a new summer volunteer named Andrew Goodman—were missing. Given the hostile climate, and despite the skepticism of local law enforcement (who said their disappearance was a hoax), the community of activists had no choice but to assume the worst. We learned that the three activists had driven from Meridian to the small Mississippi farming community of Longdale, near a town called Philadelphia, to investigate several beatings and the burning of a church where Chaney and Schwerner had convinced church leaders to host a Freedom School. The three were driving back to Meridian when they were arrested by local deputies who held them in jail until nightfall and then released them.

  Then they vanished.2

  Before the three Mississippi workers vanished, many civil rights leaders and CORE staff members, including former FAMU professor Richard Haley, had been pressing the U.S. Justice Department for protection for voter registration workers. A month and a half later, after an extensive search, the bodies of the three workers were found. They had been murdered, it was discovered—handed over to their killers by the police.3 (Unfortunately, many younger Americans’ only exposure to this important case came from the film Mississippi Burning, which is so full of distortions that the events are unrecognizable to many of us who were involved in the Movement. In order to be more commercial, the film tells the story from a white point of view, while blacks stand helplessly on the sidelines. This is common in Hollywood films about the civil rights movement. We are so often written out of our own history.)