Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Because I had lost my left fallopian tube, Dr. Brickler told me he didn’t think I would be able to conceive a child without great difficulty, if at all. That made me sad. What made me sadder was when he told me I would need to rest for several weeks, and that it would be out of the question for me to return to the voter registration project I had been shepherding for months.

  While I was recovering, I remembered a conversation John had had with our lawyer, Howard Dixon, soon after John and I decided to get married. He worried that once we were married and started our family, we would no longer be of use to the Movement. “Let all children be your children,” he said. At the time, I thought his concern was unfounded. I never could have imagined that a pregnancy would sideline me from the civil rights movement. My commitment was far too strong. Now, without warning, a pregnancy had sidelined me. Yet there would be no child, and if my doctor’s fears were right, there might never be any children. For all I knew, I had just lost my present and a part of my future. I felt useless. That was a terrible time for me.

  Judy left the project soon after I did to become more involved in Gainesville, and CORE put a field secretary named Spiver Gordon in charge of the North Florida Citizen Education Project. He did a fine job. I moved into John’s apartment in Atlanta. After years with virtually no breaks, I had no choice but to take some time off to care for myself. Only nearly dying could have kept me away.

  I am so proud of Gadsden County!

  Although I was in Atlanta with John for the rest of the summer, I moved on to Jacksonville in the fall after I received good news: I was permitted to re-enroll for classes at FAMU! I was finally able to complete the student teaching that had been interrupted by my suspension. I continued to get regular updates from the others still involved with the voting project.

  It’s important to remember that our project in Gadsden County was never limited to voter education and registration. Area churches, like Arnett Chapel AME and Mount Moriah, hosted meetings and workshops on community involvement and direct action protests. We also started Freedom Schools to teach young people new skills, such as typing. Many years later, I met a young woman who said she’d attended a Freedom School I taught in Quincy, and she credited the experience with eventually setting her on a path toward law school. With only a little initial leadership, the people of Gadsden County really came together to devise solutions to their own problems—unlike some Southern communities, whose grass-roots coalitions fell apart as soon as the civil rights organizers left town. Led by Rev. James Crutcher and others, Gadsden County developed a civic organization, C.I.G. (Citizens Interest Group), which remained quite active in community improvement projects.

  Of course, segregation in northern Florida didn’t end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and civil rights workers met continued harassment throughout the year. The Florida Free Press, a weekly newsletter, kept workers and the community informed of troubling incidents, such as the time four Negroes—Johnny Watson, Charlie Hall, Steve Hendley, and Vencille Gibson—were threatened with a shotgun when they tried to eat at the Havana Terminal diner in a small town right outside Quincy. A white CORE observer, Arlene Bock, was thrown to the pavement as she watched, her camera yanked roughly from around her neck. A crowd grew, chanting “Kill them! Kill them!” Another white CORE volunteer, Richard Williams, was arrested as he tried to drive the group that had been attacked to the FBI office to complain. Williams was charged with driving without a license, even though his license was perfectly valid. He was taken to jail, where he was beaten and released after two days.

  That same week, six fires were set in the North Florida Citizen Education Project’s office in downtown Quincy, damaging half the rooms in the six-room suite. Luckily, no one was there at the time, and many of the papers destroyed had duplicates stored elsewhere. As he viewed the damage from kerosene-soaked rags, Spiver Gordon told a reporter, “Florida at one time had the reputation of being one of the better Southern states, but this proves that the haters in Florida have come out of the same rotten barrel as those in Mississippi and Alabama.… He did not scare us, and he did not inconvenience us.”3

  There were many other incidents, probably too numerous to name, but none of that could diminish the sense of accomplishment the entire community felt on election day, November 3, when a record number of more than 3,500 Negroes in Gadsden County went to the polls to vote. In the previous presidential election, only 300 Gadsden County Negroes had been registered to vote; now 4,300 were reportedly registered, and about 90 percent of them voted. In fact, according to The Pain and the Promise, North Florida had registered more Negroes than any other region of the South.4

  On election day, CORE workers amassed a fleet of eighty-five cars to help transport voters to the polls, and the ferry service ran all day. Those who couldn’t get rides walked. People who could barely see struggled to choose the right lines on the ballots as CORE workers gave last-minute instructions on how to mark their candidates. When a CORE worker pointed out to five women he had brought that they should mark the ballot’s second line if they wanted to vote for Barry Goldwater, the women all “whooped with laughter,” a St. Petersburg Times reporter noted.5

  It was a celebration. Everyone knew what a momentous occasion it was. Among the voters was Mrs. Pearlie Williams, the 109-year-old woman we had registered that summer. She turned up to have her say, too, although she admitted to a reporter that she had trouble seeing which candidate she had voted for. “I hope it was for Johnson,” she said.6

  The day did not go entirely smoothly. One Negro woman was physically removed from a polling place and her ballot destroyed because she was wearing a button that said “I Am Registered.” (Polling places ban political literature, but it’s ridiculous that a button proclaiming one’s registration status would be considered “political” at election time.) Several other ballots were also impounded because the voters were carrying matchbooks with their candidates’ names printed on them.

  In the end, President Johnson won the state of Florida, but he did not win Gadsden County. Whites in the fairly affluent tobacco county gave the election to Barry Goldwater by a slim 190 votes.7 If only a few more registered Negroes had turned up to vote, the county’s election undoubtedly would have gone to Johnson, very much the same story that Floridians faced in the 2000 presidential election. I have always known that every vote counts!

  Jewel Jerome Dixie, a Negro man who had written himself in as a candidate for Gadsden County sheriff, got more than 1,500 votes,8 which was unheard of in that area, although he did not get nearly enough votes to win. Negroes’ preferred candidates did not win the Gadsden County election in pure numbers, but we had all won something far, far greater.

  Pride. Courage. Belief in our future as full American citizens.

  I am so very proud of Gadsden County.

  In the fall of 1964, I still had to contend with visits to New York based on my arrest at the World’s Fair. During one of my absences, I had to leave Scout and Freedom, our two dogs, with John in his Atlanta apartment. That might have worked out fine, except that John was sent to Mississippi to help evaluate the results of the Freedom Summer voter education campaign. With no one to look after Scout and Freedom, John had to take them with him.

  What happened next is one of those stories from the Movement that is both funny and sad.

  John and I had a blue Volkswagen Beetle, and John drove the dogs to Mississippi in the backseat, as we often did. John stopped at the national SNCC office in Atlanta because he’d been asked to pick up Bob Moses. “Why are those dogs back there?” Moses said when John arrived, eyeing the two German shepherds suspiciously.

  “Sorry, man, my wife’s in court in New York,” John had to explain.

  The two men drove to Mississippi with the dogs in tow. John dropped Bob Moses off at the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office in Jackson, then drove to his final destination of Greenwood, Mississippi, where Stokely Carmichael and an activist named Art C
obb had an office under the auspices of SNCC. John met with the activists, and at about 2:00 A.M., he realized he needed to let the dogs out. He didn’t have leashes for them—and he wouldn’t have been eager to walk around Greenwood at night anyway—so he opened the door to the office to let the dogs run out.

  “Scout didn’t go very far, but Freedom took off,” John recalls. She ran out of sight.

  So John ran outside bellowing, “Freedom! Freeeeee-dom!”

  I can only imagine how far his voice must have carried. The windows to the office were open, so John’s fellow activists heard the fuss he was making outside as he cried for Freedom. By the time he came back inside with the dog, Art Cobb and some others gave him an earful. “What’s the matter with you? Are you trying to get us shot?”

  Somehow, John survived his trip to Greenwood, Mississippi.

  During the 1964–65 school year, I threw myself into my studies. I had decided that nothing was going to come between me and my degree. I had been attending Florida A&M University, on and off, since 1957—for seven years!—and I was ready to move to the next phase of my life.

  During my student teaching in Jacksonville, I taught five civics classes a day, and I was asked to conduct the program for what was then called “Negro History Week.” I taught the students about Florida’s most recent civil rights history, discussing the sit-ins and our subsequent projects. I already felt a need to begin passing on the story. I knew how short people’s memories are. After I completed my student teaching and returned to FAMU’s campus in early 1965, John joined me in Tallahassee because he’d been hired as Southern Regional Counsel for CORE.

  I was finally doing what I wanted to do for myself, and John was doing what he wanted to do. As I wrote to Mother on February 8, I am just happy to be together again.

  But happiness always seemed fleeting in the 1960s. Two weeks after my letter to Mother, on February 21, 1965, yet another horrible event took place: Malcolm X was assassinated. In many ways, the death of Malcolm X was more upsetting to me than the death of President Kennedy. Although I had never been a follower of the Nation of Islam, I always realized Malcolm X was a very necessary component of the struggle. He was the only one really talking about economic development, which I thought was crucial to the survival of our people, and because the black nationalist was perceived as so militant, more people in power were willing to listen to those of us who followed a philosophy perceived to be more moderate, like Dr. King. With Malcolm X gone, it seemed that the struggle was in the midst of a nightmare that would never end. Who would be next?

  A month after Malcolm X’s death, Priscilla, who was teaching in Ghana by then, wrote us with some news: She had gotten married! During her ship’s passage, she’d met a Dutch radio operator named Muncko Derk Kruize, whom she called “Mun” for short. They married in Sekondi, Ghana. Like me, Priscilla had a civil ceremony, but unlike me, she had a honeymoon, in Israel, courtesy of some of her friends. I was happy for Priscilla, but I had never met the man she married, so now my sister’s life was even further removed from mine. Since she had married a foreigner, it seemed less likely that she would return to the States anytime soon. Mother, for one, was very upset not to be included in the wedding, but it would have been too expensive. Mother couldn’t afford to fly to Africa, and Priscilla and Mun couldn’t yet afford to bring her.

  Still, this was an exciting time for the Stephens sisters. Soon after Priscilla got married, despite my doctor’s pessimistic prediction, I discovered that John and I had conceived a child. We were thrilled! This time, there was no confusion about whether I was pregnant because I suffered from terrible morning sickness. I felt sick all the time, to the point where sometimes I could hardly move. Everyone told me my morning sickness would pass after three months, and I looked forward to that milestone, but unfortunately it lingered. I was sick all nine months. We had to hire a housekeeper because all I could do was lie on the sofa, or on the floor. The floor was my favorite resting spot, really.

  By then, John and I had a house on the other side of town, on Fourth Avenue, so I had to drive myself to classes each day. I still remember how I would drive a little, then pull over to vomit. Start, stop. Start, stop. But I always made it to my classes. Once I arrived on the campus, my professors were understanding, allowing me to eat crackers in class to soothe my nausea. I also signed up for a golf class during my pregnancy because it entailed a lot of walking, and walking was what I craved. I haven’t played golf since.

  I honestly don’t know how I passed my classes during my last term at FAMU. When I was in class, it took virtually all of my concentration not to feel sick. I took notes, but I could tell I was not absorbing the information. I often panicked, thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to have to actually recall this information!” I had no idea how I would manage, but somehow I did. By way of a miracle, right before exam time, I had one good day—and I mean one day—when I did not feel sick at all. Relieved, I gathered my notes and textbooks and studied as hard as I could, forcing myself to retain as much as I could. That was the only way I was able to make it.

  I wrote Mother that I wanted to leave a trophy to FAMU that meant a lot to me. During our summer tour after the jail-in, I had received a trophy “for convictions above and beyond the call of duty” at a Freedom Jubilee at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, soon before receiving the Gandhi Award from CORE. By the time I was finally about to graduate, I really wanted to begin mending the bad feelings that had brewed over the years between activists and Dr. Gore. What has happened in Tallahassee should become a part of the history of the city and school, and as I see it, the only way for this to happen is for me to practice what I preach—nonviolence—forgiving and trying to bring all sides together.

  As I was approaching my own milestone in August, John had reached his earlier that year: He opened his own law office in Tallahassee. We have a photograph of John wearing a suit and bow tie while polishing the smoky glass on the door of his office—JOHN D. DUE, JR., ATTORNEY AT LAW, the sign reads. The dean of FAMU’s law school, Thomas Miller Jenkins, who had just been selected president of Albany State College in Georgia, stands proudly beside John, watching his former student set out on his own. That photo ran in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Negro newspaper. Graduation day was one of the proudest days of my life. There I was, twenty-five years old, finally graduating from a four-year college after so many setbacks! The only painful aspect of the day was that John and my brother, Walter, were the only family members who attended the ceremony. Priscilla was out of the country, and Mother had finally received a ticket to Ghana from Priscilla, so she had left for a trip we all knew she would remember the rest of her life. Priscilla sent me a letter of congratulations instead: I am extremely grateful, proud, and overwhelmed that you have finished the beginning of a long educational journey, she said.

  It was good to see Walter, though, so the absence of Mother and Priscilla did not dampen my spirits. In fact, the night of my graduation party was one of the few nights I wasn’t sick from the pregnancy. John and I invited all of our friends from the Movement to the house, and we had the party to end all parties. I danced myself nearly to exhaustion! People kept asking me, “Pat, how can you keep dancing like that when you’ve been so sick?” But it was as if I’d tapped into a source of energy I’d forgotten about, because I felt more happy and free than I had in a long time. Losing myself in the music reminded me of my days as a freshman on FAMU’s campus, absorbed in my own world in those rehearsal rooms, not realizing how quickly my life would no longer be my own. I can’t remember the last time I’d had a chance to dance before graduation night! That party is one of my happiest memories from the 1960s.

  I had done it. I had been involved in civil rights and I had gotten my degree. That night, as I danced, nothing else in the world mattered.

  Our first child was born at FAMU’s hospital a month prematurely, on January 5, 1966, the same day as our wedding anniversary. Maybe I’m wired differently than other people, but I
didn’t experience the kind of immediate joy and bonding most mothers describe when I first looked at my new baby girl. Her little face was the spitting image of John’s, but I have to admit that I thought the baby looked strange, with all those folds of wrinkled skin. Since I’d had an emergency cesarean section, however, I was probably in a daze. It took me some time to gather my thoughts and feelings.

  Priscilla and I had vowed to name our daughters after each other whenever we had children, but I decided to use “Priscilla” as the middle name. I’d picked out a first name already. A couple of years earlier, while I’d studied contemporary Africa in a course taught by FAMU professor Dr. William Howard, I learned about the nation of Madagascar and its capital city, Tananarive. (Madagascar is the island near the southeast coast of mainland Africa.) The name sounded like music to me, and I’d vowed I would name my firstborn daughter after the city. The only problem was, by the time I finally had a child, I had forgotten how to spell the name. I took a guess on the birth certificate, spelling it T-A-N-N-A-R-I-V-E, but since I wasn’t certain, I called Professor Howard to check. “No, no,” he said, hearing how I’d spelled it. “You’ve left out an A. It has ten letters.” Somewhere, there is an original copy of Tananarive’s birth certificate with the original misspelling crossed out and a correction hurriedly added above it, thanks to Dr. Howard. We chuckled over that for many years.

  I’d coordinated demonstrations and registration drives, but I was at a loss when it came to caring for a baby. I hadn’t been around many people with young children, so having a baby in my life was a very new experience for me. Whereas most of my relatives in Quincy had kept their distance while I was there with the North Florida Citizenship Education Project, I found that they were eager to assist me with my new baby. It’s not that they had ever stopped caring about me; they had only been afraid before. I have never been one to expect people to do more than they feel comfortable doing, in most cases, so I did not hold a grudge. Believe me, I was grateful for their help. Mother also came to spend a week with me. For the first few weeks, while I recuperated from my surgery, my new baby and I were waited on hand and foot.