Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  When John and I needed a babysitter, Mrs. Augustine Hudson, the wife of FAMU chaplain Dr. James Hudson, was happy to look after her. There were so many people who were important to me that I named several godparents for Tananarive, all of them from the Movement—Judy Benninger, James and Lillian Shaw, and Mrs. Dorothy Jones. Later, I would name a Miami lawmaker, Rep. Gwendolyn Cherry, as another godmother. Tananarive was dedicated at the Unitarian Church in Tallahassee. Dr. Irene Johnson, a geography professor from FAMU, came to Tananarive’s dedication, as did other friends and family. Walter, my brother, who lived five hours away in Atlanta, also attended the dedication, and he frequently visited us for holidays, including Tananarive’s first Christmas. Our families were very close. (When Tananarive was a little older than two, she was the flower girl in Walter’s wedding to educator Rita Willis.)

  John and I did not slow down after becoming new parents. Although a rift would grow between us in later years regarding the demands of family versus the demands of activism, in 1966 we were still very much of the same mind. When Tananarive was only three months old, we took her to Miami to live with Mother for a while because John and I were busy on the campaign trail for state and local elections. We were supporting candidates we believed were sensitive to the needs of Negroes and the poor. With record numbers of Negroes in Florida registered to vote, we wanted to start capitalizing on the community’s newfound voting power.

  The previous year, we’d seen the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson had supported, in large part in response to the travails of those of us who had worked in voter registration drives in 1964, and especially in response to the violence in Selma in 1965, where marchers supporting voting rights had been subjected to arrests and brutal beatings at the hands of police and racists. Again, it had taken suffering and bloodshed to prick the nation’s conscience. It was so ridiculous that we needed new, special laws to guarantee rights Negroes should have been able to take for granted just like any other U.S. citizens.

  John decided he would run for the state senate in Florida’s Sixth District. At that time, there had been no Negro state legislators since the days of Reconstruction. John felt very strongly that all of Florida’s citizens were not being properly represented. We were very hopeful that political empowerment could lead to rapid, sweeping changes. John thought he might actually have a chance to win.

  John had an official campaign manager, but believe me, I had to do most of the work. And it was work! We knew it was going to be a very tough race, and not just because John was Negro. The Sixth District was drawn so that it included twenty-four counties, including Leon and Gadsden Counties. Our first challenge would be to reach all of the voters; the next challenge was the racist Democratic machinery, which saw John as an outsider. Armed with eye-catching campaign cards with green print reading “DO IT WITH DUE,” we got a convertible and began the difficult task of driving from county to county to introduce ourselves to the voters. We brought Tananarive with us as much as we could, but for the longer trips we left her with babysitters like Augustine Hudson, the wife of Dr. James Hudson, FAMU’s chaplain, who was so supportive of civil rights.

  My skin was burned to a crisp and peeling as we traveled through those hot Florida counties in our convertible. We arrived, uninvited, at every official Democratic party function we heard about. Most of the events were picnics, and we would stroll in and look for John’s rightful place among the candidates. You should have seen the looks we got! If John appeared to be approaching the vicinity of a white woman, the white men gathered around her as if John were some kind of beast who would attack her. Some candidates actually got up and left the table when John sat down. You could almost read their minds: Look at the audacity of this nigger coming here into our territory.

  Though we were encountering hostility from racist whites, the Negro voters we met were overjoyed to see a Negro running for the Florida senate. When we had the baby with us, they cooed over her. I’m sure people were very pleased to see a family working together to make changes. When it was time for the election, John got enough votes to carry both Leon and Gadsden Counties, which even President Johnson had not done in 1964. Unfortunately, the other counties voted for his opponent, so John lost the election by a wide margin.

  But the race had been a family affair, and even baby Tananarive had been in on the act.

  After being a CORE activist for so many years, the philosophy of nonviolence was deeply ingrained in me. I never owned a gun, even during the worst times in Gadsden County, but when Tananarive was nearly nine months old, I realized how much motherhood had changed my perspective in some vital areas in my life. In the summer of 1966, I lost my belief in nonviolence, at least for a day. I was not launching a protest or looking for trouble, but somehow trouble found me, as my family tells me often seems to be the case.

  Priscilla had told me in her letters that she planned to wait a few years before starting her family, but she got pregnant right before I gave birth to Tananarive. I know she agonized over her pregnancy, because her true desire was to have the baby in Ghana, but she considered the medical system there too unreliable at that time. Her baby was due August 25, so she had written to tell me she would be coming home for the first time since her departure. I begged her to come back to live in the States, where we could see each other more often and our children could grow up near each other. This was my dream, of course, but Priscilla’s attitude had not changed, as reflected in a letter she’d sent me in February: As for me coming to live in America again, Never! she wrote emphatically. She also noted that since I had my own baby, it was less likely that I would travel to visit her in Africa. We seemed to be in a no-win situation.

  When Priscilla returned to the States that summer, I wanted to show her that things had changed since she’d left. After all, we had the Public Accommodations Act and the Voting Rights Act. Although Tallahassee’s municipal pools were still closed since Priscilla’s kick from a police officer at the 1963 “wade-in” and a subsequent protest in the summer of 1964—sadly, the city fathers preferred to have no swimming pools rather than integrate—great progress had been made in other areas in a very short time. If we could only have a pleasant visit, I thought, Priscilla would change her mind about living in Ghana.

  It was so good to see my sister again! She came home bubbling with stories about her travels, her admiration for Ghanaian reform president Kwame Nkrumah, and the University College of Science Education in Cape Coast in Ghana, where she worked. It really seemed that Priscilla had managed to cram several lifetimes worth of travel into only two short years, and I could live vicariously through her stories. As she liked to tell me, I shouldn’t just think of the fact that she had left. I should think of all the places I might see through her, as Mother had done. To this day, Priscilla is the most well-traveled person I know.

  I left Quincy for Priscilla’s visit, bringing Tananarive with me to live with Mother in Miami for a month, until Priscilla’s baby was born. By that time, Mother had left Leo Sears, the man she’d married after her divorce from Daddy Marion. Their relationship had been rocky from the beginning, and it simply never worked out. Mother had a job at Gulf American Land Corporation on Biscayne Boulevard in northeast Miami, so she left Priscilla and me at home with a list of chores each day when she went to work. I tell you, Priscilla and I behaved like we were children again. From the time Mother left the house each morning, we sat in the living room eating snacks, watching movies on television, and laughing as we talked about our days as young people. I purposely avoided some of the more painful subjects of the civil rights movement, not wanting to remind Priscilla of all the reasons she had left. Each day, as we realized it was almost time for Mother to get home from work, we’d scramble to do the chores she had asked of us. Those were carefree days, and we spent a lot of time laughing.

  When Priscilla was nine months pregnant and as big as a house—actually, I believe she may have been overdue by then—she decided she wanted t
o drive up to Belle Glade to see some of our childhood friends. Belle Glade was about a ninety-minute drive from Miami, and we packed up baby Tananarive and left in the morning, planning to return home by late afternoon.

  Priscilla and I had a good day visiting people we’d known in Belle Glade, but as the afternoon wore on and the summer sun grew hotter during the drive home, Priscilla began to feel sick. I knew that feeling well, and since she was pregnant we both understood what it meant: She needed to eat something right away to overcome the nausea. We had only made it to the town of South Bay about five miles outside of Belle Glade on Highway 27. We saw a sign for Roy’s Pit Barbeque, so we stopped to get Priscilla a sandwich to keep her from being sick.

  Imagine us as we were: Priscilla was very, very pregnant, and I walked in carrying a nine-month-old child. There were plenty of empty seats in the restaurant, so we took the first table we saw. Like any other customers, we sat and waited to be served. Yes, we got some stares from whites in the restaurant. Maybe I was being naive again, but since two years had passed since the federal law outlawing racial discrimination at public facilities, I did not expect to have a problem that day. If I had, I never would have exposed my baby and pregnant sister.

  The waitress was very excitable, and when she saw us there, she flew to our table, her face red with anger. “You can’t sit there!” she said. “Go on, git. I said you can’t sit there.”

  Instead of pointing out that the law was on my side, I tried to explain what the problem was. “Miss, we just want to get a sandwich. As you can see, my sister is pregnant, and she isn’t feeling well. We just need a sandwich and a drink, and we’ll be on our way home.”

  “You get up from there!” the waitress said, as if I hadn’t spoken.

  “If you would just listen to—”

  I never finished my last sentence, because I saw something I could barely believe even though it was happening before my own eyes: That waitress picked up a steel chair and began raising it as high as she could, heaving it over her head, as if she were going to hit us with it. Priscilla and I were shocked. We were a pregnant woman and a mother with a baby, and this woman was about to throw a chair at us.

  “You listen to me,” I said in a deep, solemn voice that I barely recognized, because my voice was filled with something that had never been awakened in me until that moment. “If you make one more move, I will wipe up this floor with you.”

  I saw the waitress freeze. She knew I meant it. She had no doubt that if she hurt my pregnant sister or my child, she would be lucky if I didn’t kill her.

  Priscilla had such a bewildered, pained look in her eyes. To think that another woman could behave with such poison, with such mindless hatred! Priscilla glanced at me, and I knew what she was thinking: How could you say things have changed? Pat, things are worse than before! There was nothing else I could say to her about moving back to the States. As soon as she could leave after the September 6 birth of her son, Muncko Derk Kruize II, Priscilla went back to Ghana to live, and I couldn’t blame her. Maybe, deep down, I wondered if John and I were the crazy ones for staying here to raise our own child.

  That incident wouldn’t still be so painful in my memory if it had somehow been resolved, if authorities had reprimanded the owner, who was responsible for the behavior of the employees. I called John to let him know what had happened, and he called the FBI to report the incident as a violation of federal law, but Priscilla and I were treated as if the whole thing was our fault. While we were researching this book, Tananarive and I put in a request for my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, and my file includes extensive interviews from the incident at Roy’s Pit Barbeque. All of the witnesses interviewed by the FBI contended that Priscilla and I were the ones who had been belligerent, that I had threatened the waitress first! I don’t think a single person told the truth, the way it had really happened.

  I’m so puzzled when I read those varying accounts in the FBI report, which is riddled with inaccuracies. Were those the real witnesses the FBI spoke to? Did those people invent different accounts because they were trying to protect the restaurant? Did someone else tell them what to say? Or did they somehow see an event that looked wholly different in their eyes simply because Priscilla and I had darker skin?

  “The owner was sick that day, you know,” an FBI agent in Miami told me in a scolding tone. “Why would you go in there bothering the owner with a protest? They had to pull the owner out of bed.” He completely missed the point. Priscilla was feeling sick, too, and I never asked anyone to call the owner, I said.

  When Priscilla and I walked into that diner, we never expected to become part of a controversy. No one could understand that we had only wanted to order a sandwich.

  Twenty-Four

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

  —James Baldwin

  “It’s time to have a civil rights reunion,” my mother said in the summer of 1997, after months of work sessions at her home, where we’d culled through the newspaper articles, letters, and photographs from the 1960s in her personal archive. “It’s time for all of us to get together. Before long, it’ll be too late.”

  She and a few activists had always talked about having a reunion someday, maybe in Tallahassee, which had been a hotbed of protest, or maybe closer to South Florida, where so many of them had settled later. But the plans always got swallowed by intricacies and logistics and busy schedules and, in particular, the devastation wreaked by Hurricane Andrew in 1992. A committee had been meeting regularly until Andrew hit, but even five years later, the effort had never picked up the same steam. Maybe, deep down, there was a little unwillingness to go back down that road as a group. Maybe the activists feared collective memories would be harder to stomach than the individual ones.

  I’d had a taste of what that reunion might feel like in 1994, after the state teachers’ union, Florida Education Association/United, bought a building in Tallahassee that had once been a site of many protests and hundreds of arrests while it was the Florida Theatre. A former University of Florida white student activist who’d been arrested outside that theater, Daniel Harmeling, now an educator and union representative, suggested that a plaque be erected in honor of the students who had made such a courageous stand at that building. After a two-year battle, the union finally agreed. I attended the dedication ceremony with my parents and about a dozen other activists, and the state’s commissioner of education, the Tallahassee NAACP president, and a Tallahassee city commissioner, joined by Governor Lawton Chiles, thanked them for their efforts years earlier (an ironic contrast to the past, when my mother and other student activists were referred to in court as “niggers”). There, I met George and Clifton Lewis, two white Tallahassee residents who had been so helpful. Rev. Herbert Alexander, a black activist, had died only the night before, but his three daughters bravely came in his place, saying they would not have missed it. The activists exchanged hugs, posed for photographs, and reminisced briefly about the events that had brought them there, but they hadn’t had time to sit and really talk to each other.

  My mother envisioned a reunion where they could share the stories behind the stories: What had the personal price of their activism been? What did their children and grandchildren know about what they had done during the civil rights movement? What had the impact of activism been on their families? What did they think of present-day race relations? She wanted to follow through, even if it meant she and my father had to host it in their home.

  As she planned the reunion, and I printed up colorful invitational brochures quoting Frederick Douglass’s reminder that “There is no progress without struggle,” my mother began to call it “The Gathering.” There was little joy in this work. She simply felt a strong sense of duty and necessity. Time was running out, and organizing it nearly wore her out.

  My mother was in college when she got involved in civil rights, which meant that the older activists wer
e nearing their eighties. Even some of the younger activists had already died, and more were dying. Mrs. Mary Ola Gaines, who’d been fired from her job as a maid after joining the sit-in in 1960, had died practically penniless only two months earlier. James Van Matre, who’d been a crusader and the first white student to enroll at all-black FAMU, wasn’t doing well at all, my mother found out when she spoke to his wife, Julia. And he was still a relatively young man, barely past fifty! Julia Van Matre, who’d been thrilled to hear a friendly voice from the past, said her husband had just gotten out of the hospital and was having problems finding work, and she hoped a meeting like The Gathering would give him a spark, maybe cheer him up. But he never made it, probably because of his health. Two months after The Gathering, he was dead.

  Some activists were vanishing in other ways. My mother had reached Augustine Hudson, the widow of a now-deceased minister, Dr. James Hudson, the former chaplain at FAMU who had been active in Tallahassee’s civil rights struggle. My mother had heard Mrs. Hudson was sick, so she didn’t expect her to be well enough to fly to Miami for the reunion, but Mom called her because we were thinking about flying to Louisiana to interview her for our book, to ask her how the civil rights movement had affected her husband and family.

  “Who?” the woman’s frail voice had fluttered across the phone line.

  “Patricia Stephens Due, from Tallahassee,” my mother said, repeating herself because she thought maybe Mrs. Hudson’s hearing was failing. “You remember, I worked very closely with your husband in Tallahassee. Pat and John Due. We had a daughter, Tananarive, and you were her first babysitter. I spent forty-nine days in jail in 1960 for sitting-in at a Woolworth.”