Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  “You did?” She sounded impressed, but there was no recognition in her voice.

  Mrs. Hudson didn’t remember her. She didn’t remember Tallahassee, where she had spent so many years of her life. She didn’t remember her own part in the civil rights movement at all, as if it had never happened.

  Those were painful setbacks for my mother, which is why planning The Gathering was so much more to her than addressing envelopes or hunting down telephone numbers. Sometimes she would get a lead on the whereabouts of someone she had lost touch with—for example, the family members of long-deceased William Larkins, FAMU’s former student government president who also had spent those forty-nine days in jail—and then end up disappointed by a cool trail or a disconnected telephone number. Even when she was able to reach people, the conversations meant catching up on years of changes and developments. Children. Families. The Movement. To her, it was an exhausting exercise.

  And there were those who didn’t seem to want to remember those times at all.

  My mother has not been able to reach one woman on her list in several tries over the years, although the woman is very much alive. This woman was among those who served time in jail with my mother and aunt during the 1960 Tallahassee jail-in. Now she refused to take part in any conversation to recollect those times. When my mother finally reached her on the telephone to invite her to The Gathering, her tone was clipped and tight, on the edge of politeness. “You can just leave me out of it,” she told her. She wanted nothing to do with those memories. My mother never did find out what happened to make her feel the way she did.

  For many civil rights activists, the only true sense of community during the Movement was at meetings and protests. After that, when the battles had been lost or won together and the last freedom songs had been sung, they’d all simply faced the world alone. My mother knew from her own experiences that everyone paid their price in their own way.

  Over the years, my sisters and I have seen the toll civil rights has had on our parents, too. To this day, both my father and mother have a distrust of the telephone. Important names and information like bank account numbers are never revealed on the phone, and during any given conversation my mother is likely to lapse into incomprehensible code, to the point where my sisters and I honestly think she’s paranoid. But then again, why shouldn’t they be paranoid? Our family discovered that my mother and father each have FBI files 400 pages long, presumably from the civil rights era, when they could hear the clicking of wiretaps on their telephones. From their perspective, wiretapping by government agencies isn’t far-fetched.

  There are other impacts, too. My father is a voracious reader, and the surefire gift for him at holiday time was usually a book about the struggle, such as Race Matters by Cornel West, Rage of a Privileged Class by Ellis Cose, or Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch. He’s always been able to draw resolve and purpose from those books. But in the past few years, as he just looks more tired, he’s told us no more books. His plate is full. No more.

  When a Miami Herald reporter interviewed my parents separately for a newspaper story on the thirty-year anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1998, they each broke into sobs in separate interviews, surprising themselves. “I guess I’m still in agony,” my mother told the reporter, explaining her sudden tears. “Dr. King knew as we all did when we participated in the movement what the consequences could be. I felt badly for him and for his family, but I was in agony more for the country.” My father was quoted as saying, “I’m mourning more now than then. I guess it’s like what they call Vietnam syndrome. It’s only twenty or thirty years later that they begin to mourn the people who died.”1

  I hadn’t thought it would be easy for my mother to watch Mississippi Burning, the movie that fictionalized the FBI’s search for murdered civil rights activists Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman. Our family went to see it together years ago, and sure enough, not long after the movie was underway, my mother began coughing in response. As she watched the movie, I think she was probably as disturbed by the historical distortions as she was by its depictions of white Southerners’ antipathy toward the civil rights workers. Eventually, she had to leave the theater altogether. A year later, I hadn’t expected her to have that same reaction to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, a film by a black director, but in a scene where police turned fire hoses on protesting blacks, my mother suddenly began choking and coughing, feeling like she couldn’t breathe, and she hurried out of the theater. It was too much for her.

  I saw that same physical reaction to the stress more and more in the year leading to The Gathering, while we traveled throughout the state to research this book. She’s been determined to tell the story—probably as much as she’s been determined to do anything—but reliving those events extracted a price. Billie Holiday once said, “Sometimes it’s worse to win a fight than to lose.” I don’t know if that’s true. But I do know that, win or lose, fights always leave scars.

  On August 23, 1997, the sun was shining full of summer, making it the sort of day when my mother is always careful to wear her dark glasses. My mother’s glasses have large lenses as dark as midnight that hide her eyes and parts of her face, so it’s easy for me and my sisters to forget what she looks like behind them. Sometimes, she says, she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror, without her glasses, and is startled by her own appearance. One day, she was surprised to notice that the color of her eyes had changed from coffee to a lighter shade, closer to her mother’s.

  The dark glasses are a necessity. Sunshine and bright indoor light always mean pain to her—as if she needed a reminder of what The Gathering was all about. Just as her eyes were injured by tear gas in 1960, every single person my mother had invited to The Gathering had scars of their own, whether visible or not.

  Almost all of my immediate family members were there: both my parents; my maternal grandmother, Lottie Sears Houston; my Aunt Priscilla; and one of my two sisters, Johnita, a New York attorney who is two years younger than I am. The other people who came weren’t family in flesh and blood, but they were names I knew well: Doris Rutledge Hart was a longtime family friend who lived in North Dade County, and others came from farther away, like attorney Jeff Greenup from New York, whom I’d never met, and who had not seen my mother in more than thirty years.

  By late morning, curtains drawn across the windows to keep out the light, my mother, by now a woman of fifty-seven with generous streaks of silver hair, surveyed the group of men and women assembled in a loose circle in her living room. All of the activists there were black except one, Daniel Harmeling, who had been arrested at a demonstration outside a segregated Tallahassee movie theater. Like Harmeling, some had been barely past adolescence in the 1960s; now, they all had their share of gray hair. Time had changed their appearance in many ways, but in other ways, at least for now, time was frozen. The freedom songs that had been playing on the cassette player—the near-mournful “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” and the more bouncy “Freedom”—still hung in the air, fresh as yesterday.

  “It really is such a pleasure to see everyone,” my mother said, her voice tinged with emotion beneath the formality. I could also hear a hint of her exhaustion. I noticed her wipe perspiration from her brow, a sign of a fever. I’d come down with a cold myself within the past day, and the entire event, so long-awaited, seemed surreal. Stress and illness are surely related.

  “All of you, I’m sure, don’t know each other, but all of you had something to do with me and John in the Movement,” she said. “I know you all have done so much. I would just like you to tell us where you’re from, and your first experience in the nineteen sixties. You probably can’t tell it all in one time, but we can begin.”

  Then it was time for the stories. My parents have never been given to much socializing, being very protective of their private lives to compensate for their very public presence. But despite the food and soft drinks offered, The Gathering wasn’t a party; i
t was an opportunity for the activists to unburden, to share, and to understand that what they had done mattered.

  Mom encouraged my grandmother, who was seventy-seven at the time, to speak first. Lottie Sears Houston was an elegant woman who had recently spent months recuperating in a nursing home from surgery to treat complications of diabetes. Considering that we’d spent Christmas of 1996 at her hospital bedside, and her frail appearance had made us all fear she might not live long past the new year, her presence at The Gathering was significant in more ways than one. (She died three years later on Christmas Day, literally weeks after learning that this much-discussed book about her children’s civil rights involvement had finally found a publisher.)

  My grandmother began to speak with the precision of her well-bred upbringing in Quincy, Florida. “This isn’t pleasant for me, because during that time, my heart was very heavy, when you all were so involved in all this stuff,” she began, squirming as though the words themselves caused her physical discomfort. “I didn’t know half the time where you were, or where you were going, or where you were coming from. And it was very dangerous.”

  She admitted in a tiny, pained voice that even all these years later, if her telephone rang late at night, she still felt a quickening of her heart, leftover anxiety from the era when a phone call at such an hour was likely to bring tragic news about her two daughters. All over the South, parents regularly received heartbreaking calls that their children had been jailed, beaten, killed, or that they’d simply vanished. Being the parent of civil rights activists meant fearing the worst on a regular basis. “I just learned to live with it and support them. I didn’t get out there and march with them, but I did give them support,” she said.

  Aunt Priscilla, who’d come to The Gathering in a bright-red African-print dress and matching head wrap—her trademark style of dress after living for several years in Ghana in self-imposed exile—flashed her smile and beautiful teeth toward her mother. “I didn’t know it was going to be so serious. I was trying to get a steak dinner from Wolfie’s,” she joked, recalling her first introduction to the civil rights organization CORE.

  “I thought you all were down here visiting your father, having a good time, and you’re here at these workshops and getting all involved in this thing that’s going to last for years and years,” my grandmother said.

  “A whole lifetime,” Aunt Priscilla said, as if awed herself, and the room murmured in agreement. Everyone present knew that all too well. For many of them, civil rights involvement had simply taken over their lives after they’d chanced upon a demonstration, or heard a speech, and something inside them had been ignited forever. Each, in his or her own way, had always wanted to work toward change, but none could have anticipated to what extent the Movement would impact their safety, their futures, and their lives.

  For Dr. Robert Hayling, who came with his wife, Athea, it was not easy to talk about his severe beating at a Ku Klux Klan rally in St. Augustine, even among kindred spirits. The sight of black-and-white photographs from the civil rights era, which my mother was passing around the living room, made tears spring to his eyes.

  Familiar faces, immortalized in youth. Old hurts. Old outrage. Old fear.

  Of the people we had contacted about attending, my mother had been the most excited when Dr. Hayling agreed to come. Dr. Hayling was in his early sixties and still very active in the black community of Ft. Lauderdale, about a forty-minute drive from Miami. As usual, the name sounded familiar to me because it had been repeated many times in my parents’ anecdotes over the years. “John represented him in St. Augustine, one of his first civil rights cases,” she always said. “St. Augustine was vicious. Dr. King said it was one of the most vicious cities he’d ever visited. And everybody knew Dr. Hayling. He was right in the middle of it.”

  Thirty-four years had passed since Dr. Hayling nearly lost his life in a beating at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1963, but when he tried to talk about his experiences, he was smothered by his memories.

  “So much has happened to us, and so many other people who were involved with us are not with us anymore,” Dr. Hayling said after breaking down while trying to tell his story. “There’s so much we’re talking about, years and years and years, and to compress all of that, what I went through.… I apologize to everyone, because most people who know me would know this is very unusual, but this is a very unusual moment.”

  The activists made empathetic sounds, nodding. They all had their own hurts.

  It has always been hard for me and my sisters to imagine the world these activists grew up in, the one they confronted. As the day passed, it was clearer and clearer that these activists had lived in the midst of a time when, in the South, tolerance was the exception rather than the rule. Blacks were considered less than fully human, and whites who recognized their humanity were considered freaks, at almost every level. Fear of change was so rampant that normally law-abiding citizens could justify violence to preserve the status quo. It’s painful for me to think that my mother was a young woman trying to envision her future in an atmosphere of so much oppression and psychological poisoning.

  Although Johnita and I had not experienced what Harmeling, Hayling, the other activists, and my family members were recalling that day, we knew full well that their experiences would have traumatized us, too. In a very real sense, they had all suffered what they did exactly so the world we inherited would be a different one.

  Jeff Greenup, the New York attorney who had represented activists participating in a voter education project directed by my mother in Quincy, said that his children were his main inspiration for taking time away from his legal practice to volunteer as a civil rights lawyer in the South, and risk his life. “I confess I was somewhat of a coward,” he began, “because I had two young daughters, and I looked on the TV screen up in New York and I saw those youngsters bucking those dogs and I saw white bigots spitting on them, and I just said I couldn’t send my kids to do that. But I also couldn’t just stand idly by. So, I went South.”

  It was children, he said, who made the biggest impact on him, especially as he observed the fearless high-school and college-age youngsters for whom the South was home. He recalled being picked up at the train station by interracial student pairs boldly singing freedom songs, and, later, how a football team from an all-black high school in Quincy served as his bodyguards when he was being followed.

  “One of the things that always troubled me was what happened to those dedicated folk when we left and they were stuck there,” Greenup said. He said he’d always wished he’d remembered the names of the people he came into contact with during that time. All he can recall most of the time is a string of nameless, faceless heroes. One, he said, was a young man who allowed him to live in his brick house in Quincy when he needed a place to stay. He’d heard later that the man had lost his job because of that courage and kindness.

  “Oh, my cousin, Velton Banks!” my mother exclaimed. Vivian Kelly, still a Quincy resident and still active at age seventy-eight as the first black chair of the Democratic Executive Committee of Gadsden County, told him she knew of Banks and his involvement. She, too, had worked to find activists hot meals and a place to live during that time, becoming almost a surrogate parent to my mother. As a result of her own voter registration activities, Mrs. Kelly said, for years one of her sons had suffered difficulty finding a job in Quincy’s school system. And Banks came under extra scrutiny because of his involvement, she said, particularly from the IRS (which, unfortunately, was not uncommon).

  Another hero, Greenup recalled, was a little white boy in St. Augustine when Dr. King was in town in 1964 to support local civil rights activities. Since Dr. King received so many death threats, civil rights organizers established elaborate decoys to disguise his sleeping arrangements. That night, Dr. King was scheduled to sleep in a tent.

  “There was a young white kid, no more than eleven or twelve years old,” Greenup said. “One day he ran through our office while we were
at a strategy meeting. He said, ‘Look out for twelve o’clock.’ We didn’t pay too much attention to him. Then he came back about a half hour later and said, ‘Dr. King shouldn’t sleep in the tent tonight.’ ” Somehow, Greenup said, there had been a security breach, and outsiders had learned about Dr. King’s sleeping arrangements.

  Someone, somewhere, was plotting violence within earshot of that child.

  “Nighttime came, and Dr. King was standing around talking, and then he walked over to the tent where he was supposed to sleep. And then I crawled back with him to the office and took him somewhere else,” Greenup said. “I don’t know if you remember or not, but that night they threw a stick of dynamite at the tent. I often wonder who that kid was. To me, he’s definitely one of the unsung heroes.”

  Listening, we all nodded and muttered in agreement. “Unsung heroes” is a term my mother uses often, and was most of the reason she’d planned The Gathering in the first place. Telling and retelling the stories of heroes, she must have reasoned, would help ensure that the next generations would not forget. I heard her fear echoed time and again that day. In fact, many of the activists said they could already see their fears coming to pass.

  “We allow people to hit us and we turn the other cheek, and that’s the way we have survived,” my Aunt Priscilla said, “but we have to leave a legacy for our children that is stronger than we are, because most of our children don’t know anything about the struggle. Our grandchildren will know nothing. We may not even be around to tell our grandchildren how they have to fight, how they have to survive. They will have to have new strategies to survive.”