Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Immediately, my old CORE colleague Marvin Rich sent me and John a letter. By then, Marvin had left CORE and was executive director of the Scholarship, Education, and Defense Fund in New York, but he had heard about the baby’s death through the civil rights grapevine. What can I say about the loss of a daughter? Lucretius once said, “No single thing abides, but all things float. Fragment to fragment clings.” Truly, we are all fragments and I see the changes from stormy to peaceful without rhyme or reason, Marvin wrote, doing his best to console us.3

  I’d had endless energy when it came to organizing, planning, and protesting, but I felt completely drained when it came to losing my child. I was so upset during that time, the days passed in a complete daze. I was not even well enough to attend my own baby’s funeral, so Mother must have planned it with help from a family friend, Rosa Burns. The only remnants of the funeral I have are photographs of that day: John in his suit, and little Tananarive in a beautiful yellow dress, near her sister’s grave, although she was only fourteen months old and far too young to understand the significance of the event. Believe it or not, I never visited the grave site, not even once I was able to leave the hospital. It was too difficult for me. Until more than thirty years later.

  In March 2001, Tananarive and I visited St. Hebron and Quincy so I could show her the sites that were significant for this book: the house where my family lived when I was very young; the property where the Freedom House had once stood; Mount Moriah Missionary Baptist Church, where we held mass meetings; Arnett Chapel AME Church, where James Farmer spoke; the former Gadsden County Times office, where Negroes registered to vote in record numbers; and St. Hebron AME church, the church my mother brought us to each Sunday when we lived there, and which awarded me a plaque in 1964, when I returned to work with the voter registration campaign.

  St. Hebron AME has a graveyard on its property, and I knew our baby had been buried there all those years ago. I did not know if she had a proper marker on her grave, or if it had been entirely overgrown with grass or weeds, but I wanted to find her.

  What had drawn me to that cemetery so many years later for the first time? I’m still not sure, but something had been pulling me back to Gadsden County for many years. John and I had recently finalized the purchase of a home near Quincy, since it had been my dream for some time to retire there, in the county of my birth, and we’d bought a home large enough for Mother to live with us, since she had grown frail and it was clear she would not be able to live on her own much longer. Only days before we were scheduled to close on the new house—on Christmas morning—Mother died in her bed at home in Richmond Heights. (Across the ocean in Holland, Priscilla’s husband, my brother-in-law, died the very same day, multiplying our family’s loss.)

  Mother had said often she didn’t want to leave her house to move back to Quincy, and sometimes I believe she knew she never would. I had spoken to her only the night before on the telephone, making our Christmas plans for her to visit with us at our Miami home, ten minutes from hers, because she was no longer able to host the Christmas Eve celebrations that had been our family tradition for decades. My youngest daughter, Lydia (who would later be my dead baby’s namesake), had spoken to Mother the night before, asking questions about Priscilla. “I asked if she thought Aunt Priscilla had been affected by the civil rights movement. She said yes, that she had never been the same,” Lydia recalls. The next morning, Mother was talking to Priscilla on the telephone when she died.

  So only a few months before, all of us had attended Mother’s funeral and stood at another grave site at the same funeral park where Grandmother was buried, and which Mother had visited faithfully at holiday time for years. Her three children, six grandchildren, and one of her four great-grandchildren had all been there, as well as cousins, friends, church members, and admirers. We had all watched her casket lowered beneath two palm trees at Dade South Memorial Park, hardly able to believe a woman who’d always been so spirited and clear-minded was really gone.

  Only weeks before Mother’s death, at the beginning of December, Tananarive and I learned that our book of family history would be published, and Mother had been thrilled at the news. She knew we had been searching for a home for this book for years. “I’m so happy for you, Pat,” Mother had said. “Once your book is published, you can put this behind you and enjoy the rest of your life.” Mother had always felt that all of the energy I’d put into documenting the Movement took away from my ability to do things for myself and enjoy my life. Although it saddened me greatly that my mother would not live to see the publication of this book, I took solace in the fact that she had heard the good news. She knew her story, too, would be told.

  I was also glad Mother had lived long enough to know that Tananarive was pregnant with her first child, news that had coincided with our book sale. But only two weeks after Mother died, while Tananarive was in the middle of a book tour for her novel The Black Rose, she miscarried. My daughter relived her own version of the losses I had known while I lived in Gadsden County. (Tananarive was as hard-headed as her mother; she kept touring even after she learned the eight-week-old embryo had died, and she was on the road again two days after her surgery.)

  Mother had died in December, so her death was very fresh on that day in March. I was still not myself, and it was hard to imagine a time when I would feel like myself ever again. Mother had not only been my mother, but truly my best friend, someone I talked to on the telephone several times each day, and one of the few people I could say anything to. She lived to be eighty years old, and perhaps that sounds like we’d had a lot of time together, but all I could think about after she died was that I had wanted more time. I had been robbed of a part of my life that could never be replaced. Now that I was back in St. Hebron, I was remembering the old days clearly, when Mother had been much younger and the times had been very difficult.

  Given how emotionally fragile Tananarive and I both were at the time, I did not know how it would feel to go to the little cemetery in St. Hebron where Mother’s lost granddaughter had been buried since 1967. “I don’t think we’ll find her,” I kept saying as Tananarive and I scanned the grave markers with one of my childhood friends, Ethelyn “Jay Baby” Cunningham, who had directed us to the cemetery. Perhaps a part of me was hoping I wouldn’t.

  Would I be able to bear seeing my daughter’s grave for the first time?

  “Look!” Tananarive cried suddenly from a distance in the graveyard. “Richard Allen Powell! Your grandfather, Mom!”

  There it was: the gravestone for Richard Allen Powell—and beside it, neatly lettered on a marker small enough to be easily overlooked, we saw the name DUE. Lydia J. Due, the marker said. March 1, 1967–March 2, 1967. The baby I had never even met had been beside her great-grandfather all these years. She had never been alone.

  Later I described the day in my computer diary as my eyes overflowed with tears:

  I was overcome with joy and sadness all at the same time. I could hardly speak. I had to breathe deeply to make sure that I could catch my breath. I found my baby at last. We must have a proper tombstone made for her, documenting her Powell roots. I pulled the grass with my bare hands around her small headstone to be certain that she is forever visible to me. Now, she can rest in peace. Her mother is back and will take care of everything.

  “Maybe this is why I was supposed to come back to Quincy,” I told Tananarive later. “Maybe I was supposed to be closer to the baby.”

  The losses in 1967 did not end with little Lydia Johnita.

  In August 1967, five months after my baby died, there was more terrible news: Calvin Bess, the Tallahassee student who had been in high school when he first grew interested in civil rights as a member of my Young People’s Progressive Club, had been killed under suspicious circumstances while registering voters in Mississippi. In my memory, Calvin was a child. As far as I knew, he had gotten involved in civil rights because of me.

  I was not at home at the time, but John tells me Calvin’
s mother came to our house in grief, saying her son’s death was my fault.

  Those were very painful days. For all of us, it seems, death was in the air.

  Twenty-Six

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.”

  —Stokely Carmichael

  George Calvin Bess’s family could not make it to The Gathering, and neither could he. His father was too sick from kidney problems to travel. His sister had a prior obligation with neighborhood schoolchildren. George Calvin Bess himself had been dead for thirty years.

  His name had come up many times over the years as one that stuck particularly in my mother’s memory, and she had been afraid his family members might react coldly if she called to interview his family for our book. Mom has always felt that his family blamed her for his death, and deep down, I think she always blamed herself, too.

  But when we tracked down his family in Tallahassee and Mom was brave enough to make the call, the family was happy to hear from her. “Patricia Due?” his father kept exclaiming with happy recognition. They were eager to take part in interviews about the impact of the civil rights movement on their family.

  Calvin’s mother was in a nursing home and could not speak to us. Nor would she have agreed to it, her husband said; she’d never recovered from the loss of her only son. But we did speak to Calvin’s father and his sister, Cherrye, who’d been only six in the summer of 1967, when the older brother she’d simply called Brother never came home. (Mrs. Cherrye Bess, Calvin’s mother, died in 1997, the year after we interviewed her family; and Calvin’s father, also named George Calvin Bess, died in 2000.)

  Most people know about Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, the three civil rights workers who died during Freedom Summer in 1964. I remember seeing Mickey Schwerner’s mother years ago on Donahue and thinking that, no matter how painful it was to lose her son, she might have won some small consolation in the fact that her loss, and his sacrifice, were known. Hollywood fictionalized it and made the movie Mississippi Burning about it. But Calvin Bess had died, too, and almost no one knew. He did not make national newspaper headlines. His name does not appear in history books. His family has not been on Donahue, nor on Oprah, nor have they had to watch the horror of their son’s final days Hollywoodized for the careful consumption of the general public. Hollywoodized, perhaps, but at least remembered.

  Mom’s spark was able to light a durable flame in Calvin for a variety of reasons, not the least of which, we know now, was the influence of his father, also named George Calvin Bess. Mr. Bess and Mom hugged upon meeting each other. George Bess was tall, at least six-foot-two, with thick arms and a handsome face, despite his seventy-one years. Mom and I were both struck by how attractive he was. His nature matched.

  At the beginning of the interview, he chuckled good-heartedly over stories of his exploits as a young man, like getting into a brawl with a Tallahassee store clerk who called him “nigger,” and not getting arrested because someone intervened and argued that he didn’t know local customs since he was from New York. He also took part in an on-base riot at an Army camp in Florida, when the black soldiers weren’t permitted to watch a Noble Sissle concert with the white soldiers. “We broke into the main post warehouse and we took all the guns we could find, and all the ammo, and we shot the place up. And we burnt the post headquarters down,” he said. “This was in 1942. Shortly thereafter, they shipped us out of there. They shipped us overseas.”1

  Mom and I could instantly see where Calvin got his determination.

  Calvin’s mother, predictably, was worried about his involvement in the civil rights movement, especially once he was arrested, but she gradually had to accept it. There was no convincing a Bess man not to do something he wanted to do.

  There were no classes at Harvard that Calvin was interested in that summer term in 1967, nor at FAMU, so he decided to do some voter registration work in Selma. Before he left, his father took him to a nearby auto shop to buy a blue Triumph convertible. After he’d packed up his car, his father noticed he had a taillight out, so he warned him and fixed it for him.

  At the time Calvin died, his kid sister, Cherrye, who rode with him everywhere he went, was six years old. Cherrye called him “Brother,” and he called her “Q” (“Because he said I was cute,” Cherrye said). Cherrye told us that she remembered riding in the convertible with her brother to civil rights meetings when she was very young, and how much she’d loved singing the freedom songs even though she hadn’t understood what they meant. Cherrye remembers him studying and writing a great deal before he left.

  Neither of his parents had really wanted him to make the trip because of the danger. But at least it was Selma, his father told him. Selma wasn’t so bad. Cherrye wondered why she couldn’t go on this trip with her brother—she went to all of his other meetings with him, she sang freedom songs with him. But he was very insistent, she says. She could not go. She would have to wait. And wait she did. She waited by the front door’s jalousie window for her brother to come home.

  Soon after he left, Calvin called home and said he wasn’t in Selma, after all. There wasn’t anything for him to do there. He’d gone on to Mississippi. His father recalls how, when his son called him and told him he’d decided to move his voter registration work that summer from Selma to Mississippi, he’d told his son, “Well, you’re in no-man’s land now.” But Calvin always told his parents he was all right. He was safe. He talked to them a few days before he died.

  The other call came the first Sunday in August. The sheriff’s office in Mississippi and one of Calvin’s civil rights coworkers, a man Calvin had nicknamed “Tex,” had tried to call the Bess family several times that day. George Bess remembers getting the call after church. Cherrye Bess remembers she answered the phone first, that they’d come back from getting groceries. Her mother took the phone from her, then shrieked and sank to her knees, sobbing. “And then Daddy ran to the phone,” Cherrye recalls, “so I knew it had to be something pretty bad. Nobody was speaking to me, though.” Even after she was told what had happened, she did not fully comprehend it. She still waited for her brother by the window, she remembers. “I told Mama, ‘God gon’ put a Band-Aid on him and send him back,’ ” Cherrye recalls.2

  People who visited the house, like Stokely Carmichael and others, kept telling Cherrye about the Movement. “They asked, ‘Do you understand the Move-ment and Civil Rights and why they were fighting for my rights? They made it very personal,” she said. She did not understand until much later, but she remembers that when she was a child, people thought it was very important that she should know.

  No one ever fully believed the police account of what happened to Calvin. Calvin died of a blow to his head that made a large gash at his temple. Mississippi locals always thought the car had been hauled to that creek by racist murderers, that they had not really driven into the creek. But Calvin’s parents were too distraught, and too frightened, to go to Mississippi to investigate, even when the NAACP offered assistance. They did not think they would find the truth, and they were afraid the same fate might befall them.

  Calvin’s father had the water-damaged car towed back to Florida. For six months, it sat in front of their house. Every time Calvin’s mother saw it, she was overcome with grief. He put it in storage eventually, but it was eating away at him, too, so he finally got rid of it.

  Along the way, though, the family experienced tiny miracles. The biggest was that soon after Calvin died, they discovered he’d fathered a child they didn’t know about. The mother lived in Ocala, and the boy was about a year old. They intervened just as he was about to be adopted by a family in Daytona, proved they were related from the similarity of photographs, took the boy home, and named him Calvin. Everyone, even little Cherrye, felt the baby was solace. Now there was a Calvin, Cherrye says, and she could stop waiting. Calvin had come back.

  The day we spent with Calvin
’s father and sister was very moving. Listening to Calvin’s father tell his story, recalling the awful day the telephone call shattered their lives, my mother began to choke and had to excuse herself from the room. Later, I took pictures of Calvin’s father hugging my mother, and I hoped that the book we wanted to write would give him and his family a sense that his son has been properly honored.

  The tragic footnote is that George Calvin Bess IV became one of a long line of Bess men who fathered children shortly before being separated because of traumatic events—George Calvin II was overseas during World War II, with no expectation of returning, and didn’t see his child until he was two; George Calvin III died in Mississippi, never seeing his child at all; and George Calvin IV was incarcerated, leaving a young daughter outside. At nearly the same age his father had been when he died, Calvin’s son was sent to prison on drug charges, sentenced to thirteen years for his first offense, a nonviolent crime. He is almost thirty at this writing, and he has spent most of his adult life in jail. Truly, the criminal justice system in this country is the next great frontier in the civil rights struggle.

  How did we leapfrog from the painful gains of the civil rights movement to seeing so many of our young men end up in jail? It’s a question of economics, in part. For so many misguided young people, even the brightest ones, drugs are a trade, an attainable means of support. Too many of us are still outside the system, haven’t learned to thrive within the law. And the “War on Drugs,” which is really a war on drug addicts and the poor, a war on inner cities, has filled our prisons with obscene numbers of nonviolent offenders.

  Calvin Bess always told his father that he was dedicating himself to civil rights work for Cherrye, so she could go to school anywhere she wanted. She chose Bethune-Cookman College and FAMU, historically black schools, but she chose them. Today, Cherrye says she cherishes the memory of singing with Calvin when she was young, her first memories of singing. Today, she is active in Tallahassee’s black community, giving of herself to make the city better for everyone, often through song, gracing audiences with her lovely singing voice every chance she gets. Her brother would be proud.