Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  Since The Between was first published in 1995, my mother has been my (mostly unpaid) manager. My mother approached my book career with the same methodical energy she’d always tackled other projects with, studying literary and film law, helping me schedule appearances, videotaping my readings, guiding me through this new, untested phase of my life. Along the way, she has always delighted and motivated the booksellers, librarians, and readers we’ve come in contact with. And while she was with me during the Black Rose tour the summer of 2000, everyone had been excited to hear that we were writing a mother–daughter civil rights memoir.

  Since the same publisher, One World/Ballantine, would be publishing Freedom in the Family, I wondered if my editor, Anita Diggs, would be willing to pick up the tab so that my mother could spend a couple of weeks on the road with me for the Black Rose tour. I was thrilled and relieved when Anita said yes. Since we were also promoting our book, she said my mother could accompany me on the East Coast portion of the tour. The trip would not erase the pain of Mother’s death, but at least Mom and I would be together during that horrible period after the loss. Since I’d moved to Washington State after my wedding in 1998, Mom and I weren’t spending nearly as much time together as we once had, so this would be a treat for us.

  We enjoyed ourselves as much as we could. We saw everything in hues of gray during that time, but we snatched a few bright moments of laughter. We bickered, vowing never to share a hotel room again. We found ourselves wanting to call Mother to share things, only to be faced again and again by the incomprehensible fact that she was not at home where she usually was. We fought tears at unexpected moments, neither of us wanting to cry in front of the other.

  Mostly we did our job. We interacted with readers and booksellers, trying to stoke the fires of enthusiasm for The Black Rose and Freedom in the Family. We stayed distracted. As she learned to do long ago, my mother swallowed her emotions and went to work.

  Our first stop was Washington, D.C., then Baltimore. Next, we flew to Atlanta.

  Atlanta had a gift waiting for us.

  As soon as we stepped off the plane, I began scouting for my driver. One of the real pleasures of touring, to me, is having a driver or escort waiting at the gate with a sign bearing my name, something that never happens to me in my “real life,” away from book tours. Sure enough, I saw a chauffeur waiting with a sign: TANANARIVE DUE. Most people don’t bother to spell out my first name, or they spell it wrong, but this driver had it right.

  Waiting beside the chauffeur was a tall, smiling black man I had never seen before. When he saw us approaching the driver, the stranger said, “Excuse me, but are you Tananarive Due?” I said I was, so he said, “Tananarive, my name is Gregory Allen Howard. My uncle is William Howard, and he taught your mother at Florida A&M University.”

  “Dr. Howard!” my mother cried, overhearing him. “You’re Dr. Howard’s nephew?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” the man said politely. “I’m here at the airport to pick him up. He’s coming to Atlanta, and his flight gets in a little later tonight.”

  “That’s wonderful!” my mother said. “I would love to see him.”

  “Uncle Bill has told me the story about how he had a student in his class in the nineteen sixties who named her daughter Tananarive, and she grew up to be a writer.”

  “Yes, Mom’s told me that story,” I said. “And she had to call Dr. Howard so he could tell her how to spell the name, because she’d forgotten.” We all laughed, having heard the story many times before. My mind was swimming. What were the odds that one of my mother’s old college professors would be arriving the same night we did? And on a trip she had not been originally scheduled to make?

  The stranger gave me his business card. “My cell phone number is on here,” he said. “Why don’t you give me a call tomorrow? I know Uncle Bill will be tired when he gets in tonight, but I’m taking him to dinner tomorrow, and I’m sure he’d be thrilled to see you two. I’m in Atlanta because I’m being honored by the governor.”

  “Why are you being honored?” I asked him.

  “I’m a screenwriter,” he said. “I wrote the screenplay for Remember the Titans, and we shot most of that in Georgia.”

  I congratulated him heartily, my eyes shining with admiration. Remember the Titans, starring Denzel Washington, had been one of the biggest movies of the year. When I’d seen the movie, the screenwriter’s name had passed in a blur. I hadn’t known he was black, much less that he was the nephew of someone my mother knew.

  The next night, we sat at a table in a restaurant with Gregory Allen Howard, his uncle, and various representatives from the governor’s office who’d taken part in the ceremony earlier that day. For my part, I was glad to be included in a celebration for Remember the Titans, one of the few successful mainstream movies to tackle a story about this nation’s struggle to bring understanding between the races. More than that, I felt a warm satisfaction as I watched my mother sitting at the end of the table beside Dr. Howard, huddling close in their own private conversation about life, losses, and an era in Tallahassee, Florida, they alone could remember. Dr. Howard had known Mother long before I was born, and I was glad Mom had someone she could share her pain with. Dr. Howard knew the essence of who my mother was, and she didn’t have to explain herself to him, nor he to her. There is so much comfort in unspoken familiarity.

  Unfortunately, Dr. Howard did not have much longer to live; Greg Howard wrote me that his uncle had died in March 2002, only a year later. But that night, time had not yet marched on. That night, we created a timeless space for ourselves.

  During that dinner, I told Greg Howard that I’d assumed Remember the Titans was based on a novel. Not so, he said. He told me he’d left Hollywood in frustration a few years back and ended up seeking a more quiet place and finding it in Alexandria, Virginia. One of the first things he noticed about the town was the unusual harmony between the races. He was in a barbershop one day, and asked somebody why blacks and whites in Alexandria got along so well.

  “It all goes back to the Titans,” someone told him, and he heard the story of the high-school football team that had been forced to integrate and gone on to an undefeated season. It was all there: The racial hatred. A tough-as-nails black coach. High school boys who had been forced to grow past prejudice and become men. Lifelong friendships between blacks and whites.

  Stories are like that. They’re always sitting there, waiting for someone to discover them.

  I was in a state of calm awe that night, feeling a circle closing around me. Dr. William Howard was in Atlanta for an event to honor his nephew, and my mother was with me on my book tour, all of us celebrating family love, achievement, and pride rooted in the untold stories of our people’s struggle. Dr. Howard had helped prepare my mother and her generation, and my mother’s generation had sacrificed for mine. Gregory Allen Howard wrote Remember the Titans and a script for the movie that would become Ali, and I was about to write a book with my mother about the civil rights movement, honoring everyday heroes and heroines.

  All of us sat there in the city of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birth in a space somewhere between the past and the future. We laughed. And remembered. And dreamed some more.

  Thirty-One

  PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE

  “Parents have become so convinced that educators know what is best for children that they forget that they themselves are really the experts.”

  —Marian Wright Edelman

  During the 1960s, I had always understood how difficult it was for activists to adhere to the principle of nonviolence, not arming themselves or striking back when they were attacked, but perhaps I hadn’t truly understood what those people with families had suffered until my family came under attack in the 1970s.

  Our family had done a lot of moving around by 1974. We’d lived in Liberty City, Opa-locka, and Richmond Heights, which were all predominantly black areas. Once John got a steady job with the county’s Community Relations Board, we want
ed to buy a house, and we had trouble finding a house for sale in those areas. Middle-class black families just did not want to let their homes go, we discovered. So John and I took our home search to the predominantly white suburbs of southwest Dade County, and we ended up moving into an area called Colonial Drive, where we rented a home with an option to buy it. Usually, moving into a new home is an occasion to celebrate, but it didn’t feel that way to us.

  Colonial Drive is a very ethnically mixed area today. In fact, Priscilla has lived there since she returned to the States in 1977, when she decided to see if she could emotionally reclaim this country, but a black family really stood out in 1974. Many of our neighbors were transplanted from other Southern states and considered themselves hard-core rednecks, so they were not happy to see us move onto their street. “You tell those nigger kids of yours if I ever see any of ’em in my yard, I’m gonna go get my shotgun and shoot ’em,” one neighbor told me point-blank with a hateful stare. Other neighbors threw stones and eggs against the house, and since Tananarive and Johnita had bedrooms near the front of the house, I worried that one of them might be hurt by breaking glass.

  Another issue was John’s high visibility because of his job, which often entailed public statements to the media, so sometimes our neighbors took out their frustrations against him on our family. For the first time in my life, I considered buying a gun. John never liked the idea, but I felt very exposed in that house. Instead of arming ourselves, though, we tried community mediation. Representatives from John’s office at the Community Relations Board came to our neighborhood to talk to our neighbors and to build goodwill, but that didn’t work. We called the police, but there wasn’t much the police could do. White members of the First Unitarian Church we attended grew so concerned after they heard us talking about our harassment that they volunteered to sit in front of our house at night to check on our safety. Feeling like we had no choice, we agreed.

  For me, the hardest part of that whole ordeal was having children old enough to perceive the things going on around them. Tananarive was eight, Johnita was six, and Lydia was nearly four. Tananarive was a tomboy, making friends with some of the neighborhood boys (including the son of our neighbor who’d threatened to shoot them) and breaking her eyeglasses while she played tackle football. I did not want her to feel afraid, but I was also uneasy about exposing her to verbal attacks or violence. John and I never told the girls about the severity of the threats, or the church members sitting watch outside of our house, so we were able to shelter them somewhat, but I’m sure they sensed that something was not quite right.

  Beyond that, I was happy during that time because I had a job I really enjoyed. After many years of staying with the children, working and volunteering only when I could find the time, I loved the stimulation of adults. James Burke, a black attorney, hired me to work for Community Lawyers, a government-funded program, which was designed to give legal assistance to people in the Liberty City area.

  Preventive law was a major part of our program, and we taught people how to evaluate contracts carefully before signing. We also handled divorce cases, which could be quite traumatic. Sometimes people would come in threatening to kill us, blaming the lawyers who were helping a spouse get the divorce, but that was not the norm, and the occasional drama at work didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for the job. I loved being part of a program helping people in the community do things for themselves. We also reached out to Haitian refugees, who were often denied jobs. As far as I was concerned, racism prevented many of the Haitians from entering the country at all, and then racism surfaced again when they tried to find work. Many of the Haitians didn’t have clothes for their families, so we took part in what was called the Haitian Refugees’ Concern Board, and we had a room at Community Lawyers where we piled the donations people brought in nearly to the ceiling. There was a real spirit of giving.

  During this time, I also became involved with a grassroots organization, the Tenant Education Association of Miami (TEAM), which assisted people in affordable housing, public housing, and landlord disputes. The two women who really organized TEAM were Mrs. Eufaula Frazier and Mrs. Adell Dillard, but I served as the vice chairperson. I also became involved in a dispute centered around Miami Northwestern Senior High, an inner-city high school, because parents were organizing to secure better equipment and facilities for their students. The school was 99 percent black and needed many repairs and upgrades. My children were too young to attend high school, of course, but I saw the situation at Northwestern as a separate-but-equal question that is of concern to any parent. All children deserve good schools, no matter where they live, what color they are, or how much money their parents make. Unless parents speak up and organize, though, schools in affluent neighborhoods with more parental involvement will always have the advantage. Parental involvement in education and health care proved to be two of my strongest issues in the next few years, as they remain today.

  I kept telling John parental involvement begins at home, and soon that became an issue for me. I began having problems with Lydia, the youngest, during the time I was working at Community Lawyers. All three girls were in school by then, and because I was working, they were in an after-school program until I could pick them up. Tananarive and Johnita were fine, but Lydia was in a classroom with younger students, and she was crying every day when I came to pick her up. Not only that, but day after day, I got telephone calls from the school asking me to pick her up early because of her crying. Parents might expect a young child to take some time to adapt to a new situation, but Lydia’s crying never stopped.

  I finally realized I could not do that to my child. As much as I hated to, I told my director, James Burke, that I would have to resign from Community Lawyers. Mr. Burke, who would later become a Miami-Dade County commissioner, was very concerned. He asked me why I would resign from a job he knew I loved. I told him my problem.

  “Patricia,” he said, “why don’t you just go pick up your kids from school every day and then take them home?” It had never occurred to me that he would permit me to do that. Mr. Burke was actually very progressive for his time. Excited to have a solution, I found a baby-sitter and tried it.

  Unfortunately, I had already been driving fifty-two miles a day to work in the county’s northwest section even though we lived in the southwest section. Since now I had to double back to pick up the girls, I was driving 104 miles a day. I also arranged for ballet lessons and drama lessons for the girls, which meant more driving. After fifteen months, I sadly told Mr. Burke I couldn’t keep my job at Community Lawyers. There was too much driving and not enough time.

  My girls were my first priority.

  In 1975, we left Colonial Drive because the homeowner wouldn’t stick to the original sale price he’d offered us. We found another house we liked on the bank of a canal in Point Royal, a Cutler Ridge neighborhood not far from the Colonial Drive area. Like our old house, the new one was also very close to Mother, which was nice for us. This was also the time I’d realized that Tananarive, Johnita, and Lydia needed to attend public schools. I liked the curriculum at the Horizon School for Gifted Children, but I was very worried about their racial isolation. Although the Point Royal area was not yet very integrated, its schools drew students from a wide area and all income levels and races. I knew that would be a better situation for them.

  On the first day of school, I took all three girls to Bel-Aire Elementary School, within walking distance, expecting to register them. The front office told me that Johnita and Lydia could stay, but Tananarive was a fifth grader, and fifth graders attended R. R. Moton Elementary School, which was in another neighborhood entirely, West Perrine.

  I had never heard of R. R. Moton Elementary School. The flyers our real estate agent had given us said that children attended Bel-Aire Elementary and Cutler Ridge Junior High. There had not been a word about R. R. Moton. Confused, Tananarive and I got into the car.

  When I drove Tananarive to R. R. Moton, I understood why
the school’s name had conveniently been left out of the flyers: West Perrine was a poor black neighborhood across the highway. Sending my daughter to a school in a black neighborhood pleased me, but it would not have pleased the majority of families moving onto our street. The school system achieved school integration by busing the children in first through fourth grades from West Perrine to Bel-Aire Elementary School, and then busing the older white children to R. R. Moton. I am a believer in integration, and I knew that busing was the only way to introduce students from different backgrounds to each other so they could all attend schools side by side, but I saw that particular system as unfair. Why should the youngest black children have to be bused while the youngest white kids could walk to school? As usual, the situation favored the families with more money.

  But R. R. Moton Elementary, named after black educator Robert Russa Moton, who worked with Booker T. Washington and became president of Tuskegee University, was everything I could have hoped for in a school for Tananarive. On the outside, the school needed paint and the fence needed repairing. Constructed in 1951, the building did not have air-conditioning like Bel-Aire Elementary, which was a much newer school, but inside the hallways were neat and colorfully decorated, and there were children and teachers of all races. Tananarive’s assigned teacher, Mrs. Janelle Harris, was black, and so was the school principal, Maedon S. Bullard, a woman with a lovely personality. Mrs. Bullard’s smile could light up a room, and she had a wonderful spirit.

  I met Mrs. Bullard right away because it was my custom to introduce myself to my children’s teachers and administrators, which is something I believe all parents should do as a matter of course. Not long after Tananarive started school at Moton, Mrs. Bullard came up to me and asked if I would run for president of the PTA.