Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  I nearly laughed. Me? A PTA president?

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about baking cakes and cookies,” I told her.

  Mrs. Bullard shook her head, and I could see there was serious business in her eyes. “Mrs. Due,” Mrs. Bullard said, “if I needed someone to bake cookies, I have plenty of other parents who can do that. I’ve heard about your civil rights and community involvement, and I need somebody who can fight for this school.”

  R. R. Moton’s existence was very much in danger, Mrs. Bullard told me. The school had been desegregated because of a court order, but a vocal group of white parents didn’t like the situation, believing that the neighborhood was dangerous. White families tended to “get religion” when their children were old enough for Moton, sending them to private schools instead, so Moton’s population was shrinking. Even while Moton was under-enrolled, white parents had lobbied the school system to build another elementary school in a nearby white area, with the hope that their children could go to the new school for fifth and sixth grades, instead of to Moton.1

  Perrine’s families were really almost at war with one another, I came to learn. Perrine’s unofficial dividing line was South Dixie Highway. Tananarive was bused with the white children to Moton from the east side, but my sympathies lay with the school, which was located in a black neighborhood on the west side.

  Moton tried very hard. I think its disadvantaged surroundings had forced the staff to raise the bar in terms of the school’s programming. Quality was not the issue. R. R. Moton Elementary School had an excellent staff. While Tananarive was there, the school was one of only ten elementary schools in the state to win a prestigious “Little Red School-house” award, offering its students accelerated math and literature classes, modern dance, a macramé club, a creative writing club, an art club, a drama club, a school newspaper, Cub Scout pack, school band, and guitar ensemble.2 Tananarive played trumpet in the band, and she won a part in the school production of Mary Poppins, which was only an amateur production, but students and teachers were so dedicated that I thought Moton’s play nearly rivaled the version of The Wizard of Oz Tananarive had once starred in at the well-recognized Coconut Grove Children’s Theater.

  The stereotype of the substandard inner-city school did not match R. R. Moton Elementary. But I’m afraid many white parents saw the poverty surrounding the school and were afraid it was something that would reach out and harm their children, rather than simply serving as a lesson that some people in this world are less fortunate. For my part, I was glad Tananarive was forced to acknowledge the existence of poverty. I had always tried to take the girls to poorer neighborhoods so they could see how many black people lived. My children grew up with certain advantages, but I did not want them to develop a rose-colored view of the world.

  Another thing Mrs. Bullard told me bears mentioning: She liked the fact that I visited the school so often, three or four times a week, because I served as an example to other neighborhood parents who were not accustomed to being participants in their children’s education. Not every school will face a battle for existence, but all schools need parents.

  I told Mrs. Bullard I would help her keep the school open.

  I don’t think I realized what I was stepping into, but the fight that ensued demanded as much of my energy as any civil rights campaign from the 1960s. The opposition to Moton was organized under a parents’ group called PAGE, the Parents’ Association for Good Education. That group definitely kept me running. I had to drive the twenty-one miles between my house and the Dade County School Board meetings twice a month just to keep up with the latest developments in that fight. It dragged on for several years. By the time Johnita arrived at Moton two years later, in the fall of 1977, the school’s student body had been slashed from 436 to 230, and the number of teachers had been cut from 55 to 28. Many of the arts programs that had won it honors in the past were cut because of lack of staff.3

  PAGE also made the fight personal, singling out three of Moton’s black teachers with charges that they took long coffee breaks and paddled students. They raised charges with the Professional Practices Council, a state oversight agency. Those charges caused a good deal of stress to some excellent teachers, and although one of the teachers acknowledged “tapping” a student with a ruler, I believe to this day the charges were only raised in the effort to close the school.4 As far as I’m concerned, PAGE launched a witch-hunt at R. R. Moton Elementary.

  Not only did I have that to contend with, but at the same time, Neal Adams, a black Metro-Dade commissioner who was very involved with the NAACP, had appointed me to the Dade County Commission on the Status of Women. I had to go to those meetings, too, and they happened to fall on the same night as the school board meetings. Usually, I tried to go to the school board meeting first to keep pace with PAGE, which always had representatives there, and I knew school board politics well enough to understand that the school board members were often swayed by whichever group seemed to be the most dedicated and to carry the most clout. When my appearance at the school board was complete, I drove over a few blocks to the courthouse for the meetings for the Dade County Commission on the Status of Women, but I monitored the school board meeting on the radio while I drove. Occasionally I heard the school board about to reverse an action that had been made while I was there, so I had to turn around and go back. It got so bad that I would spend seven and eight hours at every school board meeting just so I could be certain they wouldn’t change their minds and try to destroy Moton after I had left for another meeting.

  Emotions were running high during that time. The parents from PAGE were very emotional, and of course the Moton staff felt under siege, with teachers’ livelihoods at risk, so they were very emotional, too. I remember one school board member, Mrs. Ethel Beckham, telling me once, “With all that emotion and stress, it’s just going to make you sick.” I knew she was probably right, but I could not back down. I believed in my cause. This was a neighborhood institution—my own children’s school—with a majority-black staff that needed an advocate, and I felt I had no real choice.

  Mrs. Bullard knew how much she was asking of me. Just like those women who used to come to my hotel room in St. Petersburg at 4:00 A.M. so I could go sit in front of garbage trucks, Mrs. Bullard understood that my children needed to be looked after. She made certain there were people to stay with my daughters, that their homework was monitored, that they were given meals to eat when I was not at home. As important as the fight to save Moton became to me, I had learned from living with the Steeles and reading about others who were very involved that families could suffer in the cause of activism. I constantly prioritized what I could do, which meant there were times I did not go downtown. I felt torn, but my children came first.

  I’m happy to say that R. R. Moton Elementary School is still open and is today a magnet school for the arts, with a program that attracts students of all races from all over the county. Rebuilt after Hurricane Andrew in 1992, it still stands in a poverty-stricken neighborhood as an example of excellence in a community badly in need of good news.

  Integration, to me, never meant that we should give up everything we held dear. We have excellence to share, too.

  When Mrs. Maedon S. Bullard died in 1996 at the age of sixty-eight, she instructed her family to ask Tananarive to write her obituary in the Miami Herald. Tananarive, who was a features writer and columnist twenty years after I first took her through the doors of R. R. Moton, agreed. Mrs. Bullard died so young! As I read her obituary, my memories of my days as a PTA president came back to me. I wonder sometimes if Mrs. Bullard’s fight for her school in the mid-1970s helped cut her life short, combined with countless other battles blacks have been forced to fight.

  I don’t think I could ever calculate how many years all of us have lost.

  Again and again over the years, I’ve realized that the lessons I learned during the mass struggles of the 1960s can be applied to other aspects of life.

 
Based on my experiences as a parent, I’d been involved with Title I, a federally funded education program signed into law in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson that provides funds to school districts nationwide for disadvantaged children. In Dade County, we had a particular focus on math and reading. As a Bel-Aire Elementary School parent, I’d been asked to serve as chair of the Bel-aire Title I Parent Advisory Council, as mandated by the federal government in order for schools to receive their funding. I eventually became president of the Area and Dade County Parent Advisory Council, then the Florida Title I Parent Advisory Council. At one point, I was president of all three of these groups.

  All of these parent groups were organized to monitor and participate in the education of their children, especially where Title I funds were concerned. Although this was no longer considered a part of the civil rights movement, I saw it as an extension of what we had been fighting for. Education, to me, was the most important thing I could be involved in, helping to build the foundation for the next generation, and parental involvement was the key ingredient to children getting a good education. If parents weren’t there and didn’t understand what their responsibilities were, the schools would do whatever they wanted.

  The Florida Parent Advisory Council had been headed previously by a very good-natured man who allowed the state to run everything. The state made up the agenda, the state decided what would happen, and the state decided when it would happen. That is not the way I do things. I was urged to run for president because my experiences spanned the entire state. I’d been born in Quincy, I’d grown up in Palm Beach County, I’d interned in Jacksonville, I’d worked throughout North Florida, and now I lived in South Florida. I never ran based on my civil rights work because there were too many conservative whites among my constituency. I had the support of parents and school administrators as well, especially Johnnie McMillian, a very involved parent specialist in Dade County. She and other administrators and parents spent many hours assisting me as I finalized my platform. (Based on that experience, I later asked McMillian—who has since changed her name to Adora Obi Nweze and is now the president of the Florida State Conference of NAACP Branches—to chair a committee during the planning of the 1980 NAACP convention in Miami Beach.) I won that election because blacks and whites from throughout the state elected me on the basis of parental involvement and my deep belief in education.

  At the same time, I was education chair for the Florida Conference of State NAACP Branches, and the NAACP had some of the same concerns as Title I, and vice versa. It was funny during that time to see all of these conservative whites sitting around the table hashing out a strategy with me, and they’d say, “Well, we don’t want the NAACP riding on our coattails.” They didn’t know I was representing the NAACP, and I was using many of the same ideas in both venues. But as parents, we would all become much better trained and more sophisticated about having a voice when it came to spending and programs for our children.

  Unfortunately, parents have to fight for representation, too. Nothing comes easily.

  In Dade County, Title I was responsible for bringing millions of dollars into the school system, but parents had to sign off on all new proposals. That was the way it was set up. Sometimes the administration failed to give parents adequate time to review documents, and under my leadership we insisted on following the letter of the law—that is, having the opportunity to review and have input before signing off. That was one of the reasons I had a disagreement with Dr. Johnny L. Jones, Dade County’s first black superintendent of schools.

  I was out of town attending a national meeting, and Dr. Jones wanted to present something to the school board, saying the parents had approved it. Since the parent representatives were out of town, he had someone contact me because I was president and could poll the other parents. I realized I had been presented with a very long document, and I knew I could not approve it over the telephone. I had no idea what it was, so how could I properly explain it to the other parents and hope to reach an informed consensus? I thought they should have presented it to us in time to give us an opportunity to study it properly. I had learned even before my days at Community Lawyers never to sign my name to anything unless I knew exactly what I was signing. The way I see it, the schools system would say it wanted parental involvement but, to expedite things, sometimes the parents were rushed.

  Regrettably, that situation caused a rift between me and Dr. Jones. Dr. Jones was a man of strong will who did not want to have to regularly butt heads with me because I have a strong will, too. During his time as school superintendent, he really did a lot for black children. For instance, he insisted that teachers include more minority children in gifted education. I would never try to take that away from him. He insisted that all children develop to their fullest potential, and his strong style of leadership caused much racism to surface among the teachers charged with carrying out his vision. I respected him for his efforts, but I would not lie down for anyone simply for the sake of political friendships. I am a real stickler in that way.

  When he asked me to sign off on a document I had never seen, I told Dr. Jones to wait until the parents returned, and he did not like that one bit. He got very angry, and I believe he retaliated by having people close to him control the parent elections. In that way, through manipulation, he was able to have me ousted from my role as president in Dade County.

  The other parents were very upset, and people encouraged me to take him to court, but I stopped and took stock of the entire situation, not only the situation as it affected me. Would suing Dr. Jones and having a nasty fight between the biggest black Parent Advisory Council and the black superintendent do the children any good? Honestly, if he had not been doing a good job otherwise, I would have fought him tooth and nail, race aside, but he was making a positive impact, so I decided to let it go. The other parents did not agree with me, but it was my decision alone. I have always acted according to my personal principles, whether or not other people have understood or appreciated my position. Whether it was a police officer, a judge, a school superintendent, or my own colleagues, that has never changed about me. I have lived my life trying to do what I think is right for everyone, not necessarily for myself.

  Then Dr. Jones was accused of stealing money and equipment and having his home fitted with gold-plated plumbing fixtures, and the situation changed yet again. After the school board met on a Sunday to vote him out of his post, I was more convinced than ever that his political enemies had simply taken advantage of an opportunity to get rid of him. I organized mass meetings and protests over it. Some people who knew our history might have found that puzzling, but once again, this was a decision that had nothing to do with me personally. I wanted only what was right.

  Although Dr. Jones eventually won an appeal of his conviction and there were not sufficient witnesses to try him a second time, that situation destroyed him, and some of what he’d tried to build was lost with him. I think a lot of people lost jobs and were shuffled around once he was gone. No one can tell me that racism didn’t play a part in that situation. During this time, Mother was working as an occupational specialist at a middle school in South Dade, and she saw with her own eyes how people on staff at the school had written notes calling Dr. Jones a “nigger” and a “coon” on the school bulletin board long before the plumbing controversy. And some of these people were teachers responsible for the education of black children!

  I’ll never forget how excited I was about the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, but many other activists and I have come to wonder if school integration was really the right thing for black children. Our black schools may have been poorly equipped compared to the white schools, but how do you fix a value on having teachers who love black children? The WHITE ONLY and COLORED signs came down in the 1960s because we worked to change the laws, but changing laws isn’t the same as changing hearts and minds.

  Changing hearts and minds is a battle all its own. And it will be the hardest o
ne to win, especially since too many of our young people have been fooled into thinking the “old days” of fighting for their rights are over.

  Or they don’t know how to fight at all, unless they’re fighting each other.

  Thirty-Two

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “You can’t be nobody but who you are … that shadow isn’t nothing but you growing into yourself. You either got to grow into it or cut it down to fit you. That’s all you got to measure yourself against that world out there.”

  —August Wilson

  Why do you write horror?

  Since I have been best known for my horror novels, that’s one of the most common questions posed to me during interviews or bookstore appearances. I’ve been making up my answer as I go. It could be because my mother is a die-hard horror movie fan, and my sisters and I were raised on weekend Creature Feature movies, The Mummy and Dracula and The Fly. Or, it could be because a high school friend gave me a copy of Stephen King’s The Shining on my sixteenth birthday, and although I had never read King before, I was hooked from the first sentence. That book made my eyes widen, my heart pound, and my palms sweat. I wanted to recapture that feeling again and again, and by the time I started writing novels myself I’d figured out that the way to really tap into it would be to write about my own deepest fears.

  Loss, for one. And death, for another.

  I’ve always lived with a wary knowledge of death. I used to lie awake as a child and imagine what it would feel like to be nothing. I knew I was only here temporarily, and even as a child, time always passed too quickly for my liking. I hoped there was an afterlife, as the Bible taught, but even if the afterlife was waiting, I was not ready to say goodbye to this world, and I didn’t think I ever would be. For all its problems, I have always loved life. I have always felt blessed, in part because my parents taught us to feel blessed, and in part because plain common sense told me so. My parents loved me. I had a roof over my head. I had my writing. I had two sisters who, for all our bickering, I knew would forever be my best friends. Death was the robber waiting to steal everything I held dear.