Of course, Freedom in the Family is the most special book of all, and not only because it’s a family chronicle of one piece of the Struggle. It’s special for reasons I didn’t predict.
I am no longer the same person I was when I first began researching this book with Mom, when we went to the dude ranch to celebrate the beginning of our journey. To be honest, I began this work with an overwhelming sense of personal obligation, and I was full of self-doubt and trepidation, plowing ahead on faith because I knew how important this book was to Mom. I think I believed I owed it to her and that once it was finished I could proceed with my own life unfettered. That mind-set seems foreign to me now.
Mom and I have learned so much about each other while we have worked on this book, shaking some of our long-held impressions as a mother and child and discovering how to see each other as people—and friends. Each of us has surprised the other along the way, and it’s an experience I will always cherish. I have grown up since Mom and I interviewed my ailing godmother Judy Benninger in 1990, when I was barely out of graduate school and full of anxiety about how I would carve my place in the world. In 1990, Mom and I never imagined that we would be sending each other text files thousands of miles over the Internet to finish this book. Or that Mother, who was so healthy and lively then, would be gone.
Over time, I have come to realize that this book is not a gift to my parents, but to me—a spiritual force bringing healing and enlightenment. No matter how many other books I write after this one, it’s hard to imagine that any of them could make me feel so complete. Even if I had only written this book for our family’s private library and no one else’s eyes, I needed to write it. Every family needs to write its history.
I have a stepdaughter, Nicki, and my husband and I hope to have other children soon. I have felt great satisfaction in knowing that they will always be able to read Freedom in the Family. This book is also for my grandchildren who will arrive at some hazy point in my rapidly approaching future, when my parents will likely be gone and this book will be all my grandchildren will ever know of John D. Due Jr. and Patricia Stephens Due. Now I understand why Mom has always wanted to keep records of everything, and why my great-grandmother Lydia wrote me those letters about my Indiana ancestors even though her eyesight was poor and her hand was probably cramped with arthritis. They wanted me to know them and their stories, and through them I would better know myself and my stories.
Accidentally, I believe I may have discovered the remedy for my childhood fears of death and loss at last. Remembering is the one and only thing that can make time stand still.
Thirty-Three
PATRICIA STEPHENS DUE
“For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell. It’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
—James Baldwin
I believe in reparations.
I believe black people in this country are owed a great debt for what we have gone through, and for what our children and grandchildren are continuing to go through. I’m still waiting for my forty acres and a mule. I’m waiting for the day when I’ll be able to live my life without seeing how much racism is still a part of our society. Lydia has two sons, Tananarive has a stepdaughter, and both Tananarive and Johnita plan to have children of their own, and I am honestly afraid for my grandchildren. I know there have been improvements in this country, but I also see that there is so much more left to do, and there seem to be fewer people willing to do the work. Really, there seem to be so few people who are aware of how much work is left to do, which is even more troubling to me.
I didn’t expect my children to have so many battles left to fight. When Johnita was much younger, I remember her agonizing to me one night, in tears because she didn’t think she would be able to accomplish the kinds of things John and I have accomplished. I told her she shouldn’t feel like she has to accomplish the same things. I never wanted my children to have to undergo the experiences John and I did, but at the same time I want their generation to understand that just because some of us appear to have made it over, that doesn’t mean the war is won. Too many people have been left behind. I wanted to be able to see this fight through to the end, but the older I get, the more I realize that those of us who were fighting in the 1960s will not live to see the victory we wanted. I think some activists realized that truth a long time ago, which is why life was so difficult for them to bear. But I haven’t given up.
Of course, there have been things along the way I didn’t expect. I have some friends I discuss my children with, and sometimes we laugh to ourselves, saying, “Well, we taught them that everybody was the same, but we didn’t expect them to believe it.” Johnita married a white man from Ireland who works in finance, Mark Willoughby; and Lydia married a white computer programmer she met when she was in law school, Jonathan Greisz. Tananarive’s husband, Steve, is black, but his first wife—his daughter Nicki’s mother—is white, too. As a result, our family is all colors of the rainbow, and I have other black friends from the Movement who are in a similar situation. That’s why we laugh sometimes, but in a good-natured way.
It’s just one of those things we never predicted, like I’m sure Mother never predicted I would come home with a white man, John B., and announce in 1960 that we were engaged, or that Priscilla would marry a Dutchman. I have to admit, I had hoped all my daughters would go to college and find black men to marry like I did, but I love my sons-in-law. They are good to my daughters, which is all I ask of them. And I know Johnita, Lydia, and Tananarive well enough to feel confident that they will teach their children who they are. My biggest concern with interracial marriages is when parents do not raise those children with any knowledge of their black heritage, either from ignorance or shame. As far as I’m concerned, those parents are sending those children into the world completely unprepared. From the time they were born, I have given Justin and Jordan, Lydia’s sons, children’s books with African and African-American folktales. I want to teach them the freedom songs, too, just like I taught my children. I look forward to the day when they will be old enough to read this book, to learn their family history. I want them to have pride in themselves. I want them to know where they have come from.
This country may look different on the surface than it did forty years ago, but I know better. They should be ready.
In all honesty, I never set out to write a book about the Due family. I am a very private person, and there are many people who have known me for years, even my own sister, who have not been privy to some of the incidents I disclosed in this book. I had to think long and hard about exposing myself this way, but in the end I decided I would do whatever it took to tell the stories of the people I knew. In telling our family’s story, I believed, I could also shed some light on the stories of other civil rights families. I had to go beyond myself to write something I thought would be beneficial to young people—older readers, too, but especially young people.
As I write this, I am sixty-two years old. I can barely believe it. When I go through my papers and see everything I’ve been through and everything my family has been through, it’s amazing to me. This country really has not made it easy for us to exist here. Now, I feel as if it’s flying in front of my eyes, all of the running around trying to right the wrongs in the community and country, being knocked down time and time again—and getting up. Whether we were knocked down physically or emotionally, we were knocked down, and it took its toll.
I have a half dozen different kinds of pills I have to take every single day. Even Mother used to tell me she didn’t have to take as many kinds of pills as I do. As I look at all of these bottles of pills, I remember the collective toll all of this has had on me. It really is amazing I have lived to be sixty-two. I think about Stokely Carmichael, who has already died. He was younger than I am! A lot of fallen soldiers died so young. The system is still set up so that blacks do not live a
s long as whites in this country, and it’s no wonder. Sometimes it’s enough to knock you down for good. But no one has knocked me down.
I was inducted into the Florida A&M University Gallery of Distinction in 1987 in recognition of my civil rights work, and John and I were named “Living Legends” by the university in 1997, commemorating its 101st birthday. In 1998, FAMU awarded me and John the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award. “Your alma mater is proud of the courage you displayed as a major force in the civil rights movement,” my plaque reads.
Those awards were all very gratifying, especially in light of the problems I had with FAMU’s administration as a young person, but I felt most excited when Tananarive established a scholarship at FAMU named for me and John in 1997. I feel it is so important for new generations of young people to learn about the events that have taken place on FAMU’s campus, as well as all over this country. Through the years, I have given civil rights presentations to thousands of people at schools, colleges, churches, and civic organizations, sharing our history. Although sometimes it brings back painful memories, I think it is very important to have role-playing exercises with the students, giving them an opportunity to go back to an earlier time. Our youth are an immeasurable resource, and I want to give them as much as I can.
My priorities will continue to be education, health care, and sharing our history with young people. I’ve always liked the words in the freedom song “We Are Soldiers in the Army”: My mother was a soldier / She had her hands on the gospel plow / One day she got old, she couldn’t fight anymore / She said, “I’ll stand here and fight anyhow.”
I’m going to stand and fight as long as I can.
In December 2001, I went to another funeral, for Miss Daisy Young, who lived to be seventy-five. Her service was held two days after Christmas at Fountain Chapel AME Church in Tallahassee, where we held some of our CORE meetings in the 1960s. The seats were filled with hundreds of mourners. As John and I walked into the church, the choir was singing the hymn “There’s a Sweet, Sweet Spirit,” which was very befitting because there have been few spirits as sweet, or as strong, as Miss Daisy O. Young’s.
I didn’t know if I would be able to make it through Miss Young’s funeral. I really didn’t. Miss Young died on December 15, 2001, while I was writing this book. She had worked at FAMU until 1991, when she retired as the assistant admissions director after 39 years.1 She died right before Christmas, which was already such a hard time for me, bringing back memories of the awful shock of Mother’s death on Christmas morning the year before. To make matters worse, Tananarive and I had been unable to find Miss Young for some time because she had left Tallahassee, and we finally tracked her down only a couple of weeks before she died. We discovered that she was bedridden and living in Miami with a sister-in-law, Mrs. Theresa Young Brunt. I told Mrs. Brunt that I was about to leave town for a family Christmas and Kwanzaa celebration upstate, but I would drive to visit after the first of the year. I wanted to let Miss Young know I had finally finished writing this book. Every time I saw Miss Young on my visits to Tallahassee over the years, she said to me, “Pat, when are you going to finish that book?” But she died before I had the chance. I tell you, people slip away from us so quickly.
When the choir began singing “Amazing Grace,” I squeezed John’s hand and tried to pull my emotions away from that service. It had been a very difficult month; not only had we just passed the anniversary of Mother’s death, but on December 14 I’d had to put my Great Dane, Samson, to sleep after he had been part of our family for almost nine years. I had also just been to another funeral in Miami right before Thanksgiving. Anna Price, a dear friend of mine, had lost her mother, and I broke down during that funeral. I didn’t want that to happen again, especially once John pointed out that my name was on the program to give civil rights remembrances about Miss Young. Many of the people at the service knew Miss Young from her untiring work in her community, her church, and at AME conferences. The presiding elder, Bishop A. J. Richardson of the XIX Episcopal District, was there, but I wanted to remind everyone how much she had meant to the Movement.
I guess I always want to make sure the stories are told. That gives me strength.
Henry Steele, the son of Rev. C. K. Steele, who went to jail with me in 1960 as a high school student, was also at the service. So was Mr. Edwin M. Thorpe, the registrar at FAMU who had been Miss Young’s boss, warning her in the 1960s that her job was in danger.
The room was also full of ghosts, in my mind. I could imagine Rev. Steele there in his bow tie. I could also imagine Richard Haley, my music professor, who had been so close to Miss Young during the jail-in and the theater demonstrations. I guess all of us were there in spirit.
Bishop Richardson set the tone by telling the mourners how FAMU’s president, Dr. Gore, called the meeting of his faculty and staff to warn them against activism in the 1960s, telling them they should either stay on the ship or get off the ship—a story I had heard many times. Dr. Gore’s hands were shaking so badly during that speech, the bishop said, that his voice could barely be heard over the noise of the trembling microphone.
When it was my turn to speak, John walked with me up to the podium to give me moral support. Forty years earlier, John had proposed to me—the first time, anyway—on the porch of Miss Young’s house on Pinellas Street. I wondered again: Where does the time go?
“You know, Miss Daisy O. Young might have been very small in stature, but she was a giant,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “All of us are standing on her shoulders. Without people like Miss Young, Tallahassee’s history might have been very different.”
So I told them what I knew. About how Miss Young wore many hats, working with the NAACP, CORE, the SCLC, and the Inter-Civic Council, among other organizations. How she assumed the risk so few others in her place were willing to. How dangerous those times were.
“Miss Young told me a story,” I said. “She told me how one night in the nineteen sixties she and Mr. Haley were alone in the CORE office on Floral Street when they heard a knock at the door very late. They were very concerned. That’s just how bad it was in those times. Mr. Haley told her, ‘Miss Young, you go in the back. If I don’t come out in five minutes, you get out of here.’ And when he went to the door, there were two white men who’d brought seven thousand dollars to get the arrested students out of jail.”
As I spoke, those mourners sat up straight, their faces glowing, their eyes wide open.
They listened. They heard.
After The Gathering civil rights reunion we hosted some years ago, Tananarive told me that, to her, many of the activists sounded like we felt hopeless, which she could not understand. She said we tend to look at how much remains to be done rather than what has already been accomplished. Well, Tananarive is wrong about that. Just because I can see all the work that remains does not mean that I feel hopeless. I am full of hope.
First of all, I am very proud of all three of my daughters, who have grown up to be their own people. They have always tended to judge themselves against me and John, but they are unique individuals with their own special lives. I can honestly say that there are ways in which they have surpassed me. And I am glad. That’s what any mother wants for her children.
This book is one thing that gives me hope, as well as other books that tell our history. I am very grateful to Tananarive for helping me document the story at last. I will always be active, but even at the age of sixty-two, there are ways in which I now believe I can discover what I really want to do with my life. That is a wonderful, wonderful feeling.
There are also some other young people who have demonstrated to me through their actions that the Movement is not dead the way so many people seem to think. People of my generation tend to say that the younger generation has a short memory, but that isn’t always true. I saw that for myself in January 2000, during a sit-in outside of Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s office in Tallahassee. I felt as if I had stepped back in time.
John and I heard that two young Florida legislators, Sen. Kendrick Meek from Miami and Rep. Anthony Hill of Jacksonville, had staged a sit-in at the capitol. I have known Kendrick’s mother, a former state senator and U.S. congresswoman named Carrie Meek, for years; Kendrick is a few years younger than Tananarive, and I remember him when he was only a little boy. Now a Florida senator himself, Meek and another lawmaker had refused to leave Lieutenant Governor Frank Brogan’s office when Governor Bush refused to meet with them on the question of affirmative action. (The two offices are in the same suite.) Under a plan called the “One Florida Initiative,” Governor Bush was pushing to do away with affirmative action in university admissions and the state’s hiring and contracts. Florida is only one of several states toppling affirmative action gains. Truly, the clock is turning back. I have been saying that for years.
As soon as I heard about the sit-in, I knew John and I had to be there. We dropped everything and made reservations to fly to Tallahassee from Miami. As usual, before I left, I called Tananarive in Washington to leave a detailed telephone message so she could tell the other girls where we were. Ever since my days in the Movement, I never travel anywhere without leaving word of my whereabouts. On Tananarive’s voice mail, I quickly explained what had happened with the two legislators. Tananarive still had the recording of the message nearly two years later, so it was preserved: “They sat all night in the office,” I said with both pride and indignation in my voice. “John and I are headed to Tallahassee on a 1:45 P.M. flight. I don’t know where we’re staying. I’ll get back to you all later. We are in a hurry. We’re on our way to Tallahassee for you, for Justin, and for all the people who need to be treated with dignity. These people are crazy. And if you watch the news, you’ll see Governor Bush said, ‘Get their asses out of there.’ Well, we’re going to take our asses up there.”
Freedom in the Family Page 47
