by Jon Meacham
Then there were the black women, first Daisy, then Ella. And finally Grady.
I wish you could have seen her in 1950. Most of the women in my family ran from slender to bony. Grady was buxom. She wore a blue uniform and walked around our house on stout brown calves. Her skin was smooth. She had a gap between her front teeth, and so did I. One of the first things I remember Grady telling me was that as soon as she had enough money she was going to get a diamond set in her gap and it would drive the men wild.
There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which such a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism. Indeed, for the black person, the feigning of an expected emotion could be the very coinage of survival.
So I can only tell you how it seemed to me at the time. I was 7 and Grady was 16 and I adored her and I believed she was crazy about me. She became the weather in which my childhood was lived.
I was 14 when she went away. It would be many years before I realized that somehow, whether by accident or by plan, in a way so subtle, so gentle, so loving that it was like the budding and falling of the leaves on the pecan trees in the yard of that happy house in that cruel city in that violent time, Grady had given me the most precious gift that could be received by a pampered white boy growing up in that time and place. It was the gift of a free and unhateful heart.
Grady, it soon became clear, was a talker, and I was already known in my family as an incessant asker of questions. My brother, Jerry, who is 10 years older than I, says one of his clearest memories is of my following Grady around the house, pursuing her with a constant buzz of chatter.
That is funny, because what I remember is Grady talking and me listening—Grady talking as she did her chores, marking me with her vision of the way things were. All of my life, I have carried this mental image of the two of us:
I am 9 or 10 by this time. We are in the room where Grady did her ironing. Strong light is streaming through the window. High summer lies heavily across all of Birmingham like a blanket. We are alone, Grady and I, in the midst of what the Alabama novelist Babs Deal called “the acres of afternoon,” those legendary hours of buzzing heat and torpidity that either bind you to the South or make you crazy to leave it.
I am slouched on a chair, with nothing left to do now that baseball practice is over. Grady is moving a huge dreadnought of an iron, a G.E. with stainless steel base and fat black handle, back and forth across my father’s white shirts. From time to time, she shakes water on the fabric from a bottle with a sprinkler cap.
Then she speaks of a hidden world about which no one has ever told me, a world as dangerous and foreign, to a white child in a segregated society, as Africa itself—the world of “nigger town.” “You don’t know what it’s like to be poor and black,” Grady says.
She speaks of the curbside justice administered with rubber hoses by Bull Connor’s policemen, of the deputy sheriff famous in the black community for shooting a floor sweeper who had moved too slowly, of “Dog Day,” the one time a year when blacks are allowed to attend the state fair. She speaks offhandedly of the N.A.A.C.P.
“Are you a member?” I ask.
“At my school,” she says, “we take our dimes and nickels and join the N.A.A.C.P. every year just like you join the Red Cross in your school.”
It seems silly now to describe the impact of this revelation, but that is because I cannot fully re-create the intellectual isolation of those days in Alabama. Remember that this was a time when television news, with its searing pictures of racial conflict, was not yet a force in our society. The editorial pages of the Birmingham papers were dominated by the goofy massive-resistance cant of columnists like James J. Kilpatrick. Local politicians liked to describe the N.A.A.C.P. as an organization of satanic purpose and potency that had been rejected by “our colored people,” and would shortly be outlawed in Alabama as an agency of Communism.
But Grady said black students were joining in droves, people my age and hers. It was one of the most powerfully subversive pieces of information I had ever encountered, leaving me with an unwavering conviction about Bull Connor, George Wallace and the other segregationist blowhards who would dominate the politics of my home state for a generation.
From that day, I knew they were wrong when they said that “our Negroes” were happy with their lot and had no desire to change “our Southern way of life.” And when a local minister named Fred L. Shuttlesworth joined with Dr. King in 1957 to start the civil rights movement in Birmingham, I knew in some deeply intuitive way that they would succeed, because I believed that the rage that was in Grady was a living reality in the entire black community, and I knew that this rage was so powerful that it would have its way.
I learned, too, from watching Grady fail at something that meant a great deal to her. In January 1951, with the savings from her work in our home, she enrolled at Dillard. She made good grades. She loved the school and the city of New Orleans. But the money lasted only one semester, and when summer rolled around Grady was cleaning our house again.
That would be the last of her dream of becoming a registered nurse. A few years later, Grady married Marvin Hutchinson, a dashing fellow, more worldly than she, who took her to all-black nightclubs to hear singers like Bobby (Blue) Bland. In 1957, she moved to New York City to work as a maid and passed from my life. But I never forgot how she had yearned for education.
Did this mean that between the ages of 7 and 14, I acquired a sophisticated understanding of the insanity of a system of government that sent this impoverished girl to Louisiana rather than letting her attend the tax-supported nursing school that was a 15-cent bus ride from her home?
I can’t say that I did. But I do know that in 1963, I recognized instantly that George Wallace was lying when he said that his Stand in the School House Door at the University of Alabama was intended to preserve the Constitutional principle of states’ rights. What he really wanted to preserve was the right of the state of Alabama to promiscuously damage lives like Grady’s.
It is April 23, 1991. I approach the locked security gate of a rough-looking apartment courtyard in Atlanta. There behind it, waiting in the shadows, is a tiny woman with a halo of gray hair and that distinctive gap in the front teeth. Still no diamond. Grady opens the gate and says, “I’ve got to hug you.”
Grady’s apartment is modest. The most striking feature is the stacks of books on each side of her easy chair. The conversation that was interrupted so long ago is resumed without a beat.
Within minutes we are both laughing wildly over an incident we remembered in exactly the same way. Grady had known that I was insecure about my appearance as I approached adolescence, and she always looked for chances to reassure me, preferably in the most exuberant way possible. One day when I appeared in a starched shirt and with my hair slicked back for a birthday party, Grady shouted, “You look positively raping.”
“Grady,” my mother called from the next room, “do you know what you’re saying?”
“I told her yeah. I was trying to say ‘ravishing.’ I used to read all those True Confession magazines.”
Reading, it turned out, had become a passion of Grady’s life, even though she never got any more formal education. For the first time in years, I recall that it was Grady who introduced me to Ernest Hemingway. In the fall of 1952, when I had the mumps and The Old Man and the Sea was being published in Life, Grady sat by my bed and read me the entire book. We both giggled at the sentence: “Once he stood up and urinated over the side of the skiff. . . .”
Partly for money and partly to escape a troubled marriage, Grady explains, she had left Birmingham to work in New York as a maid for $125 a month. Her husband had followed.
“So we got an apartment, and the man I worked for got him a job,” Grady recalls. “And we got
together and we stayed for 31 years, which is too long to stay dead.”
Dead, I asked? What did that mean?
For Grady it meant a loveless marriage and a series of grinding jobs as a maid or cook. And yet she relished the life of New York, developing a reputation in her neighborhood as an ace gambler and numbers player. Through an employer who worked in show business, she also became a regular and knowledgeable attender of Broadway theater.
There were three children: Eric Lance, 37, works for the New York subway system; Marva, 33, is a graduate of Wilberforce University and works in the finance department at Coler Memorial Hospital in New York; Reed, 29, works for a bank in Atlanta, where Grady is a dietetic cook at Shepherd Spinal Center. It has not been a bad life and is certainly richer in experiences and perhaps in opportunities for her children than Grady would have had in Birmingham.
At one point Grady speaks of being chided by one of her New York–raised sons for “taking it” back in the old days in Birmingham.
“He said, ‘I just can’t believe y’all let that go on,’ ” she says. “I said: ‘What do you mean y’all? What could you have done about it?’ What were you going to do? If you stuck out, you got in trouble. I always got in trouble. I was headstrong. I couldn’t stand the conditions and I hated it. I wanted more than I could have.
“I always wanted to be more than I was,” she adds. “I thought if I was given the chance I could be more than I was ever allowed to be.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for Grady that she should be accused of tolerating what she had opposed with every fiber of her being. But how can a young man who grew up in New York know that the benign city he saw on visits to his grandmother each summer was not the Birmingham that had shaped his mother’s life?
Among black people in the South, Grady is part of a generation who saw their best chances burned away by the last fiery breaths of segregation. It is difficult for young people of either race today to understand the openness and simplicity of the injustice that was done to this dwindling generation. When you stripped away the Constitutional falderal from Wallace’s message, it was this: He was telling Grady’s mother, a working parent who paid property, sales and income taxes in Alabama for more than 40 years, that her child could not attend the institutions supported by those taxes.
Even to those of us who lived there, it seems surreal that such a systematic denial of opportunity could have existed for so long. I have encountered the same disbelief in the grown-up children of white sharecroppers when they looked at pictures of the plantations on which they and their families had lived in economic bondage.
For people with such experiences, some things are beyond explanation or jest, something I learn when I jokingly ask Grady if she’d like her ashes brought back to Pratt City when she dies.
“No,” she answers quite firmly, “I’d like them thrown in the East River in New York. I never liked Alabama. Isn’t that terrible for you to say that? You know how I hate it.”
Word that I had found Grady shot through my family. When the reunion luncheon was planned for my sister’s house, my first impulse was to stage-manage the event. I had learned in conversations with Grady that she remembered my mother as someone who had nagged her about the housework. None of the rest of us recollected theirs as a tense relationship, but then again, none of us had been in Grady’s shoes. In the end I decided to let it flow, and as it turned out, no one enjoyed the reunion more than Grady and my mother.
“You’re so tiny,” Grady exclaimed at one point. “I thought you were a great big woman. How’d you make so much noise?”
My mother was disarmed. In the midst of a round of stories about the bold things Grady had said and done, I heard her turn to a visitor and explain quietly, in an admiring voice, “You see, now, that Grady is a strong person.”
Grady is also a very funny person, a born raconteur with a reputation in her own family for being outrageous. It is possible, therefore, to make her sound like some ’50s version of Whoopi Goldberg and her life with my family like a sitcom spiced with her “sassy” asides about race and sex. But what I sensed at our gathering, among my brother, sister and parents, was something much deeper than fondness or nostalgia. It was a shared pride that in the Birmingham of the ’50s this astonishing person had inhabited our home and had been allowed to be fully herself.
“She spoke out more than any person I knew of, no matter what their age,” my sister observed. “She was the first person I’d ever heard do that, you see, and here I was 18 years old, and you were just a little fellow. This was the first person I’d ever heard say, ‘Boy, it’s terrible being black in Birmingham.’ ”
As Grady and my family got reacquainted, it became clear that my memory of her as “mine” was the narrow and selfish memory of a child. I had been blind to the bonds Grady also had with my brother and sister. Grady remembered my brother, in particular, as her confidant and protector. And although they never spoke of it at the time, she looked to him as her guardian against the neighborhood workmen of both races who were always eager to offer young black girls “a ride home from work.”
“Even if Jerry was going in the opposite direction,” Grady recalled, “he would always say: ‘I’m going that way. I’ll drop Grady off.’ ”
In my brother’s view, Grady’s outspokenness, whether about her chores or the shortcomings of Birmingham, was made possible through a kind of adolescent cabal. “The reason it worked was Grady was just another teen-ager in the house,” he said. “There were already two teen-agers in the house, and she was just a teen-ager, too.”
But it is also hard to imagine Grady falling into another family led by parents like mine. They were both from the Alabama hills, descended from Lincoln Republicans who did not buy into the Confederate mythology. There were no plantation paintings or portraits of Robert E. Lee on our walls. The mentality of the hill country is that of the underdog.
They were instinctive humanitarians. As Grady tells it, my father was well known among her relatives as “an open man” when it came to the treatment of his employees. I once saw him take the side of a black employee who had fought back against the bullying of a white worker on a loading dock—not a common occurrence in Birmingham in the ’50s.
The most powerful rule of etiquette in my parents’ home, I realize now, was that the word “nigger” was not to be used. There was no grand explanation attached to this, as I recall. We were simply people who did not say “nigger.”
The prohibition of this one word may seem a small point, but I think it had a large meaning. Hill people, by nature, are talkers, and some, like my father, are great storytellers. They themselves have often been called hillbillies, which is to say that they understand the power of language and that the power to name is the power to maim.
Everyone in my family seems to have known that my great long afternoon talks with Grady were about race. Their only concern was not whether I should be hearing such talk, but whether I was old enough for the brutality of the facts.
“I would tell Howell about all the things that happened in the black neighborhoods, what police did to black people,” Grady recalled to us. “I would come and tell him, and he would cry, and Mrs. Raines would say: ‘Don’t tell him that anymore. Don’t tell him that. He’s too young. Don’t make him sad.’ He would get sad about it.”
Grady told me in private that she recalled something else about those afternoons, something precise and specific. I had wept, she said, on learning about the murder of Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in Mississippi in 1955.
To me, this was the heart of the onion. For while some of the benefits of psychotherapy may be dubious, it does give us one shining truth. We are shaped by those moments when the sadness of life first wounds us. Yet often we are too young to remember that wounding experience, that decisive point after which all is changed for better or worse.
Every white Southerner must choose between two psychic roads—the road of racism or the road of brotherhood. Friends
, families, even lovers have parted at that forking, sometimes forever, for it presents a choice that is clouded by confused emotions, inner conflicts and powerful social forces.
It is no simple matter to know all the factors that shape this individual decision. As a college student in Alabama, I shared the choking shame that many young people there felt about Wallace’s antics and about the deaths of the four black children in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in September 1963. A year later, as a cub reporter, I listened to the sermons and soaring hymns of the voting rights crusade. All this had its effect.
But the fact is that by the time the civil rights revolution rolled across the South, my heart had already chosen its road. I have always known that my talks with Grady helped me make that decision in an intellectual sense. But I had long felt there must have been some deeper force at work, some emotional nexus linked for me, it seemed now on hearing Grady’s words, to the conjuring power of one name—Emmett Till—and to disconnected images that had lingered for decades in the eye of my memory.
Now I can almost recall the moment or imagine I can: Grady and I together, in the ironing room. We are islanded again, the two of us, in the acres of afternoon. We are looking at Life magazine or Look, at pictures of a boy barely older than myself, the remote and homely site of his death, several white men in a courtroom, the immemorial Mississippi scenes.
Thus did Grady, who had already given me so much, come back into my life with one last gift. She brought me a lost reel from the movie of my childhood, and on its dusty frames, I saw something few people are lucky enough to witness. It was a glimpse of the revelatory experience described by Graham Greene, the soul-shaking time after which all that is confusing detail falls away and all that is thematic shines forth with burning clarity.
Our reunion turned out to be a day of discovery, rich emotion and great humor. Near the end of a long lunch, my sister and my brother’s wife began pouring coffee. In classic Southern overkill, there were multiple desserts. Grady spoke fondly of my late Aunt Ada’s artistry with coconut cakes. Then she spoke of leaving Birmingham with “my dreams of chasing the rainbow.”
