Low Road

by Eddie B. Allen, Jr.

  Of course, the music was partly to blame.

  Shoo be bop be bop

  At least indirectly.

  Doo be doo be ske be doo

  Those bad-ass jazz cats were the coolest on the set. By now, their music could be heard everywhere. It was ridiculous to think that these musicians were all influenced by some kind of addiction, but by the same token, pushers jockeyed for unofficial celebrity endorsements. They offered free dope to the performers. At times, amazingly, the suppliers found out where touring musicians would stay overnight before the musicians ever got word. Jazz brothers served as walking billboards for whatever happened to be hip at the time. As a result, lots of fans got hooked, often confusing the talent and creative ability of those they revered with some kind of drug-induced brilliance that manifested itself in the sweetest sounds. It was one misleading, fucked-up fad. In truth, the musicians had spent plenty of sober hours honing their crafts. If they still carried those devastating tunes when they were high, it was because they were on autopilot. The legendary Charlie “Bird” Parker was a good example. A magnificent saxophonist, his beginnings resembled Donnie’s in some striking ways. Parker dropped out of school, like Donnie, at age fifteen. And the musician had also answered the call of heroin when he was still traversing through adolescence. As he rose through the ranks as a top-flight artist, his addiction became a hindrance, as would the habit of his band mate, trumpeter Miles Davis, who played in Bird’s quintet. Bird was idolized, nonetheless. It made little difference to his admirers that years of heroin and alcohol were helping to bring about his death. Who could know the numbers of others affected as destructively by the trend?

  Though no one could be sure what kind of music was playing in Donnie’s head, it was soon apparent that he had a problem. In fact, he probably didn’t make much of an effort to hide it. The cravings and the urgency to use were unlike any that healthy young people could have experienced, save hunger and the need to use the restroom. Donnie’s very blood had developed a dependency on the substance that held in its powdery components the powers to bring pleasure and pain. More than a few soldiers had become addicted to medications that numbed them to their physical discomforts. In civilian life, drug abuse became as normal to Donnie as waking up in the morning. As the weeks and months got behind him, his habit remained a companion. At some point, though, he recognized that the addiction was a destructive one. He approached his mother and Joanie, now an older child, with sincerity. Donnie believed he could kick his habit with just a little help and support. It wouldn’t be a simple challenge, but he felt capable of meeting it. Donnie asked Myrtle and Joanie to lock him in his bedroom. He anticipated how the withdrawal symptoms might cause him to react. They would have to promise, Donnie told them, that no matter how he persisted—ranting, raving, crying or pleading—not to let him out until he had completely rid his body of reliance on the smack that he pumped through his system. Myrtle had never imagined that she would be frightened of her special boy. But the reality of the screams and curses that eventually came from behind the locked door were chilling. Myrtle and Joanie could only listen. If there had been any temptation to free him from his self-imposed solitary confinement, his aggressive reactions to being suddenly without drugs at his disposal removed them.

  “Open this goddamn door!”

  Donnie was like a man possessed. And this was exorcism.

  “Let me live my own life!” he screamed. “Aaaaah! Goddammit! Mind your own damned business!”

  Under ordinary circumstances he never spoke to his mother or baby sister this way. Now, he was a person they didn’t recognize. Intense chills, nausea, and cramps could leave a junkie with feelings of sickness that no visit to the pharmacy would be able to cure. It was simply more of a monster than Donnie could handle. Ultimately, he escaped from his prison, and did so repeatedly after any number of similar attempts. He might be reduced to groveling like a pitiful child one day, asking “Please, Mama,” or muster all his might and fury to break the door down the next. Whether he had to beg and plead, tear loose hinges, or tunnel through the floor to the ground outside, he was determined to get a fix. Once he had found his medicine, he returned home content, as if he had not felt near the verge of death just a few hours earlier. His efforts were honest ones; his opponent more worthy than he’d imagined. Myrtle and Joanie kept trying, despite the terror it brought them. After all, they loved Donnie.

  * * *

  Not completely aware of the vice her brother struggled against, Marie was contending with other stress. She had married at seventeen, while still a student at Cass Technical High School in 1951. Myrtle and Joe were against it, but she raised such hell that they finally relented and gave their consent. Charles Glover had grown up in the neighborhood along with Marie and Donnie. He was employed at the post office and struck Marie as a pretty stable young man. At nineteen, he decided he was ready to be a husband. Not long afterward, the couple began having children. Marie’s first baby died, but in all, there would be three boys: Charles Jr., Robert, and Sammy. In time, Marie began to see another side of her young husband. Charles was a gambler, and she came to view their marriage as a mistake. He became abusive toward Marie. Charles took to manhandling, not difficult to manage with a lady of Marie’s weight and size. She was wholly unaccustomed to anything besides peace, refuge, and formal table settings in a home. Now, with not only herself, but also little ones to consider, she had to review her options carefully. She learned to fight back. Marie had gotten around a bit after all, it appeared. One time she opened up Charles’s head with a fireplace poker. She borrowed a page from the days of slavery resistance and crushed bits of glass into her husband’s food. Occasionally, she would add a laxative to the recipe. Marriage became psychological warfare. Then Donnie came to mind. Knowing that he was around gave Marie relief from her sense of helplessness. After getting the word from her, Donnie rounded up a few of his partners and they paid Charles a visit. The confrontation made its point, but the marriage would not last.

  Before she was twenty, Marie became a dancer for the Harlem Globetrotters. Neither well-traveled nor from New York, the athletes, whose collective name was conceived as a marketing gimmick, had at one time been regarded one of the best basketball teams in the world. During the course of her road trips, Marie would encounter a player who briefly appeared on the Globetrotters roster before signing professionally with the Philadelphia Warriors. At seven feet and one inch tall, Wilt Chamberlain was destined for greatness. He had attracted attention since his days as a high-school athlete on the East Coast. Chamberlain and the eldest Goines daughter began dating. At barely sixty vertical inches, Marie chuckled when she thought of the fact that she was the height of “Wilt the Stilt’s” belt buckle, which suited him just fine. The high-scoring center was only one of several celebrities Marie met during her travels. She had also become a “pony girl,” or backup dancer, for Cab Calloway. While Marie toured the nation with the different troupes, she observed a society in the process of change. There had been no reported lynchings since 1951, but in 1955, three Negroes fell victim to the familiar southern evil. One was fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Louis Till.

  The boy had badgered Mamie Till Bradley to allow him to visit family in the town of Money, Mississippi, as they had paid him a visit in Illinois. One day during his trip in late August, Emmett and about eight of his cousins took his uncle’s old Ford to a nearby market in Money, where they had what proved to be a fateful encounter with the pretty white clerk, Carolyn Bryant. Big-talking Emmett was urged to make a pass at her. So, choosing not to back down, the city slicker went inside, where he hugged the woman’s waist and squeezed her hand, whistling on his way out. Bryant claimed later that he said “Bye, baby,” as his companions rushed him away, fearful that he had gone much too far.

  Days later, outraged men, including Bryant’s husband, showed up with pistols at the home of Emmett’s uncle, Mose Wright, about 2 A.M. In short order, they snatched the boy outside and disappeared
with him. His body, nude, brutalized, and decomposing, was later discovered by another teenager while he was fishing in the Tallahatchie River. It appeared that Emmett had been put through a hellish torture: A seventy-five-pound cotton gin fan was fastened to his neck with barbed wire, his skull was partially crushed, and an eye was missing. Hundreds of news reporters arrived at the rural courthouse where two white men were put on trial for taking a black life. The judge refused to let the store clerk give her testimony, believing that it would inflame the jury, though she had already done plenty of talking about what had occurred. Neither Bryant’s husband, nor his half-brother, took to the witness stand. None of Emmett’s young cousins who’d been at the market would testify, either. One of the boys who had accompanied Emmett to Mississippi was prevented from returning, for fear that his safety might be at stake. At sixty-four, Mose Wright, however, took perhaps the boldest step of anyone toward gaining justice for his nephew. It was an unwritten rule that black folks didn’t testify against whites in court, but the old man was asked to identify the men he had watched helplessly dragging Emmett off into the darkness of the early morning. Wright stood and pointed at the codefendants, saying “There he.” In the broken English that it was delivered, the statement was no less dramatic and should have been no less damning. But an all-white jury deliberated for just over an hour, and a juror arrogantly confided in one reporter that it had only taken this long because they stopped for a soda break. The men were found not guilty of both the murder and the more obvious charge of kidnapping. Public outcry rejecting the verdict provided momentum for what eventually became an era dedicated to challenging the existing social system. “The life of a Negro in Mississippi,” declared one foreign newspaper, “is not worth a whistle.” Mamie Till Bradley became a lecturer, referring to her son as a “little nobody who shook up the world.”

  Demonstrations had little immediate effect on justice in Mississippi. Mose Wright left the state to be with his Chicago family, while the men who killed his nephew stayed behind to brag about their crime. The pair received $4,000 from a publication in exchange for telling their story: They claimed they had abducted Emmett and brutalized him to frighten the child, which they had acknowledged during the trial. But when the boy showed he was too proud to beg for mercy or apologize, they said, they had little choice but to murder him. The racists said Till was shot in the head and then they threw him in the river after he was given one last chance to deny believing his humanity equaled that of a Caucasian yet refused it. J. W. Milam seemed as if his only regret in the child’s killing was that Emmett hadn’t known better, when he was quoted as saying: “What else could we do? He was hopeless. He thought he was as good as any white man. I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life. I like niggers—in their place. I know how to work ’em. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice.”

  Marie found that in Alabama, where she also performed, there was a different type of notice being given. Months after the Till case, the city’s capital of Montgomery found itself crippled significantly. In December 1955, 42,000 Negro residents began a year-long boycott of the public transportation system. Ordinance called for black passengers to sit in the rear, gradually decreasing their allotted space as more white passengers boarded. The previous year, on May 17, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that separate-but-unequal facilities in education were unconstitutional. Five different cases that had challenged the legality of segregation in schools had originated in South Carolina, Virginia, Kansas, Delaware, and the District of Columbia. Oliver Brown et al. v. Board of Education became the landmark decision that decried the separation of white and black children in public schools. Oliver Brown had tried to send his eight-year-old daughter to an all-white elementary school located just a short distance from her home in Topeka, Kansas. The court ruled unanimously that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Discrimination through the school system had a detrimental effect on black youth, the court decided. Separate school facilities created feelings of inferiority related to their standing in the community. Substandard buildings and accommodations, entirely apart from the inability to go to school with white children, might have been just as damaging to their self-esteem.

  For whatever reason, though, the Montgomery power structure viewed bigotry on the bus as a whole unrelated category. Boycott organizers distributed approximately 52,000 fliers asking blacks to find alternatives to public transportation. Armed with shotguns, police roamed the streets seeking any intimidators who forced other blacks off the city vehicles. Later, the cops threatened to arrest taxi drivers who gave discount rates to black passengers. Aside from cabs and moving about by foot, former bus riders joined car pools, but they caught similar hell in attempting to get where they wanted to go. Police harassed the drivers, citing them for traveling too fast or too slowly. It wouldn’t have taken a discerning person to recognize that Montgomery’s leadership was feeling economic pressure. The segment of the population it had alternately disregarded and exploited was taking away its power. By the end of the demonstration another court ruling outlawed segregated seating in public transportation. The victory, however, had not come without its casualties. Along with the legal intimidation they faced from police, members of the black community were given hell by the White Citizens Council. Believing that there were outside forces influencing the protest, the racists turned their attention toward boycott leaders. Other groups went as far as setting off bombs at black homes and churches. It was a contradictory and confusing message to suggest that the presence of Negroes on Montgomery’s buses was less desirable than that of whites but to simultaneously terrorize Negroes for their refusal to ride those very same buses.

  Even in the Baughs’ hometown of Little Rock, where Marie had family roots, there was resistance and upheaval. President Eisenhower ordered 1,000 military paratroopers to Arkansas to protect children who were only a few years younger than the eldest Goines child at the time. Whites had become rabidly violent after efforts got underway to integrate Central High School, pursuant to the Brown decision. Activist Daisy Bates helped coordinate the admission of the first group of nine black students, who became known as the Little Rock Nine. The governor made his pro-segregation feelings known, while other racists urged white children to work hard at driving their new classmates into submission. A sampling of newspaper headlines told the story of the Nine’s struggle and the community’s resistance to the idea of having them walk the same halls white children walked: “Guard platoon sent to school after threats of bombing”; “Another racial clash reported at Central High”; “Dynamite found at CHS…”; “Another bomb scare disrupts CHS routine…”; “CHS plagued by more bomb scares”; “New bomb scare at Central High proves false”; “Another bomb tossed at LC Bates’ house”; “Negro parents take insults, pray for children’s safety.” The students were routinely shoved down stairs, kicked, tripped, threatened, and attacked with ink on their clothes, books, lockers, and seats. One of the children wrote in her diary about a day she experienced in February: “I got hit across the back with a tennis racquet. I managed to smile and say, ‘Thank you.’ Andy said, ‘What did you say, nigger?’ I repeated, ‘Thank you very much.’ I spit up blood in the restroom.” The governor had called in the National Guard to prevent the Nine from entering the building to begin with. When he was compelled—but only by a court order—to remove the guardsmen, a hysterical, raging mob defied police and forced their removal from the school. The troops Eisenhower ordered would remain on guard for the rest of the school year after the Nine returned. The governor ultimately closed Central High and other public buildings in Little Rock, saying he refused to open the schools as integrated institutions. He became a regional hero, as southerners attempted to let it be known that they were not prepared for a new way of life that included sitting next to Negroes on buses, in classrooms or elsewhere. Not until 1960 were the schools forced to reopen.

  By the time Marie returned to the relative peace of Detroit,
she was prepared to settle. She went back to reside with the family at the Goines home. It didn’t take long for her to realize that things had changed considerably where the stability of her siblings was concerned. Even as she had traveled the country, witnessing various forms of failure, success, and survival in cities all over the map, she had seen nothing like the full-blown addiction of a real-life junkie. The boy who called her “Wee Wee” had grown up but into someone possessed by something she didn’t truly understand. Smack. It had been given this, among other nicknames, because of the heroin addict’s habit of smacking his or her arm in order to find a vein where it could be injected. The whole filthy notion was about as far from Marie’s experience as traveling to the moon, which astronauts had only recently achieved. Donnie had become a captive, and she could find no hope of freeing her brother. Part of him would have had to acknowledge that he wanted no taste of this freedom anyway. Freedom from such a bittersweet high would mean a sober reality. A sober reality would mean a cold, hard look at the stress and challenges of his readjustment to the existence he’d left behind in his late childhood. Whatever the source of his anxiety or pain, whatever the source of his irritation, getting high was a form of relief. Searching for a job, meeting his parents’ expectations, even brushing his teeth or washing his ass—it could all wait, said the all-mighty, all-soothing needle. Every little thing would be just fine.