Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family (10 page)

Because they often worked on school issues, the CORE people talked a lot about children, but very few kids ever came to these sessions with their parents. The exceptions were the Deans. Roz Dean had been high school friends with my mother’s sister Esther. She had joined CORE along with her husband, Alan, who was black. When meetings were held at our house during the daytime they often brought their sons Michael and Clifton. The two families became close. We spent many
Saturdays and Sundays at their home and they often came to see us. Michael and Clifton played with us in the alley behind the house and on the sidewalk out front. I think this must have been where I first heard the phrase “nigger lover” muttered by someone passing by on the sidewalk.

In this time, from 1961 to 1967, Chicago was one of the hot spots in a national civil rights movement that was gathering strength. The tactics used at protests were expanded to include passive resistance and participants expected to be arrested. Many people received special training—they were taught to make themselves limp and heavy—right in our living room. Afterward we would play at this activity, imitating the adults we saw lying like rag dolls on the floor of our apartment.

Although we were too young to understand exactly what my mother was doing as she left for a few hours of marching, we noticed that she returned with a lot to discuss. On three or four occasions she stayed away overnight because she had been arrested. These arrests, as I later learned, were usually part of a plan. CORE trained volunteers in the methods of civil disobedience and passive resistance. When the protesters respectfully refused police orders to stop their picketing and move along, the officers had no choice but to charge them with disorderly conduct and take them into custody. As they tried to do this, the protesters would go limp and fall to the ground. By relaxing as much as possible they made their bodies difficult to handle, which turned any effort at mass arrests into a laborious spectacle of teams of police officers hauling people one by one onto paddy wagons and buses.

Arrests increased the chance that a protest or demonstration would get media attention. They also signaled that the issue at hand, whether it was education, housing, employment, or anything else, was so serious that otherwise law-abiding citizens were willing to go to jail in order to be heard. Although there were few of them, the presence of women, especially white women who could be mothers, added an important touch of diversity to these scenes.

My mother’s first arrest was in Chicago, and probably occurred
around 1963, when people all over the country attended demonstrations to show their support for Martin Luther King Jr. and the campaign for racial equality that blazed across the South. My mother spent one night in a Cook County jail after she was arrested with many other civil rights protesters. A friend helped my dad take care of us while she was gone. Having seen pictures and TV film reports of police using nightsticks and turning dogs and fire hoses on protesters, we were a little anxious, but with enough reassurance we were able to go to sleep and by morning she was back at home.

On two other occasions, my mother was arrested in Evanston, a wealthy northern suburb that is home to both Northwestern University and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The first time she was dragged in by police who had responded to complaints about pickets disrupting traffic at a real estate company. She was released by a judge who said she would be dealt with more harshly if it happened again. The second time someone reported that she was back at the real estate agency and was the “ringleader” of a protest. Finding herself in serious trouble, my mother called on a family friend who was a lawyer. She expected that Jerry Jaffe, an older man with a quiet legal practice, would help her find a younger attorney who knew his way around the criminal courts. Instead he took up the cause himself. He got my mother released and then told her, “Thanks for reminding me why I became a lawyer in the first place.”

Although a middle-aged lawyer might have gotten a certain charge out of my mother’s case, she did not take any of these incidents lightly. Jail is jail, even if you know you won’t be there for very long, and she worried about us at home. Indeed, we were so accustomed to her attention and our nighttime routine that we were always upset by her absence. And though my father supported her unequivocally, there were times when our grandfather Herman thought she was risking too much. He knew the tough-minded people who were standing against integration in places like the Back of the Yards neighborhood on the South Side. They had shown him their willingness to fight during union battles in the 1930s and ’40s. Herman had no doubt that they
could turn violent if they felt provoked. He was afraid that my mother would find herself in the wrong place at a moment when shouts were answered by rocks, fists, and baseball bats.

Years before, when she had been more or less forced to give up her own shot at an education, my mother had been a girl unable to speak on her own behalf. Now she was a woman who saw that the political system was bullying powerless children in a similar way and she had discovered she could do something about it. Having found her voice, both in the civil rights movement and as an adult with her own family, my mother stood up to Herman. She told him she knew how to take care of herself and would continue her activism. The lessons she taught us through her courage and assertiveness were as important as any other form of mothering. They also showed us that people can evolve and grow and that women can be full and multifaceted human beings, not just nonstop caregivers. In these ways marching and shouting and getting arrested were a way for our mother to express who she was.

The subtext of my mother’s civil rights work, especially the bit about women as fully engaged human beings, was not something Herman would have grasped in a conscious way. I don’t think that even my mother understood, at that time, all the factors that drove her to fight for kids and families who were being oppressed. But she made it very clear that she was not going to stop attending the protests or welcoming the neighborhood chapter of CORE to our home.

Herman’s worst fear—that my mother would be harmed during a protest—was never realized, but his daughter
was
occasionally manhandled by white police officers who resented having to move limp and heavy protesters who lay on the sidewalks practicing passive resistance. They could not understand why this woman, who looked like their wives, was mixed up in racial politics. “Lady, what are you doing here?” they would ask. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she would reply before challenging them with the charge that they were disrupting a perfectly legal protest.

Under my mother’s influence, I became the kind of kid who evaluated everything he saw and heard and did not assume that anyone’s
word was final just because he or she wore a uniform, a badge, or a doctor’s white coat. It was my right, perhaps even my obligation, to determine if people were being fair and not just accept their authority. Of course, a small child’s world, especially one in which adults are loving and patient, is just and fair in a way that the real world can never match. Growing up is often a matter of confronting this reality, and adjusting to it. As a young child I was truly disturbed, for example, when I realized that many people in America and around the world lived with hunger and without basic shelter or medical care. However, I was relieved to know my parents were doing what they could to help solve these problems. Then came the Passover afternoon when we got in the Rambler to drive to my grandparents’ house for a Seder.

We had driven just a few blocks when I said, “Daddy, how do you make money?”

“When babies get sick, I take care of them.”

“You mean you take money for making babies well?”

“Well, I don’t take much, Jonny. And I have to take care of our family, you know.”

He was right, of course, but I was outraged by the thought that my father required payment for his services as a doctor. For the rest of the ride I sputtered questions about parents who were poor and could not pay and demanded to know why everyone could not just get medical care for free. All he could do was explain that he did help many people for free, but that doctors had to care for their families, too, and that meant that someone had to pay.

When we got to my grandparents’ home I ran upstairs to tell the Big Bangah how terrible it was that my father was taking money from the sick. He declared, “My daughter is raising a socialist.”

No doubt our neighbors would have taken Herman’s statement as a fact, not a joke. In their eyes we were radical. And while the landlord insisted the reason was all the noise we made on the ceiling of the first-floor apartment with our running around, there probably was something more to his refusal to renew the lease on our apartment on Buena Avenue. He did not like the big, mixed-race meetings my mother was
having in our apartment. Those sessions were no bigger or more troublesome than a typical dinner party or cocktail hour, but the neighbors who hissed “nigger lovers” at us on the sidewalks found them intolerable. And I’m sure they let their discomfort be known to the landlord.

In mid-1963 a moving van pulled up to our building on West Buena Avenue and our furniture and other belongings were loaded up for a two-mile journey north to a quiet block on Winona Street, on the northern edge of the neighborhood called Uptown. The four-bedroom apartment my father found for us took up the entire first floor of a building, so there were no downstairs neighbors to be bothered by our pounding footsteps.

With nine rooms, the place on Winona was as big as many suburban houses and came with high ceilings and heavy moldings. Even better, for us boys, was the location. It was half a block from the park along the lakeshore and two blocks from the beautiful sandy beach at Foster Avenue.

My parents made some definitive statements with the way they divided up the space. First, they made sure that a small room that faced the street was reserved for my father as a study where he could read, listen to music, and do paperwork. After taking the biggest bedroom for themselves they moved my grandmother into a small bedroom/bathroom suite off the kitchen, which had presumably been designed for a maid. We three boys were crowded into a single bedroom, with an attached half bath. Rahm and Ari slept on bunks. I had a single bed. The fourth bedroom was set aside as “the children’s study.”

Equipped with three desks, each with a lamp and chair, and a shared bookcase, the study room was where we were expected to do our homework and any other extra projects we might choose to do. No one talked about this being an unusual arrangement, but my guess is that in 1963 very few families would have devoted an entire room to the academic pursuits of three boys under the age of six. My parents did it, and their choice signaled the value of study, work, and achievement.
In time they would reinforce the importance of academic excellence by carefully reviewing our schoolwork and consistently emphasizing the value of getting good grades, which would eventually help us enter top colleges.

It was around this time that my parents also began talking about how I ought to become a doctor when I grew up. I was the firstborn child of an immigrant who himself was a doctor. Plus I was a goody-goody and got good grades in all my school subjects, and I especially liked science, where I could literally poke and probe nature. Thus, because of my brains and curiosity and our immigrant status, it seemed almost predetermined that I should be a doctor. That I was going in the medical direction relieved Rahm and Ari of any career pressure. In this Jewish family, one doctor son would be both necessary and sufficient. I always thought those two owed me big-time for giving them this freedom of choice.

Outside our apartment, the neighborhood was full of families from different ethnic and religious backgrounds. In this way, Uptown was like countless neighborhoods in postwar America where families of varying backgrounds found shelter for a time as they climbed the economic ladder. Shared aspirations for middle-class comfort, safety, and status meant that we all had much in common. However, there was no denying that our differences bred prejudice and often led to conflicts, especially with kids who recently arrived from Appalachia. These boys and girls had definite feelings about “kikes” and “nigger lovers” and were aggressive about expressing them.

We did find friends in the building next door, however. Georgie, the Italian-American kid who was involved in Rahm’s finger-smashing incident, introduced me to the rituals of the Catholic Church as he practiced during the week for being an altar boy on Sundays. I let Georgie put me down on my knees, hands folded in prayer, while he uttered some Latin prayer or other. I had no idea what was going on. In our building, the other tenants included a Greek-American family and a couple named Downs, with sons named Sean and Tommy and a daughter named Ana Maria. Mr. Downs, whose first name was John, was an “artist/reporter” for
The Chicago Daily News
. Seven years
younger than my father, he was reflexively conservative and rarely questioned authority. His mind began to change as he got to know my parents and heard about the issues discussed at the organizing meetings at our apartment. But he never joined them. He preferred, instead, to observe and report for the newspaper and, when off duty, to enjoy our family’s friendship.