Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (42 page)

He shared a vision and a mission and, of course, a dream: “I have a dream that one day the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

He spoke about it in ways that would move a nation to share in the dream. That march on Washington would be followed by historic civil rights laws over the next couple of years, and great progress in tearing down the walls of inequality. Everything was coming together.

It seemed like the whole world was there in Washington on the anniversary of Emmett’s murder. That’s the way it looked as I watched it all, the way so many others watched: from a distance. On television. Yet I still felt so close to it all. I would watch a great deal on television over the years, and I would read the newspapers, tracking the progress. But it was progress, as we would all see, that came at great cost.

Just a little more than two weeks after the march on Washington, white racists bombed the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Four little black girls, Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson, were killed. And their families were left to sift through the rubble of their shattered lives, and their broken hearts. Oh, God, the children. Why were they being made to suffer, again and again?

In June that year, Medgar Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his home, the same night President John F. Kennedy told the nation “that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” Medgar Evers was given a soldier’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery, and I wondered how many people realized, as I did, just how much of a hero he had been. My heart went out to his wife, Myrlie,
and their children. I knew, as only a few could possibly know, the depths of their despair.

Everything seemed to be turned upside down. People were being brutalized. The Freedom Riders were dragged off buses and beaten. Peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, were attacked by a merciless mob. White state troopers. Peace officers. People would call it Bloody Sunday. And blood was being shed everywhere. No one seemed to be safe from the violence. Not even a man who dreamed of peace. When Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated on April 4, 1968, I shared the pain of his loss with everyone. As I watched the sorrowful funeral, I wanted to be there for Coretta Scott King and for her children, as I had wanted to be there for Myrlie Evers and her children. I never met Dr. King. But Mama did. It was when he brought his campaign for equality to Chicago in 1966. Mama happened to be driving by the place where he was staying, saw him, and stopped to talk. Just like that. She told me they talked about Emmett. The black people of Montgomery were outraged and determined following Emmett’s murder when Dr. King led the bus boycott there. They were moved by it.

As unbearable as it was to consider our loss and a family’s grief, it also was hurtful to watch the violence that exploded in the wake of Dr. King’s death. He was a man who had stood for turning hate into love, and here just the opposite seemed to be happening. I had gotten the message. I had lived that message. I was determined to share it with everyone I could.

Once, for a moment, I had been part of something, something important. Although I was, in a way, left behind by events, I made a point of keeping up, keeping informed. I knew at this point of great national crisis what I had learned at the point of my greatest personal crisis: What happened to any of us affected all of us. And each of us had a role to play in the struggle for justice and equality. There were people who were prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for what they believed in. There were too many families and loved ones left in the unbearable wake of so much sacrifice. At the very least, everyone had a duty to understand the meaning of all that. I felt a special personal need to understand, to know everything I could know about everything that was happening. If ever the call came for me to be there again, I would be ready.

 M
ama moved in with Gene and me. It was not long after Papa Spearman died, in 1967. I don’t recall that we talked much about it at all. Mama was alone, we had the space, and that really was about all there was to it. Gene had always felt close to Mama, partly because he had lost his own mother when he was so young. We wanted my mother to be with us and, eventually, we put an extension on the house to make it more comfortable for everybody. So, Mama finally was able to live in the house that she built, with the good neighbors and the garden she had wanted so much to tend.

As it had always been with my mother when I was coming up, there seemed to be a constant flow of relatives staying with us at various times over the years. Mostly the younger ones. Oh my, we loved that. There were young cousins Bertha Thomas and Abriel Thomas and all their brothers and sisters. Their mother, Juanita, was Uncle Crosby’s daughter and Mama’s favorite niece. There were so many others who would stay with us from time to time: Shafter Gordon, and my cousins and goddaughters Ollie Gordon and, later, Ollie’s daughter, Airickca. And you could be sure that every child who walked through our door would get the family lessons from Mama. Whether they were coming for dinner, the weekend, or whatever, she would sit them down and tell them about Emmett. The whole story. Family was always so important to Mama, and she felt it was her duty to teach the family history. It was their duty to know it.

Daddy even stayed with us for a short while, about a year or so after Mama had moved in. Gene and I wanted to go to California during my summer vacation. Daddy wanted to come down from Detroit to go with us. He had made all the arrangements and bought all his provisions for the
road trip we would make. Daddy kept insisting on bringing a washbasin and cooler. We could sleep in the car, wash up in the morning along the side of the road, and eat meals from the cooler. That was Daddy’s plan. But Gene and I had other ideas and tried to convince Daddy that we would all be more comfortable staying in motels along the way. While we were going around and around on all this, Daddy took ill. He had been diagnosed with diabetes, had already lost a toe, and now was having some complications with his heart. The doctor said he should stay in, stay quiet, stay cool. I had installed central air-conditioning in the house years before when I found out Gene was spending so much time at that barbershop because it was more comfortable there in the summer. So Daddy would stay at our place where the air was conditioned and the environment was quiet, just as the doctor had ordered, until he recovered. Daddy and Mama insisted that Gene and I should still make our trip. Mama arranged with her good friend Annie M. Goodman to stay there, too, to help with Daddy.

Now, this arrangement seemed a little unusual to us, but Daddy’s wife, A.D., back in Detroit, was relieved that he would be cared for, and that’s all she cared about, so we made our trip. When we got back, we found Daddy and Mama had been sitting around talking, patching up their differences. Daddy had accepted Christ. You couldn’t spend two weeks around Mama without doing that. Daddy played my piano, played his heart out, the way he must have done all those weekends when he would disappear from our place back in Argo so many years ago, working that juke joint for shots. There in my home, he tickled the keys and made us all smile. Mama and Mother Goodman sang along, happy songs. And everything was in tune.

We all went up to Detroit for Thanksgiving. Mama wanted to take the turkey with us—the turkey, the roast pan, and everything she needed to work with. She went into that kitchen at Daddy’s place and prepared the whole Thanksgiving dinner, including the yeast rolls. A.D. just sat there and watched in amazement as it all came together. Daddy returned to Chicago early in 1969 to visit. We had dinner at our place and he was getting ready to carry a couple of cousins home before he returned to Argo, where he was staying with his brother, Uncle Emmett, and Aunt Babe. He didn’t look well and I wanted him to lie down and let me drive our cousins. He insisted that he was all right. Mama and I both stood outside watching as the car disappeared into the night.

Inside the car, he was chatting away with our cousins, glancing up at the rearview mirror with a smile. “See how much they care about me,” he said. “They’re just standing out there. Watching me.”

Back in Argo that night, Daddy could barely get up the steps to Uncle
Emmett’s house. He sat on those steps for a while. He had eaten at our place, so he refused all the comfort food Aunt Babe offered him inside. Around three that next morning, Aunt Babe thought she heard labored breathing coming from Daddy’s room. When she and Uncle Emmett checked on him later that morning, Daddy was cold.

It was Mama who called Daddy’s wife in Detroit to break the news about Daddy’s passing. She wanted to know what should be done. A.D. asked Mama to take care of everything. Mama was there and, well, Mama always took care of everything. As God would have it, Daddy’s brothers already had bought plots for all of them at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago. So Mama took care of it all, as A.D. had requested. She contacted the mortician, selected the things for Daddy to be put away in, the casket, everything. After it was all over, Daddy’s wife put her arms around my mother’s neck and spoke to her softly. “I couldn’t have done a better job myself. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

In the end, Daddy had been there for me, as a father should be. He had helped Emmett and me in Detroit, he had traveled with me to protect me in Mississippi and in so many cities we visited after the trial. Mama had made her peace with Daddy; she had forgiven him. Even though I never actually spoke the words of forgiveness, they were there, between everything else—the other words we spoke, and the hugs we shared, and the lyrics to so many songs we sang around that piano in my living room.

Although we know that death is a part of life, knowing it never makes it any easier to accept. In 1970, Aunt Lizzy died, and Uncle Moses would follow her seven years later. They had adjusted to their life in Argo, but were forever saddled with the horrible memory of the thing that had carried them out of Mississippi. A lot of people were left damaged by that nightmare. A lot of people who tried to make sense of it. Papa Mose talked about it for years with his grandson William Parker, one of Wheeler’s brothers. He shared all the details, searching in vain for ways that it might have turned out differently. You can adjust to a new life but, try as you might, you never quite let go of the life you’ve left. You never get comfortable with the pain of what has been lost. It just sits there on top of everything else you ever feel or next to everything else or between it all, elbowing everything aside when you least expect to have to face it. I know what Papa Mose felt, and Aunt Lizzy. I felt their pain and Emmett’s and my own.

There is no way I ever could have endured as much as I have had to bear without my faith. It is a deep knowing, even at the moment of greatest despair, that things will be okay. Emmett had to stand at the darkest point he
had ever reached at Papa Mose’s place in order to be able to look up and see a billion stars in the nighttime sky. So I had to reach the darkest point in my life to see the light. And I made it through because I believed I would. Something pulled me back from the abyss. It was faith. In my deepest despair, when I thought there was no reason for me to go on, God reached out to me. He had a plan for me. I followed the plan. I followed it because I believed. When there are questions, I know how to find the answers. It is through dealing with the deep sorrow of death that I have found my own words to live by: Life is fragile, handle with prayer.

Someone asked me once whether I tithed and I said I couldn’t afford to do it. Well, that was the wrong answer. She explained to me that I could afford to do a lot more than I thought, but that I had to believe that I could do it and never doubt that. In fact, she told me that I should not only tithe, but that I should also make regular deposits into my savings account. Well, I didn’t know how she expected me to do all that. With all our expenses at the time, we were just breaking even. But I decided I would try it, and when I made that decision, I believed I would do what I set out to do. So I started contributing 10 percent of my biweekly paycheck to the church. After I deducted that forty-five dollars, then I set aside another five dollars to put into my savings account for the pay period. Well, before I knew it, my little five dollars had grown to five hundred dollars. And I got a raise.

On top of all that, Gene wound up bringing in even more money. He was selling Cadillacs. It started some time after he bought a used one for us in 1968. People kept admiring that car. Oh, and it was something, too. He finally started carrying folks down to Hanley Dawson, the dealership, to help them pick out cars for themselves. He knew what to ask for, how to negotiate a good deal. Well, he was carrying so many people down there that they started giving him a finder’s fee and eventually a job. He became the top salesman with wonderful commissions and incentives. We were sent on trips to the Caribbean and, oh, just everywhere.

So, of course, I increased my tithe, bumped my savings up, and I never looked back.

Tithing was only part of my contribution to the church. Periodically I would get invitations from local churches to speak about Emmett and his connection to the events that followed. These were small affairs and that suited Mama just fine. She saw no need for me to travel or to take part in the big events that were unfolding throughout the country. She felt I had enough to keep me busy right there in Chicago. But I knew there were other reasons she felt that way. She wanted to keep me close. She wanted to keep me safe.

Mama had taken a leave of absence from Roberts Temple Church of
God in Christ to help start another church, Corinthian Temple Church of God in Christ. I had gone with her, helped her with all the fund-raising, listened to all the planning. That woman was something to behold. She helped to found five churches since coming North, starting with the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ. But not long after this latest church was set up, she was ready to return home to Roberts Temple. There would be no more church founding for her. I asked her what I should do, since I had followed her to the new church. I should have known that Mama had another plan for me. She told me she wanted me to follow Elder George Liggins, who was called to establish another church. I felt I had worked enough with Mama founding churches, but she insisted and I finally sat in on a meeting about it. I was so happy I did. I became captivated by the whole idea of this new little church and I had to be a part of it. I worked with Mother Goodman, Mama’s buddy, and Elder Liggins, who had bought our two-flat building on St. Lawrence when we moved to the new place. We were so committed. After I left work, I wouldn’t head home, I’d head off to work on our little church, helping to make sure it got off to a great start. I became one of the seven founding members of the Evangelistic Crusaders Church of God in Christ, which was established on May 13, 1973. By the time the church would celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, it would have five hundred members, and it has been said that thousands more have been part of the congregation before getting the call to go on to found other churches. Many have grown from what we started. I would serve as the first church secretary and, of course, as a Sunday school teacher. I looked for every opportunity to work with children, wherever I found myself. It filled so much of my life and seemed to keep me young. So young, in fact, that when I asked Gene how old you have to be, how long you have to wait to become a church mother, that special rank of responsibility and leadership, his response was quite simple: “When you start acting like a church mother.”