Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (44 page)

The year after the Denver dedication, Wheeler Parker, Jr., became a minister. He had prayed for deliverance in the darkness of Papa Mose’s home when those men came to take Emmett. Wheeler had made a promise for that deliverance. And in 1977, Reverend Wheeler Parker, Jr., kept his promise. By 1993, he would become pastor of the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ. My mother would have been so proud to see Reverend Parker as pastor of the first church she had helped to establish, the one that had been founded in our home.

By April 1981, Mama had to be hospitalized. It was her heart. Although she was released, this was a very anxious time for me. As it turns out, there was reason for me to be concerned. Mama had to return to the hospital that August. Gene and I were there every night of the week, often together, sometimes in shifts. No matter how tired we might have been after work, we were there, all the time she was hospitalized, from August to November.

We did our best to make her feel comfortable, but that was not always easy to do. They had these tubes going down her throat. She was in and out of consciousness.

There were times when she was alert and I would step out to talk to the doctor or the nurse, leaving Gene to talk to Mama, keep her company. But when I’d walk back into the room, she would stop talking. Strange. I didn’t understand that. So one night, after we left, I asked Gene what that
was all about. He looked at me long and hard and finally revealed what Mama had been telling him, what she had been urging him, what she had been hoping and praying he would do. She wanted him to take care of “Baby.” That was me. Hearing that was the end of me.

“You’re all she’s got now,” Mama had told Gene. She wanted him to look after me. And to be good to me. Oh, God. I couldn’t bear it. I started crying so much Gene needed a mop and pail to clean up after me.

The next time we were there together with Mama at Michael Reese Hospital, she looked at me and must have known that Gene had told me. A look is all it would have taken for a mother to read a daughter, a daughter who was her best friend in the whole world. Finally, she turned to Gene.

“Son,” she said.

“Yes, Mama.”

“I want to go home.”

Gene turned to me, and then back to her. “Well, Mama, we can’t take care of you at home like they’re doing here.” He knew there were so many things Mama needed that we could never provide at our place.

She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. I want to go home.”

That’s when I broke down. That’s when I broke in: “No, Mama! You’re not going anywhere. We need you.
I
need you.” She had taught me to be a fighter and I was ready to fight even her if that’s what it took to keep her.

Mother didn’t try to talk to me any more after that. Everything she had left to say, she would say to Gene.

On November 11, 1981, I was there in the room by myself with Mama. Everything was quiet at first. Then she began to have seizures. Violent seizures. It terrified me to see her whole body jerk up into a full sitting position then fall back again. I called the doctor. He had to do something. I couldn’t take it, seeing her like that.

The doctor called a nurse, told her to give Mama an injection. Just as the nurse came back in ready to follow the doctor’s order, my mother fell back to the pillow. She never moved again. In the end, I was thankful that they didn’t give her that injection. I would be left forever to wonder if it was the needle that killed her. God simply answered her prayer. He took her home.

Oh, my God. I had lost Mama. What was I going to do? I felt life would be impossible without her. I cried so hard I was in pain. I stood there, alone, after the doctor and nurse left. Someone came in later and said I was just standing there gazing down at Mama in the bed, my arms outstretched, my fingers spread wide. They said it looked like I had released her. Finally.

I couldn’t remember a time when my mother wasn’t there for me. Now she would be there no more. She was seventy-nine years old and had so much wisdom. What is it worth to gain so much knowledge if you can’t stay around for others to benefit? Then again, maybe that was the selfish reaction. Mama had been able to influence a great many people in the years she had been given. Without question, she had left a mark, an impression on the people she met. She was a strong, determined woman other women wanted to emulate. Yvonne, Gene’s youngest daughter, named her oldest daughter Alma.

We are only given a certain amount of time to do what we were sent here to do. You don’t have to be around a long time to share the wisdom of a lifetime. You just have to use your time wisely, efficiently. There is no time to waste.

At Mama’s gravesite at Burr Oak Cemetery, where we had buried Emmett, I watched as they began to lower the coffin, as the pallbearers threw the gloves in, as they dropped the first shovelful of dirt, and prayed. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And suddenly, there it was, just as I had seen it before. At Emmett’s funeral. That fluttering, right there at the corner of my eye. I looked only to see it escape me. As if it was flying away. Off into the sky. It was the dove. I saw it again, just for a moment. And then I let it go.

 A
t Scanlon School, I had developed a reputation as a tough teacher. Tough, but understanding. I was known as “the little lady in the Cadillac you don’t mess with.” Yes, I was still driving Cadillacs in the early eighties. Things had been working out so well for Gene at Hanley Dawson that he was selling Cadillacs full-time. Word spread so far about how good he was that everybody was going down to see Gene about buying a car. In addition to the money, we also were still getting all those wonderful incentive trips and we had new Cadillacs all the time. Gene thought they were his, I thought they were mine, but as long as Mama was around, she would always trump both of us. Oh, she did enjoy driving those cars.

So, anyway, I was tough. But I felt that I had to be. I could see what some of the kids couldn’t see for themselves. It was my job to see these things. How important their education would be, how many sacrifices had been made for the opportunities they had, how tragic it would be to waste any part of their lives. I looked at my kids and I saw what they were going to be. And I never let up. I found myself once backing a boy into a wall, grabbing his collar, and laying it all out for him. Now, I’m barely five feet tall on my tiptoes, and this kid was nearly a foot taller than I was, so the first reaction everybody had was utter shock. But I was not giving up on him, and I was not about to let him give up on himself. Oh, no, that was not going to happen. I told him I was his last chance and that he was going to do well if it killed him. I never let up. He was going to be a better student, a better person if it killed
me
. It was a challenge. His father was not around, his mother had a drinking problem, nobody had ever done more than just move him along. He had no respect for women. But I
knew from my own experience that when a man, or even a man-child, has no respect for women, it’s because he has no respect for himself. No one had ever shown him they cared about him, or that he should care about himself, for that matter. I showed him. I proved it. He settled down, he applied himself, he adjusted to being a good student. I was tough. But it was tough love. A parent’s love. I used the strong arm of a father and the tender touch of a mother to get through to my kids. They knew I loved them when I didn’t have to, and that made an impression. The ones who turned out the best were the ones who could work their way through the tough part and feel the love. Everybody has had that one teacher who turned a life around, made something click, made a difference. For so many children, I was that teacher and nothing would give me more satisfaction than to hear that from former students over the years. I moved them to want to become the best they could possibly become, and they knew that
becoming
was an ongoing process. They learned to keep their eyes on the horizon, and to never,
never
let up.

One day in 1982 I got a call. I was at home that day and not in school because the Chicago teachers were out on a job action for better working conditions. It seemed that the people who appreciated us the most were the kids we were helping. But we needed help in order to provide help. The call was from a former student of mine. It was Odel Sterling, the boy who had worked through his stutter by learning Dr. King’s speeches. He wanted to come over to my house and bring a few of his friends. I told him they could all come. And, oh, my, there were about eight of these boys who showed up at my place. I had to wonder what this was all about. Well, they told me. They wanted to be in school. I was shocked. But that’s what they said. They wanted the teachers to go back so that
they
could go back. I explained what the action was all about, that there was more than money involved, and they seemed to understand that.

Then something happened. I noticed that they were kind of hanging their heads, and I never wanted kids to do that. I would tell them about that sort of thing all the time. “We’re not in Mississippi anymore. We have rights. Hold your heads up.”

One of the boys lifted his head. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry for what? I said it was okay for you to come by.”

Odel explained. “We’re gang members.”

My goodness. Eight members of the Black Gangster Disciples sitting right there in my living room. And they were telling me they wanted to get off the streets and go back to school. They were reaching out to me because somehow I had reached them. Some had been students of mine, others only knew about me. But they were looking for help. The teachers’
action would sort itself out, but the most important thing to me was making a point with these boys, a point I always made with my Emmett Till Players. Life is all about choices. Every choice you make comes at the expense of so many other choices you
could
have made. We must be careful to consider all our choices, and what they will cost us. I could only hope that they were thinking about what I was saying as much as I was thinking about it myself. The choices I had made. The costs I had paid.

Later, Odel would take part in one last school assembly I would produce before my retirement. He did the “I Have a Dream” speech. And he did it with such power and passion that the entire assembly was silent for a moment after he finished. Just a moment. People had been so moved by him that they couldn’t move themselves. Finally, there was an outpouring of appreciation. Teachers were in tears. They recalled the day Dr. King delivered the speech and what it had meant to all of us. And the students would learn all that.

Odel walked over to me after the assembly. “I’m through,” he said. “I’m getting out of the gang.”

I looked at him and I knew he knew how proud I felt. “Well,” I said, “the only one who can get out is you.”

I had always been firm with my students. But I also gave them some room to figure things out, to solve problems without having the solutions dictated to them. I knew that success as a teacher was not seeing a child meet your expectations. True success was in seeing a child exceed your expectations. Children can only excel when they are given a chance to go beyond merely solving the immediate problem, when they reach the point of learning an important lesson in problem solving, working it through themselves.

That is the lesson Emmett taught me when he would not allow me to walk him through his school assignments. And, oh, how I wanted to help him, especially with his writing and his spelling. But he only wanted me to answer a question here, a question there, and then he’d stop me: “Okay, okay. I got it.”

What he had gotten was just enough to go and work it through himself. The confidence he gained from doing that made him believe he could do anything, solve any problems he confronted. I remembered how disappointed I had been when Emmett hadn’t allowed me to see him through the process. That was because I didn’t fully understand the process back then. Now I could quietly thank my son: “Okay, Bo. Okay. I got it.”

So, I guess I had given Odel just enough to figure the rest out on his own. There was no future in gangbanging. That was a choice that would cost way too much. At least five of the other boys who had come to see me
with Odel that day also would quit the gang. Two others who stayed in were killed. Odel and I would enjoy a special relationship long after I moved on from teaching. He would make good choices, profitable ones. His mother, a minister, would be so pleased to see her son graduate from Southwest Baptist University and become an investigator with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, and provide service as a motivational speaker and church deacon. Through it all, Odel would always remember the speech he had learned, in part, to impress me. “I Have a Dream.” The speech that helped him lose his stutter. The speech that helped him find his direction.

Following my retirement from teaching in 1983, I was able to step up my work with my church and with the Emmett Till Players. Gene would tell people that I was working harder in retirement than I had all the years I held jobs. Occasionally, I would still get requests from local, Chicago-area churches and community groups to speak. But retirement also would give me more time with family, and I was so happy about that. Gene and I were able to spend more time fishing and traveling with Lou and Reverend Mobley. Yes, Wealthy might have dismissed me when I first suggested that he become a preacher, but my voice kept playing back in his head over the next ten years that followed our little chat. He would get more and more involved with his church until he was called to the ministry in 1974. By 1988, he would establish his own church, the Gospel Truth Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago, and Gene and I would be right there to help in every way we could. Pretty much the way I had envisioned it. In the meantime, there was so much joy in the moments we all had together, especially during our travels. We even drove down to Mississippi once to visit Uncle Crosby and see the new home he was building. But I’ll never forget the monthlong trip we made out to California when Lou and I sat in the back of their new 1985 Crown Victoria and played Uno. We spent three days touring the Grand Canyon, and Reverend Mobley was acknowledged by the congregation of a Los Angeles church we visited. He was invited to preach the sermon.