Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (6 page)

It was a special time back then. And even though, from time to time, I might have gotten impatient with all the activity in our home as a child, that feeling didn’t last very long. I loved listening to the conversation of people who were set on moving forward. It was a time filled with love and support and I felt it all very strongly. And then there was Mama, who had a way of calming me down. It wasn’t so much something she said as just the way she was. A deeply religious woman, and a committed one, who believed in family as well as God. She was a very strong woman, the matriarch, and she took her strength from her faith, but also from her folks. She seemed to pull on a deep awareness of one fundamental truth: Above all else, you must always keep your family close. Without really knowing why, I came to understand that. But I wouldn’t fully appreciate it for a long time, nearly a lifetime.

Not only did it seem that the world was beating a path to our door, but it also seemed that the whole world was within a short distance of our door. Argo was like that. It was a small town in a large metropolitan area, living in the shadow of everything around it. The total population was only thirteen thousand. Archer Avenue was our main street of small storefront shops, and there were tidy little residential streets of mostly single-family homes with big-family values. There was an elementary school, a high school, and a number of community churches. That was basically it. That, and the huge thirty-acre Argo Corn Products Refining Company squatting on the southwest edge of town. Like a fat man on a seesaw, the plant supported everything else on the other end. Our end. And you could pretty much see it all from our end, on the sidewalk in front of my home. The elementary school right across the street, the church not too far down the street, and to the right, filling up the distant horizon, was the Corn Products plant. Our whole world.

As important to me as anything else in that world was the fact that, to the left of our place, only several doors down, was the home of my dearest friend, Ollie Colbert. You know you are truly blessed when you find your life filled with special people who will do anything for you, without thinking about it, without being asked, without batting an eye. Certainly your family, but also friends who are so much like family you almost can’t
tell the difference. That is the kind of relationship I have had with Ollie for as far back as I can remember.

My household was so strict that it seemed like my one social activity was spending time with Ollie. Even though we were a year apart in school, I feel like we were inseparable. There were so many mornings when Ollie would come by my house for breakfast, listen for the school bell, and then run with me to make it to class on time. As we grew older, our bond became closer. And the list of things we wouldn’t do for each other grew shorter. When I was about fifteen, Mama began teaching me to drive. One day Ollie stopped by after school and we talked about errands she had to run. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get everything done and carry everything back. We looked at each other and knew right away, the way close friends know things without saying them. I looked for Mama’s keys, slipped the car out of the garage, and we made it back without ever being missed.

Ollie took the plunge for me too. Literally. At Argo Community High School, I was an A student, and the first black to make the honor roll. I liked school. I liked it a lot, and I wanted so much to do well. Since things were so strict at home, mostly all I ever did was study, anyway. And, obviously, it was paying off in tough subjects like Latin and science. I even had a flair for poetry and found myself writing on my own when I didn’t have poetry assignments. I wanted to make National Honor Society, but there were two things standing in my way. One was geometry, and the other was swimming. Actually, they were one-and-the-same problem, because I had the same instructor for both.

First, geometry. Now, I would bring my books home every night. I would memorize theorems and get Mama’s help, calling out numbers that I could just close my eyes and visualize. I felt that I knew it all cold. But then something happened. I always recopied my notebook for the week before handing it in, as we were required to do. One week, my book was taken, probably by some boys I knew who wanted to get my notes. That meant I didn’t have anything to turn in. I got a failing grade that week from a teacher who didn’t seem to like me very much anyway. Well, I wasn’t going to take that. I had gotten nothing but A’s each week. I went to the principal’s office and dazzled him by showing that I knew what I was doing, proving to him that my notebook really had been taken. He was convinced and made the teacher change my grade. Oh, she did not like that. And that brings us to the swimming problem.

Even though I was getting perfect grades, the National Honor Society wanted its candidates to be well rounded. So, I took swimming. There were three problems with this choice. First, the geometry teacher also was
the swimming instructor. Second, that same teacher also was on the board for the National Honor Society. And the third problem was, well, I couldn’t swim, but it was the only gym class left. Now, I loved to dive, I just didn’t know what to do once I made it into the water. And we were all standing at the deep end. The teacher, the one who had given me the failing grade in geometry, the one who was ordered by the principal to restore my A, well she was really critical of the students who were just standing there, afraid to jump in. Students like me. As she kept walking back and forth, I felt something behind me. It was a nudge and the next thing I knew, I was in deep, flailing about, going down. Ollie saw all this. Now, even though Ollie could swim, she hadn’t yet received her junior lifesaving pin. That didn’t stop her. The next thing I knew, she was pulling me out of the water.

Ollie had risked her life for me, I had risked Mama’s wrath for her, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know who was taking the biggest chance. We laughed about both incidents for years, the many years that we have been close friends, and sometimes competitors, the way friends drive other friends to do their very best. After high school, when I found out Ollie was making twenty-five dollars a week working for the federal government, while I was making only fifteen dollars at the Coffey School of Aeronautics, I applied right away for the federal job, because, well, I just could not be outdone. And although I went on in 1940 to become only the fourth black to graduate from Argo Community and the first to graduate first in her class, one thing bugged me for a while: Ollie made National Honor Society. I didn’t.

Over the years, Emmett would call her Aunt Ollie. And when Ollie had children, they called me Aunt Mamie. Fitting, really, for two best friends who thought of themselves as sisters.

So, this was the world I had brought Emmett into. It was the world that would shape him, define him. A world of strong values where you kept your family close and you kept your friends for life. It would become his world too, surrounded on all sides by people who loved him dearly. If it’s true what they say, that it takes a village to raise a child, then Argo was that village, Emmett was that child. That’s why for Bo and me, life with Mama and the community she helped to create was as close to perfect as you could get. This would be the place he’d know best. This would be the life he’d know best how to live. And he’d always know who he was in this place. Argo’s favorite son. And he’d always know where he stood. At the center of our universe. After all, to even the most casual outside observer, it would seem like we had realigned the planets just to revolve around him.

 E
mmett took his first little baby steps when he was about eleven months old. Within a few months of that, there would be yet another step forward. A big one.

At the time, I was still working as a clerk-typist at the Coffey School of Aeronautics. It was a good job and it paid well enough, even though I always turned everything over to Mama: my paycheck, as well as the money I was getting while Louis was still alive. Mama, in turn, had complete control over Bo. Then again, Mama had complete control over everything in her household, and practically every other household within shouting distance, for that matter. Anyway, when I got home this one night, Mama was telling me what she had prepared for dinner and then she glanced at Bo, measuring the distance between them as he made his busy little way around the kitchen. She turned back to finish spelling it all out to me.

“And I made some
J-E-L-L-O
,” she said in a hushed voice, as if spelling it wouldn’t have been safe enough.

Suddenly, from behind her came this proud little-bitty voice. “Jell-O.”

Mama turned around in shock. “He can talk.”

I was even more amazed. “He can
spell
.”

Now, I don’t know; when you sound out the letters
J-E-L-L-O
, it does kind of sound like the actual word “Jell-O” to me. And Bo loved it enough to have been paying special attention to each syllable. But still, just to be there to hear him speak his first word, and to know that he had translated it from the letters, well, it sent an unbelievable charge through my whole body and through that entire kitchen. Mama must have felt it, too, because she moved into action. Right away, as if on command, she got a bowl and went into the icebox. The Jell-O wasn’t even firm yet, but that didn’t
seem to matter. Bo loved it. I mean, he would scream for Jell-O. And, from this point on, he would know how to say it as he screamed for it. For the time being, we were content to savor the special moment, as Mama served the Jell-O, and Bo slipped into baby bliss, and she and I continued to spoon-feed new words to him. Now, I would have preferred his first word to have been “Mama,” but maybe this was the next best thing. Our relationship would—well, I guess you could say it would
gel
through just this kind of care and nurturing and fun.

Now that he could walk and talk, there was no stopping our little Emmett. “Mama” wasn’t far behind “Jell-O” in his ever-growing vocabulary. I made sure of that. Then came “Ma-moo.” That’s what he called his grandmother. I was Mama, she was Ma-moo. I’m sure that was his way of helping us figure out who he was calling on. Probably made no difference whatsoever to him. You see, as far as he was concerned, he had two Mamas. And, as far as my mother was concerned, she had two babies. Yes, now it was two children for Mama. I was the big kid, Emmett was the little kid. And this was the beginning of the special relationship we always would have. We were so much like brother and sister, like friends back then, and it added a unique dimension to the mother-son bond we would forge over the years ahead.

“Jell-O” might have been dessert for Bo, but it was just an opening for Mama. Once she saw Emmett was ready to learn, she didn’t waste any time at all teaching him. Everything, starting with his ABC’s. She took this on with the same kind of intensity she had when she’d kept me up all night teaching me my multiplication tables or drilling me on geometry theorems until I could simply close my eyes and dream the solutions to all my problems. She wanted to make sure that Bo could count and spell long before he started school. She became his personal “Big Bird.”

Of course, Mama just loved being the caregiver. I mean, she
really
loved it. There seemed to be nothing that pleased her more back then than attending to every possible need her
babies
might have. And Mama would give Emmett everything. Her love, her attention, her devotion. Everything. Over the years, Emmett would have all that he wanted and probably more than he needed. We lavished him. And we made sure he looked good, too. Bo would always be a clotheshorse, although, early on, I guess he was just a clothes pony. I went out of my way to buy him the best outfits. The earliest ones had sort of a theme. Armed services. First, there was the cutest little sailor suit and then we turned to the army. After all, it was the 1940s. Military was in style.

Later my mother gave him a suit that, I’m sorry, I just did not like at all. It had plaid sleeves on a solid-colored body and—well, I had spent so
much money on his clothes and that one, I don’t know, it just looked bargain basement to me. But then he put it on and told his grandmother he looked better than he’d ever looked in his life. And, my goodness, that was such a slap in the face for me. Even back then, it seems, he had a sense of what was important and how to make the important people around him happy. I might have been making the money, but Mama was making the Jell-O. I have to say that Bo was becoming quite the little diplomat.

It’s no wonder, then, that Mama couldn’t even think about leaving him behind when she planned to make a trip to Mississippi. Emmett was not quite two at the time, and it would be a tense trip for her, but I knew I didn’t have to worry about anything as long as he was in my mother’s care. One of Mama’s sisters, Elizabeth Wright, was expecting another child. Mama felt she simply had to travel down to Money, she had to look after Aunt Lizzy, who was the most fragile of Mama’s fourteen brothers and sisters. She had lost three of her ten kids through difficult childbirths. Mother wanted to go down there to insist that Aunt Lizzy’s husband, Moses Wright, would take her sister to a doctor. Now, Papa Mose was a preacher and a sharecropper and just as tough as Mama. If she was considered the matriarch of our very large family, then Papa Mose was considered the patriarch. He didn’t budge on his decision to use the midwife. But Mother was there to supervise, to monitor, and, of course, to holler out if things didn’t go well. They did go well. They went very well. And when the baby came, Mama was the one who came up with the name: Simeon Brown Wright.

Mama and I weren’t the only ones who treated Emmett in a very special way. Part of that was due to my mother’s dominance in the family. She just commanded attention for herself and her offspring. I was the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side and on my father’s side, and had always done so well in school that most of my relatives tended to dote on me, thinking Mamie Lizzie was the be-all and end-all. But beyond all that, everyone in our family simply adored Emmett. How could they not? He was irresistible. With his sandy hair and twinkling hazel brown eyes, he was the cutest little boy. And, by the time he was two, he had gotten way beyond all of the problems we suffered during his birth. The facial scarring had disappeared, and his legs had gotten stronger, so much so that it was hard to keep him down. He got a kick out of pulling a little mischief every once in a while, then running to hide under the bed, waiting for people to come after him, playfully. Within a few seconds, he must have felt the coast was clear and he would peek-a-boo his way out from under the bedspread, and there I’d be, just waiting for that little rascal. But then we both would have such a wonderful laugh that he’d wind up getting a
hug instead of a spanking. For Emmett, pranks and hugs were inseparable, wrapped up together in one big loving bundle.