Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (9 page)

Emmett couldn’t wait to start school, and we were encouraged by that. As it turns out, he wanted to be with his friends who were going. Wheeler was ahead of him by a couple of years, and Bo just had to be with Wheeler. After all, Wheeler was his idol. Almost every day, Emmett wanted to know why he couldn’t go to school. It wasn’t enough to explain to him that he wasn’t old enough, that he would be going in September. What sense does that make to a little boy? But when school was ready for him, he was ready for school. Mama had been tutoring him all along. My mother had been a teacher in the South. She didn’t have a college degree. She came up in a simpler time. Among black people back then, if one person was ahead of the group, that person became the teacher. Mama was that person. And although she hadn’t been trained, she had strong values and she recognized the value of good education. And that’s the way it worked.

When Bo was about to start, we talked to him. We always stressed discipline. And we told him what an important thing it was to start school. We let him know that he was getting to be a big boy now. He had to take it all seriously; he was not going to school to play. We told him he was going to school to learn all he could learn so that, when he became a man, he would have something to depend on. This was the kind of encouragement we kept giving him. And we figured that it would sink in over time. But, at that moment, just before his first day of school, an excited boy as young and playful and sociable as Bo had to be thinking that school was the place where he could see all his friends most of the day. And that was all that mattered to him.

Mama and I had really enjoyed shopping for Bo’s clothes for the start of school. Mama talked me into getting some blue jeans, and we bought him shirts and shoes. I got him everything he needed. Of course. And then, when winter came, we had to fight. The boots and the heavier coats and sweaters, they were all fine. But the long underwear? No way. Oh, he complained, he protested. He didn’t want to wear those things. “Nobody else is wearing them,” he said. But he was no match for Mama. She ruled the roost. I remember how she made me wear long, white stockings in the winter. And I hated those stockings. She also made me wear long underwear, and then pull my stockings up over them. When I’d get to school, I would go straight to the washroom and I would pull the legs of those drawers up as high as they would go and then I would pull my stockings
back up over my bare legs. Then I’d have to go to the washroom again at just about three o’clock every day.

One day the teacher couldn’t resist any longer. “Why is it that you have to go to the bathroom every day at three o’clock?”

She had gotten wise to me. Or somebody had told on me. It didn’t matter how she knew, she wasn’t letting me go. And that meant that I had to go home without readjusting myself, and face Mama. Bo wouldn’t stand a chance. Thanks to me and a teacher who wouldn’t let me go to the washroom, Mama knew all the tricks.

Emmett was always looking for something to do to make some extra money or get a treat. It started with the milk truck. Emmett would help the deliveryman carry bottles of milk from the truck to the front doors of all the customers on our block. Bo would wind up getting a bottle of chocolate milk for his troubles. The next thing I knew he was picking up bottles in alleys and collecting the deposits. He even ran down the hill to the train yard where the railcars were delivering coal to fire up the furnaces of the Corn Products plant. Coal would always fall off the coal cars. Bo had a scuttle. He’d pick up spilled coal, carry it back to our block, and walk up and down yelling, “Coal. Coal man. Coal.” He could sell a scuttleful for ten to twenty-five cents. Then he’d run back to the train yard to collect more spilled coal to sell. But his favorite “job” was ice delivery. He’d run ahead of the man on the ice truck, knock on doors, and take orders from the houses. Then he would tell the iceman how much each customer would buy. Twenty-five pounds here, fifty pounds there. Bo actually even tried to carry a twenty-five-pound block of ice once. Just once. The iceman appreciated the help. He liked Bo and gave him a chunk of ice wrapped in a little rag for him to enjoy on the hot days. But that wasn’t all. He also paid Bo a quarter.

A strong sense of responsibility was an important quality to have back in Argo, when Emmett was coming up. In a way, our section of town was a community of immigrants. That’s what we were, really, all those black folks from the South. People coming to a strange, new land—the land of milk and honey—in search of the kind of grand opportunities they would never have back home. There is always something special about people like that. They don’t look back. They don’t let anything stand in their way. Every day, the people in our little Argo community could see the Corn Products plant spread out there on the horizon, dominating our landscape. It stood there as a constant reminder that the gateway to a better life was hard work. So, even those folks who had no jobs worked in whatever
way they could to make a way for themselves. Bo saw them, he watched them, he learned from them. Now, a six-year-old boy really doesn’t need a job. And, with everything we gave Bo, he certainly didn’t need money. What he did need, though, was a sense of his place in his world. A sense of belonging. And to belong, you had to make a contribution. Making a contribution had its value, but it also had its rewards. At the time, for little Emmett, that reward was only twenty-five cents. But it was a good start.

 E
ven though I’ve always believed that we’re strengthened by our values, sometimes I think we can be limited by our customs. As a child in Argo, I learned somehow that the most important thing for a little girl was to grow up to become some man’s wife. I wasn’t the only one. So many of the little black girls in our community had quit high school by age sixteen to marry that there were only four blacks in my entire 1940 graduating class. In fact, I felt like I was at risk. Even at the top of my class, it seemed that I was still falling short of success. I really was beginning to think that I was on the brink of becoming an old maid when I waited until I was eighteen—almost nineteen—to marry Louis Till. As I got closer to thirty, I began thinking all over again about all the things I had been taught to think about marriage and family and what it meant for a woman to have a significant life. My mother had married for the third time. Papa Tom Gaines died in 1945 and she married Henry Spearman in 1947. Mama moved to Chicago. Bo and I stayed behind in Argo surrounded by other relatives, yet still feeling that something was missing. I was working regularly for the federal government and thinking that I really should start working regularly on getting married again before Emmett got too much older. There should be a father figure, at least, to replace his real father.

Now, apart from that one trip to Berg’s Drugstore with Louis, I’d never had any experience with dating, so I didn’t even know the first rule of that game. If I could have limited my choices to Argo, I wouldn’t have felt so uneasy about it all. I knew Argo. I knew all the people in Argo, so many people with familiar backgrounds that would make it seem less like a stab in the dark. But, as we started closing in on a new decade, what I knew
most of all was that there were no real prospects in Argo. People I knew were married already. That’s how people were in that place. That was the custom of that place.

As it turns out, there was a fellow I thought I would like from Maywood, another nearby community. He came to take me out once and we wound up at a popular spot, the Rum Boogie. This was one of the elite clubs on Chicago’s South Side. There were two shows a night with big bands, chorus girls, singers, and comedians. There was dancing, and so many tables on the main floor and the mezzanine, and bars on both levels, and, oh, so many people, fashionable people who were moving to a different beat. The atmosphere was charged, so very exciting. I was dazzled, and maybe just a little overwhelmed. After all, I was used to sleepy little Argo. But I figured this guy knew his way around. He certainly knew his way to this spot. I figured he could take care of anything that might come up. So I tried to relax with it all, sit back and enjoy myself. The conversation started. He was a good talker and, as he started talking, I listened to the words and looked at the man behind the words to see if there was somebody there I might want to spend more time with. Someone I might want to spend more time with Emmett. So he talked about his job and his life and his wife and his children and … Wait a minute.
Wife? Children?
How did this happen? How did I wind up there in a nightclub on a date with a married man? Oh, my goodness. What was I supposed to do? I began to question everything and he simply said that he thought I already knew he was married. Now, really. How could I have known that? I guess you’re supposed to ask, but it never occurred to me to ask about his status, because I never dreamed that a married man would ask me out. What did I know about these things? Well, I demanded that he take me home at once. He did, and just vanished into the night. This was not a good start and the road ahead didn’t look too promising.

Meanwhile, my cousin Ruby kept writing to me, telling me what a great time she and another cousin, Juanita, were having in Detroit. I felt very close to these cousins; they had spent quite a few of their summer vacations with me. By this time, Ruby was encouraging me to relocate to Detroit, telling me, among other things, that I would be able to meet somebody, a good person, probably with a good job in the automobile industry, somebody who could help me with Emmett. My father also was living in Detroit at the time. He had moved there after he remarried.

It became clear to me that I was going to have to leave Argo. The little town that had been my home for so long, the place that had been so comfortable, the place that had nurtured me and my son was no longer an option if we were going to look to our future. It also was clear to me that I
was going to need some help, as I had always gotten in Argo. I needed a support network, people who could look out for me, expose me and protect me all at the same time. People who might be able to help me screen the prospects, and avoid another Rum Boogie. So the choice came down to Chicago or Detroit. Mama was in Chicago. Daddy was in Detroit. I didn’t think Mama could help much at all at this point. Besides, her last husband, Papa Tom, had adored Bo and was always there to pitch in with his care. Her newest husband, Henry Spearman, was, well, he was a good man, but children weren’t his strong suit. And there was nobody else I could really count on at the time. Without that support, Chicago could be a strange and overpowering place. So, even though Chicago was nearby, it was more distant in a strange kind of way. As I saw it, I did have family in Detroit, and family could make any place closer.

Still, there was a problem I would have to sort out. A major one.

For a number of years, I had lost contact with my dad. One morning in 1932, when I was eleven years old, my father got up, got dressed, gave me a nickel, and drove away. I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I was used to my father going away on the weekend, returning on Monday morning, usually in time to make it to work at Corn Products. He would be disheveled when he got back, looking like he’d walked down ten miles of bad road. And that struck me because my father was so handsome and so meticulous about his appearance. Still, I was always happy to see him. But, Mama, oh, would she make a fuss. She was very unhappy about all this. To say the least. But what could she do? She couldn’t whip him. And she couldn’t make him obey her. So, instead, she did what a duty-bound wife did in Argo. Mama would pour coffee and get the tub ready for him to take a bath. We didn’t have a tub in the bathroom, so he had to get in the tin tub behind the heater in the dining room, and I had to go to my room and lock the door until he finished. I couldn’t hear everything that was going on. I didn’t have a clue.

It was only later that I would find out where my father went on these weekends away from us.

There was some kind of dive over on Forty-third Street in Chicago, sort of a juke joint, where he would play the piano and sing. All night. All weekend. People in the bar would keep a whiskey glass filled on his piano. They paid him in drinks. He wouldn’t eat. He would just sing and play the piano, and that whiskey kept him going.

This went on for a while and was causing so much stress in our home. Still, I was always happy to see my dad come home. One day, I thought I would do something to show him that I loved him, something that would
make him feel he had a reason to stay at home with us. He had a couple of pairs of knob-toed shoes. One pair was black, the other burgundy. My daddy loved those shoes and used to have them shined so bright that they’d look like “a puppy dog’s eyes under the bed.” Well, I knew what I was going to do. I decided to shine my daddy’s shoes. I pulled both pairs from under the bed and found the shoe polish. All he had was black, but I figured that would work. Polish was polish. And I polished those shoes and polished them, bright like “a puppy dog’s eyes.” I couldn’t wait to show him what I had done. I couldn’t wait for him to give me a great big hug to thank me for what I had done.

He came home, and I ran to get the shoes. I was so proud as I handed the two pairs over to him. “Daddy, look what I did for you.”

He looked down at the shoes, the black pair with black polish, the burgundy pair with black polish, and his face fell. “Gottuh-mighty-knows!”

I never knew exactly what that meant, but I knew it wasn’t good, especially when he pulled off his belt. Daddy gave me a whipping that day for polishing his new shoes. Black polish on burgundy shoes. It was the only whipping I ever got from my daddy. There would be no need to whip me again. That one stung for years.

So, there came a day when my daddy handed me a nickel and drove away. I thought it was just like all the other weekends, until Monday came and my daddy didn’t. I was asking Mama, “Where’s Daddy?” And Mama would always tell me she didn’t know. Her best guess was that he must have come to town and gone on straight to work. But then the morning shift ended, and Daddy still didn’t come home. When somebody you love just disappears like that, you find every way to avoid the obvious conclusion, the one that makes sense in your head but not in your heart. You find every way to avoid facing the reality that becomes more and more apparent. Finally, I had to accept the fact that Daddy had driven out of our lives forever. And he hadn’t even said good-bye. I guess the nickel was supposed to make up for it. Compensate somehow. That’s what he left me. A whole nickel. A buffalo nickel. I wish I had held on to it.