Here Comes Trouble (11 page)

My mother’s love of country, its government, and its political institutions was always evident. She saw it as part of her parental responsibility to school us in the values of a democratic republic, specifically this one: the United States of America.

When I finished fifth grade in the summer of 1965, she loaded my sisters and me into our Buick and drove us to our nation’s capital for our summer vacation. While the other kids in the neighborhood got to go “up north” or to Scout camp or to Tot Lot, we were forced to go see the original documents of the Founding Fathers, the first flag sewn by Betsy Ross, the plane that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. We took the FBI tour at the Department of Justice, we had our picture taken in front of the Iwo Jima statue, and we knelt and prayed in Arlington at the grave of our fallen Catholic president. We traipsed from one end of Pennsylvania Avenue to the other, climbed all 896 steps of the Washington Monument, and paid a visit to our congressman to shake his hand and let him know we’d be voters someday.

And it was while I was there, inside the Capitol building, that I found myself separated from my mother and sisters and our cousin Patricia. We were on our way to sit in the Senate gallery as the senators were debating a bill that would provide free health care for all the old people in America. But I got distracted by the statues and sharing the life of Zachariah Chandler with whomever would listen.

Eventually it dawned on me that I was all alone and on my own. My mother and sisters were nowhere in sight. I began to panic.
Where did they go? Why did they leave me here?
I may have thought I was a smart kid, but I had no idea where I was, where they were, or how I would find them. At age eleven, the Capitol Rotunda seemed like its own planet to me or, worse, a giant white marble vortex spinning madly and sucking everything into it. I tried to catch my breath and began walking quickly in whatever direction seemed like the way out.

I somehow ended up on the Senate side of the building and went down a staircase, looking frantically for any sign of my family. Realizing I was getting nowhere, I bolted through a pair of elevator doors just as they were closing.

Inside the elevator I began to cry. There was a lone man in the back corner, leaning against the railing, his face covered by the newspaper he was reading. He heard my sniffling and put the paper down to see what the commotion was all about.

As I had been properly schooled in all things political and Catholic, I instantly recognized this man. He was the junior senator from New York, Robert Francis Kennedy.

“What’s wrong, young man?” he said in a voice that was comforting enough to stop the tears. After all, no one had ever called me a young man before.

“I lost my mom,” I said sheepishly.

“Well, that can’t be good. Let’s see if we can find her.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Where are you from?”

“Michigan. Near Flint.”

“Oh, yes. My brother loved that Labor Day Parade. Big parade.”

The doors of the elevator opened, and he put his arm on my shoulder and escorted me to the nearest Capitol police officer.

“Seems this young man from Michigan…” He turned to me. “What’s your name, son?”

“Michael. Moore.”

“Michael has lost his mother, and perhaps we can help him.”

“Yes, sir, Senator. We’ll take care of it.” The officer told the senator he’d handle the matter from here on so that the senator could proceed with his much more important duties.

“Well, I’ll stay here for a minute or two to make sure he’s OK.”

I stood there thinking how stupid did I have to be to get lost, and now I was holding up Bobby Kennedy and the business of the United States Senate so that everybody could go search for my mommy. Jeez-oh-pete, was I embarrassed.

“How old are you, Mike—can I call you Mike?” Kennedy asked.

“I’m eleven. This is my first time in the Capitol,” I offered, hoping to make myself seem less like an idiot.

“Well, you got your first ride in the Senate elevator. That almost makes you a senator!” The Irish in him had now kicked in, and he flashed that Kennedy grin. I smiled, too, and joined in.

“Hey, you never know!” I said, then wanted quickly to retract this wise-ass remark.

“Well, we got two good Democrats from Michigan already, Senators McNamara and—”

“— Hart!” I jumped in as if I were on a quiz show.

“You know your senators. Very good! And promising,” he added with a wink to the officer.

“We’ve got his mother,”
a voice squawked across the police radio the cop was holding.
“Stay there. She’s coming.”

“Well, it seems everything worked out OK,” proclaimed the senator from New York. “Good luck, young man—and never lose sight of your mother!”

And with that he was gone, before I even had a chance to thank him or wish him well or recite for him my favorite passages from his brother’s Inaugural Address.

Within minutes my mother and sisters and cousin arrived, and after a stern look and a word or two, we were off to sit in the Senate gallery and listen to ninety-eight men and two women debate the passage of a new law that would pay for the doctor bills of every single senior citizen, a radical idea to be sure. They called it “Medicare,” and the idea seemed to sit well with the doctor’s daughter in the gallery. Most senators also seemed to like the bill, though there were some who said it was the first step toward something called “socialism.” My sisters and I had no idea what that was; we just knew it was a bad word.

“This law will also help poor people,” our mother added, and although that wasn’t us, by the tenets of the Church it was considered a good thing, even if it did conflict with the principles of Mom’s Republican Party. The bill passed, and one senator proclaimed that the elderly would never have to worry again about going broke because of medical bills.

When we went back a few days later to sit in the House gallery, a new bill was up for discussion: the Voting Rights Act of 1965. From watching the evening news and being taught to read the daily newspaper, I knew that “colored people” were being unfairly treated, even killed. A few months earlier, in March 1965, a white housewife from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, upset at what she had been seeing on the television regarding the savage treatment of black people, made an impromptu decision to head down to Selma, Alabama, to march with the Rev. Martin Luther King. I knew King to be the Negro man in charge of the civil rights movement, and in the town where I lived his name was rarely mentioned—and when it was, it usually had other words attached to it, none pleasant.

Mrs. Liuzzo, a mother of five children, was brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan while volunteering as one of the drivers who ferried demonstrators back and forth to Selma. It was a shock to most of Michigan, and when I heard it being discussed by Jesse the barber, he informed those who were getting their hair cut that day that she was found with “some nigga boy” in the car—a married woman up to no good and “sticking her puss in where it don’t belong!” Jesse’s Barber Shop was the place you went for enlightenment in Davison, and the place was always full. Jesse was a short man with a short haircut, and there was always a pair of scissors or a long razor in his hand. This was problematic, as he wore thick-lensed glasses, the kind the legally blind wore, and it frightened me when I sat in his chair as he held court, the sharp instruments being used to make various punctuation points in the air.

For many nights after Mrs. Liuzzo’s murder I could not sleep, and when I did, I had dreams that it was my mother found dead in the car along the road in Alabama. I told my parents of this, and they suggested I give the news-watching a break, but I continued to tune in to Walter Cronkite each night.

It was confusing for me and my sisters, sitting in the House gallery, listening to men talking about how “it isn’t the federal government’s business” who gets to vote.

“Why don’t they want people to vote?” I asked my mother.

“Some people don’t want some people to vote,” she said, trying to protect me from the fact that even United States senators could think like the men who killed Viola Liuzzo.

The next day we took an overly long and punishingly hot car ride to Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson. This historic site, located about two hours southwest of Washington, deep in the state of Virginia, took us into the beginnings of the “real South,” as our mother called it. The tour through Monticello was mostly unmemorable, except for the too-short doorways that indicated people two hundred years ago were not that tall, and the glaring omission of any mention of Jefferson’s slaves.

On the way back to D.C. we pulled off the highway for gas and for a trip to the rest room. I walked with my mother around to the back of the station, where there were two doors. One was marked WHITE and the other COLORED (though it looked like someone had tried to scrape that last word off, unsuccessfully). I stood and stared at these signs, and although I knew what it meant, I wanted to hear my mother’s explanation of it.

“What is this?” I asked.

She looked at the signs and was silent for a moment.

“You know what it is,” she said curtly. “Just go in there and do your business and get out.” I went into the “Colored” bathroom and she went into the “Whites.” When we came out, she led me back to the car.

“Get in there and stay with your sisters.”

She then headed into the gas station with the kind of walk we three kids knew meant that heads would roll. We cranked
our
heads out the windows, hoping to hear what she was saying to the man at the counter, but all that was available to us was the tight-lipped look on her face and the few motions she made with her index finger. He, too, made a few gestures, including a shrug of his shoulders. She came back outside to the car and got in and said nothing.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Just mind your business,” she said, cutting me off. “And lock your doors.” (This would be the only time in my life I would hear such a demand when in the vicinity of all white people.) We never learned what she said to the man, or what he told her, and years later I liked to think she had given him a piece of her mind for her children having to witness such immorality in the U.S.A. that she loved. He might have told her that they just hadn’t gotten around to taking it down yet, or had tried (the Civil Rights Act outlawing such things had passed twelve months earlier), or maybe he told her to get her nigger-loving ass out of there. Or maybe she was just complaining that the ladies’ room was out of toilet paper. I always meant to ask but didn’t. She was no Viola Liuzzo, and for that, I guess, I was thankful, as I liked my mother being alive.

The trip to D.C. to learn how our government worked was coming to a close, but our mother had scheduled a “part two” for our summer trip: we were going to New York City and to the New York World’s Fair! When she was eighteen, her parents took her to the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, and it was there she first saw inventions like the television and was given a glimpse of the “World of Tomorrow.” We would now get a glimpse into our future via this new Fair. Five hours later we arrived at our aunt’s house on Staten Island.

The New York World’s Fair of 1964–65 was a mind-bursting experience. Located on 646 acres in the borough of Queens, the Fair included over 140 pavilions and exhibits from all over the world. Most of it, for our young eyes, was a thrilling look at what the adults of that day thought the world would look like in the twenty-first century. The IBM pavilion introduced us to what computers could do for us, and while it was never proposed that we would ever own our own computers, it did spike the imagination and create an excitement for the bold world of the coming new millennium.

At the Pepsi pavilion we saw a very entertaining show called “It’s a Small World,” a precursor to the “We Are the World” vibe of the 1980s—though Pepsi was less concerned with African starvation than with beating Coke.

There was nothing that came close to the massive building sponsored by General Motors at the Fair. They called it Futurama, and with all of us being from the company’s hometown, we were quite proud to enter its doors. They put us in chairs—and suddenly those chairs began to move! They took us on a ride through the Future—flying cars, cities under the oceans, colonies on the moon, and happy people everywhere. It was a world at peace, where everyone had a nice job, and there was no poverty or pollution or anything that might upset us. That was cool. We went on the ride again, and this time I took notes. GM was making a very generous promise, and I wanted to be able to tell the boys back in the neighborhood about it.

Many states and countries also had their own pavilions. New York State had three towers from which you could see the tri-state area. The tallest one had a huge lobby with a million-dollar map of New York laid out with exotic tiles (and a star on the location of every Texaco gas station in the state). At the top of the tower was a revolving restaurant. The new state of Alaska had an exhibit, as did Wisconsin (free samples of cheese!), and the British, French, Canadians, and dozens of other countries were well represented.

But the longest lines were reserved for the Vatican City pavilion. For it was inside this edifice that the Pope had sent abroad, for the first time ever, a work of art from St. Peter’s Basilica. Yet this wasn’t just any piece of art. This was one of the most famous works of sculpture in the history of the world: the
Pietà,
by Michelangelo.

The
Pietà
depicted the Blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, holding the body of her dead son after he was taken down from the cross. It measured approximately six feet high and six feet wide and was only the third sculpture by a young and somewhat unknown twenty-four-year-old Michelangelo of Florence, Italy.

To view the
Pietà
you had to wait in a long line and, once inside, you were placed on a moving sidewalk where you could view the work at 1.2 miles per hour. No photography was allowed and silence and reverence were expected at all times.