Chapter 20
On Monday afternoon, November fifth, Mr. Thurgood Marshall wheels his rental car into the packinghouse lot. Leaving his suit coat in the car, he strides into our showroom, tie loosened, starched white shirtsleeves rolled back against the heat.
“Did you hear about the cold snap in New York?” he asks, patting his forehead with a folded white handkerchief. “There were icicles hanging off our front stoop when I left,” he tells us with a throaty chuckle.
“Welcome to paradise,” Daddy says, turning the small electric fan on the counter in his direction. “Time for another tango with Sheriff McCall?”
“Ackerman, the defense counsel, has filed for a change of venue; Judge Futch is going to rule on it day after tomorrow,” the big man tells us. News of the Supreme Court-ordered retrial—of the two young Negroes accused of raping a white woman up in Groveland— has been all over the papers for months.
While I pour Mr. Marshall some fresh-squeezed juice, I listen to him tell Daddy they’re hoping to get Prosecutor Jess Hunter removed for calling the N.A.A.C.P. “a subversive and Communist organization.” He wants to transfer the proceedings to Marion County, where Lake County’s notorious Sheriff McCall “has fewer friends.”
“Better there than Miami,” Daddy says, and the two men shake their heads over the most recent string of bombings— three more since Labor Day.
“What the hell’s taking the F.B.I. so long?” Daddy rails.
Mr. Marshall’s face falls. “Your guess is as good as mine. We’ve called everyone we can think of,
twice
. And that includes the President and the former First Lady!”
“And, unfortunately, old give-em-hell Harry’s up to his eyeballs in Communists?” Daddy asks, raising an eyebrow.
“We’re standing in a line that’s gets longer every day,” Mr. Marshall tells him sadly, finishing his juice. “If you have the time,” he adds, “you’re welcome to attend Wednesday’s hearing in Tavares.”
“Really?” I say, avoiding Daddy’s eye. “Me, too?” I ask, hoping to confirm my seat from Mr. Civil Rights himself.
Far too smart to be caught between a teenager and her parents, Mr. Marshall shakes his head. “That’s for your parents to decide, Reesa.”
After he’s gone, my begging begins. The trick is to press hard enough to get a yes, but not so hard I get a no. “Please, Daddy, please. After all I’ve read, all the things the paper’s said, you have to let me go! It’s history!”
My father, no slouch at smartness either, gives me the sly eye. “We’ll discuss it with your mother, later.”
It should have been, it would have been, something to see Mr. Marshall at work, defending Walter Lee Irvin and Samuel Shepherd, two of the four young Negroes who stopped their car to help a white couple and were later accused of raping the woman. But, on November sixth, on their way to the courthouse, both Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd were shot. Shepherd was killed. What happened that night, on a lonely road in Lake County, depends on who you choose to believe.
In the local paper, Sheriff Willis McCall tells his side of things:
In the late afternoon of November sixth, the sheriff and his deputy James Yates drove up to Raiford State Prison in Union County to pick up defendants Irvin and Shepherd. The lawmen’s court-ordered task was to deliver the two Negroes back to Lake County’s court in Tavares. When they left the prison, the defendants were handcuffed together in the front seat next to the sheriff. Deputy Yates sat in the back.
“Fearing interference from a lynch mob,” Sheriff McCall explained, he drove Deputy Yates to Weirsdale to pick up a second car. “By that time, it was dark, so I sent Yates ahead to watch for roadblocks. On the way,” McCall said, “a tire went flat and needed fixing. When I opened the car door to get the prisoners out, Shepherd grabbed my flashlight, smashed me on the head with it, and yelled to Irvin to get my gun.” Sheriff McCall pulled his revolver and shot each prisoner three times. Then he radioed for Deputy Yates to come back and to call a doctor. When the doctor got there, Samuel Shepherd was dead. Walter Lee Irvin looked dead, but was not.
Instead, Irvin’s in the hospital with tubes draining blood from his chest cavity, and a bullet lodged forever in his kidney. Miraculously, he’s able to talk. In an interview, headlined “Who Lied?,” twenty-three-year-old Irvin tells his story:
“The sheriff and the deputy began talkin’ on the radio a little bit. The sheriff told him to ‘go ahead and check’ and so the deputy sheriff went on a short ways in front of us and he says, ‘Okay’ . . . The sheriff shimmied his steering wheel and said, ‘Something is wrong with my left front tire.’ ”
Irvin said McCall reached under the seat for his flashlight, got out and kicked the front wheel. “Then he opened our door and said, ‘You sons of bitches get out and get this tire fixed.’ . . . So Sammy—he was by the door—he takes his foot and put it out of the car and was gettin’ out, I can’t say just how quick it was, but he shot him. It was quick enough, and he turned, the sheriff did, and he had a pistol and he shot Sammy right quick. Then he shot me. He reached and grabbed me, and snatched me, and Sammy, too. He snatched both of us and then threw us on the ground.
“Then I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say nothin’. So later he snatched us, he shot me again in the shoulder, and still I didn’t say anything at all, all that time. And I knew I was not dead.
“In about ten minutes, the deputy sheriff was there. And the deputy he shined the light in my face and he said to the sheriff, ‘That son of a bitch is not dead.’ And then he said, ‘Let’s kill him.’ The deputy sheriff pointed his pistol on me and pulled the trigger, snapped the trigger, and the gun did not shoot. The deputy took it around to the car lights and looked in it and shined the light in it. He turned it on me again and pulled it and that time the gun fired. It went through me here,” indicating his throat, “and then I began to bleed out of my mouth and nose. I didn’t say nothin’ and didn’t let them know I was not dead. And some people came . . .”
There isn’t a doubt in my mind that Walter Lee Irvin is telling the truth. And that Sheriff McCall is, like Daddy says, “a lying sack of cesspool slop.”
But, like Daddy also says, “These are devilish times.”
At the end of the week, an all-white Lake County Coroner’s Jury hears nine hours of testimony and decides, after just thirty-five minutes of deliberation, that Samuel Shepherd’s death was “justifiable homicide,” and that Sheriff McCall fired “in self-defense and the line of duty.”
Even the most conservative people we know can hardly believe it. But no one is more disgusted than Harry T. Moore.
“This thing stinks to high heaven,” he tells Daddy, asking us to join him in a statewide letter-writing campaign demanding that the Governor suspend Sheriff Willis McCall.
“A total whitewash!” Daddy agrees, reading a copy of Mr. Harry’s own letter to Governor Warren.
“Florida is on trial before the rest of the world! Only prompt and courageous action, by removing Sheriff McCall, can save the good name of our fair state,” the normally reserved schoolteacher warns our Governor.
“This is great, but, Harry,” Daddy locks eyes with the soft-spoken leader of the state N.A.A.C.P., “I hope you’re watching your back.”
Good Lord
, I think, stunned,
who would even think of harming Mr. Harry?
“There have been threats,” Mr. Harry says, jutting his chin, “but I’ve got a .32 caliber in my car, and, if it comes to that,” he declares, “I’ll take a few of them with me.”
Chapter 21
December snuck up on me. I should’ve seen it coming but I was busy with other things.
From the middle of November to the end of December, the packinghouse is a crazy place. We have long lists of standing mail orders to pack and ship, big wooden baskets of Florida Sunshine, fresh-wrapped fruit, to get to somebody’s Aunt Mabel, or Cousin Larry, or, my special favorites, the children’s wards of quite a few hospitals.
Aside from school, we do everything but sleep in the big back work area behind the showroom, helping our parents “make pay while the snow falls.”
The radio is constantly on, providing a rhythm to our work, and there must have been a time when the Christmas carols began, but I didn’t notice it. I did notice, however, the point at which my mother, planner of picnics, singer of songs, initiator of card games, disappeared, permanently it seems, behind her Poker Face.
The radio announcement on the morning of December fourth was brief: In Miami, at three A.M., an explosion blew up yet another Carver Village apartment building. Thirty minutes later, another building in that very same housing project exploded and fell in the night. Half an hour after that, a blast at the Miami Hebrew School and Congregation shattered forty-four stained-glass windows, a memorial to family members lost in Hitler’s Holocaust. Exactly thirty minutes later, a fourth blast destroyed a Jewish community center, sending nearby residents screaming into the street.
“What a nightmare!” I say, mad as can be.
“When will it end?” Mother says, but she’s not asking me.
And I watch it happen: As if somebody pulled a plug, her brightness fades, her dimple disappears. Only her Poker Face—the careful, studied expression, the hazel eyes that see everything and say nothing—remains. She shifts her attention back to the task, wrapping and packing fruit in the basket between us, working as hard, harder, than anybody. But she has drawn the curtains and retreated to some private, inside place.
Even a week later—when U.S. Attorney General Howard McGrath decides,
finally
, to act, ordering Florida’s F.B.I. agents to “investigate to see whether they can investigate” violations of anyone’s federally guaranteed civil rights—my real mother does not return.
Even when we hear that Mr. Harry T. Moore—the F.B.I.’s most vocal critic, the Negroes’ most powerful advocate, the compiler of civil rights case files that local law enforcement conveniently overlooked—has been invited to Miami to brief the federal agents. Even then, she doesn’t respond. Not really.
Even as the rest of us sit around the break table, expressing our hopes that, maybe now, the bombings will stop. Maybe now, the tidal wave of evil will ebb. Maybe now, Marvin’s murderers will be brought to justice. And the winter tourists, who should be choking the Trail with traffic by now, will change their minds and decide it’s safe to come to Florida after all. Even now, she holds herself apart, playing Solitaire at the table’s other end.
I wonder, I worry, I even think about asking her directly, “What’s going on behind that Poker Face of yours?” But it wouldn’t do me a bit of good. My mother, the expert card player, never tips her hand. “You think
I’ve
got a Poker Face,” she told me once, “you should have seen my
father’s
!”
My mother adored her father, the soft-spoken accountant whose thick spectacles and thinning hair made him look older than he was. He taught her everything there is to know about card playing—from how to count the cards to how to calculate, in her head, statistical probabilities. The summer she turned sixteen, a bad strep throat kept her daddy home from work. She helped him pass the hours, that stretched into days, with their own special versions of Pinochle, Gin Rummy and double-handed Bridge. While she sat by his bedside playing by the rules, and he did everything the doctor ordered, that strep throat turned into scarlet fever, a child’s disease, that somehow became rheumatic and masked the pneumonia that, in the middle of the night, stole him away from her forever.
I know, from my own father, it was a terrible shock and a devastating loss for her. And, I can’t help but wonder if it’s playing on her mind now, the way it is on mine. Is she worried, too, that something awful is sneaking up on us the way that pneumonia did? I’d like to ask her about it. But I have the distinct feeling she’d tell me to “breast your cards,” which is cardplayer talk for “mind your own business.”
Chapter 22
In the store windows and on Christmas cards, Santa Claus shows up as a round little man with a white beard and a red suit. At our house, Santa is a feisty old lady with silver-toned cat-eye glasses and mink-colored hair.
“You’re a sorry sight for sore eyes,” Doto tells us and she’s probably right. The events of the past seven months, since she left us last May, have made us “all hollow-eyed” and “too thin,” she declares. Mother’s “just skin and bones” and “obviously, these children need more ice cream.”
Doto’s like a tonic. In the span of a single week, she’s bullied us out of the backroom to cut down a Christmas tree (a Florida pine from the woods off Wellwood Road); she’s unearthed the decorations, opened her pack (from the trunk of the DeSoto) and infused our lives with much-needed holiday spirit.
Heaped under our tree are gifts from her and from our cousins in Montana and Maryland. There are gifts from our mother’s side, our cousins and grandmother outside Chicago. And there are the small gifts which we children have for our parents and each other, thanks to Doto carrying us off for an afternoon’s shopping at Woolworth’s and the Opalakee Five-and-Dime.
On Christmas morning, we plow through our presents like half-starved entrants in a pie-eating contest. Afterwards, our opened piles are full to bursting with possibilities: board games, science sets, puzzles, new underwear and outfits for all, plus a bright red Radio Flyer wagon for Mitchell, a Schwinn bike for Ren, and a pink portable record player for me. For the first time in recent memory, it feels like some kind of normal has returned.
The last gift to be opened is a very large box tagged
To the
whole family. Love, Doto
. My brothers and I have been eyeing it ever since she arrived, trying to guess what it could possibly be. Daddy drags it from behind the tree to Mother, who invites us to help her unwrap it. With each of us posted on a different side, we tear back the colored paper, racing to see who will solve the mystery first. It’s Mother who realizes it’s a television, a beautiful dark-wood cabinet with an oval screen the size of a turkey platter, the much-talked-about black-and-white eye on the rest of the world. Doto has topped herself! We surround her, hugging her, calling our thank-yous.
“Hurray! Now we can see
Howdy Doody
!” the boys cry.
“And
I Love Lucy
!” I say.
“What’s
I Love Lucy
?” Doto wants to know.
“It’s new. Miz Lillian says it’s her favorite,” I explain. “Miz Lillian never goes
any
where on Monday nights anymore because she doesn’t want to miss Lucy.”
“We’ll just have to check it out then, won’t we?” Doto grins.
As Daddy looks over the manual for hooking up the television, Ren, Mitchell and I organize our gifts into individual piles under the tree. Doto and Mother clear away the box of wadded-up wrapping paper and curled ribbons, then head into the kitchen to check on the turkey, already in the oven.
At noon, Sal and Sophia arrive carrying a round box of panettone, Italian Christmas cake, for the adults and a red tin of Amaretto cookies for us. I know that later, after dinner, Sal will show us how to twist the paper cookie wrappers and light them so they take off and fly like tiny angels.
During dinner, the adults entertain us with their favorite Christmas stories. Doto tells about the morning she received her very own pony, complete with wagon. Doto was one of two children, but after her only sister, Hettie, died of scarlet fever, her parents spoiled her
terribly
, she says. Shy Sophia, egged on by the rest of us, tells about the time when, as a child in Rome, she attended midnight mass at St. Mark’s Cathedral. But old Sal’s story is my favorite. It’s about a big fire on Christmas Eve that destroyed his apartment building off Brooklyn’s Flatbush Avenue, how all the people and families from his building were adopted by other big families on the street, who shared their dinner, clothing and gifts with those who’d lost everything. At the end of the story, both Sal’s and Sophia’s eyes are watery.
“That’s really what Christmas is all about, isn’t it?” Daddy says, smiling around the table.
“Yes, is about good neighbors,” Sal agrees, “and about moving on, what Sophia and me, we must do.”
The crack in Sal’s voice, the look on his face, prompts Daddy, who’s all of a sudden solemn, to ask, “What do you mean?”
“Sorry.” Sal drops his eyes and shakes his head. “I didna mean to speak of this in fronta the children.”
“Please, Sophia, are you moving?” Mother’s tone is urgent, concerned. Doto is frowning.
Sophia closes her eyes, unable to speak. She puts a shaking hand on Sal’s arm, a mute request for him to explain.
“The phone calls,” Sal tells us, nearly in a whisper. “They started lasta month. First, justa name-calling, a man with a Southern accent saying, ‘Fish-eaters!,’ ‘Pope-lovers!’—baby stuff nexta what I heard in Brooklyn as a kid. Then, the calls, they got worse. Insults, threats about us and the coloreds, saying leave, ‘or else!’ Lasta night, a stick wrapped in paper thrown through our big window. We hearda the crash, ran downstairs, and found—the stick was dynamite. On the paper, the words: ‘Next time, this will be lit.’ ”
Across from me, Ren goes bug-eyed. Beside me, Doto gasps.
Mother’s eyes fill with tears. “Oh, Sal, Sophia, how horrible!”
“Have you talked to anyone else about this?” Daddy asks Sal.
“I called the Constable’s office lasta week, also the week before. Constable Watts came, but when I talked, he kept interrupting. ‘Speak English! I can’t understand you!’ he says. Then he shrugs. ‘A little phone call never hurt nobody,’ he says. I think now, if I showed him the dynamite, he’d shrug again and say, ‘It don’t hurt if it ain’t lit.’ ”
“What will you do?” Doto, angry, wants to know.
“If I was a younger man . . .” Sal’s voice trails off. His eyes find Sophia’s, then return to Doto. “Sophia and me, we boarded up the window and putta sign on the front door, ‘Closed, Out of Business.’ We called her sister in Tampa. We go there, for now, this afternoon. Afterwards, who knows?”
Sophia is sobbing into her napkin. Mother moves to put arms around her and leads her away from the table, into the kitchen. In the silence, Doto stands. “Children, it’s time we took a look at Reesa’s new puzzle. Everybody out on the front porch,
now
!”
We drop our napkins beside our plates and follow her quickly out of the dining room, leaving Daddy and Sal alone. Looking back, I see my father, stony-faced and rock-hard, turning slowly in his chair to face his old, suddenly frail-looking friend.
This place has gone to hell in a handbasket
, I fume inside my head to Whoever’s listening, which, as near as I can tell, is nobody.
The morning after Christmas, the rumble of Daddy’s truck engine wakes me. I hear women’s voices in the kitchen, Mother’s, Doto’s, and, surprisingly, a third one with an accent. Sophia, I remember. She and Sal spent the night in Mitchell’s room, the boys camping out on the couch in the living room. The Plan.
Instantly, it comes back to me. My parents persuading them not to leave for Tampa yesterday afternoon; Daddy and Sal’s trip to The Quarters to meet with Luther, Armetta, Reverend Stone and the elders from St. John’s A.M.E. Last night, after Doto led Sal and Sophia upstairs, my parents explained The Plan. It goes like this:
Sal and Sophia wanted to leave town immediately, abandoning everything, walking away from the contents of their beloved store, and the sunny, furniture-filled apartment above it. Daddy convinced them to wait one day, to attempt to salvage as much of their lives as possible.
Their Christmas night meeting in The Quarters proved fruitful. Luther and Reverend Stone agreed to rally the residents to purchase as much of the store’s perishable goods as possible in a special sale this very morning under the big oaks behind the church. Daddy and Sal left early to load the truck with the store’s stock of dairy, meat and produce. The elders of the church will oversee the sale. Luther and the Reverend offered to stock the church’s choir room with the store’s canned goods, sell them to the locals as needed, then turn over the proceeds to Daddy for forwarding to Sal and Sophia in Tampa. On top of that, Armetta volunteered to take on collecting from their credit customers in The Quarters.
The Tomasinis seemed overwhelmed by the willingness of their customers to help them. “We know all about the Klan, Mistuh Sal,” the elders said. “You and Miz Sophia have been nuthin’ but good to us ever since y’all came here.” By way of thanking them, old Sal presented Reverend Stone with his hastily disconnected twenty-five-foot antenna which, the Reverend told him, would make a fine addition to St. John’s steeple.
I head into the kitchen where Sophia sits at the table, fingering her black rosary beads. With her big eyes, made larger by dark, worried circles, and her long hair hanging loose instead of in her usual bun, she looks like a little lost soul instead of our Sophia.
“Everything will be fine,” Doto tells her, patting her shoulder. “Warren said they’ll be home by noon.”
“Mother, Doto, look at this!” “Come here, quick!” The boys’ cries pull us out of the kitchen and into the living room, where they point wildly to the television.
On the screen, a man is talking: “. . .
from Mims in Brevard
County. Agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrived
this morning and cordoned off the scene of last night’s explosion. Local lawmen suspect dynamite destroyed the home of the state’s
N.A.A.C.P. leader and his wife. According to relatives, Harry
Tyson Moore died on the way to Sanford Hospital. Doctors report his
wife su fered severe internal injuries. Her condition is critical.”
“Santa Maria, Madre di Dio!” Sophia cries, beads to her chest. Tears slick her face.
“Relatives say the blast occurred after the Moores returned home
from a family party celebrating Christmas and their twenty-sixth
wedding anniversary. The Brevard County Sheri f’s Office states
that although the F.B.I. has no jurisdiction in this case, murder being a state crime, the local authorities will give Mr. Hoover’s G-men
their full cooperation. At this time, there are no known suspects.”
“This is a nightmare,” Doto rages.
“That poor man and his wife,” Mother murmurs, to none of us in particular.
Mr. Harry. Dead?
My mind flashes with pictures of him, vibrant and alive: His first visit to our house with Luther and Mr. Marshall; his patient help with my homework (“Democracy is the fairest form of government on earth,” he’d said); the jut of his chin when he told Daddy about the death threats and the .32 caliber under his car seat.
I remember telling Daddy once it didn’t fit, the soft-spoken schoolteacher with the loaded gun under his seat. But Daddy said Mr. Harry was
made of steel
. “Any man who travels up and down this state registering Negro voters right under the noses of all these Klanners is
solid steel
, through and through,” Daddy told me.
As we stare at the screen for more information, it’s obvious the reporter cares more about the arrival of Mr. Hoover’s G-men than what happened to Mr. Harry. Doto fiddles with the knobs and the V-shaped wires she calls rabbit ears in search of another station. Frustrated, she and Mother move into the kitchen for a radio update.
Ren and I run out front to retrieve the morning paper which, because everyone was worried about Sophia and all, lies forgotten in the driveway. Outside, we rip off the rubber band, scan through the sections for something, any kind of mention of the Moores. Nothing. Ren runs to take the paper in to Mother, but all of a sudden,
I can’t move
. Just then, at that very moment, all of it, every single, stinking, heart-hurting detail of Marvin in the bed of Daddy’s truck comes bolting back on me.
Collapsing on the lawn, I see it
all
, all over again—the cuts, the wounds, the striped blood-soaked turban hiding his eyes. I hear his raggedy breath, bubbling on bleeding lips, knowing now what I couldn’t know then, that it was one of the last breaths he’d ever take on this earth. And I smell, in a memory more sharp, more painful than all the others, the smell of his life’s blood oozing out of him onto the filthy truck bed.
For what?
I want to know.
For WHAT!
I rage at the Rock of Ages who, as far as I can determine, has turned His back on this whole stupid mess called the State of Florida.
When will
this nightmare end? And why, WHY is ALL this happening?
Sophia stands on the front steps, frantically fingering her beads, watching the driveway for signs of the truck. We hear it, she from the steps, me from the lawn, roar onto the property. I watch her fly down the walk to the far side of the drive, and, as Sal climbs from the truck, fling herself into his arms.
The minute I see Daddy’s face, I can tell he’s heard the news. Wrenching his door open, he strides right past me, asking, in a voice like granite, “Your mother in the house, Roo?” But he does not look or, taking the steps two at a time, listen for my reply.