The Grace of Silence Page 15

  Fred Horn, one of my father’s classmates, served sixteen years as a state legislator. He later taught at the school. He coached basketball, golf, and football and was the primary force behind the establishment of the athletic field behind the school that now bears his name. “We believed that we were better than anybody else,” Horn said. “This was taught. And we had to graduate and prove to ourselves and to the world that we were better.”

  Nearly all the students who served as foot soldiers for freedom in the 1963 protest came from Parker High School. Hundreds of children walked the few blocks from Parker to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, where Dr. Martin Luther King had told them to march with pride and without violence. These students were then attacked by dogs and with water cannons. Timothy Archie was at Kelly Ingram Park that afternoon. He said the force of a water cannon sent him flying as though he were “a piece of paper.” He was bruised for weeks, but has no regrets. “This was the turning point of the civil right movement here in Birmingham,” he told me. “Children made the change. We made the change.”

  At Parker High School nowadays, it is hard to argue that, on the whole, change was for the better. The school sits in the shadows of the city’s downtown, but it might as well be a galaxy away. It is surrounded by sagging bungalows and boarded-up buildings. The campus, once so lovingly maintained that it was featured on postcards sold in stores throughout the city, now abounds with weeds, trash, and graffiti.

  Under segregation, Parker was a place where the children of black doctors and ditchdiggers learned side by side. Under integration, the best and the brightest moved to better-equipped schools elsewhere in the city and the suburbs. Today Parker is still 98 percent black, but because the black middle class has fled, there’s de facto segregation based on class, not color. On college entrance exams, students at Parker now perform well below the national average, so much so that the state has threatened to intervene.

  When I went back to Parker on a reporting trip in 2004, I was stunned to see that Dad’s likeness was on a wall in the lunchroom. They didn’t have yearbooks back then, just class photos—hundreds of tiny oval portraits on a single eleven-by-fourteen-inch sheet of paper. Of all the Parker graduating classes, the sheet including Belvin and Woody Norris had been blown up and affixed to a large wall, like a vintage mural. The Norris brothers graduated the same year, 1943. Now, together with hundreds of others in suits and ties and neat dresses, they look out from that mural over students who wear hoodies and gold “grills” on their teeth. A few feet from the wall, a student told me, “It’s still a struggle ’cause you know how they had separate but equal? It’s separate but unequal, and it’s still like that. I mean, despite the struggles of, you know, our forefathers in the civil rights movement, it’s not separate and equal.”

  After leaving Parker, I went a few blocks down the road to visit former civil rights activist James Armstrong, who’d been arrested and jailed half a dozen times for his efforts. He was at the head of the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965 and has since carried the American flag in reenactments, year after year. Armstrong also filed the lawsuit that eventually led to the integration of Birmingham’s schools, resulting in the diminishment of his very own neighborhood.

  For more than fifty years he ran a barbershop near Parker. The walls inside provided a history lesson to young customers, who patronized the shop for haircuts from “back in the day”: side parts, freedom ’fros, and fades. On the walls of his establishment were signs for colored restrooms and for separate entrances to movie theaters, as well as campaign posters for Jesse Jackson’s presidential run and for Birmingham’s first black mayor, Richard Arrington. At the entrance was a placard Armstrong had made with the city’s youths in mind: IF YOU THINK EDUCATION IS EXPENSIVE, TRY IGNORANCE.

  Customers had ample time to read the placard while James Armstrong slowly made his way to the front door. You see, visitors to his barbershop had to ring for service. The neighborhood had gotten so bad that Armstrong spent his days behind a locked door, a civil rights warrior living in fear. “I keep that door locked when I’m here by myself. I’m afraid of my own folks,” he told me.

  James Armstrong died in November 2009, at the age of eighty-six. He lived to see the struggle for civil rights sublimed by the election of Barack Obama—he’d counted himself among the longest line of black voters Birmingham had ever seen. Armstrong said he hoped that those left behind by integration would stoke the consciences of those propelled by it. I hope he’s right.

  At first glance, you might think that poverty is the chief vicissitude bedeviling the neighborhood around Parker or the neighborhood a few miles away where my grandparents lived. You’d be wrong. People have always been poor here. But years ago, they were also rich with social capital. There was an abiding sense of community. Every household had a breadwinner, sometimes three or four, working at the mills, the mines, the railroads, the schools. Or at the homes across town, as maids, nannies, and gardeners. Stable families were the norm. Two parents. Lots of children. Small houses. Big dreams.

  Today, these black neighborhoods are composed of crumbling buildings full of people even at the height of the business day: too few adults hold jobs; too many students skip school or drop out altogether. Avenue G is no longer a supposedly poor enclave. It is unquestionably destitute—a place of broken windows and shattered dreams. Scary dogs roam with abandon. Drug dealers seem unafraid of hawking their wares in broad daylight.

  My grandparents’ bungalow is gone. The lot is empty; all that remains are two trees along the boulevard. In the distance I hear an ice cream truck and I’m back in 1960-something, when my grandfather would make us recite a poem or a psalm to “earn” our ice cream money. I lean against my car, listening to a Scott Joplin rag blaring from a speaker on top of the Good Humor truck. A teenager, holding a Dreamsicle, passes me by on his bicycle. After he’s halfway down the block, he turns back: “You need help? You from around here?”

  I tell him my grandparents raised six boys in a house that sat on the empty lot before our eyes. The kid shrugs his shoulders. “Don’t know ’em,” he said. “But I tell you what. You don’t need to be here. Too dangerous. You just can’t roll up in this neighborhood for sightseeing. You likely to get robbed or even killed. Best you get yourself back to where you came from.”

  12

  Home

  A COIN TOSS LED BELVIN NORRIS, a man who didn’t leave much to chance, to Minnesota, the place he would call home until his death.

  Once Belvin and Woody Norris made their court appearance and paid their fines as recompense for their arrest, following their violent encounter with the Birmingham police, they left the state in a hurry. Birmingham was a dangerous place for black men perceived as agitators. Woody and Belvin had little money and no clear plans. One by one, their older brothers had moved to Chicago’s South Side, while dozens of their classmates had hightailed it to Detroit, looking for jobs in the auto industry. But Belvin and Woody decided to head somewhere else, in part because they feared that the long arm of Alabama law enforcement might find and harass them if they followed the traditional routes of black migration north from Birmingham.

  Paranoia? By today’s standards, their panic might seem absurd, but in the mid-1940s southern police departments would often inform their northern counterparts about potential troublemakers, recent black arrivals in need of close monitoring. Some blacks were gripped by irrational fear of the dogged persistence of southern authorities to keep them in check, even after they’d left the region. Such was the psychological terrorism of the Jim Crow system.

  Horace Huntley, who directs the Oral History Project at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, shook his head and shuddered as he recalled a deeply ingrained angst. Decades ago Huntley was in the military, stationed at Grand Forks, North Dakota, and during weekends he would take quick trips north to Winnipeg. “The guys had told me how liberal Canada was,” Huntley said, laughing at the comedy of an encounter in retrospect. “So
the first time I went to Winnipeg, Manitoba, I got on the bus. I had sat on the front seat, and about, I guess, maybe a block and a half later, a young white woman got on the bus and sat next to me.… Now, here I am a young black teenager, eighteen years old, from Birmingham, Alabama, never known anything different, and here this white woman was going to sit down next to me. It nearly scared me to death for a very brief period. ’Cause all I could imagine was that Bull Connor had a camera and it was on me and it was sending all this back.… And then, she not only sat there, she started a conversation. It’s the first time I’d ever talked to a white woman or a white girl my age. And it was, it was rather traumatic … the trauma of growing up in apartheid Birmingham.”

  Woody and Belvin left the city they’d grown up in and made their way to Boston, where Dad knew someone from his years in the military. But things didn’t work out well. Dad’s friend had moved away by the time they arrived. They had no place to live, no work, no leads or relatives. At their wits’ end, they turned once again to their older brother Simpson, and it could not have been an easy call to make. Simpson had bailed his brothers out of jail after the shooting and the arrest. Here they were again, palms out, begging for train fare to join the rest of the Norris clan in Chicago.

  Soon Dad was earning decent money at a post office there. All that studying during the voter drive had been put to good use when he’d applied for a postal job and aced the civil service exam. One of his best friends at the time was a fellow postal worker named Jimmy Brown, although theirs was an unlikely friendship. Jimmy was a looker. Because of his chiseled cheekbones and carefully tended mustache, women used to tell him that he could have been Clark Gable’s black brother. Jimmy liked to hang out on the town and ran with a bunch of Chicago hipsters. Belvin offered something different. “You could just trust him,” Jimmy said. “He was not into all that jive talk and all that kind of stuff. He had a different way about him. You could trust him. In a fast town like Chicago, you hold on to people you can trust.”

  Though the Norris brothers all lived together in Chicago, Belvin and Woody were always a pair. Their childhood bond remained strong, and had perhaps been deepened by their terrifying arrest and incarceration. The pair would become a trio: Belvin, Woody, and Jimmy. Every year after Christmas, they would spend some of their overtime pay on a road trip, usually of short duration, to places throughout the Midwest, like Wisconsin Dells, Detroit, or fishing resorts in Minnesota.

  Occasionally, at Belvin and Woody’s behest, they would drive down to Alabama. Jimmy would go reluctantly, and only because he’d been outnumbered in the voting. Jimmy Brown was from Minneapolis and didn’t much care for the South and its strict covenants. So when the time came for their next adventure, he suggested they flip a coin: heads, we go to Minnesota; tails, we go to Birmingham.

  Belvin and Woody were so peeved about losing the coin toss that Jimmy was forced to be the sole driver on the eight-hour trip to the Twin Cities. The Norris brothers were still sprawled out on the backseat when Jimmy pulled off the interstate and noticed there was a dance in progress at the Labor Temple in southeast Minneapolis.

  Jimmy woke them up and found a decent gas station so they could all fix themselves up a bit before going to the dance hall. “Once they got inside, you could have flown an airplane into their mouths,” Jimmy said. “It was a mostly white crowd, and they just were not used to that. You know, seeing mixed couples on the dance floor and whatnot. The girls came up to them and were so nice and so talkative. They didn’t know what to do. They were so shy. It tickled me.” As for the white men at the dance, they treated Woody and Belvin as equals. They looked them in the eye. They waved them toward the bar and extended “you first” courtesies. This behavior by white men was unfamiliar to the brothers, but quite welcome.

  So entranced were Belvin and Woody by this newness that Chicago’s allure began to diminish. Belvin and Woody started visiting Minnesota regularly. Woody would eventually marry a small-town, white Minnesota girl named Audrey, who already had a young daughter. Audrey’s family was at first unsettled by the union but soon came to repeat Woody’s charms.

  As things turned out, Dad, too, would marry a Minnesotan. In 1960, Jimmy Brown’s best friend became his brother-in-law. Everybody called Elizabeth Brown McGraw either Betty or Bets. A divorcée with two adorable girls, she was tall, stoic, and slightly bookish. “Regal” was the word my dad used whenever he showered her with compliments. And she, like Dad, was a saver. While many of the women Dad had dated yearned for fancy dinners or nights out on the town, Mom preferred simple things. Walks in the park. Trips to the library. Picnics with my half sisters, Cindy and Marguerite. All the better to save money toward buying and furnishing a nice house. She was a woman who spoke his language. Dad was smitten.

  Life is full of little ironies. Even after their marriage fell apart, Mom and Dad seemed to get along better than many of the parents who chaperoned our events. They talked to us kids and to each other, while other parents stood side by side in the gym but appeared to be galaxies apart. In retrospect, the forces that had stifled my father’s military career prepared him, in an odd way, for single parenthood. I’m not sure he would have been capable of running such a tight ship at home had he not spent much of his naval service in mess halls. Often the indignities and despair we endure can serve us in surprising ways. The U.S. military, while deserving of reproach for its treatment of men and women of color, has paradoxically become an institution that best models the concept of equal opportunity.

  Here’s another little irony: while Dad was the steadfast parent, keeping the ship afloat when Mom decamped, he was a mourned absence when I myself became a parent. He didn’t live long enough to meet my husband or hold his grandchildren or listen to his daughter on the radio. Now it’s my once absent mother who has become the mighty ballast for all of us: her siblings, my sister, my husband and I, her grandchildren, and the elderly ladies in her condominium, who always seek her wisdom and recipes.

  Now I understand that she has always been there for me, even when her actions caused me pain and confusion. Like most black mothers in our neighborhood—indeed, all of America—Mom was hyperattentive about taming my long, thick, kinky hair. With the exception of Easter Sunday, she kept my hair in braids. When I was young, she tied a profusion of teeny ones. I would sleep with a little pink sponge roller hanging on my forehead to effect little sausage roll bangs, which would frizz like antennae the minute I stepped on the playground. It didn’t matter that my bangs never lasted beyond lunchtime. When I got home, Mom would hit those tufts of hair with a dollop of DuSharme or VO5 and pull out the sponge roller to commence the process all over again.

  When I was older, we set aside the rollers and the gum-ball hair ties and went for two long Pocahontas braids separated by a center part. As my hair got longer and seemingly thicker, with each passing year, Mom stopped washing it herself in the kitchen sink and sent me instead to various neighborhood “kitchen beauticians,” women who could work magic with a hot comb and a hair dryer in the same space where they churned out fried chicken and coleslaw. Over time, some of these kitchen beauticians became proper businesswomen, like Miss Olivia and Miss Debbie, who got their husbands to turn their basement recreation rooms into full-service salons, with reclining shampoo chairs and upright dryers. After years of hearing me wince and cry as Mom worked her way through my tangles on Saturday night, Dad did not complain when my hairdresser visits were added to the family budget. The hairdressers would wash, dry, and straighten my hair and then quickly work it into a hairdo, always involving braids.

  A few months after Mom left, she announced that she was taking me for a haircut. I assumed she meant a trim, because most of her hair-care advice revolved around helping my hair grow. “Eat your vegetables.… Here’s a spoonful of cod liver oil.… Make sure to wrap your head up at night.… Don’t wear a wool hat any longer than you have to.… Make sure to put curler paper over your sponge rollers so that congealed foam won’t pull y
our hair out.… Don’t play with your ends.… Wear a swim cap.… Forget about bobbing for apples at that birthday party just ’cause the other kids are doing it.… Use a boar-bristle brush.… Thank the Good Lord you have a healthy head of hair.” I’ve always wondered whether there is some kind of encyclical spelling out the cardinal commands of black hair care, rules my mother followed to the letter.

  That spring day, when we left our neighborhood and headed downtown, she had something else in mind. I thought maybe we were going to one of the “real” salons, where lawyers and newscasters got their hair and nails done. I soon realized that Mom had a different plan when we arrived at a barbershop. I’d spent enough time with my father at barbershops on the South Side of Minneapolis to know that women rarely entered these sanctums. If they did, they were usually, like me, accompanying a customer. Or they were young women who’d freed themselves from the tyranny of the hot comb to go natural with an Afro.

  When Mom and I made our way into the downtown barbershop, I would soon be, unbeknownst to me, of the latter category. The barbershop was nothing like the place where Dad spent an hour every Saturday morning. It was in the IDS Tower, which at the time was the tallest building in the state. Even if you’ve never been to Minneapolis, you might recall the glass skyscraper, for in her weekly television sitcom Mary Tyler Moore would take the measure of it and toss her tam in the air. The barbershop was inside the building’s cavernous lobby, and it was so much fancier than any place the men I knew went to get their hair cut. While a few barbers there wore the standard short-sleeved white coats, most were dressed like disco kings, in bell bottoms and shirts with wide collars. This, Mom explained, was where the truly cool came to get their Afros shaped and refined. Afros?