The Grace of Silence Page 9

  On those rare instances when Dad referred to his time in the navy, he was always breezy or humorous. At bedtime, he would march up the stairs like a soldier, trying to get the kids to follow him. Or he might hum military tunes while maneuvering his old-fashioned push mower. I can still see him striding up and down the lawn as he cut the grass, muttering, “Left, right, left, right, left!” He used to tell us that he learned to speed-peel potatoes and carrots on KP duty, boasting of his skill while making fun of our pathetic attempts to help Mom prepare supper.

  My naïveté was laughable, as I’d imagined that just about everybody in the military had done KP duty, during initiation or as punishment. War movies I watched as a child on Saturday matinee television always showed men sweating over steaming cauldrons or washing mountains of dishes and silverware. I didn’t realize at the time that a sink hose sprayer was the closest thing to a weapon many servicemen of color had been allowed to wield in World War II.

  What must it have been like for a young man, barely eighteen years old, to discover that his country, fighting oppression overseas, was unashamed to marginalize him? In those days a young black man fully expected to encounter racism in the South. But an optimistic fellow would also have assumed that whites in the North were different, less prejudiced. Although the South could strangle your spirit, there was a bedrock belief that life would be easier up North, where the well-educated men who ran the country did not share in the fierce racial hatred consuming the offspring of the Confederacy. This optimistic young man might also have assumed that the collective wartime spirit would smooth over old divisions of race and class. But, as so many of these brown-skinned men came to realize, military officials everywhere, seated behind mahogany desks in marble-columned buildings, were prone to firing off memos that dictated laws and customs as biased as those propounded by Klansmen and race-baiting politicians enforcing Jim Crow laws.

  I never had the chance to talk about any of this with my father. He didn’t bring it up, so I had no occasion to press him. Until I pored over his military file, my appreciation of his time in uniform was faint. I wonder how he described his service in his letters to his mother, father, or five brothers. I’ve combed through letters written by other black servicemen to get a sense of how, in a segregated military, they saw their country and themselves in the fight for human rights overseas.

  For the most part, these men were at once patriotic and frustrated. An anonymous letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh Courier, sent by a private in the 47th Quartermaster Regiment, Company D, illustrates the point: “If ever there were a time that all racial prejudices and hatred should be put aside, now it is at hand, and the country should be unified in every possible respect.… Negroes like the whites are quitting their jobs to increase the military strength of this Nation, because we all think that a nation worth being in is worth fighting for. But in the view of this so called Unity and National emergency the age old Monster of Prejudice has raised its head high.”8

  In March 1944, the New Republic printed another soldier’s letter, one of several it had received about bias in the military. The editors chose it because they believed it expressed a common sentiment: “Those of us who are in the armed services are offering our lives and fortunes, not for the America we know today, but for the America we hope will be created after the war.”9

  9

  The Shooting

  LIKE HIS FELLOW COUNTRYMEN, my father participated in the war effort to help win the four fundamental freedoms spelled out by President Franklin D. Roosevelt: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. But there was no freedom from want in Birmingham after the war, when Belvin Norris Jr. returned during the winter of 1946.

  Although Birmingham’s economy had flourished because of increased wartime industrial production, life on the home front still demanded sacrifice. The city, like much of the country, was triumphant in spirit, even as virtually every material resource was stretched to the limit. Sugar, steel, butter, lumber, cotton, and corn were all in short supply.

  Even clothing was a hot commodity, especially menswear. Tens of thousands of returning veterans needed to swap their uniforms for civilian clothes, but stores couldn’t get their hands on enough merchandise. At the outset of 1946, the government called on retail merchants to reserve hard-to-find garments for returning servicemen, whenever possible. Suits, overcoats, shirts, and underwear were to be set aside in “substantial proportions” for exclusive sale to veterans, noted the Civilian Production Administration, which also asked veterans, in turn, to limit their buying to their “immediate needs.”

  If returning white soldiers were having a hard time finding civilian clothes, the difficulty was compounded for black veterans. Even in those retail establishments where they were allowed to shop, they were denied the use of dressing rooms, as prescribed by segregation laws. Civilian clothes were in such short supply that some returning black veterans had to avail themselves of coveralls, jumpsuits, castoffs from mine workers, or hand-me-downs from church congregants—garments that were an insult to their pride and a reminder of their second-class citizenship.

  There were shortages of everything. Meat was so scarce that fistfights broke out in butcher shops. The desperation in Birmingham was akin to what was going on all over the country. One widely printed newspaper story told of a melee outside a Philadelphia shop. A mob formed when word spread that the butcher had acquired generous cuts of prime meat. After much screaming and chanting by the mob outside, the rattled proprietor finally opened the door and tried to explain that he had only a single leg of lamb. A buxom woman shoved him aside and pushed her way in, grabbed the leg of lamb, and used it to bludgeon her way to the cash register.

  In 1946, President Harry Truman asked for even more belt-tightening in the United States to avoid what he called “mass starvation” overseas. Under Truman’s directive, wheat could no longer be used as livestock feed or to make hard alcohol or beer. And a greater portion of the wheat kernel was retained, producing flour darker and grainier than what was customary in the spongy, store-bought bread Americans loved. The government was so worried that people would rebel against this change in their eating habits that the president, with the help of Department of Agriculture home economists, staged a taste test for the White House press corps, hoping to sell the country on the idea that dark bread was more healthful than white.

  Clothing and food shortages were the least of it for black veterans, who returned to civilian life more acutely aware of the disparity between America’s promise of freedom and its continued practice of racial segregation. In the mid-1940s, Birmingham, Alabama, was a place where even the best-dressed black man might have to step off the sidewalk if a white person—regardless of class—was heading in his direction. Strict segregation ruled all aspects of city life. Bathrooms, water fountains, restaurants, waiting rooms, public transportation, and private hospitals were all divided along the color line; only the boldest or most desperate dared to cross it. When asked to describe the racial climate in Birmingham, a local branch officer for the NAACP said that blacks in his city were “gripped with an almost paralyzing fear.”1

  Birmingham was a city of boundaries, warnings, exhortations. Ministers preaching of brotherly love also insisted on the necessity to keep the Negro in his place. If the minister was a Negro, he might advise his congregants against trusting even the most benevolent white person. Black children were advised to lower their eyes and their voices when speaking to white adults, and white children learned that certain simple courtesies were never to be offered to a Negro. Nor was a Negro to be called “Mr.” or “Mrs.,” much less “sir” or “ma’am.” If respect was due because of age or affection or trust, then a Negro worker should be addressed as “Auntie,” “Uncle,” “Nanny,” “Mammy,” or by a first name. The white child was instructed that the world of white privilege would tilt off its axis if he or she called a dutiful family employee Mr. Otis or Mrs. Ella Mae or used any other form of
address proper only for whites.

  The code for blacks was strict and unforgiving, held in place by the unspoken though ever-present threat of loss of income, dignity, or even life. In her memoir The Wall Between, the activist and former journalist Anne Braden tells of a memorable conversation she had with a man from an older generation. She describes him as one of the kindest men she had ever known, someone she had always admired for his gentle spirit and courtly ways and the respect he showed to people of color. Nonetheless, she says, he embraced segregation with “a violence that squared with nothing else in his personality.” When she suggested to him that an anti-lynching law might be a good idea, his response was abrupt and caustic, intended to stifle such foolishness on the part of a “well-bred” southern girl. He told her, “We have to have a good lynching every once in a while to keep the nigger in his place.”2

  Much later Braden would reveal that the courtly gentleman was her father. And while she was convinced that he would never have joined a lynch mob, she nonetheless concluded that he had already “committed murder in his heart and mind” by voicing a sentiment that had “sprung out of the unconscious places of his soul.”

  In film and literature and elsewhere in popular culture, segregationists are often portrayed as grotesque caricatures warped by hate and aggression. But in reality the Jim Crow system was held firmly in place by fear on both sides of the color line; fear of diminished social status, lessened earning potential, or cheap, exploitable labor was as keenly felt as fear of white retaliation or loss of dignity. Both whites and blacks had to live according to a strict racial hierarchy.

  Consider the tight vise of Birmingham’s racial system when my father returned from the war. Imagine downtown, not as it is now, with its smattering of hotels and sandwich shops, but as it was in the mid-1940s. Because of wartime production, Alabama’s urban population had grown by 57 percent, as tens of thousands left rural towns for industrial centers like Mobile, Montgomery, and Anniston.3 As the state’s largest city, Birmingham saw the biggest influx. After the Depression, Birmingham had turned into a boomtown, the downtown area reflecting the city’s changing fortunes. It had a domed train station, neoclassical skyscrapers, and swank department stores like Porter’s and Pizitz. The business district was abuzz day and night, with its early morning farmers’ markets, midday retail rush, and crowded nightclubs and church revivals in the evening.

  Though downtown brought blacks and whites together and they walked the same streets, everyone observed racial demarcations. Blacks knew which restaurants offered service through a side window and which buildings had colored restrooms or drinking fountains. Only certain stores allowed colored customers to try on hats, gloves, or clothing before buying them, though the courtesy was never advertised. Birmingham’s strict segregation had facilitated the emergence of a thriving black business corridor, just beyond downtown’s main retail center. Originally settled by Jewish families, Fourth Avenue evolved into the lifeline of the black merchant class. It was the main artery of a network of juke joints, dance halls, beauty shops, real estate agencies, and restaurants. You could pose for a picture at Brown’s studio, as my father and his brothers often did, or you could stop by to see Bishop B. G. Shaw, an entrepreneurial clergyman who could fix you up from head to toe—he owned Shaw’s Beauty Salon and Shaw’s Shoe Store. At the Little Savoy Cafe, ten cents would get you a strong cup of coffee, and for twenty-five cents you could have a fried chicken dinner with a choice of three sides. The food in the Fourth Avenue district was legendary and its gravitational pull so strong that prestigious white families who would never set foot in a Negro restaurant quietly dispatched emissaries with wooden boxes or straw baskets to sneak in and out for large orders to go.

  Lawyers, doctors, dentists, and other professionals were clustered in one of two tall buildings, the black community’s pillars of self-respect: the seven-story Beaux Arts limestone Masonic Temple at 1630 Fourth Avenue and the six-story brick Pythian Temple. Their names suggest ornateness, but, save for the arched windows or Corinthian columns, the two looked like most office buildings constructed around the turn of the twentieth century. While modest by today’s standards, they were considered skyscrapers at the time. Both had been designed by a black architect and built by a black-owned construction company. For a time, the Pythian Temple housed one of the first black-owned financial institutions in the United States, the Alabama Penny Savings Bank, later sold to the Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias, a service organization.

  Both buildings had spaces for social gatherings, entertainment, and civic organizing. The Masonic Temple housed the first lending library open to blacks; the NAACP had offices on its sixth floor; and the Southern Negro Youth Congress was headquartered on the fourth. In addition to its professional offices, the Pythian Temple boasted a private waiters’ club, where its meticulously groomed manager, Johnnie Perkins, looked down his nose over his pencil-thin mustache and decided who got in and who didn’t.

  The Pythian Temple is at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Third Avenue, across from the rear entrance of the Alabama Theatre and a few blocks from the Tutwiler hotel and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As a child, I frequently passed the building on the way to the train station or a downtown department store, whizzing by, my forehead pressed against the car window. And though, from the front seat, my relatives would offer running commentary about city landmarks and who did what on this or that corner, no one ever once referred to the melee involving my father at the Pythian Temple on the night of February 7, 1946. Had I been older or more perceptive, I might have caught some discomfiture in my relatives’ speech or demeanor, as we rushed along the building’s sidewalk on our way to fetch new church gloves to replace the ones I was forever misplacing or soiling beyond repair. The Pythian Temple had no special place in the narrative of our lives, even though it was where my father, Belvin, and his brother Woody had been arrested.

  When I first started asking questions about the shooting and arrest, I discovered that my mother had learned about the incident—much as I did and at around the same time—to her great surprise, from a cousin who had blabbed about it at a family funeral. While the revelation had made me want to scream with frustration, my mother initially dismissed the story as “crazy talk.” She shrugged her shoulders, no doubt adding the tale to her catalog of possible explanations for the failure of her marriage to Belvin. She didn’t know anything about it, and saw no reason to bother herself with knowing more. “You believe what you need to believe about your parents,” she told me. “It’s what we all do, and that belief has served you well in your life, so please don’t go looking for old ghosts.”

  I wondered if Mom, too, had had her own epiphanies and how she had coped with the fact that Dad had walled off a part of his life. How could she not have known? How could she have traveled to Alabama repeatedly and never heard anything about this from her husband or his parents? Grandpa Belvin treated Mom like a queen. He called her “Daughter” as if that were her first name, and for a man who had six sons, it was a term of endearment. Yet in all those long talks on the front porch in Birmingham, it never came up? How could it be that, in their intimacy, the husband and wife on Oakland Avenue had never spoken of this? And had she known, would it have made a difference? I suppose I should have known better than to expect a simple yes or no to that question from Mom. Instead she said, “It would have explained a lot.”

  Untangling what had happened at the Pythian proved extremely difficult. My grandparents and four of my father’s five brothers had passed away. Only Joe, the youngest, remained to give sketchy recollections of what he’d heard. He had been away in the military when the shooting happened. He wasn’t at the house when Dad and Woody ventured out for the evening and returned home from jail twenty-four hours or so later.

  When my father and his brother left Ensley for downtown Birmingham that fateful evening, they were with their fellow classmate John Beaton, as the police docket suggested. Beaton’s parents, A
be and Jesse, lived two doors down from my grandparents; the two women, Jesse and Fannie, were particularly close. If I could track John Beaton down, I thought, he might be able to tell me exactly what had happened in the Pythian elevator. But I soon discovered that John Beaton had died years ago. My next idea was to find one of his siblings, who might have lived on Avenue G back in February of ’46, in the hope that they remembered the hubbub the shooting most certainly would have caused.

  John Beaton had two brothers: Morris, known as Mott, and Abe, named for his father. Like my father and uncles, the Beaton men had moved north—in their case, to Chicago—in search of better opportunities. I reached Abe on a Thursday morning and immediately regretted placing the call so early. It’s hard to get information from anyone jolted from sleep by a ringing phone. And since Abe Beaton was eighty-five years old, I imagined a heavy, old-fashioned rotary phone whose ring could be heard throughout his building. Groggy as he was, he softened when I mentioned the name Norris, but his familiarity with the incident didn’t yield much. His speech was slow and somewhat slurred; in response to my appeals he couldn’t offer any firsthand information. He seemed to believe it was still 1946 and he was in the army. The more we talked, the more he appeared eager to get back to bed. I thanked him and said good-bye.

  I tried to reach his brother Morris repeatedly, with no success. Just when I was ready to give up, Uncle Joe remembered another Beaton relative—Julia, much younger than her brothers. When I got her on the phone, I had no idea what I was in for.

  Julia Beaton had been five years old in 1946, and while she could not remember the specifics of the incident involving my dad, she recalled a chaotic evening that winter that had left her parents wary of police cars cruising through the neighborhood. She suggested that I try her brother Morris and gave me his cell phone number, noting that it was a much better way to reach him than his house phone. I was grateful for the tip, but before I let her go, I asked, “What do you remember about life in Birmingham?”