True Believers

by Kurt Andersen

  When I became an actual adult, and Greta at age thirteen accused me of being “some kind of Amish yuppie” because I refused to buy her aerosol Silly String or let her dress like Madonna, I laughed and congratulated her on the turn of phrase, which naturally made her all the angrier. Like Danish father, like American daughter.

  Among all my Reasons for Loving Summer at age ten—School Out, Longer Nights, Fireflies, Insect Sounds, Playing Frisbee, Going Barefoot, Swimming at Centennial Park, Eating Dinner Outside, Driving to Get Ice Cream—only two were not generic: More Luck Happens and Being with Violet. I rarely saw Violet, our cleaning lady, during the school year because she arrived at our house in the mornings after I went to school and left before I came home. Her presence during the summer—rather, my presence as she cleaned our floors and dusted our furniture—made the summers distinct, more fun and interesting, and somehow summerier.

  Until I became a beatnik, I wore pigtail braids, and first thing every Monday and Thursday morning in the summers, I sat on a red stool in the kitchen so Violet could braid my hair. She did them tighter than my mother, so tight they hurt a little the first hour or so, but I felt improved by the rigor, and loved the feeling of her rough fingers on my neck and head, and never complained.

  On summer Mondays, I’d sit on the big lint-covered cushion in the corner of the laundry room and draw or read as she washed and dried and folded our clothes and answered my occasional questions about her sons, and her husband who disappeared after the war. (“Disappeared like—like a ghost?” I asked at age six, embarrassing myself.) Down there in the basement on one of my parents’ ancient radios, she listened to horse races from Arlington Park and to what she called her “hillbilly songs.” My mother disapproved of both horse racing and country-and-western music, which made those times with Violet all the more delicious.

  For lunch she’d make us waffles covered in bacon and Cheez Whiz, and lemonade. She always let me stir the mayonnaise into her potato salad (“the Hellmann’s,” she called it, as if it were beurre blanc, to distinguish it from the Miracle Whip in her own kitchen), which she always made on Thursday afternoons for our Friday picnic-table dinners in the backyard.

  When I was ten, she told me the reason her hours were nine A.M. to three P.M. was because it took her almost two hours to travel to and from Chicago each way. I thought she was joshing, and when she assured me she wasn’t, I felt terrible. I’d never known about her long commute, and I blurted that she should quit and get a job closer to where she lived. “And never see my Kay-Ray again?” she said, kissing me on my forehead the way she always did. “Uh-uh.” I believe the one day she ever missed work was after her daughter-in-law was murdered.

  The only complaints I ever heard from her were about her inability to afford bets on the Arlington Park horses she picked every day, and how “they always take away my music”—by which she meant WLS changing from country to rock and roll. She never complained about her asthma, either, and when she got a modern inhaler that replaced her old-fashioned squeeze-bulb gizmo, she told me that it made her believe in progress.

  Violet was the only black person with whom I’d ever spoken until I was almost in high school.

  The week before I started at New Trier, early on the last Thursday of the summer of 1963, I was lying in the hammock on the back porch reading On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I shook my head and harrumphed when I read M praising the Swiss because they “cope with the beatnik problem.” No wonder the book begins with Bond wanting to resign from MI6.

  “For a girl all done with her summer school, Kay-Ray is up bright and early.”

  “Hi, Violet! It was too hot to sleep. I was sweating like a pig up there.”

  “Perspiring like a pig. Where your mom and the kids at?”

  “Choir practice and the allergist.”

  “Which dress you plan on wearing at work this afternoon? I’ll be putting a load in the machine after I finish these.” She gripped a paper sack of potatoes in one hand and a big yellow Pyrex bowl full of water in the other.

  “Yesterday was my last day. They closed Scattergood O’Donnell and went up to Uncle—my uncle … He and his law partner and their families went up to Tom’s place in Wisconsin for the long weekend, to their, you know, the lake house there.” My mother’s brother, for whose law firm I’d worked part-time, was named Thomas Scattergood, and I’d suddenly realized I did not want to say “Uncle Tom’s cabin” to Violet.

  She sat down on the bench, emptied the potatoes into her lap, and started to peel them into the empty sack.

  I kept reading, although I wanted to discuss civil rights with Violet. My earliest memory is my mother standing and crying as she listened to a live radio report about thousands of white people down in Cicero rioting outside an apartment building into which one Negro family had moved. And for the last few years I’d read news articles and watched the TV reports about Negroes fighting white Southerners to end segregation. Back in fifth grade, after the Negro college students’ sit-ins at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter in Uncle Ralph and Aunt Gaby’s town in North Carolina, I’d suggested to my mother and Violet that we all go to our Woolworth’s lunch counter in Wilmette, at the Edens Plaza shopping center. Mom thought it was a grand notion, but Violet quietly, firmly refused to play along, which mystified and mortified me.

  So as the civil rights movement burgeoned, I didn’t talk about it much, because the one colored person I knew had swatted me away when I’d butted in. Nor did it help that my mother and dad were such total bleeding-heart liberals, so proud to be members of the NAACP and sign open-housing petitions and attend vigils for racial justice. With Pope John’s death that summer, Martin Luther King, Jr., had ascended to first place in my mother’s pantheon of living saints. At fourteen, I wasn’t looking for new ways to agree with my parents.

  But during that summer of 1963, the “civil rights movement” turned into the “Negro revolution,” and I was devouring the coverage. I now felt connected to great events, no longer a child reading stories—I was working in a law firm, and the Negro murdered in Mississippi had been an NAACP lawyer. The first Negro to attend the University of Alabama appeared on Newsweek’s cover, a girl not much older than I was. On the news one night, as my family watched the Birmingham police set snarling German shepherds on protesters and then blast the Negroes with fire hoses, my father shook his head, and I saw that my mother was crying when she went to get dinner ready. I found myself performing a charade of sadness that night, feeling not depressed or disturbed, not like I’d witnessed a tragedy, not a bit, but awestruck to be seeing history firsthand, as it happened, absolutely thrilled to watch kids my age—kids Sabrina’s and Peter’s ages!—jumping over the walls of the schools where they’d been locked down, actually rebelling. And getting hosed and beaten, paying the price for their rebellion on national TV. I had never seen anything so dramatic in real life.

  And now, in late August, there was the large event of the day before. I decided it would be rude not to broach the subject. I would have my first real conversation about the Negro question with a Negro. I closed my Bond book.

  “Violet? What’d you think of the march on Washington?”

  “Haven’t read my paper yet today.”

  “But it was on TV! Live! Mom and I and the little kids all watched.”

  “Didn’t see it. The Stuarts”—the family in Highland Park for whom she worked two days a week—”won’t have no TV or radio on in the house during the day. And by the time I got home, Huntley-Brinkley already talked about it, I guess.” She was peeling, not looking at me. “They’re about to make the news thirty minutes long starting next week. So maybe I can get to see it sometimes.”

  Perhaps Violet complained more—more slyly—than I’d realized as a child. “Well, there’s a lot more news to cover these days.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said, “that’s true.” She plonked her peeled potato into the water. “My neighbor says movie stars were there, the Ben-Hur man—”r />
  “Charlton Heston.”

  “—and that cute colored boy, Sidney Portoo …”

  “Sidney Poitier. He was. And Bob Dylan sang.”

  “Who’s that?” Violet asked.

  “That singer you say looks like Chuck who you think can’t sing worth a darn?”

  She smiled. “So it was a whole show, huh?”

  “Yeah, and the biggest demonstration ever in Washington. Ever, in history. Martin Luther King’s speech came at the end. It was on all three channels at once, the whole speech, live, for like fifteen minutes. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, either, in history.”

  She stopped peeling and looked at me. “What’d Dr. King say?”

  “Well, you know. He said he has a dream of everybody being equal and everybody treating everybody else fairly.”

  “Huh. That’s what he said for a quarter of an hour?”

  “No. He said that—” I stopped. “Is it okay—do you mind if I say ‘Negro’?” Violet referred to Negroes exclusively as “colored people.”

  “It’s okay, honey.”

  “He said that Negroes aren’t free in America, even in the North, because of segregation and discrimination. That it’s shameful for America to be this rich, rich country where Negroes are forced to live on a poor island. That America gave the Negroes a bad check and now we won’t cash it.”

  She chuckled. “Dr. King called it that? ‘A bad check’?”

  “Yeah, and that we can’t have freedom happen gradually, that we have to do it right now, immediately. That he’s leading a revolt that won’t stop.”

  I could see she was a little shocked. “A revolt? He used that word?”

  “Yup.”

  “Well,” she said, shaking her head, just barely smiling again. “I’ll be.”

  “And you could hear people in the audience shouting back at him, ‘Yes,’ ‘Uh-huh,’ ‘Say it.’ It gave me goose pimples.”

  “Did it upset you, Kay-Ray?”

  “No! It made me excited. And he said that Negroes shouldn’t hate white people, and they need to let the good white people, who want to help them, help them.”

  “Mm-hm,” she said, and started peeling another potato.

  “Have you ever seen police brutality, Violet? He talked about the ‘horrors of police brutality’.”

  “I seen a horror all right. A great big horror with the police right there. That’s why I live in Chicago and not in Arkansas no more.”

  “What happened?” In the hundreds of hours I’d talked with Violet over the previous decade, I’d learned that she’d been born in Arkansas, had arrived in Chicago as a girl, and had lived in the same neighborhood ever since, somewhere between Hyde Park and the Loop, although she’d recently moved to a smaller apartment, since her three boys were grown. Her ex-husband had worked at a meatpacking plant. Her eldest son’s wife had been murdered in 1957. Violet’s friends were always “pushing on” her to attend church, which she called “the A.M.E.” Lady’s slipper orchids were her favorite flower, fried chicken livers her favorite food, and The Real McCoys her favorite TV show. Her left hip hurt lately. She loved country music and horse racing. She had asthma. Those were the facts I knew about Violet Woods. “What was the big horror that made you move here?” I asked.

  She used her asthma inhaler and took a deep breath and looked at me, and in the moment I saw her deciding that I was old enough to hear the truth, I felt the enormous pleasure of being taken seriously. She stood up with her potatoes and bowl and asked me to “skooch the bench a little, would you, out of the sun,” then sat down again and proceeded to tell me her story. Violet was not ordinarily chatty.

  Violet said she’d lived outside the town of Moscow, Arkansas. Her parents were tenant farmers growing cotton—”renters, not croppers,” she made a point of saying. The winter and spring she was eleven, in 1927, it rained and rained, and the levees on the Mississippi and all the other rivers broke, and on Easter Sunday the land flooded “just like it says in the Bible. Everything washed away, our little place, all the equipment, the mules, everything. I saw the Arkansas River run backwards. The land was an ocean, with a few islands where we gathered up. At the Red Cross camp, my little brother Joe caught sick and died right away.”

  “My gosh, it sounds like a nightmare.”

  “Uh-huh, that’s right, exactly what it was, like a terrible dream. It didn’t seem like it could be real. It was like a story.”

  “That was the horror that made your parents decide to move to Chicago?”

  She shook her head. She said they weren’t allowed to leave the Red Cross camp until the man—she did not say “the white man”—who owned the land they farmed came and signed them out. This made her father angry—”since Daddy wasn’t no cropper, he was a renter”—which in turn made a policeman hit him with a club. Then the National Guard soldiers arrived and forced her father to work rebuilding a levy, standing in the cold floodwater heaving sandbags all day long. After another week, the family escaped the camp in the middle of the night.

  “Escaped?” I said, astonished. Slaves escaped, not people thirty years ago, not someone I knew. “Oh my God!”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She started peeling the last potato. I reminded myself that my parents paid Violet twelve dollars a day for six hours of work—way above the minimum wage, Dad said.

  “Then you came to Chicago?” I asked.

  She shook her head again. “To Little Rock, where my mama’s people lived at. We got to Little Rock on a cool, bright Sunday, the first of May. First city I ever saw. That was like a story, too, so big and busy and fine.” She plopped the last naked white potato into the bowl of water, rolled up the paper sack full of peels, and gripped it with both hands as she continued.

  “Right away we found out Little Rock was all terrified. The day before, they found a girl murdered in a church, a white girl, and they’d caught the one who did it, the janitor at the church, a colored man. So the white people in Little Rock was angry and upset. And then, after we been in the city just a couple days, some white woman said another colored man attacked her and her daughter. The man they said did that turned out to be a cousin of ours—he was simple, Mama said. You know, retarded? Anyhow, at dusk, this whole parade of cars come driving slow down the big main street where we was staying at, honking horns. Cars and cars full of white men, and in the colored neighborhood there. We all looking out the front windows, watching, and then one of my aunties shouts, ‘Holy Jesus, it’s Johnny, they killed Johnny!’

  “This colored man, his body, was tied onto the bumper of a car, just dragging and bouncing along the road half-naked. And he already been hung. And shot. First time I ever saw Cousin John, he was all bloody and ragged like some dirty side of hog meat. Then they stopped, and pretty soon there was so many white people, hundreds, all excited, and they lit a great big fire right in the street and burned him up.”

  “Oh my God, Violet!” Tears were dribbling from my eyes. Once again, as when I’d watched the Birmingham police with their fire hoses and German shepherds, along with shock and disgust, I felt excited to be getting the plain and ugly truth firsthand. “You must have been so scared. Didn’t the police come?”

  “They came. But didn’t do nothing to stop it. Even when people was tearing apart that boy’s burned-up body.”

  “Oh, God, no! No!”

  “My daddy saw a man carrying and waving John’s burned arm like it was a prize he won at a fair.”

  “People are evil. People are monsters.”

  “Mm-hm, some people.”

  I wiped away my tears and took a deep quivering breath. “I don’t know why all colored people don’t hate all white people. Seriously.”

  She leaned over and hugged me. “No, no, I’m sorry, Kay-Ray, honey, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “You know what? I wish I could travel back in time, and take a gun, and go to that street in Little Rock, and shoot all those people.” I made fists and vibrated them cl
ose together, firing a big machine gun like in a war movie, mowing down that lynch mob around the bonfire in Little Rock.

  I could see that I’d upset her a little. Suddenly, Peter ran out onto the porch—”Hi, Violet!”—and past us, down the wooden stairs straight out to the backyard. My mother caught the screen door before it sprang shut. She looked at Violet and me. She sensed the unusual emotional weather.

  Violet stood and picked up the bowl of potatoes—not wanting to seem like a shirker or troublemaker, I understood. “Morning, Mrs. Hollaender.”

  “What’s going on here?” Mom asked with a big smile, her voice in a high register. Strenuous good cheer with a strong undercurrent of anxiety became her default affect for dealing with my adolescence and the 1960s.

  “Karen was telling me all about Dr. King and the march on TV yesterday.”

  “Oh, you didn’t get to see it, Violet? It was so moving. The Lincoln Memorial looked beautiful. It was just wonderful. It made us proud.”

  “Proud?” I said. “Really? I don’t know how any white people in America can ever feel proud, Mom. Even people like us.”

  In Newsweek a few days later, I would read every word about the March on Washington and the Negro revolution, and I’d fill five pages of my final scrapbook with the articles. I would circle certain paragraphs. I would underline the quote by Roy Wilkins, the nice, moderate Negro who ran the NAACP: “The Negro citizen has come to the point where he is not afraid of violence. He no longer shrinks back. He will assert himself, and if violence comes, so be it.”