Implosion

by Elizabeth W. Garber

  ON THE THIRD day of the riots, my mother shifted the gears on her faded old VW bus to labor up the hill into Mill-vale, dreary Cincinnati public housing designed with only one road in to keep poverty hidden from view. The projects were considered so dangerous that ambulances refused to go in there at night. My mother had started volunteering at the Millvale Head Start Montessori School four years before the riots. My youngest brother, Hubbard, was three when she started taking him along with her to play with the other children while she helped the mothers.

  My mother was one of the legions of upper-middle-class women in Cincinnati who joined the Junior League or the Women’s City Club to “do something,” to put their brains to work, to organize, to plan, to feel competent. She didn’t know any women who went to a job and worked, except the one single mother we knew who was a nurse—besides, of course, the black women in Glendale who took care of white women’s babies and served food at their dinner parties. These private social organizations provided myriad options for a woman to channel her energy: fashion show fundraisers to organize, panels for discussions on social issues, or hands-on volunteering. My mother felt shy and uncomfortable with the stylish women at the Fashion Show, and somehow found her way to Millvale where she preferred volunteering. At dinner my mother would tell us stories about the students and their families.

  With a new edge of confidence in her voice, my mom explained how the school didn’t have money for the fancy Montessori equipment that private schools spent a fortune on. She admired the teachers who made their own sand trays, letters, numbers and measuring materials out of what they had lying around. They called her “the white lady” since she was about the only one they ever saw in Millvale. The teachers asked her to figure out ways to involve the mothers who had to volunteer or take a class at the school while their kids were in the program. She kept trying to think of interesting places to take them.

  She told us, “These moms don’t have cars. Their girls get attacked on the way to school. They are stuck there.” In our VW bus, she took the mothers to Findlay Street Market downtown to show them how to buy fresh produce and meat cheaply instead of using canned food to feed their families.

  Some of her stories were funny, like the field trip to the whiskey factory. The mothers went through the whole tour hoping to get free samples at the end. The factory didn’t give samples, but they did give visitors a full sit-down lunch. The mothers were hiding food in their purses to take it home. “The factory people asked me not to bring any more field trips.” My mom laughed, “We had a great time.”

  Around the small kitchen table, when we sometimes ate early with our mother, long before our father got home, she’d tell us about the world beyond our village of Glendale. She shrugged, “I’m so naïve and I don’t understand a lot of things, but I do ask questions.”

  When she wondered why some people had sheets or blankets covering their windows, one of the black women, a mother at the school, looked at her like she was crazy for not knowing. “That’s a drug house.” Our mother found out that people boiled down Paregoric—a medicine we’d taken when we had tummy aches—because it had opium in it, and then they’d shoot it up with a needle. When she was interviewing families for Head Start, she’d go into apartments where all they had for heat were the gas burners on the stove.

  In one house where children were crying of hunger, she observed their grandmother putting a white powder in their mouths. My mother asked, “Why are you feeding those babies cornstarch?” My mother repeated a line that came to her as if from a dream: “Waitin’ for the red clay of Georgia.” Startled, the grandmother looked at her, “How you know that, white lady?” My mother shook her head, didn’t know how she knew, but it must have been a story from Cora, the black woman who had raised her.

  During the riots, when my mother arrived at the Millvale Head Start to volunteer for her usual shift, the teacher looked up and asked, “What are you doing here today? There are riots going on in the city!”

  My mother shrugged. “I didn’t think you’d be closing school, so I came.”

  The teacher was firm. “I think it would be better for you to go back home.”

  As she walked to the VW, a few young men ran up to her. She asked, “You aren’t going to hurt me, are you?”

  “Oh no,” they answered, friendly. “You’re the white lady in the green and white bus. We know who you are. No one around here is going to bother you. We just want a ride downtown.” She took them as close to Avondale as she could before they saw lines of police in helmets with heavy billy clubs. She dropped them off a block away, saying, “You be careful.” They smiled back at her, “You too.”

  THE RIOTS CAUSED a seismic shift that split our community. I slowly realized my parents had slipped onto different sides of a widening divide.

  My father’s booming voice announced regularly how liberal he was, how he hired a Negro architectural student to work in his office before anyone else had hired a Negro student, how pleased he was to design the addition to the Negro church in Glendale. When he talked to Negroes in the village, they called him, Mr. Garber. He’d say, “Just call me Woodie.” When Rena helped serve at dinner parties, he told her and anyone listening, “We’re just like family. We go back together a long time.” He’d explained that she had been a teenager when she started taking care of his father as he was dying. She smiled and nodded in her crisply ironed uniform, “We go way back, Mr. Garber. We sure do.”

  In southern Ohio, the village of Glendale seemed to me like places I had read about in the South. When my father had grown up in the village, many of the big houses in the village had Negro ladies in well-ironed uniforms who “lived in.” Others had “day help.” Now there were just a few houses where Elsie or Louise would answer the door when my mother paid a call to older ladies. As children we called all adults Mrs. or Mr., except these dark-skinned women with warm voices who brought out trays of food and ran the workings of the household. Everyone white, even children, called these Negro women by their first names. But to my black friends at school, they were “Mrs.” They had never even heard their first names until we said it.

  The Negroes lived on the other side of the village in a few blocks of modest houses. Since I’d been a little girl, I’d gone with my mother when she bought chunks of homemade lye and lard soap from Rena. Her children and I had looked at each other shyly, standing next to our mothers’ dresses as they talked. But when Rena had helped at my house when new babies came, or for dinner parties, she called me her “special girl.” She’d taken care of me since I was a baby.

  AFTER THE RIOTS, my mother went to Rena’s house to check in on her. They sat and talked on Rena’s porch swing. Rena told her, “No one dared go out on the streets the three nights of the riots in the city.” The black neighborhood was only a handful of streets, but the police were cruising heavily. “We were hiding in our houses, waiting it out. We didn’t want anyone to think we were like those hot-headed city blacks who call us Uncle Toms.”

  She shook her head and smoothed her apron. “We like how things are here in Glendale. Everyone knows their place.” Rena explained that they weren’t happy about the new Negroes, who were moving in on the new street into big split-level ranch houses. “They don’t know their place.”

  THAT SUNDAY AFTER the riots ended, my mother, brothers, and I walked up the hill for the ten o’clock service at the Episcopal Church. Some white men standing in front were saying in loud voices that they needed to get a machine gun to protect their church and village from “those Negroes.” The next week my mother met with her friend, the Episcopal Bishop of Southern Ohio, Roger Blanchard. He told her how he wore his black shirt and white collar as he walked and talked with rioters on the streets, the only unarmed white man out on the streets, night after night, as the city burned, and tanks rolled. A few weeks later, he came to our church to give the sermon. Before he began, I heard some older people grumbling that some Episcopalians were getting too radical for their taste.


  A strikingly tall man with a shock of white hair, his melodious voice filled the gothic arches above us as he told stories about what he heard on the streets those nights. “These men and women are rioting because of racism and poverty that we have allowed to continue.” When he had confirmed me, I’d felt a shock of energy as he made the sign of a cross on my forehead. Standing at the carved podium with an ornate rose window behind him, he seemed to be looking right at me. “We need to make a commitment to make a difference.”

  He explained that a commitment wasn’t just a nice idea, something put aside when it was inconvenient. It was a serious undertaking. He read the definition from the dictionary. “It means to be obligated or emotionally impelled.” He told us that he had planned to go on a sabbatical, but because of the riots he was staying here. He had been given an office in City Hall so he could work to improve race relations and economic justice. He looked carefully at each of us, his face scanning the filled pews. “What is your commitment?” I turned to look at my mother. She was gazing up at him, nodding, her lips tight and serious.

  My mother’s life changed after she read what happened when three hundred arrested rioters were sent to the Cincinnati Workhouse. We had always been curious about the shabby castle-like building next to the new Interstate when we drove into the city. Now riots erupted at the Workhouse. The paper inaccurately reported that inmates were banging their metal cups on the bars. TIME magazine explained the prisoners were protesting with their pee buckets in cells built for Civil War prisoners. Some demonstrators set fire to their straw-filled mattresses to protest the conditions. Hearing about the prison haunted my mother.

  One afternoon, she was driving us home in the VW bus from swimming at the whites-only private club we belonged to, the Glendale Lyceum. She was about to turn right, to go down our wooded driveway to our modern house, but she pulled over to the side of the road and didn’t turn. We stopped talking and stared at her.

  I asked, “What are you doing, Mommy?”

  But she waved us quiet as she sat in the driver’s seat staring at the driveway. Though I could hardly know it at the time, my mother was staring at a line only she could see. A line she believed was there just for her.

  “Mommy?”

  “Shhh. Wait.”

  She was looking. Thinking. Then she looked at us, at the road, at us again. And then she gripped the wheel, and we were off, slowly crossing that invisible line, toward the beginning of something––what, she did not know. But it was the end of something too; that much she did know. The end of waiting.

  She knew she had to research the Workhouse, and then do something about it.

  The next day she headed down to the Cincinnati Public Library. They let her go into the stacks and unwind the rolls of hundred-year-old newspapers to read about the building of the Workhouse in 1869. Eventually she started going to the Workhouse to interview women inmates, and later organized volunteers to go into the Workhouse, the beginning of her work in prison reform.

  At home she told us what she was doing, but didn’t tell our Dad. He often made comments about how she didn’t know what was going on in the news, and told her she should read TIME every week like he did. She was afraid to tell him about her research, afraid he’d say it was silly. Much of the time that was easy; she stayed quiet at dinner, and Dad dominated most conversations with his frustrations dealing with the University about designs and safety regulations for Sander Hall. That dorm seemed to be wringing the joy out of architecture for him. Meanwhile, she decided the safest path was to avoid any arguments and keep what was important to her secret.

  Elizabeth, Hubbard, Wood, 1968

  MONDAY NIGHT

  1968

  We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.

  —MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR

  ON A MONDAY NIGHT IN MAY, AS MY BROTHERS and I set out plates and silver at the round Formica breakfast table, Mom said, “I decided to try out these frozen French fries I saw at the grocery store.” We looked at her, amazed she would be so daring.

  Our father forbade us to ever eat fast food. “I won’t have my children eating that fried trash. Name me one restaurant with better cooking than your mother’s!” We’d never been to one of those drive-in places near the highway. Everyone at high school went to them. I’d pretend that I knew what their shakes and fries were like.

  Every night of the week we had good formal dinners, except on Monday nights when we ate cube steaks or fish sticks because every Monday our father went to the Literary Club of Cincinnati. Formed in 1849, this was a private club for one hundred men of the city—professors, theologians, physicians, men of business and finance, politics. Each member had to be proposed by a member of the club. Once invited, members were in for life, meeting their requirements for an hour-long paper every two years and short papers on their off years. The year’s schedule of meeting dates, readers, and titles of papers was printed on a small card that my father always carried in his date book.

  Once when we were downtown, Dad parked in front of a small Greek Revival brick house down the street from the Taft Museum. He pointed out a small brass plate that said Literary Club on the door. I asked, “Has a woman ever gone to a meeting?”

  “Never. We don’t even let women serve when we have our dinners. Only at the spring picnic meeting are wives invited, when it is held at a member’s house.” As we drove away, I thought how strange that was, that women couldn’t even touch their food. From September to June on Monday nights, our dad never missed a Literary Club. For us, Monday nights were our favorite night of the week.

  When our father was home, we followed the Victorian rules of his childhood, with correct table manners and his authoritarian rule. We were becoming tense, obedient, and wary every night he was home, except Monday nights when we could relax and be ourselves. When we were home alone with our mother, it was as if we were almost equal, that all our voices and stories were respected and heard, and that it was more important to be real than to be polite. Our personal liberation began because we were simply having fun instead of obeying. Across the country, many mothers joined their children in turning against the fathers who had been raised to be strict at the dinner table. Battle lines between children and their fathers began to form over the length of hair and skirts, turning the dinner tables into a battlefield. When some mothers sided with their children, the fathers raged at their betrayal.

  When Mom brought the hot fries to the table, we each grabbed a handful out of the pan.

  “Ugh, they’re lumpy,” Mom grimaced.

  “And dry,” I added and shrugged.

  Wood pretended one was a cigarette, took a puff and blew out the smoke. We all copied him, even Mom, balancing cigarettes like Brando. We kept blowing pretend smoke at each other as we ate our cube steaks, cottage cheese, and peas frozen from the garden last summer.

  Wood looked at me and said, “You so ugly, the tears run down the back of yo head.” He’d spent the afternoon at The Corner in Glendale, where Jefferson dead-ended into Washington, in front of the uneven basketball court, on the black side of town where long ago “the help” had lived. Wood was the only white boy hanging out and telling jokes with Otis, Artie, Big George, and Wood’s best friend Boris.

  “Hey, Wood, that is so funny. Tell me some more.”

  “Yo mamma so fat, she wishes she could clap.”

  I looked confused on that one. He rolled his eyes. “Don’t you get it? She’s so fat, her hands can’t meet.” I nodded, now I got it.

  “You’re the slowest person I ever knew to get jokes. You so smart, you’re dumb. Hey, why are you punching me?” He looked up at our mother laughing. “Save me, save me, Jo. Elizabeth’s being mean to me.”

  For years our father had insisted that our friends call him Woodie and then told us to call him that as well. Recently I’d experimented with our mother. “Okay, Jo, I’ll fold the laundry.”

  She had been shocked and spoke to me sh
arply. “Don’t be impertinent with me, young lady.”

  A few hours later she stood in my doorway as I was working on homework. “You know, calling me Mommy doesn’t really work now that you are getting older. Besides, your friends call me Jo, so of course you can call me Jo.” My brothers instantly changed over to calling her Jo, even though they were only in seventh and fourth grade.

  Our father lectured her for letting the children be “too familiar” with her. She looked at him incredulously. “You’ve told them to call you Woodie for ages.”

  WOOD TOLD MORE stories. “Big George was brilliant today. He was doing the Ed Sullivan show. Lots of people can say, ‘We’ve got a really big shoooow for you tonight,’ but George does the whole show, all the guests.” Wood imitated George imitating a Barbie girl, batting eyelashes, teetering in high heels, and talking in a high voice. “We were rolling around on the ground, we were laughing so hard.”

  George had been in my class since fourth grade, always funny and smart, the only heavy boy in a class of skinny kids. Now that we were in ninth grade, his humor was bitter and angry. I’d grown afraid of him. I was sure he saw right through me, that I was some stupid white girl who didn’t have a clue. I hurried off to class, imagining him watching me, shaking his head and muttering, “Pitiful.”

  I announced, “I have a cool new friend in study hall. She’s from Lincoln Heights.” Cute with short curly hair, Billie Jean had joined our class when her school integrated with our high school in the fall. Lincoln Heights was an entirely black city that had been built in the 1920s and 1930s to provide housing for Southern blacks who were coming north to work in the big factories along the canal that once connected the Ohio River to Lake Erie. They had their own mayor and police, school, and stores. It was near Glendale, but I’d never known it was there. At school I heard kids say no one white ever drove through it and the town had dirt streets.