One week later, President Lyndon B. Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress in a nationally televised speech. He took the side of the Selma marchers. “Their cause must be our cause too,” Johnson said. “Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.”
LBJ had had enough. On March 17, he submitted the Voting Rights Act to Congress. Four days later, the march resumed, under federal protection. By the time the protesters reached the Alabama state capitol, their number had grown to twenty-five thousand. In his address to the crowd, Dr. King said that the civil rights movement does not seek the victory of the black man over the white man, but aims at achieving peace, equality, and justice, a common victory for “man as man.”
“I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’” Dr. King continued. “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
It bent, in fact, toward that bright, shining moment in Chicago. Standing with more than two hundred thousand of my fellow Americans on one of the greatest nights in our country’s history, I swore that I would take my mother and father to Barack Obama’s inauguration if it was the last thing I ever did.
“I DON’T WANT TO GO,” my father said. “It’s going to be too cold.”
“Daddy,” I said, “you may watch it on TV, but you are going to watch it from a TV in D.C.”
Thank God I insisted that my parents go, and have that memory of being with them at that special time in the life of our country, especially African Americans. We could not have imagined it at the time, but Tee would lose her fight for life two weeks before Barack Obama was elected to his second term.
I rented a suite of rooms for my folks and Aunt Tee Mae. We flew into Washington from New Orleans on a Sunday night, two days before the inauguration. Riding in a hired SUV from Dulles Airport, we had to take the long way around the National Mall because of security. Though there were five of us in the car, including the African American driver, there was silence, and tears. We all knew what we were in Washington for, and what it meant.
Suddenly, from the front seat, Daddy began to laugh. It was a deep, throaty guffaw. He was overcome by something. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. I looked at my mother and Tee Mae, and we decided that because he’s hard of hearing, he might not have heard us talking about where we were.
“Daddy,” I said, in a strong voice. “Daddy, look, there’s the Lincoln Memorial. And look over there, Daddy, it’s the Capitol.”
He wasn’t listening. This old black man who came up in segregated schools, who fought a world war in a segregated army and was denied the medals he won, and who still cried every time he heard the national anthem, just swept his hand around and said, “You know what? A black man over all this! I never thought I’d see the day.”
On New Year’s Eve 1862, black worshippers gathered in an African Methodist Episcopal church in Boston in an all-night prayer vigil, awaiting word from Washington that President Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The good news arrived the next day. Since then, we have commemorated that event as Watch Night. On the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, it felt like Watch Night all over again. I could barely sleep.
When I turned on the television in the hotel and saw people gathering on the Mall at five a.m., I shook my folks and Tee Mae awake. “Come on, come on, wake up, let’s get down there!” I said. By the time the ceremony started, a million people had gathered on the Mall. It was bitterly cold, but it seemed that we could hardly feel a thing. Not on this day.
Obama put his right hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used when he took the oath of office, said those sacred words, and just like that, America had a black president. I was emotionally overwhelmed by it all. I had always been proud of my country, but unlike Daddy, I had never wept at the national anthem. When the inauguration ceremony ended with the “Star-Spangled Banner,” I cried. For the first time, the anthem struck my ears as a hymn.
Forty-five years earlier, the National Mall filled with 250,000 marchers, most of them African American, who had come to Washington demanding jobs and freedom. They heard Dr. King, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, tell them that he had a dream “that one day, this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’”
On that day, in 2009, four times that many Americans stood on the Mall to see a black man—who was only two years old when they marched on Washington—fulfill one of Dr. King’s dreams. The arc of the moral universe stretched across half a century and the length of the Mall, from the Lincoln Memorial to the west front of the U.S. Capitol. And I was able to stand with my mother and bear witness to the dream become a reality.
I DON’T THINK ANYTHING could have made my folks happier (or more surprised) than an African American winning the White House, but the New Orleans Saints winning the 2010 Super Bowl came close. A few months after their victory, President Obama hosted the Super Bowl champions at the White House for a short ceremony. I am known in New Orleans as a Saints superfan. A friend of mine on the president’s staff who knew that invited my folks and me to be there with the team, and off we went.
It was great to watch my parents listening to the president as he spoke on the podium. The sparkle in their eyes, the smiles on their faces, and the tears rolling down their cheeks told the story: Born into rural and urban poverty in the Jim Crow South, they had lived long enough to vote for America’s first black president, and here they were, in the White House, sharing the East Room with him.
As President Obama left the podium and exited down the center aisle, I called out to him. I introduced myself—we had never met—and introduced him to my parents.
“It’s a pleasure meeting you,” he said to them. “Wendell’s doing great work down there in New Orleans. You should be proud of him.”
“Oh, we are proud of him,” said Tee.
“Mr. President,” I said, “my father fought in World War Two.”
Said the President of the United States to Amos Pierce: “Thank you for your service.”
As we left the White House, Ron joined us. It was a beautiful afternoon. We had a nice stroll across the street to the W Hotel so we could have lunch as a family. In that simple, peaceful act was a perfect coda to this profoundly moving episode.
These two elderly people had lived through some of the most dangerous, violent racial times in America. My father fought for this country and its freedoms even though he was forbidden to enjoy them fully. And now, he had just met the man who was the fulfillment of all he had fought for, suffered for, and dreamed of. Both my parents had done their part to make America a better place, and gave a lot to make sure that a day like today was possible.
And now, let’s take a nice stroll in this beautiful sunshine, and have a quiet lunch as a family, just like any other American family. We were free. We were together. Tee and Daddy had triumphed.
It was as if something had come to completion. I was so happy to have been able to give my mother and father that gift. It felt like generations of black struggle and suffering had been for a purpose. My mother, the granddaughter of a slave, who as a child on the bayou saw the Ku Klux Klan burn her neighbor’s property, had lived to visit the White House as the guest of the first black president.
All in one lifetime. America!
At that time, good things were happening for me with Treme, which had begun filming that spring. Then, bad news: Doctors diagnosed my mother with breast cancer. She responded well to chemotherapy and went into remission, but the chemo drugs took a heavy toll on her heart. On Mardi Gras weekend in 2011, and again in 2012, she was rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure.
My fear for Tee’s life was eclipsed only by my anger that six years after Katrina, we s
till didn’t have a hospital for our half of the city. The Lindy Boggs Medical Center, damaged by Katrina, never reopened and was sold to developers. The Methodist hospital in New Orleans East was all but destroyed by the storm, and builders of a new hospital planned for the site had not even broken ground. With her heart giving out, we had to speed across the city to the nearest hospital, which was Uptown—and both years, a Carnival parade blocked our route.
In April 2012, my mother’s kidneys failed and she went on dialysis. That’s when her final decline began. That autumn, I flew home from Los Angeles to celebrate her birthday with friends and family at a fancy French Quarter restaurant. By then, it was clear that she was not going to get better. Every moment was going to be precious.
The weekend after her birthday dinner, Tee fell at home and called out to my hard-of-hearing father, but he never heard her. She lay on the floor for hours, unable to get up, until finally Daddy found her and sent her back to the hospital. She didn’t tell me what had happened until she was back home. I caught the next flight from Los Angeles to New Orleans.
When I arrived at their house, I found my mother sitting in her bed. I began cleaning the room and said to her, “Tee, we’re going to get some food in you. We’re going to make it all right.” She was barely eating then.
She looked at me and said, calmly and levelly, that she was dying, and that she wanted to focus on me. Tee told me that she wanted nothing more than my happiness, but it was time to settle down.
“I want you to go back to the Church,” she said.
“But I haven’t left the Church,” I replied, puzzled.
“But I want you to go to church,” she said.
Think of that. This woman grew up having to sit in second-class pews in the back of the church and in segregated catechism classes. She knew that a family member had been molested by a priest and that it had ruined his life. And still, her last wish for me was to go to church. She had no doubt in her soul that there was so much more to the faith than the fallibility of the men running the Church. God was there. Your heart will not rest until it rests in Him, son. Go to church.
On what turned out to be the last week of my mother’s life, my brother Ron was thinking about flying in from Washington to visit. I had taken Tee to the hospital yet again when she began to fail, but tests showed nothing wrong. She rebounded—she was a little firecracker, even to the last—and we went back home.
I asked Tee if I could shoot a smartphone video postcard for Ron, to show him how well she was doing, and to ease his mind. I did and e-mailed the clip to my brother. He didn’t come, and missed the chance to tell Tee good-bye.
I still feel guilty about that. I should have told him to come at once. But I couldn’t see what was happening right in front of me. That is, I couldn’t see it, because I couldn’t bear to see it. On a Saturday night, I checked my mother out of Touro Hospital in Uptown, loaded her into the car, and drove toward home.
“Let’s not take the expressway,” I said. “Let me drive you through the city.”
We took small detours through New Orleans, driving through Tremé so she could see a street festival. Wending our way back to Pontchartrain Park, my mother gazed out at the city that had been home for most of her life, silently taking it all in. She knew.
I put her to bed and went into the living room to watch TV with my father. Around eleven that night, she was in bed, peaceful, but squinting slightly and rubbing her stomach.
“Tee, if you’re not going to lie down and sleep, come on in and watch the television with us,” I said.
Because she was so weak, I put her in a low wheelchair that I had rented.
“Ohhhh, ohhh, ohhh! Lord, have mercy,” she moaned, rubbing her belly. “Hold my hand hold my hand hold my hand.”
Daddy was sitting next to her. He began to cry. “What’s the matter, Black?” he said.
“Ohhh, hold my hand, you just don’t know, you just don’t know,” she said.
He was sobbing now.
“Stop that crying, Amos,” she said. “Just hold my hand.”
Daddy took one hand, and I kneeled down to take the other.
“Lift me up,” she said. “Lift me up.”
I stood, positioned myself behind her, and slid my hands under my mother’s shoulders.
“No, no, no, not you,” she said. “Lift me up, Lord, just lift me up.”
She called out to her dead sisters. “Gladys and Yvonne, lift me up.”
“Let me get you a pain pill,” I said. I gave her the medicine, then went to lift her from her wheelchair. She slipped down to her knees. Oh, God, I thought, I’m dropping my mother. She was like a rag doll. I carried Tee to the sofa, and she fell fast asleep.
She slept there all day Sunday, and into the night. Around one-thirty on Monday morning, I woke her. “I don’t want you to sleep here the whole night,” I said. “You should be in bed.”
I picked my mother up as if she were a child, cradling her in my arms. “Ohhh, that was a good one,” she sighed, and I laid her in bed.
“Promise me you’ll eat something in the morning,” I said. “Look at me. Promise me.”
But she was already asleep.
Then, the next morning, I got up around nine o’clock. My father was in the bathroom. I poked my head into her bedroom to check on her. She was right where I put her. Her eyes were wide open. I said, “Tee, you up?”
She was gone.
I didn’t holler, and I didn’t start crying. Calmly, I called the paramedics and asked them what to do. They told me to put her on the ground. I gave my mother CPR until they arrived. I never imagined that I would be able to hold my mother’s cold, dead body, and feeling no fear, I would blow into her mouth, then press down on her chest, trying to restart her heart. “Whooo, whooo,” she seemed to say, but it was just my air passing over her vocal cords.
My father, who is profoundly deaf, had not heard any of this. When he emerged from the bathroom and saw the paramedics hunched over his wife, he said, “What’s going on? What’s going on?”
Then he screamed.
One of the paramedics told me my mother was dead.
I went to my father, looked him in the eye, and said, “Daddy, she’s gone.”
Sixty years of marriage had come to an end that morning. My mother died in the home where she loved her man, raised her boys, and reclaimed the life Katrina stole from her.
The EMTs pronounced Tee dead and left Daddy and me there to wait for the undertaker to pick up her body. We sat with my mother for an hour or so alone in their bedroom as the house filled with others who had heard the news that spread through the neighborhood like wildfire. We said her favorite prayer, the rosary. The undertaker put Tee’s body on a gurney and began rolling her out the same door through which she had carried me in as a newborn almost half a century earlier. As she passed, I leaned over, whispered, “Thank you for what you’ve done for me,” and kissed her on the cheek. It was complete.
After what seemed to be the longest day, that night I drove down to Loyola University’s concert hall to catch part of Wynton Marsalis’s performance. I stood alone at the side, listening to the music. At one point during his set, Wynton left the stage to come over to the alcove where I was standing, embrace me, and offer his condolences.
Toward the end of the concert, Wynton started to introduce his “New Orleans Function,” a set from his 1989 album The Majesty of the Blues, meant to evoke the way New Orleanians deal with death through music and communal ritual (that is, the jazz funeral). As he addressed the audience, Wynton began to talk about a man and about his mother, who had just passed. He then revealed my identity and pointed out that I was there in the hall with them all.
The audience gasped. Wynton invited me to join him and his band. I tried to beg off.
“We go all over the world, but we are family,” Wynton said from the stage
. “I want you to come on up here and know that we’re family, and we love you. We are going to hold you up and lift you up, and let you know how much you are loved.
“You come on up here and be with us,” he said. “This is for your mother.”
How could I say no? I walked onto the stage, and Wynton’s band, which included his father, Ellis, began playing the traditional jazz funeral dirge, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee.” The tears, they ran down like a mighty river. Head bowed, I pulled out my handkerchief and dabbed my eyes as each musician played a solo to show respect to my mother.
Do you see this, Tee? Do you see what you meant?
And then, as tradition demands, the tempo picked up, and the song changed from mourning to celebration, from death to life. “Oh, Didn’t He Ramble,” they played. My spirit rose, buoyed by the music and the love of my people. Holding my handkerchief, I raised my right hand high, waved it to salute Tee, and began to dance, second-line style. I did a little jig off the stage, to the warm applause of the hometown crowd. Wynton led his band in an impromptu second line through the hall.
That’s how we sent my mother home. It was a thing of beauty.
There was one more homegoing for Althea Lee Edwards Pierce. Tee had always said that when she died, she didn’t want a big funeral. She would joke, “Just put me in a sack and throw me in the woods.”
More seriously, she told us in the family that when the news of her death reaches us, we are to go to mass as soon as possible. That’s what I did. After learning that the Catholic Church approved of cremation, she told us that she wanted to be cremated and her ashes to be scattered on the water. “Bayou Lafourche,” she said. “Take me home.”
The Wind in the Reeds Page 28