A Mighty Long Way

by Carlotta Walls Lanier

  I liked the Christophers immediately. They were a sophisticated couple who appeared to be in their early sixties. Nathan Christopher was a prominent black dentist, very mild-mannered and easygoing. I soon learned that one of his favorite pastimes was fishing in Canada. His wife, Edith, was the more outgoing of the two—a tall, authoritative woman who owned a couple of businesses and often fronted the capital to help young black business owners open their flower shops, beauty salons, and corner stores. She traveled in powerful political circles and easily held her own among the men who sat with her on a dozen or so boards and commissions. She was a big woman who wore bottle-thick glasses that only slightly improved her vision, which had been practically destroyed by cataracts. Because of her poor eyesight, she was no longer supposed to drive. I helped drive her around, cook occasionally, and perform light chores. The couple had both a maid and a cook, so my chores didn’t amount to much more than I already did at home.

  This kind of arrangement was fairly common among black families of means who were deeply committed to giving back to the community. I’d seen it close up in my own family because my great-uncle John Cullins (the older brother of Grandpa Cullins) and his wife took in students from Philander Smith. Uncle John’s own children were grown, so he provided the college students free housing, food, and tuition assistance in exchange for their helping out around the house. I was the eleventh student the Christophers had welcomed into their home over the years. After raising their daughter and son into adulthood, the couple had committed their lives to nurturing the dreams of other black children, particularly those from families of lesser means who could benefit from the stability and guidance of two accomplished and well-connected professionals. Their home was an elegant flat about twenty-five hundred square feet on the second floor of a three-story, six-unit brick complex they owned. The building sat on East Boulevard in an upper-middle-class, mostly white neighborhood, across from a nice park. I slept in a room that had been built as the “maid quarters,” just off the kitchen in the back of the apartment. It was comfortable, though nothing fancy. But the rest of the home was exquisitely decorated. Mrs. Christopher changed the furniture, particularly in the living and dining areas, every two years. She would call in movers to haul out the pieces she no longer wanted, and with little or no notice, a moving van loaded with her expensive furnishings would show up at her daughter’s place on the other side of the city to unload. I remember her daughter sort of rolling her eyes one day as she told me about a delivery her mother recently had sent.

  Because of where the Christophers lived, I was able to enroll in East High, an integrated but predominantly white high school in the neighborhood. It was one of the best schools in the city, and fortunately for me, none of my peers knew my story. There, I was just another student, going to class, trying to keep up with my schoolwork. After the year I’d experienced at Central, it felt good to go to school without being noticed. The other students were friendly enough, but I didn’t develop any lasting relationships, in part because I had little time to get together with my peers outside of school. Most of my evenings were spent behind the wheel of Mrs. Christopher’s huge navy blue Lincoln, shuttling her from one meeting to another. But I rather enjoyed hanging out in the background of her life and watching quietly as this strong, smart black woman negotiated, gave orders, and made things happen. In some ways, she was the female version of my grandfathers, tough and resourceful. In her, I saw possibilities for myself.

  Back then, I always liked spending time with older people like Mrs. Christopher because I believed they could teach me something. I sometimes learned by just watching how they handled themselves. I also enjoyed listening to their stories. Plus, I was very comfortable around them. So when Mother sent a letter containing the telephone number of my great-aunt Maude, I seized the opportunity. Maude Warren, then sixty-six, was the only one of Papa Holloway’s siblings who had stayed in touch with him. Like my great-grandfather, she had taken a different road from that of the rest of her brothers and sisters by claiming her “colored” roots. I called her right away and asked if I could visit. To my surprise, I learned that she lived just blocks from the Christophers, close enough for me to walk.

  The next afternoon, I walked the several blocks to her house. As soon as Aunt Maude stepped to the door, I saw the Holloway resemblance. She was tall and thin, with tan skin, narrow features, and long, once jet black hair mingled with gray. We greeted each other cordially, but no hugs (the Holloways aren’t given to demonstrative displays of affection). I followed her to the living room, where we sat and talked between long moments of silence. Like Papa Holloway, Aunt Maude didn’t talk much, and she held her past close to the vest. She asked about our family—Uncle Teet and a couple of Papa Holloway’s other children whom she knew by name. She had met only the few relatives who stopped by while traveling through Cleveland. She had never traveled to Little Rock, not even for Papa Holloway’s funeral the year before. After a while, I asked if she knew any of her other brothers and sisters—the ones passing for white. At first, she didn’t answer. I had a chance to ask again later, thinking that maybe she didn’t hear me.

  “No,” she replied softly, “I don’t know where the others are.”

  I didn’t push. A few moments later, Aunt Maude introduced me to her son, Ollie, when he walked into the room. He was as quiet as a ghost, with a shock of prematurely gray hair. Family members told me that he lived with his mother because he had been unable to steady his life after serving in World War II. After about an hour with Aunt Maude, it was time for me to leave. I thanked her for allowing me to visit and headed back to my temporary home. Along the way, I thought about Papa Holloway, how much I missed him and how happy it would have made him to know that I had visited his sister.

  I returned for another short visit with Aunt Maude, but my time in Cleveland ran out sooner than I had expected. I had been living with the Christophers just one month when Mrs. Christopher called me into her room for a chat. She had never summoned me like this before, so I figured the matter must be serious. As I walked to her room, I quickly reviewed the past few days in my head, wondering if I had forgotten to take care of something she had requested or whether I might have done something she did not like. Nothing came to mind.

  When I walked into the bedroom, Mrs. Christopher was sitting on the edge of her bed. She wore a smile that told me she wasn’t upset with me, but the mood was less than happy. I took a seat in the Queen Anne-style wingback chair across from her and braced myself as she began to speak. She and her husband really liked me, she said, but I wasn’t exactly the kind of student she had requested. I clearly wasn’t deprived or lacking in social grace and skills, she said. I had been blessed with good, solid parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles who were perfectly capable of providing whatever guidance I needed henceforth. She said she believed there were other students who might benefit more from her and her husband’s help. She was very warm, almost apologetic. She didn’t ask me to leave, but I figured that would be best. I knew how important it was to her to feel that she was making a difference by providing an opportunity that a young person might not otherwise have. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that. Mrs. Christopher had some other ideas for me, though. She didn’t think I should return to Little Rock or Central. I was smart and mature enough to skip the rest of high school and start college as early as the coming summer, she said. She sat on the board of Ferris State College in Big Rapids, Michigan, and she assured me that I could get in.

  I wasn’t so sure. My gut told me that I wasn’t quite ready for college. After an entire year out of school, I believed I needed more math and science to have a chance at success in college. But I told Mrs. Christopher that I would discuss it with my parents and think about it.

  Mother and Daddy were flattered that a woman of Mrs. Christopher’s stature thought I was ready for college, but they, too, had some concerns. We didn’t rush into a decision. I applied to Ferris State, and we kept our options op
en. During our frequent conversations and letters over the next several weeks, Mother and Daddy kept me abreast of the political changes taking place in Little Rock. A recall election in May resulted in a new school board with a majority of moderates who proclaimed that Central would reopen in the fall. One of the moderates was a man named Rhett Tucker, whose son I’d get to know many years later. The votes of the city’s black residents and affluent, well-educated white residents had made the difference, my parents said. By mid-May, I received word that I had been accepted to Ferris State, but I decided not to go. My parents and I agreed that I should return to Little Rock to get my high school diploma because I needed to hone the academic skills required for college. But for me, there was an even greater need. I had been through too much over the past nearly two years—so had my family—for me to just walk away empty-handed. I needed my high school diploma, and I needed to earn it from Central. That accomplishment, I believed, was the least I could achieve now. Anything short of that would have felt like failure to me.

  The problem was, even with the correspondence courses and my two months at East High, I was still short of the credits that would be needed to complete the eleventh grade at Central. I needed to attend summer school. My parents arranged for me to spend the summer with relatives in Chicago and attend summer school there. In early June, I packed my bags, thanked the well-meaning Christophers for their generosity and kindness, and boarded a train bound for the Windy City.

  Waiting for me there were my great-aunt M.E. Cullins Beard and her husband, Elmer. I called her Aunt M.E. (I never knew what the initials represented; she said they didn’t stand for anything). She was the youngest sister of Grandpa Cullins (my maternal grandfather), and she reminded me so much of Mother. Aunt M.E. had no children of her own, but of all her nieces, she clearly favored Mother. She even called Mother her “pride and joy.” The two of them resembled each other so closely, they could easily have been mistaken for mother and daughter. Mother had picked up some of our aunt’s ways, too, particularly her keen sense of fashion. Aunt M.E. was an avid reader of Vogue magazine and always looked as though she had stepped right off its pages. She wasn’t just a fashion plate, though. She had attended Philander Smith, taught school, and worked as a secretary at one of the insurance companies located in the historic Mosaic Templar building on West 9th Street in Little Rock. She had moved to Chicago from St. Louis after meeting and marrying Elmer Beard, her third husband. They lived in the 7900 block of S. Indiana Street on the South Side, a typical Chicago suburb with neatly-trimmed trees and well-kept lawns and families headed by hardworking professional and bluecollar mothers and fathers. The next-door neighbor was a dentist. Many of the neighbors were former black southerners who had headed north, following kin who’d been part of the so-called Great Migration of the early twentieth century. They had come to break free of the stranglehold that Jim Crow had on the places of their birth. They had come in search of the opportunities touted by the Chicago Defender, one of the most widely read black newspapers throughout the South. They had come in search of jobs in Chicago’s steel mills, meatpacking houses, and railroads and the opportunity to learn, eat, and travel as freely as any white man or woman. They had come with nothing but their sheer will and ingenuity—a kind of industriousness that, I might add, was not always appreciated by their citified black brethren, who complained behind closed doors about the ruin the country folk were bringing to the neighborhood. An article that ran during the summer in the Chicago Defender poked fun at the black southerners, who were said to pull old bedsprings stripped of their coverings onto their yards, dig holes in the ground for their coal, barbecue on the wire springs, and litter their lawns with chicken bones. A line from the story became a running joke between Uncle Elmer and me. Purposely written in dialect, it said something like “… and a n-don’t care where he tho’ he bone.”

  I was too young to understand the danger of stereotypes or the irony that white folks often painted all black folks with the same broad brush. At the time, the line just seemed plain funny, and Uncle Elmer and I would look knowingly at each other, mouth those words, and crack up if we spotted the least bit of evidence of its truth.

  I soon had to share the time I spent with Uncle Elmer and Aunt M.E. with my cousin Delores Warren, who came from Little Rock to join me. The women in the family thought I’d need someone my age to keep me company. But having company was too often nerve-racking. Delores, then fifteen, wasn’t in summer school, and she watched television all day until I got home. She had a sassy mouth and talked back to Aunt M.E. She also used to sneak to the bowling alley in the evenings to see her boyfriend, John Smith, who was a few years older and already in college. John was from Little Rock but had come to Chicago that summer with his friend Al Bell—the same Al Bell who would go on to become the head honcho at Stax Records. Years later, Stax would compete with the legendary Motown for the soul of black music. Al and John were as close as brothers. Al had lived with John’s family in Little Rock throughout high school and college and his tenure as a popular young deejay at KOKY, the first local station to cater to black listeners. Al had come to Chicago to be close to his girlfriend, Mavis Staples of the famous Staple Singers, and John tagged along so that he could spend time with Delores.

  Aunt M.E. thought the lovebirds were far too serious for their age, particularly her fifteen-year-old niece. Before John arrived in Chicago, his letters to Delores had come addressed to “Mrs. John Smith.” The two indeed became husband and wife several years later, and Al brought John into Stax as a high-powered executive. But in the summer of 1959, John was just a college boy with uncertain motives in my aunt’s eyes, and she didn’t want him at her house. I became the excuse for Delores to get to the bowling alley to see John. I’d never bowled before in Little Rock, but it became one of my favorite new pastimes. I was thrilled for the chance to get out of the house, especially when the sparks were flying between Delores and Aunt M.E. Delores was the type who pushed the envelope, and I often got caught in that awkward spot in the middle when my aunt said to her: “Why aren’t you more like Carlotta?”

  I have to admit, I was more than a bit happy when Delores received a train ticket back to Little Rock from her mother, my Little Aunt Loualice (my great-aunt is Big Loualice, thanks to the confusing family tradition of passing along first names). At least, with Delores gone, I didn’t have to hear my elders comparing my cousin to me. I sometimes felt tremendous pressure to live up to everyone’s expectations—my family members, Mrs. Bates, the NAACP. I wanted never to disappoint any of them. Most times, that wasn’t difficult. My nature leaned toward following the rules and doing the right thing. But that summer, I was a sixteen-year-old music lover in a real music town with temptations at practically every corner of the stretch I walked to and from school. I attended summer school at Hirsch High, about a mile from my aunt and uncle’s home. My classes began at eight a.m. and ended at noon, just about the time that my route along 79th Street began to sizzle. I mean, it was sizzling, literally, hot as heck outside. But the music scene was just as hot. In those days, the record stores blasted the latest music through huge speakers that filled the walkways with the soulful sounds of rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and jazz. Everywhere I walked, it seemed I heard Brook Benton’s smooth baritone flowing through the speakers, heating up the already hot outdoors with his hit “It’s Just a Matter of Time,” which was topping the R&B charts that summer.

  That’s probably what first drew me into the record shop, but once I realized the place was air-conditioned, it gave me another excuse to stop there every day on the way home. I’d wander around the store, listening to Lloyd Price tell the story of the barroom gambler who lost all his money and then settled the score with his “forty-four” in the chart-topping “Stagger Lee.” Or that acrobatic voice of Jackie Wilson would be crooning “Lonely Teardrops.” Fats Domino would start pleading in “I Want to Walk You Home,” or jazz great Ahmad Jamal would take me to heaven gliding up and down the piano i
n his sensational “Poinciana”—I love that number to this day. I’d linger in that record store, listening, losing track of time, sorting through the LPs of some of my favorite artists: Little Richard, the Platters, Elvis, and the original “queen of soul,” Dinah Washington.

  One day, while walking from school, I noticed a sign that Dinah would be appearing at a popular South Side club called the Roberts Show Lounge. I had to be there. All of a sudden, it didn’t matter that I was just sixteen or that I’d probably have to scheme to get there. This felt like the chance of a lifetime, and I intended to take full advantage. It helped that I had made some pretty cool family friends who were older than me but a generation younger than Aunt M.E. and Uncle Elmer. One of them was my cousin Doris, who was from Little Rock but had recently moved to Chicago to teach after marrying Lowell Zollar, who was working in a biology lab there. Doris and Lowell, who eventually became a doctor, helped to show me a grand time in Chicago. So did Uncle Elmer’s children from a prior marriage, Sue and Elmer, Jr., and their spouses. I grew particularly close to Sue, who was a teacher, and her husband, George Love, who worked in an Exxon plant. They had moved in with Aunt M.E. and Uncle Elmer for a month during my time there, while waiting to move into their own house in another area of the South Side that was just starting to open to black residents. Sue and George were lenient with me and helped to bridge the generational gap between me and their parents. When I saw the Dinah Washington sign, I knew I could rely on Sue and George to cover for me.

  There was no cover at the door, and I just slid in with the crowd. I always acted older, and my height made me look older, too, so I didn’t stand out. I didn’t drink or draw attention to myself. I just sat in that grand lounge, which had hundreds of seats around a huge stage. A big crystal ball hanging in the middle of the room mesmerized me as much as the queen herself. As those crystals glittered and bounced off the ceiling, Dinah belted with ever so perfect timing and precision: