Freedom in the Family

by Tananarive Due

  This time, the deputy drove her to the station and parked his car outside. I followed in my car, and then called John, who came, too. John asked the deputy, “How could she be trespassing when the owner invited her to buy her lunch there?” The deputy didn’t answer. Leaving Judy in his car, he walked inside the jailhouse and vanished. By Judy’s recollection, it was nearly 100 degrees that day, and while she sat sweltering in the police car, John and I stood outside, puzzled, while we waited for the arresting deputy to come back. He didn’t. As Judy recalled, “Pat finally came and opened the door, and backed her car toward the police car, and I got in her car, and went on. And that was the end of that.”

  Judy wasn’t so lucky the next time she was arrested. She and Rosemary Dudley suffered a terrifying experience after giving a speech one night at a club in Gadsden County. They were charged with disturbing the peace and taken to jail, where they faced a nightmarish scenario. A mere trustee was in charge of a small jail with only a part-time jailer. At first Judy and Rosemary were placed in a cell for women, but then they were taken to the men’s cell, where eight white men were locked up.

  The situation was tense for all of them, Judy recalled, including the men. “They were terrified they would be charged with rape,” Judy said. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, we know they want us to rape you, but we won’t.’ They beat on the window to attract the attention of the people on the outside, and eventually raised so much commotion that we were taken out and put back in our cell.” Meanwhile, Julius Hamilton was arrested when he went there to protest their incarceration. Eventually, John and I got them all released, and the charges were dropped.8

  My marriage to a lawyer was a big help during this time, just as John and I had hoped it would be. We were a wonderful team. My expertise was in frontal assaults, and John’s expertise was in much-needed legal assistance. In the case of the tavern arrests, for example, John asked by way of a petition of removal to have the case moved to federal court. This was a tactic John helped pioneer because state courts were breaking the backs of civil rights organizations with legal costs. (Ultimately, the case was dismissed by the clerk for lack of prosecution by the state.) If we could not cut down on our court costs due to arrests, as you can see from the police harassment, I probably would not have had a staff very long! As it was, many people were intimidated by the police tactics.

  Yet other people in the community were outraged and made even bolder under the face of intimidation. When our interracial groups first began appearing in Quincy, Negro onlookers couldn’t believe their eyes, but then they grew excited and sometimes shouted, “We’ve been waiting for someone to come!” or “The freedom riders are here!” By February 1, four hundred new Negro voters had registered in Gadsden County.9 And Negroes would continue to register, despite the police harassment that included not only following me and arresting the project workers, but deputies who sat outside of church meetings and voter registration offices and took down the license plate numbers of cars parked outside. Community members involved in the voting drive began complaining about losing their jobs.10 As Judy pointed out in a letter to the editor at The Nation magazine, the voter registration office at the Gadsden County Times newspaper office was only “one block from the city police station and two blocks from the county jail.”11

  None of that could keep the momentum from building. On Sunday, February 2, 1964, CORE sponsored a series of very successful workshops at churches in Quincy, where more than 500 young Negroes learned how to conduct themselves during direct action protests.12 I organized young people into the CORE Freedom Choir, which sang freedom songs at our gatherings, even though I have never had a good singing voice. I have always loved music, so I used records to teach the singers the civil rights songs. Oh, they were good! Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on, hold on. That era was one time you could really feel the power of those songs. Songs unified us and gave us strength. Our headquarters was at Mt. Moriah Baptist Church in Quincy, where Rev. James Crutcher, one of our main supporters, was pastor. CORE also held meetings at Arnett Chapel AME Church in Quincy. We also stepped up our efforts in Tallahassee, in Leon County, sending out letters urging 100 percent of FAMU’s faculty and staff to be registered by April 4 (an effort that Dr. Gore, FAMU’s president, was willing to support).

  On March 23, 1964, Arnett Chapel AME Church hosted Quincy’s first national civil rights speaker when James Farmer, the national director of CORE, made an appearance there to help bolster the voter registration drive. Years later, when I interviewed Mrs. Jones, she told me what “a thrill” it was for her to recall how Farmer ate a meal in her home and rested in her master bedroom before going to the meeting that night. The meeting was a great success, with hundreds in attendance. Farmer was a very dynamic speaker, and he left all of us energized for the long road ahead. By April, we had registered 975 Negroes in Gadsden County, which was more than twice the number that had ever been registered there before. But there were still 10,800 who had not registered, which was very significant, considering that Negroes outnumbered whites.13

  Our foes continued to strike at us however they could, trying to both scare us and humiliate us. In April, CORE worker Doris Rutledge, who had also participated in the Tallahassee theater demonstrations, was arrested in nearby Live Oak for writing the wrong date on her driver’s license application. It was a simple mistake, only off by one day, but she was taken to the jail where she believed Ruby McCollum had been held in the famed Florida murder case. It was so bad to be jailed in Suwannee County that civil rights workers were terrified of being stopped for any reason by the police—which many Negroes considered notorious. Since Doris believed she was at the jail where it was rumored McCollum had been mistreated and lost her baby, she defiantly told her jailers, “I know the story of Ruby McCollum!” That made them very angry, she says.

  “I didn’t sleep that night because I knew I could die. I wasn’t pregnant, but I figured I could have been raped. Anything could have happened to me,” Doris says. “So the only thing that I could do was stay awake, and if someone did try to do anything, I could fight them off. I had already said to myself, ‘If something happens, they will have to kill me.’ I would not submit to anybody just to save my life. Just kill me.” She was released without incident after a night in jail.14

  That same month, an official with the Leon County Health Department began contacting Judy Benninger at the Big Bend Voter Education Campaign office in Tallahassee, claiming there was “serious evidence” she had received a communicable disease through “intimate contact.” Judy dismissed the first calls, but then a man with a medical bag from the Alachua County Health Department showed up on Judy’s parents’ doorstep in Gainesville, telling her mother that Judy probably had syphilis. Judy was mortified that such a lie was being spread not only to me, her employer, but also to her parents. A similar claim was made about Rosemary Dudley, another white woman who was working with us, and a male volunteer who was a member of Tallahassee CORE. When Judy and I went to the health department in Tallahassee to deny the claims, health department officials demanded that Judy take a blood test or face arrest. “The next time you hear from me, it will be through the sheriff’s department, and that’s all I have to say,” an official said.

  Judy didn’t want to face more publicity or an arrest, but she also didn’t trust the health department to provide a truthful blood test. Instead, she went to a Negro physician, Dr. Charles Stevens, and explained the situation to him. Dr. Stevens tested her under a false name, and the test results came back negative for syphilis. As Judy had said all along, the whole thing was a lie. Still, Judy’s mother was very upset by the ordeal, in part because she believed her husband might be angry enough to take action against Judy’s accusers if he found out. One night after speaking to both Judy and the health director in Alachua County, Mrs. Benninger suddenly felt weak and found blood on her pajamas. She later discovered she’d suffered a hemorrhage, which she believed was brought on by the emotional stress of th
e situation.15

  For people involved in the civil rights movement, black or white, our families suffered right alongside us.

  While Judy battled the health department, another group of us from Florida felt compelled to take part in an April demonstration at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York. Our voter registration workers were suffering daily harassment and intimidation, but the governor of Florida, C. Farris Bryant, was planning to tout Florida as a “paradise” at the World’s Fair, hoping to drum up tourism. Paradise? Florida might have been a paradise to whites on vacation, but it was hell to the Negroes who lived there.

  The New York chapters of CORE, which were quite militant, had planned what they called a “stall-in” to block the bridges with stalled automobiles and keep people from attending the fair. (Again, this was considered very radical; the SCLC, for example, thought such tactics would have a negative impact on the Movement.) We only had three cars from our group to offer to the demonstration, but about ten of us, including Doris Rutledge and Rosemary Dudley, drove to New York to take part. Tentatively, I called Priscilla, who was still living in New York, to ask if she would join the demonstration. My sister hadn’t had anything to do with civil rights since her kick in the stomach by a Tallahassee police officer the year before, and I didn’t know how she would react to my call.

  To my surprise, Priscilla agreed to help us. Once again, it was a decision she would regret—and it would change my family forever.

  An hour and a half before the 9:00 A.M. opening of the fair, a protester pulled the emergency cord on a subway bound for the fair at Jackson Heights, a busy hub. Other protesters then lay across the tracks and tried to block the train, but police had the subways moving again within eight minutes. I do not remember what happened in the effort to block the highways, but I assume we simply did not have enough cars to make much impact. The “stall-in” didn’t work out as the organizers had hoped.16

  The fair opened on a cold and rainy day. Three-thousand police officers and Secret Service agents were on hand to keep order, especially since President Johnson was there to make an address that day, along with former president Harry S. Truman. At the Florida pavilion, a group of us assembled with picket signs to make our views known. Florida’s exhibit at the fair featured porpoises playing in tanks and a huge orange on top of a pole that seemed to be 200 feet tall. We held up signs, sang freedom songs, and shouted “Governor Bryant must go!” when the governor appeared.

  Still, we were peaceful and probably would have avoided arrest if not for one young man—who was not anyone I recognized—who actually scaled the huge pole. I counted everyone in our group, and we were accounted for, so the man had not come with us from Florida. I originally thought he might have just been a thrill seeker, but I learned later that he was a member of the South Jamaica chapter of CORE in New York.17 I have forgotten if the man was Negro or white, but as all of us peered upward to see what in the world he was doing, the police descended upon the demonstrators and loaded us into paddy wagons. Priscilla and I were under arrest yet again. In all, 294 CORE members and others were arrested that day.18

  As many times as I had been arrested and spent time in Florida jails, nothing had prepared me for New York. This was the worst jail system Priscilla and I had ever seen. Doris Rutledge remembers being shuttled from facility to facility throughout New York’s boroughs, and having matrons put their hands all over her body to search her. When Priscilla and I first arrived to be processed, the jailers told us we were expected to submit to a vaginal exam. I honestly thought I must have heard wrong. Why should we need a vaginal exam? I can only imagine they were planning to look for drugs or weapons, but we refused. “Then you’re going to isolation,” the jailer said.

  That sounded like a punishment to us at first, until we were walked past the crowded cell block and got our first gritty taste of what a true life of incarceration would be like. Compared to Tallahassee and other small-town Florida jails, the New York jail was a different world. The jail was crowded, loud, smelly, and dirty. As we walked past the cells, women were reaching out through the bars like wild animals in cages, trying to touch us and grab us. Hey, sweetie, why don’t you come in here? You look good, sweet meat!

  Priscilla and I were shocked. Believe it or not, although we had been threatened during our 1960 jail-in, we had never experienced sexual advances from women in jail before. We knew immediately that this was not somewhere we would want to stay a single minute longer than necessary. We weren’t going to refuse to pay our fine. The sooner we got out, the better. Needless to say, we were very grateful that we were going to be placed in isolation. Even while we were in an isolation cell, women continued to try to grab us through the bars. And the food was more terrible than ever. For breakfast, they served sauerkraut, which we had never even tasted.

  There was another serious problem. As Priscilla recalls, we were not even permitted to use the telephone. Of all places, Priscilla laments, we had to spend three days in that New York jail before we could even call our lawyers or families to tell them where we were. John and Mother knew we were at the World’s Fair, but they had no idea what had happened to us. We had simply disappeared in the outside world. By coincidence, photographs of both me and Priscilla had appeared separately in the New York Times story about the civil rights demonstrations, but that was the last anyone had seen of us. By the third day, when we notified our lawyers, we were set free. “It was terrifying,” Priscilla says today. “I promised myself, and I have never broken that promise, ‘I will never, ever go to jail again.’ ”

  Our problems in New York didn’t end with the jail stay. I was summoned to New York for arraignments several times to answer to the same charges. Each time I was called, I had to drop everything in Florida and return to New York. When I arrived, the court was always confused, calling for both “Patricia Stephens” and “Patricia Due.” No matter how many times I tried to explain, the court never did understand that we were the same person. That system was the most disorganized I have ever known.

  It was even worse for Priscilla, even though she still lived in New York. For one arraignment, she was ill and couldn’t make it, so I submitted a note from her doctor explaining why she was not there. The court accepted the note, and there seemed to be no problem. But then, the next time we were arraigned, Priscilla was arrested because she had failed to show up for the previous arraignment! The whole experience proved to be too much for Priscilla. She’d pushed herself too hard. One day while I was back in Quincy, I got a phone call from her, and I could tell something was wrong by the sound of her voice. “Pat, I have to get out of here. I have to leave,” she said. “I can’t stay in this country another day.”

  Although she didn’t have any money, Priscilla was determined to board a ship bound for Ghana in West Africa, the land from which she had heard one of our ancestors had been kidnapped in the 1840s. If she could not be treated like a full American citizen, she reasoned, she would live somewhere else. “If I had stayed, I knew I would die,” Priscilla explains today. “I knew I would not have an opportunity to live a full, rich life with all my potential. I didn’t understand how things could be affecting me so badly, and I knew I could not change my feelings toward these things. I knew they would have killed me. So, I wanted to live.”

  She asked me for money, and John and I had very little to give her. Mother was ill during that time, already in the hospital, when she got a call from Priscilla. Daddy Marion had recently made arrangements for Priscilla to begin teaching with him in Florida—something everyone was very happy about—so Mother was unprepared for Priscilla’s call.

  “She called to tell me she was going to Africa, and I’m lying there helpless and I say, ‘Well, this is the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard of! This child is going to Africa. She doesn’t have any money. She doesn’t have anything. Why is she going to Africa when she already has a job at home?’ ” Mother said, recalling her feelings in her 1996 interview.

  Priscilla had at lea
st one voice of support, though. Daddy Marion had written Priscilla a letter in March, after she had apparently toyed with the question of possibly going to Africa someday: Africa is a long ways off, but if that is what you really want, by all means go to Africa.… Know thyself, and be true to thyself, and you can be false to no one.19

  Although I did not want Priscilla to go to a strange place by herself, I tried to understand why she felt she had to leave everything behind, including us. With a very heavy heart, I sent her what little money I could. Then, the woman who was both my sister and my best friend was gone. On the rare occasions Priscilla traveled back to the States to visit after 1964, her skin broke out in hives as soon as her ship left international waters and she drew closer to U.S. soil. That’s how emotionally shattered she felt by her civil rights experiences in her own country.

  Priscilla finally came back to the United States to live in June of 1977, but the sister I grew up with never returned. Priscilla was never the same.

  Twenty

  TANANARIVE DUE

  “ ‘What became of the black people of Sumer,’ the traveler asked the old man, ‘for ancient records show that the people of Sumer were black? What happened to them?’ ‘Ah,’ the old man sighed. ‘They lost their history, so they died.’ ”

  —Proverb from Sumer

  When my mother told me she wanted to spend the weekend at a dude ranch in central Florida with real-life cowboys and a rodeo, I thought she was crazy. Mom wanted to go somewhere she could ride a horse the way she had as a child growing up in Quincy, and the River Ranch Resort sounded perfect. It was a three-hour drive from where we both lived in Miami, near a town called Yeehaw Junction. I knew it was the last place most citified black women would want to go.