It’s a shame, but I had to look far and wide for a school in Miami that would accept a black child. Sometimes I felt so frustrated I wanted to scream. I eventually enrolled Tananarive in Miami Shores Montessori School, her first school.
In the meantime, John had become more and more involved with black militant organizations, especially one called the Junta of Militant Organizations (JOMO), serving as their Minister of Justice. JOMO had been founded in St. Petersburg in 1968. John didn’t realize it at the time, but some of the same people he was trying to help were reporting regularly to the FBI with updates on his activities, verifying his address and tracking his appearances. One informant told an FBI agent that while John was serving as moderator at a JOMO conference in Louisville, Kentucky, John supposedly said “the time has come for Black militants to put their guns down and attempt to gain their goals by undercover, subversive, and infiltration methods.” He said, however, they should keep their weapons handy and know how to use them in the event they are needed.2
John had lost his job with the union in the fall of 1968 because his bosses believed he was spending too much time involved in community activities and not enough time working for them. In truth, John did have a tendency to overcommit himself, so I do not think his firing was a direct response to his more militant associations. His bosses just wanted him to be more focused on organizing unions and less focused on everyone else.
Soon after we moved to Miami, John got a position with Legal Services of Greater Miami, which provided legal help and advice to the poor. He continued to travel and meet with black militants throughout the state, but he also had a full-time job again, so I thought everything would be fine. I was wrong.
In December 1969, it was time for new baby’s arrival. Because this pregnancy had been another difficult one, I was scheduled for a cesarean section. But this time, I had a different doctor, not someone who tried to schedule the surgery prematurely, so I didn’t have the same problems I’d had with high blood pressure and vomiting shortly before Johnita’s birth. On December 12, 1969, we had another girl. We named her Lydia Charlotte Due, honoring John’s grandmother, Lydia Graham, and my mother, whose first name was Lottie. Lydia was born completely healthy, and I was very grateful. I never took a new baby’s health for granted, not after everything I had been through. While I recuperated at the hospital, John posed for Christmas pictures at a department store with Tananarive, Johnita, and Cynthia Barnes Hartfield, a relative who was the daughter of Mother’s brother, my Uncle Guy. Cynthia came to help John with the children while I was in the hospital.
Lydia was dedicated at the First Unitarian Church of Greater Miami, and I named Nancy Adams—my friend in Miami who had enlisted me in the Freedom of Choice schools drive and would later pay private school expenses for Tananarive and Johnita—as her godmother.
In early January 1970, only a couple of months after Lydia was born, we received a devastating blow to our family’s finances and future: The Florida Supreme Court suspended John from the Florida Bar, which meant he could not practice law.
This happened for many reasons, some of which were unjust and some of which John had to take responsibility for. The background leading to John’s suspension stretched back to 1968, originating with his work organizing the sanitation workers in St. Petersburg. Although John had been spending much of his time as a labor organizer, in 1968 he still had a law office in Tallahassee. One of his clients was a woman who’d been charged with displaying a weapon when the deputy sheriff came to see her on a charge about her dog, as John recalls. Before John left for St. Petersburg to help organize the sanitation workers, we both stopped by the clerk’s office to make sure the case was not on the schedule. It was not. We assumed he would be free to go. We were wrong. The case was called the very next day.
Unfortunately, John’s civil rights activities meant he had many enemies in the legal and law enforcement arenas. Someone had quoted John in the newspaper as having said that the Florida Bar was racist. That statement had infuriated some white attorneys. So once John began making trips down to St. Petersburg to organize that union, his enemies saw a golden opportunity: They brought up on the court docket the case involving John’s female client, and the case was called. Exactly as they’d expected, John was absent from the courtroom.
People tried to claim that they’d notified us, but they had not. Regardless, since John didn’t appear in court, his client was encouraged to file a petition of negligence against him. That’s a very serious matter. When John got the notice, he was expected to explain himself. He knew about the problem long before he was actually suspended.
I believe this is where John himself should have taken more responsibility. Today, he explains his refusal to try to fix the situation as a rebellion against the power structure. “All I needed to do was go up there and say, ‘Yassuh, boss. I sho’ do apologize. There wuz a mistake somehow,’ ” John said when Tananarive and I interviewed him, imitating the bowing and scraping persona blacks had been forced to use to placate whites for generations. “But I was in my full balloon of Black Power activism at that time, and I said, ‘No way—to hell with these racists.’ ”
That’s fine and well, but I think there was more to it than that. John had endless energy when it came to seeing after other people’s affairs, but he seemed paralyzed when it came to some personal and family affairs. He had not done anything to avert the initial three-month suspension, and even after he was suspended, when the state’s black lawyers and community activist Gwendolyn Sawyer Cherry offered their assistance, John just seemed to withdraw. All of the burden for trying to reinstate him to the bar fell on my shoulders, and I now had three young children I was trying to raise. To Gwen Cherry’s credit, I must say that she labored long and hard on John’s behalf, even when he seemed less interested in his reinstatement than she did. Many blacks saw his suspension as a racist act—and it had been sparked because of racism, I believe—so John was a symbol to them even if he himself seemed nonchalant.
Because he’d been suspended, John could no longer work at Legal Services, so money was very tight at a time when we had just had a baby. And John’s failure to take part in trying to resolve the situation brought a great deal of tension into our home. This was the beginning of one of the most stressful times of our marriage. About two years after John’s suspension, we suffered an episode I have heard John refer to as an eye-opening experience: He was gone for two weeks, and I did not know how to reach him. I had three children, I needed money, and my husband was nowhere to be found. Suddenly a situation that had already been stressful became almost unbearable for me.
Luckily, John came home and realized that his first responsibility was to his family, not to the people he was trying to help.
But for me, those were very long years.
John and I both worked with welfare mothers in some capacity, trying to help them improve their lives. By the end of 1970, we were involved with the SCLC in planning a Poor People’s March from Miami to Tallahassee. The plan was not literally to march all of those hundreds of miles. Instead, marchers from throughout the state would congregate to march in major cities, then drive to the next city to march, and so on until we reached the state capital. The march in Florida was modeled after the SCLC’s Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., which Dr. King had been helping to plan at the time of his death. In 1968, led by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the SCLC had carried out a Poor People’s March from Mississippi to Washington, D.C., and then erected a makeshift Resurrection City for poor people of all races and ethnic backgrounds, pushing for legislation to ease the burden of the poor. When police dismantled the camp and arrested several protestors, including Rev. Abernathy, people rioted in some of Washington’s poor black neighborhoods.3
As 1971 approached, all of us wanted to rekindle the spirit of the earlier 1960s. I believed then—as I still do today—that economic empowerment must be the next step if blacks are going to avoid the fate of being a permanent underclass in th
is country. I had gone to jail and been arrested many times to fight for access to public facilities and the right to vote, but now we had to address the long-term economic gaps that had grown because of our unfair treatment. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act had nothing to do with compensating for blacks’ poverty after so many generations of second-class citizenship. Those new laws guaranteed us rights we should have had already as citizens, but now poor blacks had been left behind to cope with the mess. President Johnson’s War on Poverty had been a good start, but to me it was not enough. Too many of us were poor simply because we were black. I was going to do my best to give my children the best opportunities, but what about other black families and other black children? Who was going to speak up for them?
I was excited about Florida’s Poor People’s March. I knew how powerful marches could be. I remembered the feelings inspired when all of us had been assembled en masse, singing freedom songs, sharing heart and soul the way we had during the theater demonstrations in Tallahassee and on the Freedom Train to the March on Washington. The Movement had become very divided and ineffective in the late 1960s, a situation that had worsened when Dr. King was killed. As the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Dr. King’s best friend and advisor, wrote in his autobiography, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, “Just as we were getting to the point where we could address the most basic needs of our people for the first time, our soldiers wanted to go back home and live in peace and poverty.”4
I did not want to see that happen. I knew from experience that making changes is never easy, but the first step is to believe you can make changes. We had to love ourselves and believe in ourselves first, and I hoped our march could help us do that. Marches had unified us in the past, and I wanted Florida’s march to unify us again.
Since Tananarive was attending school, and I had no idea how long we would be gone (if we were arrested somewhere along the way, the trip might take much longer than planned), I left her in the care of some members of our Unitarian church. Mother was also there to look in on her from time to time, so I felt confident leaving her. I knew my daughter would be in good hands. As for my younger daughters, however, John and I bought a double stroller and brought them with us. Pudgy-cheeked Johnita was about two-and-a-half, wearing pigtails, and Lydia was about a year old, sporting a very cute little Afro. Johnita and Lydia were about to take part in their first major civil rights demonstration.
The march began in Miami, where about forty of us gathered to begin, the most die-hard activists. We knew we would gain marchers as we traveled north. John began with us, but he had to go back to Miami because he had a job with Legal Services and could not afford to take the days off. With us were a Miami activist named Gladys Taylor and another activist, Johnnie Parris, who, like me, had come with two young children. Johnnie was always one of the first people to respond when there was a march; she and her husband would load their eight children into their station wagon and go at the drop of a hat. (Johnnie had taken five busloads of people from Miami to Washington, D.C., for the Poor People’s March in 1968.)
Since the SCLC was the major supporter of the march, both Rev. Abernathy and another SCLC representative, James Orange, joined us in Miami. I owe both James Orange and Gladys Taylor a great debt for helping me push the stroller and carrying Johnita and Lydia when they were tired of being pushed. I really do not know how I could have participated without them. The saying “It takes a village to raise a child” was appropriate during that march.
Our first stop, fittingly, was in Palm Beach County, where Mother and Daddy Marion had raised me, Priscilla, and Walter. The marchers stopped in Riviera Beach, where members of a church were waiting to give us food and drinks. (Food stops were planned all along the route, staffed by volunteers.) We were hot and hungry by the time we reached Palm Beach County, so we were grateful for the meal. As I entered the church with Johnita and Lydia in tow, I felt the warmth of the volunteers and their encouraging smiles. I was looking forward to a meal and a rest. Then I realized one of the church volunteers was someone I actually knew. I stared for a moment: It was my high-school home economics teacher, Mrs. Ernestine B. Moore. She saw me, too, and came over to give me a big hug.
“Patricia, I’m so proud of you!” she said after she had admired Johnita and Lydia and asked about Mother. “I’ve been reading all about you in the newspapers. I read about the sit-ins and the jail-in and all those times you were arrested. I’ve wanted to tell you how proud I am for the longest time. Look at you now, with these two babies. And still marching.” She laughed, hugging me again.
There were some glorious moments in that march. In the city of Monticello, twenty miles outside of Tallahassee in Jefferson County, hundreds of people stood waiting to join our march. There was so much comradery as we swept into town, I truly felt like I was surrounded by brothers and sisters. I don’t drink from communal sources as a strict rule, but when we got to Monticello, I was grateful to sip water from a common dipper no matter how many people had used it before me. No matter how tired I was, my excitement kept me going.
Of all my memories of that Poor People’s March, the most personally significant happened soon after we left our first stop in Palm Beach County. Mrs. Taylor was pushing the baby stroller, and James Orange was carrying Lydia, but Lydia was tired of being carried. She squirmed to be let down, so we allowed her to stand on the road where we were marching. Lydia stumbled forward, one step, then two steps. Then three. Then four.
During that march, for the first time, my youngest daughter walked.
Thirty
TANANARIVE DUE
“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.… Where there’s love and inspiration, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
—Etta Fitzgerald
Atlanta, to me, is a city of pure magic.
I met my husband, science fiction novelist Steven Barnes, at a 1997 writers’ conference sponsored by Clark Atlanta University on “The African-American Fantastic Imagination: Explorations in Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror.” The city hummed with history and vibrancy. Our hosts in the college’s English department, Phyllis Briggs-Emanuel and Mary Arnold Twining, took us to a restaurant at an upscale black shopping mall, and someone at our table pointed out that the singers from the sensational a capella singing group Sweet Honey in the Rock were sitting at a table behind us, near the wall. While we sat and ate, I saw lawyer Johnnie Cochran and an entourage pass before the restaurant’s large picture window.
Sitting in the company of wonderful writers Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, and Jewelle Gomez, Steve and I both felt as if we were at a family reunion in Chocolate City. We had both spent many years feeling isolated from other blacks, especially given that the kind of fiction we wrote had not been embraced traditionally by the black community. Horror? Science fiction? Please. But there we were in Atlanta, introduced to audiences of blacks who cared about our work. I felt as if I’d awakened in an alternative universe, just like the lead character in my novel The Between, who dreams himself to different planes of existence.
Steve felt the magic, too. Steve and I lived in opposite corners of the country—he lived in Washington State and I lived in Miami—but Atlanta had brought us together. Before we realized what was happening, we began to fall in love. “We could build an empire,” I said to Steve as we sat in Atlanta’s airport and stared into each other’s eyes like two teenagers about to go home from summer camp. I felt foolish, but I also knew my words to be the absolute truth. It wasn’t love at first sight, not exactly, but it was close enough that I now believe in those fairy-tale meetings I’d always believed were exaggerated. Steve and I had done enough hard soul-searching to take responsibility for our own faults and decide exactly what we needed in a partner, so we recognized each other virtually upon sight.
I will always love Atlanta for Steve alone. But at the start of 2001, in January, I needed Atlanta’s magic again.
Life had been progressing beyond my dreams since the
time I met Steve in 1997—a new marriage and stepdaughter, a full-time career as a novelist for the first time, my first pregnancy—but suddenly events had taken a horrible turn. Both my grandmother and Uncle Mun had died on Christmas day in 2000. My phone on the west coast rang at 7:00 A.M. Christmas morning, when my cousin Muncko called from Miami to tell me that both his father and our grandmother were gone. He’d gotten both calls himself in the space of a half hour, soon after opening Christmas presents with his wife, Carol, and their young daughter, Jojo.
No one in my family ever wants to relive another day like that one.
Mom was handling the loss of her mother with strength that amazed and inspired me the way she always has, but I didn’t allow myself to be fooled by her outward display of what seemed like utter composure. I knew she had to feel like pieces of her were being torn to bits, that she was stumbling through a bad dream. My mother has spent almost her entire life taking care of others, and for once I wanted to try my best to take care of her. What could I do to help her?
Distraction, I decided.
Early January marked the start of my book tour for the paperback version of The Black Rose. The summer before, Mom and Dad had accompanied me during portions of my hardcover tour, going to appearances in both Chicago and Indianapolis. I always enjoy the chance to travel with my parents. In October 1999, I’d accompanied them to a CORE reunion in Des Plaines, Illinois, outside Chicago, where, for the first time, I’d met people like Marvin Rich and Jim Robinson, who had been on the national CORE staff, and former CORE field secretaries Gordon Carey, Dave Dennis, Rudy Lombard, and Mary Hamilton Wesley, whom my parents had known. (Lombard, who attended the 1960 Miami Action Institute with Mom and Aunt Priscilla, was arrested in sit-ins while leading the New Orleans CORE chapter. He later became CORE’s national vice chairman. Dennis also led New Orleans CORE.)1
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