by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
Mama thought my twenty-fifth birthday should be a memorable event. It would be. But not for a reason we ever would have imagined. The date—November 23, 1946—was approaching and Mama made sure everything was worked out. She and I planned it together, but, as always, she was in charge. She took care of everything, even all the cooking. She prepared a twin-turkey dinner. Unbelievable. Two whole turkeys. I don’t know how she did it, but she wanted to make sure everything was done right. That was a good thing, too, because it seemed like everybody in Argo wound up at our house on my special day. And it was special, too. When I was coming up, there was no music or dancing in our house. But now the whole town was dancing the night away. I don’t know how it all started. It seemed to have been a spontaneous kind of thing. I mean, it was a party, and that’s how parties can be. But I was nervous when all the dancing started. Once it did, it was hard to hold people back. I knew Mama, and I didn’t know when she was going to just lose it. As it turns out, Mama didn’t complain, she took it all in stride. But I believe she was just holding her peace. Until it seemed the house just couldn’t take it anymore. People were dancing so hard, the floor looked like it was starting to sag. I guess, after all those quiet years, that old house just couldn’t stand all this activity. Even without the dancing, though, the party went on.
At some point, somebody convinced me to try a little rum in my Coke. Just a little. Enough to smell the rum more than anything else. But why not? After all, you only have one twenty-fifth birthday. Now, I wasn’t a drinker, but it was my party and I didn’t see anything wrong with it, even though I wasn’t too sure what Mama would think. She knew about it. She knew about everything going on in her house, and then some. But she didn’t say anything about it. Believe me, that was startling. Now, since I wasn’t a drinker, I would take a little sip and then put my glass down, walk around mixing with my guests, and then come back, only to find my glass was missing. I’d get another drink and the same thing would happen again. In fact, it happened a few times before I really started wondering about it. Why did my glass keep disappearing like that? No sooner had I asked myself the question than I thought of the answer: Mama. I started looking around, but she was nowhere near me. Then I looked down. Oh my God. Emmett had been trailing me around the party picking up my “Coke” glass, drinking after his mama. By the time I noticed, he was in a pretty good mood. He seemed to think everything was funny. Well, I took him up in my arms and up to bed. He was so limber, not stiff at all, just very relaxed, passive. I saw that he was all right, and I relaxed, too. There hadn’t been much rum in those glasses to begin with. Even so, he wound up sleeping like, well, like a baby. Through the noise, the music, all the way through the night.
There was no more rum and Coke for me that night, or any night, for that matter. Even before Mama talked to me about the whole thing. Of course, she noticed. And she had a way of coming back at you when you’d least expect it. She really didn’t have to drive the point home. Seeing Bo with my glass was a sobering experience. He was only five years old. Very impressionable. And I knew that the impressions I made would be lasting. I decided that he would never see me with a drink in my hand again.
I have learned over the years that there are many ways that children learn. But one of the most important is by watching adults, especially their parents. There was a valuable lesson in this experience, a valuable lesson for me. I learned from Bo that he was learning from me and that I had better pay attention to what I was teaching him. Everything I did as a mother would have an effect on my son. And I decided at that moment that I had to set the right example for him. I would always remember that lesson. But if I ever forgot, even for a moment, I’m sure Mama would have been there to remind me.
CHAPTER 5
Chicago was more than five hundred miles and at least a hundred years away from Mississippi. Even though there were no visible signs of discrimination outside the buildings in the North, there were subtle reminders just behind the facades.
It was 1947. I was twenty-five years old and working for the federal government in downtown Chicago before I finally began to show a little independence. I remember when I first started working, at age eighteen, my mother would travel with me to and from work each day. Even when she didn’t have a car, she would ride public transportation. But she would always be there for me, until the day she couldn’t and I had to work my way through it, find my way home. I feel like I grew a lot as a result. So, by the time I was twenty-five, I thought I knew my way around, at least between home in Argo and my job in downtown Chicago. The Loop was an exciting place to walk around. I loved to look in the department store windows and dream about the things I might buy myself, or Mama, or Emmett. One day I decided to stop dreaming, and I had a rude awakening. I walked into Marshall Field’s like I was Marshall Field. Like I knew my way around, at the very least.
So, I was surprised when the security guard stopped me. “Are you looking for something?”
I didn’t think I looked like I needed directions. And I really wouldn’t know what I was looking for until I found it. “Well, I was just going to do a little shopping,” I said.
He gave me a stern look. “Then you’ll have to go to the basement.”
Oh, no. Not here. Marshall Field’s had a reputation as a fine department store. I figured the only discriminating you’d find there was in taste. There were no signs, so how could I have known that I was not welcome? The store motto was “Give the lady what she wants.” I guess if the lady was black, though, they would have to give it to her in the basement. I just turned on my heels and took my business down the street, to Carson Pirie Scott and Wieboldt’s, and down to the South Side to the black shopping mecca at Sixty-third and Halsted streets. That was the last time I would shop at Field’s for nearly twenty years. And when I finally went back, I didn’t go to the basement.
The way I looked at it, discrimination was somebody else’s problem: It was the problem of the person who was doing the discriminating. In this case, Field’s didn’t get my business, and I always loved to shop. But I had choices and I would make sure my son had choices. In the community where we lived, the kind of problem I ran into when I walked into Marshall Field’s just would not occur. Not since Louis and I integrated Berg’s. People there wanted our business, and our friendship. And that’s all Bo would know. In time, he would also know whites, children in school, even adults he would do business with. We made sure he would never be self-conscious around them. He would not see the signs, or the attitudes behind the facades. For him, they would not exist. There would come a time, though, when that strength would make him vulnerable.
During this same period, Mama took Emmett on his second trip to Mississippi to escort Aunt Lizzy back to Money after an extended visit in Argo. While they were down there at the home of Aunt Lizzy and Uncle Mose, Bo borrowed a hammer from the white plantation boss. He wanted to work on something. Little Bo was always working on something. After some time, the man came back to ask for his hammer.
Bo looked up at him. “Just a minute,” he said. “I’m not finished yet.”
Mama rushed in to handle the situation. The man got his hammer. Mama got Bo out of there.
People in Argo valued our family for so many reasons. But most of the reasons were Mama, and the way she could step in and handle situations. In addition to running her one-woman settlement house, my mother was the people’s choice for all kinds of advice. If she had been a man, she might have been considered the “Godfather” of Argo. When people had problems, they brought them to Alma Gaines. She had remarried by this time, Tom Gaines, after she and my father divorced. And she could draw on that experience to counsel neighbors on family problems. She was a walking resource, who pointed people to social services when there was a need, and she always led them in the direction of her church. It was no surprise, then, that she was able to get so much help when it came time to sell fish sandwiches door-to-door or anything else that might be needed to raise funds for the church. Fift
een cents a sandwich. The bricks came from the streetcar tracks removed by the town. The Argo Temple Church of God in Christ was Mama’s heart and soul. It had been organized right there in our home. Mama was into community building.
By 1947, my cousins Hallie and Wheeler Parker decided they were ready to leave Mississippi and bring their three children north. Hallie wrote to Mama and asked her whether she could help them with the move. Wheeler Senior had already come up to scout around. Of course Mama would help. In fact, there was a place right next door to us that had been available for some time. It was the house where my uncle Crosby Smith had lived with his family. For some reason we never really understood, Uncle Crosby had decided to move back to Mississippi a couple of years earlier. Everybody else was coming the other way about that time, but he wanted to go back. Anyway, an elderly couple had occupied the place for a while, but it had been vacant since they died. It was empty so long, in fact, that people had time to start inventing stories about the place. They declared they could see the elderly couple walking around at night, and nobody wanted to run into those ghosts. So the place stayed vacant for a while. But my mother brushed all that off, and the Parkers didn’t know about it, so they moved in.
They never saw a single ghost. But, with three boys, Wheeler Junior, William, and Milton, the Parkers began to see as many kids hanging out at their house as we did next door. Bo became friends with all the Parker boys, but he and Wheeler developed a special relationship. Wheeler was seven at the time, two years older than Emmett, but they had the greatest time playing together. Even though I didn’t always approve of their games. Their relationship started out as a sort of back porch kind of thing. It was one porch to the other. Ours was high with a railing and Wheeler’s porch was much lower. I couldn’t believe it when I saw those boys standing up on my railing and jumping down and across the way to Wheeler’s porch. I guess they figured it was a shortcut, but that was so frightening to me. They could have fallen and broken something. An arm, a leg, anything.
When I called out to them to stop, Emmett tried to make me feel more comfortable. I guess that’s what he thought he was doing. “Aw, Mama, nothing to it,” he said. “Look.”
Then, to my amazement, he did it again. Finally, I got tired of looking. I got tired of talking. I got me a switch and tanned his little legs. That broke up the jumping for both of them, since Wheeler also learned a lot from Bo’s lesson.
There was another time I had to get after Bo for taking chances. I had told him not to play around an abandoned garage in our neighborhood. But boys always have a sense of adventure about such things. They seem to be drawn to them. Word got back to me that he was playing around that place again. Word got to him that I was on my way, to give him a spanking. He rushed and made it home down the back way while I was headed for that garage the front way, down our street. By the time I realized what had happened and made it back home, he was already there, acting like he had been there all along. Except that he was breathing hard from running all the way home.
Bo loved to fish with Mama. Wheeler would go along with them sometimes to a spot along the Des Plaines River nearby. The boys would set up their poles at a bend where Mama could keep an eye on them. But, while she could still see their poles set up there, lines in the water, the boys were slipping just out of sight around that bend, where they could splash at the water’s edge. Scaring away all the fish. One time, though, Emmett managed to catch one. Mama had shown him how to reel it in and yank it out of the water. But he hadn’t quite worked the whole thing out yet. He was beside himself with excitement, and maybe his coordination was a little off to begin with. He managed to yank the fish out of the water, all right, just as he had been taught. But he couldn’t hold on to it. The fish fell to the ground and got dirty. Well, Bo could not stand dirt on anything. So, he picked up his prize catch with his chest all puffed up, so proud of what he had done. He walked right up to the edge of the river and dipped the fish to wash it off. Well, in the river is exactly where a fish wants to be. That little thing just wriggled out of Bo’s hands and swam away. Bo fell back on the riverbank and he and Wheeler were left there with so much laughter. That, and a fish tale.
Sometime during the summer Emmett turned six, I noticed something very odd. He always played hard and he played all the time. At least, he wanted to play all the time. First thing I saw when I got home from work was Emmett, ripping and running. Well, I thought when I got home it was time for him to come in. I figured he had been out most of the day. Naturally, he didn’t agree, and he would pitch a fit. By the time we settled him down inside, he would just completely deflate. That’s what was so odd to me, because Emmett always seemed to have unlimited energy. Mama blamed me for upsetting him by bringing him in. As far as she was concerned, this was just a childish reaction to me making Emmett do something he didn’t want to do. Within a couple of days, we started to realize there was a more serious problem. He would be active all day and then fall into this slump at night when I’d force him inside. But there was more. His temperature was beginning to soar at night.
Strange. He seemed just fine during the day, then at night, he would fall into a slump; he would be so lethargic. And now, a high temperature. We couldn’t figure it out. I searched high and low to find fault, to find a place to lay blame. I mean, someone had to be blamed. Someone had to be responsible for this, whatever “this” was. My mother was the most responsible person I knew. So I blamed Mama. I thought she wasn’t paying enough attention. Bo would get up in the morning and want to get out right away, every day. She would just let him. He was only a baby, not even six years old. How could he really know what he wanted to do? Mama told me what to do. I had no choices. But she was so light on him, so lenient. As far as she was concerned, he could do no wrong. But something was wrong with this situation. Something was very wrong.
We started using home remedies, rubbing him down with goose grease and serving him hoof tea. We set a lot of stock by this stuff. These remedies were supposed to cure a lot of things. I never knew why or how. I didn’t even know what kind of hoof came in that little box of hoof tea. All I knew was that we would wash it, then boil it, strain it, and the poor fellow would have to drink it. No sugar. Horrible taste. The goose grease was rubbed all over his body. I didn’t know what this was supposed to do, either. I just knew that all our folks from Mississippi used it. It might have been uncomfortable, but Emmett put up with the goose grease. At least he didn’t have to drink it.
He wasn’t showing any improvement with our home remedies. In fact, he seemed to be getting worse. We finally decided we better call the doctor. This was when doctors would still make house calls. After examining Emmett, the doctor gave us the diagnosis that broke my heart: polio. I felt ill. Mama nearly collapsed. Polio was the worst thing that could happen to you back then. It didn’t kill you, but it could take your life away from you just the same. It was sneaky and it was controlling and it scared people nearly to death. But we didn’t have time to think about that right then. The doctor urged us to rush Emmett to the hospital immediately. We didn’t have a car at the time and couldn’t get anyone to drive us. We were desperate. A private ambulance even turned us down. Finally we were able to get Bo to the hospital in a police squad car.
This was pure agony for me. We had no way of knowing what to expect. All we had was a vision of what might be in store. In those days, you would see the casualties everywhere. Children, mostly, in iron lungs because their own muscles had failed them. Wheelchair-bound children whose legs had shriveled, or with different forms of paralysis. And then there was my son. What was to become of little Emmett? I had defied the doctors who told me he would be crippled for life following the complications at birth. We got through that. Now there was this.
The doctors at the contagious disease center weren’t able to tell us anything reassuring at first. In fact, what they were telling us was anything but reassuring. What we heard from the medical specialists was talk about permanent limb damage, an
d the possibility that Emmett might be disabled for the rest of his life, and, oh, my God, there was just so much to absorb.
We turned to prayer. We prayed hard. I had heard this kind of talk from doctors before. I didn’t accept it then, and I couldn’t bring myself to accept it now. We tried to figure it out. Where had this come from? It was often hard to tell with polio. As far as we knew, no one in Argo had been diagnosed. Our best guess was that Emmett must have been exposed to it in a pool. But we never really knew. So, we kept praying.
Emmett had to be quarantined at home. We could go out, but he had to stay in, and no one else could come over. We kept praying. There were good signs. Emmett’s little legs and arms were still moving and our baby didn’t seem to have any brain damage. We were overjoyed. I mean, we were so grateful. He was recovering, he really was. His only problem was keeping still. Mama had to sit with Emmett all the time, practically holding him in the bed. And he just couldn’t stand that. But that was a good sign. I called constantly from work to check, and I looked after him when I got home at night. Then, on one of his regular visits to our home, the doctor finally discharged Emmett. It had been thirty days, and Emmett had recovered. He had beaten it. He was up and running again and practically tore a hole in the screen to get out.
After Emmett’s recovery, I remember we went to church one night. Mama testified how God had brought her baby through. And the whole church just started shouting. It was such a wonderful, “glory hallelujah” time. I heard Mama’s testimony, saw the church just going up in thanks, and, as the congregation rose, all I could do was sit there and cry. Tears of joy.
Although it was a great relief to learn that Emmett hadn’t lost any of his motor skills, it wasn’t long before we noticed a related problem. It was devastating to us. Emmett’s bout with polio had caused some muscle damage after all. He was left with a speech defect. He stuttered. It was especially bad when he got excited or nervous. It could just take over at times in those early days. Nobody could understand him. Nobody but Mama and me. We knew what this could mean and we refused to accept it. We were very proud people, and we didn’t want anything to stand in the way of Emmett’s success. We didn’t want him held back because of people’s prejudices, because they might hear him speak and think he had limitations.