Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244)

by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)

  In one of our quieter times, I agreed to prepare a meal for Pink, some of his friends, my two cousins, and some more people I had met. Ten people altogether. Our landlady said it was okay. She was nice enough to leave the house so that I would feel relaxed about using her kitchen to cook for my guests. She suggested that I use the pressure cooker, which I did for my green beans. She gave me some quick instructions, but I was in such a hurry that I was only half paying attention. How hard could this be, anyway? I found out.

  I’d never been exposed to a pressure cooker before in my life. I was getting this big dinner ready all by myself and I was angry because Pink was not there helping me. He was out somewhere wasting time again and expecting me to have everything ready. To tell the truth, I don’t even know why I was using a pressure cooker for green beans in the first place. But at one point, I took the little jiggler off the top of the pot. I think that’s what my landlady told me to do. Then I tried to lift the top off. But it wouldn’t move. That’s because it was still sealed by the steam, and since I had not been paying attention, I didn’t realize that until I started trying to pry the top off with a knife. I heard this hissing sound like a bomb about to explode. I didn’t know if air was going in or coming out, or what, but just at that moment, I remembered that I wasn’t supposed to lift the top until the steam went down. Too late. The top shot up and banged the ceiling so hard, it left a big dent. Beans flew all over the place, the ceiling, down my back, all over my arms. Oh, God, they were so hot. The place was a wreck, my dinner party was in ruins, and I was in pain. I just broke down in tears. And I felt so sick. I mean, I was so badly burned that even Pink realized he had to do something when he finally came in and looked at me.

  He rushed me to the emergency room. I was in bad shape: bean burns on my back, on my arms, my face. I was “beaned” up. I have bean marks on my back to this day from that incident. At some point during the treatment, I told Pink that I didn’t know if I’d be able to make dinner. He would not have that. We were there arguing in the emergency room about whether I should keep my obligation.

  “Well, I don’t promise somebody something and don’t do it,” he said.

  I just looked at him. What could I say to that? I mean, who did he care about, me or all those people? The hospital came up with the answer: I had to stay overnight. I don’t know whether Pink had that dinner or not. I don’t know whether people came or not. Maybe my cousin Ruby finished everything. Maybe they were able to pull it all together. The roast beef was done. The cornbread was in the oven. And the green beans, well, they were on the ceiling.

  I ran back to Chicago every chance I got. Usually once a month, by train. Emmett never called. He was having a great time, so much fun with Wheeler, Uncle Emmett, Uncle Kid, all his friends. He was happy as a bug in a rug. I was eager to see him, and he seemed happy to see me when we’d visit. But his gang was waiting. He would spend some time, but he was always kind of eager to get out with his buddies. For me, it was such a precious time whenever I’d see him because I hadn’t seen him in a while. But it was becoming clear to me that he was drifting away. I had always thought he would rejoin me in Detroit once I got settled in, but it hadn’t worked out that way. And it didn’t seem to distress him that he was not with me. After all, he had his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and his friends. All I had was a husband and a deep longing for my son. On top of that, I have to admit I was a little jealous. I talked it over with Mama, who urged me to take responsibility for Bo myself. With her telling me that, and when I saw Bo pulling away, I decided the quicker the better. Mama had sold the house in Argo, and used that money, along with some of my money, as a down payment on a two-flat building at 6427 South St. Lawrence in Chicago. Back in Detroit, I went in to my job and resigned right away. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t waste any time. I had to pull up stakes.

  I moved back to Chicago in November 1951. Pink came, too. Mama got him a job at Corn Products. We took the second-floor apartment in my mother’s building. Oh, I was so glad to see my baby again. I wondered how in the world I had let him be away from me as long as I had. How had I avoided losing my mind? I couldn’t hug him hard enough. I couldn’t wait to make up for the lost time. Pink was another matter. Bo and Pink got along. They got along fine. But they weren’t buddy-buddy. Pink never had time to talk like a father or participate in any of Emmett’s games or take him out. That was my job, my reward.

  Even though I thought Pink felt at home with Bo and me in Chicago, apparently, that is not the way he felt at all. He kept going to Detroit, his real home. Every weekend he would take my car and all his money and he would go to Detroit. To see his mother. During the week, he really didn’t spend much time with Bo, or even with me, for that matter. He went to work, he came home—“I’m hungry”—he slept, and on the weekends he’d disappear. It was a reminder of what I didn’t want to remember. After all, I had just rebuilt my relationship with Daddy, who used to disappear on weekends. So, finally, I decided that maybe I should just go with Pink. To see his mother. When we got to Detroit, Pink’s best buddy was waiting for him. They went somewhere. I stayed with his mother. We became very good friends, his mother and I, since we spent so much time together that weekend. Oh, I don’t know, that marriage was a miracle. Which is not to say it was a good thing. What I mean is that it just seemed to happen, just appeared out of thin air, and seemed to continue for reasons no human could possibly explain.

  I kept letting Pink come in and out of our lives, but that next Christmas season marked the end of the year 1952 and the end of us, really. He came in and got dressed one night. He grabbed a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label I kept around for holiday guests. He put the bottle in his inside coat pocket. Then he picked up the telephone and made a call. I could tell he was making plans with somebody to go somewhere, a party or something. It sounded like they were making a date. On my phone? I flew into a rage, grabbed the phone out of his hand, and learned that the person on the other end was “Margaret.”

  I introduced myself to her. It was the polite thing to do. “I’m Pink’s wife.”

  By the time Pink made it back to our place after he went wherever he was going with Margaret, he found the locks had been changed. And he found his clothes. They were on the front lawn. I had flung them out the second-floor window, every last stitch. As far as I was concerned, he had made his move and might as well just keep on moving. Helping him out was the least I could do.

  I had gone to Detroit looking for a new world of possibilities, and wound up finding it just where I had left it. Back home. I have always been strengthened by my values and I place a great value on marriage and family. But now I know that it wasn’t necessarily a good thing for me to be married at all costs, just to conform, just to live up to some local community standard, to do what people thought I should do, to be what people thought I should be. I talked with some friends after Pink and I separated. “Why did you let me do that?” I asked. They told me he seemed like a nice guy and he had a good job. But life is about more than that, and maybe it took a trip to Detroit for me to see it. Living in Argo had been good for me as a child, but leaving Argo was good for me as an adult. It was time for me to burst out of my cocoon, to emerge and strike out on my own, discover the things about myself I might not have known had I stayed in that sheltered environment. I would always value marriage, but not at the expense of my values. Some things should never be sacrificed. Nothing is more important than being true to yourself. Besides, what good is a no-good man?

  CHAPTER 7

  For the first time, Emmett and I were on our own together. We were closer than we ever had been, looking out for each other, taking care of each other, having fun together. Unfortunately, we still were one emotional step away from ridding ourselves of Pink Bradley.

  Not long after I had “evicted” Pink, he stopped by. Now, we were separated, and I can’t say what made me do it, but I let him in. Emmett was sick, some flu bug. When Pink found out, he said he wanted to see Bo. I don’t
know why. He never really had been much of a father figure when he’d had the chance. As it turns out, before he even got to Bo’s room, he started talking some stupid talk about what he ought to do to me. I just remember he had a very threatening tone. It’s funny, and sad, how women nurture men, only to have them turn on us like that. Even so, I figured I could handle it. I mean, I had handled Pink before. So I told him I wanted him to go, and thought I could make him leave. But no sooner had I said this than I noticed Bo standing there in the doorway. He had gotten out of his sickbed in his long underwear and had come to see what the fuss was all about. That was my first concern, just seeing him standing there, knowing how sick he was. But that wasn’t the part that startled me. It seems that Emmett had taken time to stop in the kitchen on his way in. At his side, he was holding a knife, a butcher’s knife.

  Well, everything just sort of froze right then and there. I didn’t know what to do. Apparently, neither did Pink.

  Finally, Bo broke the ice, very calmly, very smoothly, very slowly, taking his time to get it all out without faltering. “Pink, Mama wants you to go and I think you should go.” And his next words sounded like he had been saving them up for a very long time. In fact, the whole time I had been married to Pink. “And if you put your hands on her,” he said, “I will cut you.”

  Pink measured him up and down for a minute. Bo was only eleven, but he was the one holding the knife, a pretty long knife at that. I knew I had to step in, get Pink out. He was kind of stubborn about leaving, and struggled some. I knew he felt challenged, and might do something stupid just to make a point. I had no idea what that might be, and I was caught there in the middle, but it didn’t matter. All I knew was that I had to break this up. In a way, I was helping Pink save face. Finally, I got him out the door and locked it. I think that’s about when I started breathing again.

  My God, that frightened me so. I didn’t want my baby to wind up hurt by this man, or in jail over something that had started out as a stupid disagreement. Pink wasn’t worth the trouble. Things were still unsettled for a moment after Pink left, and I went over to feel Bo’s little heart. It was racing a mile a minute. He was very upset, even though he had seemed so calm. Really, I think I was even more worked up about it. I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to Bo. I hugged him, held him close, held him tight, but it was as much a comfort to me as it was to him. I knew at that precious moment that I would never let Pink into our home again.

  Later, Emmett and I talked about it all and I told him that he should never, ever, get between me and somebody else when we were arguing. I warned him that he might get hurt, that just because he was a kid, there was no guarantee that someone wouldn’t knock him down. Or worse. I told him that if he ever thought a situation was getting too serious, that he shouldn’t try to step in to fight. He should call the police. That’s what they’re for, to take care of things like this. He insisted that he could defend himself and he could defend me, too. He said he could duck if he had to, and I had to fight back a little chuckle. Emmett was like that. He never seemed to be aware of his limitations. Maybe it was because he had struggled so hard to get beyond so many difficulties so early on. Time would tell whether that was a good thing. But, at that moment, all he could think of was that he wanted to protect me, and from then on, he wasn’t ever going to let anybody hurt me. I told him I felt the same way about him, and that’s pretty much where we left it. But I thought about it from time to time, that whole thing, how Emmett and I had put each other in danger, and how each of us could think of nothing else but how to protect the other.

  For Bo and me, this was a turning point. We formed a new and stronger bond. It was almost like a partnership. He started taking on more responsibility. Like cooking. He loved pork chops and would go shopping some afternoons and bring home two packages, one for him, one for me. He’d cook them in separate skillets. Heaven forbid that I might get one of his pork chops. And then there was the corn, another one of his favorites. But, oh, my goodness, he would just empty the pepper can into that corn. At least that’s the way it seemed to me. I mean, the corn was yellow and black. He thought it was delicious. And I would eat it. I had to eat it. I was his mother. And I was hungry. Eventually, I had to plead with him, “Honey, please. Let up on the pepper.” So that was a typical dinner he made, pork chops and “pepper” corn, and he served it the same way each time. His pork chops went by his plate, mine went by my plate, and the skillet of corn sat in the middle of the table. That was our community dish.

  Over time, Emmett got accustomed to doing most of the cooking. He even expanded the menu. I appreciated that. He figured out how to boil potatoes, even though he would add too much salt. And he’d cook green peas, pork and beans, hot dogs, and soup. It was simple, but I was grateful, as a mother would be. Besides, I was too tired to worry about cooking myself when I got home from my Social Security Administration job.

  Emmett wanted to take on even more. With Pink out of the picture, it was clear that he wanted to be the man of the house. One evening I came home and I was bone tired. Emmett had been down the street playing and he ran to meet me at the steps of our building. He looked at me and he could tell that I was exhausted. That’s when he set out the plan, telling me then that if I had to go to work every day to make the money, then the least he could do would be to take care of the house. And I just handed it over to him. At that moment, I was in no mood to debate. I felt as if a huge load had been lifted off me. By him. It was just beautiful the way he took on that responsibility without being asked. It did take him a while, though, to tell me he would do the washing.

  Emmett was very industrious. He could take care of the house. It had started in Detroit, when he was just nine, and felt some great need to clean up the Harrises’ place. He always wanted everything to be a certain way. But now he was reaching new levels. He would see that something needed to be done and he would do it. Just like that, no questions asked. If we needed to lay a rug, Bo would tell me, “We can do it.” Which usually meant he could do it. Sweep, mop, wash walls, paint—“We can do it,” he’d say. When I saw he could handle it all, I really loaded him up. He kept a good attitude about it, a sense of humor. Emmett could find humor in anything he was doing. He and I saw a cartoon once where two of the characters had swept some dirt into a little pile under a rug. Now, I thought it was cute, but Emmett just thought it was the funniest thing. And I could see the wheels turning in his mind and I knew him well enough to know where this might lead. I knew I needed to keep that boy in check. I warned him in a playful kind of way that if I ever found out that he was sweeping dirt under my rug, I was the one who would have the last laugh. I think he got the message. He didn’t really say anything. He just looked at me, smiling, with that mischievous gleam in his eye.

  Soon, he would show me skills I never knew he had. I had bought a piece of linoleum to install in the dining room. As it turns out, we got a big snowfall on the day I was supposed to get help laying the linoleum. Mama was even planning to come over to supervise the whole thing. Of course. But that snow just kept coming and I knew my help was not. Everyone was snowed in. So I sat there, wondering how I was going to get that linoleum laid, wondering when it was going to be laid, for that matter. The roll had already been sitting in my apartment for the last twenty-four hours, getting up to room temperature as we were supposed to let it do. Oh, I was so upset. That big roll would have to sit there in the way, blocking everything, for another week while we waited.

  Emmett walked up. He looked over the situation for a minute. He started nodding his head. “We can do it ourselves. We can lay that linoleum,” he said.

  I didn’t take him seriously. “Oh, honey,” I said, “I can’t let you mess up Mama’s linoleum trying to learn how to lay it.”

  He insisted, “Mama, we can do it. I know we can.” He wouldn’t let it go. “Look,” he said, “all we have to do is move all the stuff from the front to the back and when we get back there, we move all the s
tuff back to the front.”

  Oh, was that all we had to do? He kept working on me, telling me new pieces of his plan, and walking me through it all, and, I don’t know, it was still snowing, and what else were we going to do that day? He talked me into it. But that doesn’t mean I ever relaxed about it.

  Right from the start, we were facing obstacles. We had cleared the first section of the room at the front. But there was a built-in china cabinet that couldn’t be moved. We would have to go around that. It had a shape that kind of reflected the bay window along the dining room wall, as if it had been a puzzle piece pulled from that section of the wall. It came out from the corner at an angle, then it ran straight across, then back at an angle to the wall on the other side. That was going to be one tough corner. To make matters worse, right next to the cabinet was a radiator. How on earth were we going to get that linoleum under there?

  “Don’t worry about it.” Bo smiled. He looked so confident, like he had already figured out how to do it. “Just let me handle that,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Well, you can imagine how nervous I was. The piece had to be cut just right to work around the china cabinet and all the way to the wall under the radiator. If it was off even a fraction of an inch, I knew that would be the only fraction of an inch I would ever see in that room from then on: every family dinner, every time I walked to the hutch, every day for the rest of my life. Okay. All right. He said we could do it, and if ever I was going to trust my son, I guess this would have to be the time. Besides, we already had moved everything from one end to the other.