by Till-Mobley, Mamie; Benson, Christopher; Jackson, Jesse Rev (FRW)
By the time they came home, they were loaded down. Bo had a baseball bat, a ball, a glove, some shoes with cleats on the bottom. He was all dressed up.
I was a little upset as I turned to Gene. “Why did you spend that kind of money on him?”
Gene smiled. “He’s a good boy,” he said. “He deserves it.”
They just seemed to really hit it off, building a very strong relationship. And, as a result, my relationship with Gene grew stronger, too. We hadn’t been seeing each other long, but Gene was already becoming a father figure to Bo, as if it was supposed to be that way. Funny how at first I didn’t think Gene was my type. I guess I just hadn’t given him much of a chance to show me what my type really was. Some things happen the way they happen because that’s just the way they’re supposed to be. I didn’t go into Polk’s Barbershop that day looking for a man. I went in looking to get my nails done. To look like a Chicago girl. To think I had stopped looking for that perfect man in my life and almost missed him when he finally looked me in the eye. In the end, Gene showed me something very important, something it can take so many years to discover on your own: Sometimes the best way to find what you’re looking for is simply to stop looking.
CHAPTER 9
If you look at Emmett’s century, you see that the men who lived important lives, significant lives, were truly gifted. They were blessed with good mothers, mothers who gave them exactly what they needed—unconditional love. That, and the freedom to express themselves, to fulfill their promise. In that way, these mothers helped their sons come to believe that there was nothing they couldn’t achieve. This was a gift I gave my own son—a boy of great potential.
Early on, I had a feeling about what Emmett might make of his life. I wanted him to go to college, a dream my mother always had for me. I had a great-uncle, Wade Gordon. Mama had talked once of having me stay with him because he was a minister and a professor at Fisk. When Emmett was still an infant, I wanted this for him, to go to Nashville, to attend Fisk University, maybe even to become a minister.
We had a lot of ministers on my father’s side of the family, and two or three on my mother’s side. I always thought Emmett would make a wonderful preacher. I thought he might at least become a deacon or a trustee in somebody’s church. He liked going to church and he was under the influence of his grandmother, a deeply religious woman. He talked about helping her build a church one day. He attended the one she had helped to build, the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ.
So a minister, maybe, or a deacon, at least, or a trustee. There are so many possibilities when you look at a child’s skills, his abilities, his natural tendencies. Emmett was a problem solver. If other people saw problems as locked doors, Emmett always seemed to hold a ring of keys, and an eagerness to see what was on the other side. He looked forward to a life of opened doors. That was Emmett. A solution locked in every problem. A promise in every solution. Even his stutter. Just as One-Eyed Rogers, the minister and dinner guest from my childhood, never let his life’s vision be limited by the loss of an eye, Emmett’s stutter was something he always tried to talk, or whistle, his way through. He made us believe that he would get through it, too. To know Emmett was to believe in him. That was his way: “We can do it.”
He made his analytical and persuasive abilities work for him. He loved working things out with people, to negotiate, to resolve things, as he had done with Thelma, Loretha, and me, and as he did all the time with all his friends. If a problem arose and two guys were ready to go at it, Bo would be the one who stepped right between them and said no. That would be the end of it. No one can recall Emmett ever getting into a fight. And he had an uncanny ability to keep others out of fights. I mean, nobody would buck him. Nobody would talk back to him. That was something that we marveled at. These things helped to make Bo a natural leader among his friends. They loved him. He had so much self-esteem and pride, especially in his appearance. He definitely got that at home. He was a secure boy, very confident in the way he carried himself. He might have stuttered at times, but he knew how to get his point across.
With his natural interest in working things out, he might have made a good lawyer or a politician. Aunt Rose Taliafero, the family “to-mah-to,” would have loved that, with her commitment to public service. Who knows? Emmett did have a deep sense of justice. He actually told me once that he wanted to be a motorcycle cop. We thought an awful lot of policemen back then. We saw them as good people doing good works. And we’d hear about the exploits, the dramatic stories. When I was coming up, there was a man everybody talked about named Two-Gun Pete, and by the time Bo came along, the tales of Pete had become legend in our community.
Two-Gun Pete was a man who didn’t play. His name made him sound like an outlaw, and he was every bit as tough as one. But Pete was a cop, a local black hero, who worked the trendy Bronzeville section of Chicago’s black South Side, mostly in the areas where the nightclubs were located. When he told you to put those hands up, oh, boy, he meant it. He took no stuff, and often took no prisoners. He was known for sometimes shooting first and asking questions later. And, yes, he did carry two guns. He was a two-fisted crime stopper. Street hustlers would clear out just on the rumor that he was headed in. Even if people didn’t love him, they sure respected him.
So Emmett wanted to be a motorcycle cop. He liked the work that he saw cops doing. He enjoyed being the peacemaker. And he just loved the uniform. Boys like to look up to heroes. They like to look at themselves as heroes in the making. Emmett was young and probably would have dreamed many things before settling on what he was to become. I was patient, content to let him take his time to make the right choice—whatever that would mean to him. And, with all the uncertainties in life, all the ways that young lives can turn, well, a motorcycle cop would have been just fine with me.
Gene once said that Emmett told him he wanted to be a professional baseball player. That was probably Bo’s heart talking. It wasn’t his head. It couldn’t have been the rest of his body. He might have loved the game; he might have had all the best equipment, thanks to Gene; he might have been able to go to many White Sox games, thanks again to Gene; but Bo was no ballplayer. I know, because so many times I was the umpire when he played with his Chicago friends in Washington Park. Bo tried pitching and catching and he was not very good at either. Now, I really can’t talk. As an umpire, I didn’t know the strike zone from the ozone, but, like Bo, I was out there trying. What I did know was how to get the kids in our neighborhood organized and piled into my car with the soft drinks and other refreshments to head off to their games. Of course, Bo loved that part, since it placed him right at the center of attention. And the center of attention was the place where he felt most comfortable.
Things were no better for him on the baseball field on his weekend trips out to Argo. There was a game one Saturday, the school championship game. Bo had gone out to the park, but he no longer was a student in Argo. He lived in Chicago, so he was going to have to sit and watch all his Argo buddies play. Well, Emmett was never content to sit on any sidelines. He had much too much energy running through him for that. So, he convinced the PE teacher to let him in the game, even though there was no way he could have qualified. The game came down to one out left for Emmett’s team, and Emmett came up to bat. He wound up catching a good piece of that ball and he sent it way into right field. Now, by this time Emmett was in seventh grade, and he was getting bigger. Because of his size, he was a slow runner, but he had put enough on that ball to get him all the way to third base. He should have stayed right there, just held up. He didn’t. He came around third base, and he got tagged. It wasn’t even close. Bo wasn’t used to losing. If the game had been marbles, he would have walked away with his pockets full. But this wasn’t marbles. This was a championship game. His team lost. His friends lost. But they took it pretty much the way they took most things back then: They grumbled for a moment, then they shrugged it off. They still had half the weekend left. And this would be just anothe
r funny story they’d tell over and over again.
Emmett loved those weekends he spent in Argo. The trip might take a good hour on the streetcar from our place in Chicago. But that never seemed to matter, from the time he started making the journey when he was about ten years old. And I never worried about him when he was there. I knew he was in good hands. I knew the entire community was looking out for him. It had always been that way. Kids in Argo couldn’t walk to the corner without speaking to every adult they saw, by name. They’d have to do the same thing on the way back. Argo was a good fit for Emmett. Which is why he was drawn back there, again and again. He would hang out with his friends all day on Saturdays and spend a good part of Sundays in church, where, of course, he’d find his friends again. He lived for the fellowship. He lived for the fun. That most of all.
Bo had quite a group of friends out there in Argo, his band of merry young men. There were his cousins Wheeler, William, and Milton Parker; his other cousins Crosby “Sonny” Smith, Sam Lynch, and Tyrone Modiest; along with friends like Donny Lee Taylor and later Lindsey Hill. And when those boys got together, I mean it was nonstop laughter. Many of his Argo friends didn’t have televisions yet, so Bo would be all too happy to provide the entertainment, sharing skits and sketches he had seen on his set. Comedy, of course. His favorite was George Gobel. But he also loved Abbott and Costello, and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. This was such a novelty to his friends. They hadn’t even seen these performers. But they would sure hear about them, getting whole routines from Bo. He had learned a lot about memorizing.
Bo would let his friends get in the act, though. In fact, he would insist on it. He was so hungry for laughter, he would pay for jokes just as he might pay for snacks at Miss Haynes’s store in Argo. He would come to town loaded from all those errands he ran for Gene, so he could afford to stand around paying quarters and half dollars and even dollars for jokes. His favorite jokester was Donny Lee, who had a Mississippi knack for storytelling, and had some long rhyming tales Bo would hang around for hours listening to him weave.
“Tell me another one,” Bo would say to Donny Lee, or “T. Jones,” as he called his friend, referring to a character in one of his stories.
Those two would even stand out for long spells in the cold swapping dollars for jokes and jokes for dollars. It was quite a thing, too, for Donny Lee to tell such long funny stories, since, like Bo, he stuttered. In fact, some of the funniest moments they had together came when they laughed at each other’s stuttering. Once it happened while they both got stuck placing orders in Miss Haynes’s store around the corner. She asked what the boys wanted to buy.
“I want a p-p-p-pop,” Donny Lee said.
“And I want a M-M-M-Moon Pie,” Bo added.
They just laughed and laughed over that one. I mean, it was “p-p-p-pop” and “M-M-M-Moon Pie” for the rest of the day. On purpose. That was the way Emmett wanted it. Nonstop laughter. And pranks. On the way back from a beach outing in nearby Michigan, the boys decided to wear their swim trunks and carry everything else home. Donny Lee made the mistake of falling asleep in the car with Bo. He woke up to find that he was wearing his underwear after all. On his head. Another time, when Wheeler and Sonny visited Bo in Chicago, the three boys crossed paths with some tough-looking kids up on busy Sixty-third Street. As they walked by, Bo turned to his cousins and spoke, loud enough for the other boys to hear, “You say you could beat their what?”
They all had a good laugh over that one, too. After making a run for it.
In Argo, there was always an adventure, something that touched deep inside a kid who had energy to burn. Oh, goodness, there was so much space there, room to expand, places to explore. It was just that kind of adventurous spirit that carried these boys forward through some of their best times. Naturally, over the years they had their bikes and their wagons and their balls and bats, but they seemed to have just as much fun with the stuff they found or threw together. For boys who knew how to improvise, invention was the game and Argo was one big playground. Their favorite swimming hole was more of a mud hole, a deep pit dug for an expressway bridge and then left to fill up with rainwater. Just enough to entice a group of young explorers. The same spirit of adventure carried them to the top of a nearby hill where they would slide down in oversized cartons, refrigerator boxes that had been thrown out by a local furniture store. It was the kind of daring that could move Bo out on a limb. Somebody had to go for it. A terrified cat had been chased up a tree by Miss Haynes’s dog. Bo and his cousin Milton worked it all out: Bo would do the climbing and the coaxing, while Milton would wait down below to do the catching. As it turned out, Bo had the easier job. He had seen the lessons in school, the demonstrations showing how cats always land on their feet, lightly. So he wasn’t too concerned about the cat’s safety once he got it in his arms. But somewhere between the drop from the tree and the landing, well, that little cat got nervous all over again. Very nervous. Poor Milton caught the cat, and he caught the worst of it: the cat’s claws.
Those boys would squeeze every last drop out of a day. As hard as they might have wanted to hold on to those moments, though, their days would always end much too soon. Many times they would wind up out in front of the house where Bo had spent so much of his childhood, the house where his cousin Ty now lived, and where Ty’s stepfather, Tillman Mallory, might be coming out to call his boy in as it got dark. Or they might be in front of the house next door to Ty’s, where Bo’s cousins Wheeler, William, and Milton still lived. So often, the boys would all stand under a lamppost “doo-wopping.” Everybody wanted to sing. Everybody wanted to sing lead. Nobody could get it just right. It was the only time they were not in harmony. But this was the fifties, and music was in the air. It was everywhere. For this group of boys standing under a curbside spotlight, the music was off-key, it was out of sync, it was perfect. The grace note of their young lives. And around 8:59 at night, the group would have to take their last bow. The rule of every single black household on that block was that kids had to be on the front porch by nine o’clock sharp. That’s what life was like for a bunch of happy-go-lucky boys who knew how to improvise. A championship game that nobody took too seriously, all-day jokes, an adventure in a mud hole or on a hilltop or up a tree, a song under a streetlight where nobody could carry a tune. And nobody seemed to care. For them, it was just right. All of it.
Emmett might have been doing most of the housework—the sweeping, the mopping, the waxing, a lot of the cooking and the laundry—but we took on the big jobs together. Ever since he laid that linoleum so perfectly in the dining room, I kept thinking of more and more redecorating projects we could do. We had already done the tiling and Bo had handled some paint jobs for me. At the time, people were painting their walls navy blue, dark red, dark green. I mean, they were coming up with the craziest colors. And I was following the trend. We had used all those colors in the front room and dining room and in the bedrooms. Bo and I had a great time, moving furniture, covering the floors, taping up the woodwork. As we got closer to Christmas 1954, though, I decided I wanted a new look for the little room across from my bedroom. Bo spent a lot of time there and, even though he had his own bedroom farther back, he liked to sleep up there from time to time. Near me. So I decided on something special. We were going to paper that room. And, oh, the paper I chose, something I picked out on the way home one night. It was red. When I say “red,” I mean red, red, red. And it had a Japanese theme. There was a lady, a fan, a bridge, all kinds of cultural symbols that repeated in patterns.
Since Emmett had pretty much handled the linoleum single-handedly, I was going to take the credit for this one. I’d never had any lessons in hanging wallpaper, but I figured everything out, and showed Emmett as I was going through it. Well, actually, we figured it out together as we went along. He was so excited about this project. We had to be careful to make sure everything matched up perfectly. I knew Mama would notice if it didn’t, anywhere on that wall. There was a little mark on every piece
of paper to help you line up each strip with the last, and you had to cut with care to make sure it all came out right. We did a great job, and this time I was the one puffing out my chest when Mama came by for the inspection.
“My Lord,” Mama said while she looked over our handiwork, stressing each word she spoke. “What a room.”
Now, of course, I thought she was saying how beautiful it was. What she was saying was “Of all the loud, busy patterns …” She warned me that I would be sorry about the choice once I came to my senses and decided to choose all over again. “Baby, you can’t even cover this stuff up,” she said.
I didn’t care. Bo and I were very happy with the job we had done. A perfect job, really. And I liked the idea of having something new and trendy, no matter how obnoxious it might have been.
The redecorating was just the beginning. I was determined that this would be a Christmas to remember. The best ever. I had no idea why I would make that decision at that time. I certainly didn’t need to be going too deeply into debt. But something just came over me. Call it the Christmas spirit. The first thing I did was to make sure we had a beautiful spruce Christmas tree. We had always bought the cheaper ones and I wanted a nice, fluffy spruce tree. Gennie and Bo took care of that part. It was pretty tall, too, taller than Gene: six, maybe seven feet tall. And I bought everything I could think of to fill up that great big tree. The prettiest decorations.
Since I wanted Bo to get as much enjoyment out of this as I was having, I gave him a hundred dollars. “This is part of my Christmas present to you,” I told him. “And you can use it any way you choose.”
He chose to spend it on gifts for everybody else. I can’t remember a single thing he bought for himself. Now, a hundred dollars could have easily been our entire Christmas. But this year was going to be different. I was feeling good about my job. In fact, it had never been this good for me before. And I wanted to share that good feeling with the people I loved. And I was very generous. I was buying a lot of gifts for Mama and my stepfather, Aunt Magnolia and Uncle Mack, Emmett and Gene, and others. I had accounts at several stores and wound up charging my way into about five hundred dollars of debt. That was a lot of money back then. I just threw caution to the wind.