The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  As I walked away, the satin dolls gazed at me. They must have overheard the chat about Dad’s medical release because now they wore pouty, ingratiating smiles. Lipstick contrition. I walked past them and smiled back. It hurts to recall my response; I, like my father, had reached beyond anger to offer conciliation instead. I had every right to throw my father’s humiliation in their faces. Spitting at them was, of course, out of bounds, but at the very least I should have served up a scowl. I should have made them squirm. I should have been the black girl that certain white women are conditioned to fear most.

  I didn’t do any of that. I am my father’s daughter, and such caustic gestures weren’t in my DNA. I was raised by a model minority to be a model minority, and to achieve that status, certain impulses had to be suppressed. Years later, I understand both the reason and its consequence.

  I was almost out of the waiting area when I felt someone touch my shoulder. I turned, thinking it might be one of the women, intent on apologizing, but there was no nail polish on the hand touching my arm. The hand was large and calloused, marked by raised splotches resembling coffee stains. A bearded man held my forearm; he called me “ma’am,” though it sounded like “Mom.” “I’ll watch over your pa,” he said before darting back to join his family.

  I wonder what my father had wanted to tell me, but couldn’t, right before he’d boarded the plane. More of his classic lunch-box wisdom? “Learn all you can” or “Save your money” or “Don’t eat too much late at night”? More than twenty years later, as still I mourn, I wonder if he was trying to impart some eternal verity before his final flight home to Minneapolis. This would be the last time I saw him alert. Within a day Dad slipped into a coma. Within a week a fast-growing brain tumor took his life.

  2

  Block Busters

  BEFORE THE ALARM CLOCK GOES OFF, before the smell of coffee or bacon finds its way to your bedroom door, there’s often a sound outside your window that jolts you out of slumber during winter months in Minnesota. It’s the scrape of a snow shovel against wet cement. I know the sound so well. The thwack of the blade cutting through snow, the drag of metal across pavement, the thump of the payload landing somewhere on the lawn.

  Thwack, swoosh, thud! Three steps in four-quarter rhythm, over and over, until the job is done. The thought sends an all-too-familiar ache through my shoulders. All the same, in my house as a child, I myself rarely awoke to the sounds of snow being shoveled. I listened to it going on outside my kitchen window while wolfing down Malt-O-Meal or scrambled eggs. You see, by the time the rest of the neighborhood began their collective assault on the snow, our walkway was already whistle clean. That was a point of pride for my father. When the Westvigs and the Murrays and the Bowmans and the Pratts ventured out of their stucco homes, they would look over and see that the sidewalk around Belvin and Betty Norris’s lot was already free of snow and ice. Dad would be in the house, sipping coffee, a self-satisfied grin on his face, tiny icicles still dangling from his mustache. My parents were always house proud.

  We lived on a corner lot on the South Side of Minneapolis, which was at once a blessing and a curse. In the summer, it meant we had a larger yard to play in and nearly an extra hour of daylight. Oakland Avenue was lined with towering elms that formed a thick, protective canopy. But our intersection broke up the tree line and toward the end of day we could look to the sky from our two-story Tudor house with its curved ten-foot bay window. At sundown the glow would radiate through that window like lemonade spilling out of a pitcher. We called it the golden hour.

  In winter the corner lot meant extra work. We didn’t just have to clear the T-shaped stretch of sidewalk that led from our stone steps to the street. We also had the fan-shaped curve at the corner to contend with, the long stretch of cement along the side of the house, the driveway leading up to the garage, and the opening to the alley. All that, and no sons in the house. So as soon as I could walk I was given an itty-bitty shovel. First a plastic one to get the feel of the thing, but within a year or two, a junior version of an adult shovel, wood and metal. A shovel was a tool for survival in Minnesota, so you had better get the hang of it early on. Though it’s not written down anywhere, there is strict shoveling etiquette in Minneapolis. No matter how much snow falls the night before, you are obliged to clear your walkway and driveway before leaving the house in the morning. No exceptions. My father went one step further and decreed that snow had to be cleared before our neighbors arose. No matter what, you had to adjust. Six inches of snow: wake up forty-five minutes early. Twelve inches of snow: better make that two hours. If it was a whopper of a storm, you’d do some shoveling before bedtime to skim the first few inches, then rise early to shovel the rest, satisfied that your work the night before had reduced the morning’s accumulation.

  For a man raised in the Birmingham heat, my father took to this with alacrity. He’d suit up in big black galoshes and a tight little watch cap and head outside like Teddy Roosevelt preparing to charge San Juan Hill. Everybody shoveled. Mom. Me. My two half sisters, Cindy and Marguerite. No use complaining or you’d pull double duty. This, too, was a point of pride. We were a family of hardworking folk, and my parents looked for every opportunity to trumpet the note. Belvin and Betty Norris were block busters when they purchased their stucco home near the Minnehaha Parkway in South Minneapolis. “We weren’t trying to be activists,” my mother said. “We just decided it was time to live someplace nice. We worked hard and we worked with white people at the post office who could live wherever they wanted. We wanted to do the same thing and we wanted to show them that we could do the same thing. We wanted to show them that we were just as good as they were.”

  The Twin Cities, especially Minneapolis, were known for tolerance. Even so, blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and, later, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees would cluster in a few ethnic fiefdoms. My parents wanted to be on the far South Side, where the best schools were located, and they wanted to be close to water. Finding a house wasn’t going to be easy for a brown-skinned couple. Realtors would “forget” appointments or make hasty exits when my parents walked into their offices. So my parents decided to sidestep real estate agents and focus on other ways to buy a house, like reading newspaper obituaries. After all, a family in mourning might feel pressured to entertain a strong offer, regardless of the race of the bidder, as long as the money on the table was green. Ghoulish, but Belvin and Betty did what they had to do, and eventually things worked out for them.

  In January 1961, they found a three-bedroom, two-story, Tudor Revival on a corner lot with a large yard, an open kitchen, a large limestone fireplace, and a finished basement with knotty pine paneling. After her first marriage, Mom, with two daughters, had been a little gun-shy about relationships when she’d met the handsome man from Alabama. As she watched Dad cut the real estate deal, she said she was reminded why she’d married him. When my parents showed up to make their offer, they saw discomfort on the white sellers’ faces. Mom and Dad explained that they had been preapproved for a loan and could make a decent down payment. And just when they sensed that the sellers and their agent were about to bolt, Dad stood up and said, “Do you really want to lose a sure thing for only a possibility?” The sellers were close in age to my parents. I have since discovered that the husband came from a small town in southwest Minnesota. He was the son of an insurance salesman and had enlisted in World War II two months after my father joined the navy. The two men were discharged from the armed forces around the same time. I can imagine that Cecil Fuller may have looked at Belvin Norris and seen more than just a “Negro.” Perhaps he also identified with a fellow veteran eager to use the G.I. Bill to pull himself and his family up.

  In any case, the Fuller family said yes when so many others had said no. On February 1, 1961, Belvin and Betty Norris signed the deed to the largest house on the 4800 block of Oakland Avenue. My mother’s sister advised her against buying so big a house. “It will just make it harder,” Aunt Doris said. “Why give t
hem another reason to judge you? They’re going to say you think too highly of yourself. You know how they are.” Mom wasn’t having it. “I do think highly of myself, and I don’t care if they know that. In fact, I prefer if they know that.”

  My parents moved in within a week, and the white families whose property line touched ours soon put their homes up for sale. Three who owned houses across from my parents’ also decided to decamp. As my parents celebrated their new home with a picnic supper, amid boxes in the living room, their neighbors furiously burned the dial, calling each other, calling my folks’ mortgage lender to complain, and eventually calling real estate agents to put their homes up for sale pronto. Mom says she watched the white flight with a mixture of anger and amusement. The desperation of her new neighbors to sell gave her an opportunity for a little mischief.

  Every time a real estate agent pulled up with a prospective buyer, she would send my older sisters, Marguerite and Cindy, out to play in the yard. Or she would saunter out herself, holding her back or stretching her arms so anyone could plainly see that another child was on the way. That child was me. My sisters and I never knew any of this until recently, but now Mom loves telling the story. “I’d wait until they got inside the house and had time to check out the bedrooms and look inside the closets, and right about the moment I thought they were in the kitchen giving it a real good look-see, I’d say to myself: ‘Showtime!’

  “No matter what your older sisters were doing I’d tell ’em, time to get some fresh air. Go on. Go! Out in the yard. If the kids were at school I’d go outside myself and make sure they saw that I had a child on the way.” She adds, “You couldn’t count to ten before those people would be scurrying out the front door, back to their cars.”

  The family that lived next door had the hardest time unloading their property, even though their For Sale sign went up the very day my parents moved in. Three generations lived in the home, a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law, and their children. They were “displaced persons” from Eastern Europe, and my mother told my older sisters never, ever to refer to them as DPs. Our next-door neighbors, however, saw no need for courtesy. The wife was a homemaker, a woman who nowadays might be referred to as a member of the sandwich generation because she was taking care of her elderly mother-in-law as well as her children. She had a heavy Eastern European accent and only one arm, and she used to usher her kids inside anytime my sisters stepped into the yard. My mother shakes her head in disbelief as she recalls how the woman would stand on her stoop, clutching her shoulder, as my parents carried groceries from the car. She would stare down my mother when she left for work. My mother would stare back and wave. I can see Mom gliding down the front steps with her smart black handbag and one of her classic “get with the program” smiles. Great day, isn’t it?

  The forlorn For Sale sign sat in front of the house for weeks. At one point, someone attached a flyer that read BEWARE. NEGRO NEIGHBORS, and the woman wailed so loudly that her cries ricocheted through our kitchen window. Sometimes I wonder: Shouldn’t my mother have been the one moved to tears? But that was not her style.

  My sisters were told to keep their distance from our neighbors. And usually they did. But an unfortunate incident occurred. The neighbors had a hardy little apple tree, and some of the branches reached into our yard. When my sisters plucked a few apples from the tree, the woman sent her husband over to ask them to cut it out. He seemed somewhat ashamed to have to carry out his wife’s order. He and my father had achieved a measure of civility; they would exchange curt greetings while shoveling snow or cutting grass. Despite his discomfort, the husband’s message was firm. For everyone’s sake, leave the damn apples alone.

  My sisters complied for a few days. But soon temptation was too strong. The moment Marguerite and Cindy plucked a few more apples, they were caught red-handed by the woman. Within minutes she stormed angrily out of her back door, chattering away in her native tongue. My sisters couldn’t understand what she was saying, but they knew to get back inside the house, fast! The next day a landscaping crew chopped the tree down, creating a void in the nicely designed yard. When they finished the job, a smattering of red apples lay in our yard. “I told the kids, don’t you dare touch those apples,” my mother said. She finally went out and scooped the fruit up. She thought how nice it would be to put them in a basket lined with fresh gingham, or perhaps to bake them in a cobbler or a lattice-top pie, and deliver a gift at the doorstep of the furious woman next door. She thought about it. But instead she threw the apples away.

  My mother’s tough. Rock of Gibraltar tough. John Wayne tough. Minnesota-winter tough. She lives life on her own terms; she’s an original. She has no patience for “woe is me.” Once, years later, when we were vacationing on a cruise to Alaska, Mom struck up a friendship with a fellow passenger, who told her how she keeps things in perspective. “Everybody is somebody’s pain in the ass,” the woman said. “Today someone is getting on my nerves but tomorrow I am certain to bug the hell out of somebody else. That’s just the way life works.” Mom loved that. It explained so much. She adopted that phrase and added her own coda: “Life would be pretty boring if we all got along all of the time.”

  In retrospect, I can see how Mom’s tough-as-nails exterior might keep people at bay, but she also has a wicked sense of humor and a laugh that commands you to join in the fun. Sometimes I think she has the heart of a cleric. People seek her wisdom and track her down for comfort. Social graces are of extreme importance to her. She raised “please and thank you” daughters in a “Hey, how ya doing?” culture. Now, as adults, we share her small obsessions with thank-you notes, table linens, guest books, and carefully planned menus. Social conventions shaped her views about decorum and the management of her home, but in almost every other way she’s a woman who colors outside the lines.

  Mom wasn’t quite like all the other women in the neighborhood. She always seemed larger—not physically, though she’s what you might call stately because her erect posture seems to add inches to her tall, lean frame. She turned gray early and refused to dye her hair. There was something about her that always seemed epic, like the larger-than-life characters we used to read about at night when she sat at the edge of my twin bed.

  She reminded me of those prairie women who pushed the plows on the plains. In reality she, like my father, was a postal worker; she sallied out of the house each morning bearing her thermos as if it were a scepter. Our neighborhood was full of women who took no guff from their children, but Mother was a cut above the rest. She could turn you into Jell-O with one of her looks, which she used to great effect in and outside our home. She’d give the clerk at Kramarczuk’s market a glance that would somehow compel him to pick out the best Warsaw ham from the refrigerator case. She’d narrow her eyes a bit when she spoke to my teachers, ensuring that my slight childhood speech impediment would not keep me from joining accelerated classes. And if my friends stepped out of line on her watch, she would fuss at them as if they were her own kids.

  Never tell her that she can’t do something. She is a two-time breast cancer survivor who has probably outlived the gray-haired doctor who crouched down in a hospital corridor thirty-some years ago to tell me that my mother might not see me graduate from high school. She proved the doctor wrong that day and beat the odds twenty-five years later, when cancer struck again. She showed him. She showed us all. She danced at my wedding, gave my daughter her first bath at the hospital, and wiped away joyful tears at both of my children’s first communions.

  One spring afternoon, she and I returned home after softball practice and froze when we heard hurried footsteps on the second floor. My older sisters had moved out by then. Dad was at work. Someone was in our house who did not belong there. My instinct was to flee and call the police from safety. Mom instead braced herself for a confrontation. She grew red with anger.

  Weeks before, a burglar had broken in and had stolen my father’s video equipment and a few pieces of Mom’s costume jewelry. My
mother and father were devastated by the violation—not just by the loss of property but by the notion that someone had been pawing through their things with abandon while they were off earning a living. They were unusually quiet at dinner after the break-in. They’d wait until I headed upstairs for bed; only then would I hear them pacing and fretting, wondering aloud who would have done such a thing. The theft ate away at my parents for weeks. Just when they’d started to relax and once again keep the bedroom windows open all night for fresh, cool air, another intruder was on the premises, wandering around in our private spaces.

  Mom wasn’t having it. She threw down the grocery bag, tossed her purse in my direction, and stormed toward the stairs. Before she got to the landing, a long-haired teenager came whooshing down, zoomed through the living room, and zipped right out the front door. The scene was almost comical. I never saw the look on his face, but all the blond hair flying this way and that reminded me of Saturday morning cartoons. Mom roared at the guy like a mama bear chasing a skunk from her den. Without blinking, she took off after him down the street, screaming at the burglar while punching the air with her fist. I wonder what that kid thought when he looked over his shoulder and saw a middle-aged black woman hoofing it in pursuit. She tired halfway down the block and put her hands to her knees as she tried to catch her breath. The long-haired kid hopped into the passenger side of a car waiting for him and sped off.