Mom moved eight blocks down the street on Oakland Avenue. Dad and I stayed in the Tudor house with its lush garden. He picked up the pieces and turned our house into a protective cocoon. The flowers in the yard were part of his armor. Dad tried even harder to keep up appearances, determined that the vitality of the garden would hide the death of his marriage. I was and still am baffled by my father, as I think of him in this stormy period. I am amazed by the scant upheaval of it all. I was only a few years older than my own kids are now. We were a broken working-class family in the 1970s. No housekeepers or maids or nannies, but ours was always a spotless house.
Mom made a deliberate decision to stay in the neighborhood when she moved out, purchasing a run-down but nearby house so she could hover around the edges during my teenage years while she renovated her new property. She and Dad settled into a friendly relationship. They showed up as a twosome to all my games and chaperoned school events together. We even celebrated holiday meals together. The whole thing was so weirdly civilized that I doubt most of my teachers even knew that Mr. and Mrs. Norris were no longer officially a couple.
I’ve always found my parents’ marriage enigmatic. There was the romance, then the partnership, then the breakup. When they split I was of an age when I’d just begun to think in rudimentary ideas about intimate relationships. Most of what I gleaned came from magazine articles or eavesdropping on my sisters. They were ten and twelve years older than me, and they were fabulously entertaining to a preteen kid. Their clothes. Their music. The dance moves they tried out. The hair tape one of them would wear to bed the night before a school dance, so that a little curl would dangle from her hairline and cling to her cheek. The young men they swooned over while giggling in the basement. But Marguerite and Cindy had moved away by the time my parents’ marriage started to crumble.
Looking back, I missed the cues. I knew there were tensions and occasional arguments. Mom spent a lot of time away from home, working her side job at the post office library or bowling in a league; Dad often whiled away hours at his brother Woody’s house. The chatter of late-night TV was sometimes interrupted by the clink of bottles—a search for small comfort in drink. There were no screaming matches or explosive fights, at least not when I was around. Belvin and Betty just seemed to glide to the finish line. One day they were living under the same roof; one day they weren’t. I now know they must have orchestrated the transition to play out so smoothly. They must have made arrangements for me to be absent when they moved my mother’s suitcases to her new home, or conveniently to be at a sleepover when they carried out her book collection and favorite pieces of furniture. And my extended family was in on the conspiracy of silence. No one ever talked to me about my parents’ divorce beyond asking, “Ya doin’ all right, Mickey?”
Over time, I, too, joined the conspiracy. Only once did I ask each of my parents what happened to their marriage, and on both occasions, I learned not to ask again. As I speculated about the reasons for their breakup, I could only conclude that their work schedules had done them in. Mom worked early mornings by choice so she could be home when I returned from school. Dad worked eight to five. I figured they’d been like ships passing, for even as Mom was retiring at night, Dad was putting on his slippers to relax at the end of a long day.
Only in the course of writing this book have I finally been able to talk to my mother about her decision to leave our home. It is not painful in the ways I’d expected, which is not to say it didn’t hurt. As I listen to my mother, the picture of my father that emerges is very different from the one I have clung to for all these years. The man who turned our home into an island of calm was also a man compelled to disdain all outside forces that might disrupt his domestic serenity. I thought my father had learned to exercise extreme discipline to rein in those things he could control, in order to rise above those things he could not. As I hear my mother’s side of the story, his control was something less virtuous and much more like the bars of a cage. Mom did not relish sharing her story. She has always known how close I was to my father. She did not want to tarnish my memories of him. It’s an understatement to say that I had to coax her to talk. Beg her. Decades after the breakup, I finally feel closer to the truth. Or at least her truth.
Much of the tension between my parents during that time is crystallized in Mom’s mind by something that happened at a party. She tells an anecdote time and again whenever she describes that period. “We’re talking about this and that and the subject of chitterlings came up and I said I don’t bring chitterlings in my kitchen,” Mom says, nearly spitting out the word: chitlins. “I just don’t do it. Don’t like the way they smell. Don’t like to clean them. I just don’t want to mess with them at home.”
The first time she tells me this, she crosses her hands in her lap and looks me dead in the eye. “Your Dad said: ‘You’d cook them if I told you to.’ ” This might seem like a minor infraction, the kind of thing that might lead to shouting in the car on the way home or maybe Mom’s giving Dad the cold shoulder for a week. Not something that would sink a marriage, prompting a mother to leave her teenage daughter behind. But I can see from Mom’s look that she’d borne a much deeper insult and, more than likely, not for the first time.
“We were in a circle of people and it was like he had to show them who’s the boss. That was the beginning of the end. He was willing to humiliate me. He was willing to do that so our friends would see he had power inside his house. I don’t know what hurt me more, the embarrassment or the realization that your father needed respect that badly.” My father was a gentle man. He rarely raised his voice and was never violent. But for all her toughness, Mom had a soft underside that was easily wounded by words. Her needs clashed with his. It was as simple as that. But it also had to be complicated and unbearable. Why else would a mother flee her family?
My mother’s cheeks seem to sink when she tries to explain how my father, despite his efforts, was not the partner she’d needed while struggling through her first bout with cancer. Her admission was like a stab to my gut. I remember my father doting on Mom during those long weeks when she slept on a cot in the living room because she was too weak to walk up the stairs. I remember Dad carrying trays of soup to her bedside, and going downtown to get the Sunday New York Times for her. He fixed her sponge baths and emptied her bedpans. But emotional support is as important as physical health in combating cancer, and Mom apparently enjoyed neither. “After my breast cancer your father just did things that were … well.” Her voice trails off. “He talked about what he’d lost.” I’d heard enough.
The man she was describing was not the man I’d known. I’d been living with confusion and anger for decades, for I’d assumed that Mom had just run out on Dad to live life by her own rules. I didn’t know that she’d thought she was running for her life.
At some point in the telling Mom shakes her head and concedes, “I’m no angel”—this is as close to an explanation of her detachment and departure as I’ve ever heard from her. And after yearning for some kind of explanation all these years, it turns out to be more than I can take. In sum, Mom’s account of our life on Oakland Avenue is this: Dad, who had had so little control over the circumstances of his early years, made sure to have absolute control at home. And for a woman as independent as Betty Norris, their marriage was bound to meet with extreme turbulence. Just because I didn’t hear the shouting doesn’t mean all was well. He tried to bend her will; she succeeded in breaking his heart. But we all survived and moved on. Dad and Mom both had other loving relationships, and they maintained their friendship until he passed away. Mom was with Dad the night he slipped into a coma. Deep in her eyes, you still see a faint flicker when she talks about Dad’s essential goodness.
“Here’s the thing about your father,” Mom says. “He put family first. And he never wanted a handout from anyone. He worked hard. He saved his money. He liked nice things, but only if he felt that he’d earned them. And he wasn’t ashamed of being black. And he was
not afraid of black women.” She pauses for effect, then says: “As long as they did what he said.” We both fall over laughing—the kind of knowing laughter I now share with my husband, Broderick. The sudsy giggles I enjoy with my children and closest girlfriends.
I am grateful for this gift from my parents, who could not make a go of their marriage but still managed to teach me the importance of love. And the importance of grace, for it would have been easy for my father to nurse anger at the woman who abandoned her home and her child. Easy for him to have tried to influence me to partake in his umbrage. Instead, he kept a place for her at our table, so to speak, even as she lived under a different roof. I learned from both Mom and Dad that everything in life is enriched by sharing it with someone. I gleaned that from the years they spent together and the years they decided to be together cheering me on, while living eight blocks apart.
When Mom left, Dad slunk deeper into himself. He picked up the slack without complaining, but he also read all the time. I would come downstairs at night and find him immersed in Kahlil Gibran or the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Now that his wife was gone, he and I rarely ate at the dining room table. The two of us would have dinner at the kitchen counter, a portable TV in the corner nook. The setting had changed, but the rituals continued, for the most part. There was always food in the fridge and hot meals for supper. Dad now cooked most of our meals, and I took on the rest. No takeout. Little or no fast food.
Mom helped out some, but she and Dad tried to keep their distance during these tenuous times. They also held their tongues. It would be thirty years before I would have a hint as to why my mother had simply said “enough” and bolted from our house to purchase her own. Dad and I did okay around the house, but ironing stumped us both. My mother had had her own technique to put a certain snap in Dad’s postal uniform, placing damp shirts in the freezer for fifteen minutes before smoothing them out with a hot iron. When Dad asked me to do the same, I refused, sputtering something awful like “I’m just a kid, not a wife!” I did my household chores, but the presumptuous independence that comes with adolescence provoked me to draw the line at ironing. I was a confused teenager testing how far I could go. He had every right to slap me. He didn’t. Eventually, I gave in, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t match my mom’s skill at nailing down the collar and smoothing out the postal patches without completely flattening the embroidery. Still, it was the trying that counted.
The yard that had been our childhood playground became my private retreat as I grew older. My friends and I used to sit in plaid lounge chairs, slather ourselves with Hawaiian Tropic oil, and bask in the sun for hours, passing around Fresca and Seventeen magazines. My father never said as much, but he must have thought me ridiculous: lounging was a patent waste of time; suntan oil, a waste of good money. He must have found it all confounding; he’d grown up at a time when black newspaper ads promoted skin-lightening creams and “Negro” girls were told to stay out of the sun! Sometimes I would stretch out by myself in the yard, arms and legs spread as if making a snow angel. I’d look up at the clouds and listen to distant car radios, or I’d close my eyes, better to hear the buzz of insects, the fizz of my soda’s carbonation, the hiss of the wind. I still love the sound of shimmering leaves, as relaxing as a cool drink after a long day’s work. Back when I spent hours sunning and daydreaming, if I had truly centered myself and listened even more intensely, I might have also heard a gossamer whisper: the flowers, speaking for my father, saying to his neighbors, “I belong.”
5
Alabama
I ALWAYS WONDER HOW a young man could go through his early life with a nickname like “Honey.” That’s what everyone called my father in Birmingham. Honey. Though, to get it right you had to let the first syllable hang a bit: “Hu-uh-nee.” It seemed too sweet a name for a young man unless he was a blues singer or a boxer. Dad was neither. He was the second youngest of six sons from the Ensley neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama. Anyone who questioned his nickname would quickly have to confront a rambunctious fraternity. All of the Norris men were tall, thin, and talkative—quick with a punch line and, if necessary, even quicker with a sharp left hook. You had to deal with all of them if you tried to take one on. And you had to have a thick skin and a keen wit to run with the Norris boys. They teased and ribbed and challenged one another constantly. They called it signifyin’. They’d talk about the size of your girlfriend’s behind and expect you to laugh. They’d crack on your clothing or your eyeglasses or your skin tone and then wait, with antic anticipation, for you to swat it right back with another wisecrack. And there always was another one: “Man, where’d you get them shoes? Don’t you know that Santa’s been callin’ ’cause he wants his boots back!”
The ribbing could go on and on for hours, and it usually did. And when it went one step too far with a joke about a wife or, worse, somebody’s mama, that was when my father would step up and talk down the offended party. “C’mon now … you know we’re just playing. You got to signify to qualify and, man, you more than qualified. You hung right in there,” Belvin would say, draping his arm around the shoulder of the aggrieved fellow to steer him away from the front porch, away from his brothers shaking with laughter while celebrating their verbal dexterity. Dad would keep that fellow moving along, away from the snickering and merriment. All the while, he’d be looking over his shoulder to shush his brothers, quietly sharing in the pride of the takedown. Dad was always a bit of a square, and it took extra effort for him to riff like a hep cat. “Man, you got to shake it off,” he’d say. “We’re just havin’ fun. You know the story. We all get a cut, we all get cut. Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying.”
A clan of six, the Norris brothers were thick as thieves yet devoted as apostles to an inviolate creed: good times allowed only after a day’s hard work. They were very much their father’s sons.
My grandfather had worked in the steel mills and the coal mines until age forced him to retire, after which he occupied himself with neighborhood odd jobs. My grandmother Fannie worked too, as a nurse’s aide, logging a short shift after she put her sons to bed. Belvin and Fannie were savers and strivers. They stood out in Ensley because they owned their own home and managed to keep new cars in the garage. Grandpa Belvin turned those cars into a business, shuttling people to and fro for money. For years, though, he refused to drive to church on Sunday mornings, a custom some neighbors believed he adopted from the city’s large Orthodox Jewish population. Jewish merchants ran most of Birmingham’s department stores and nearly all the shops in Ensley. For the Orthodox, driving on the Sabbath is taboo because starting an engine is akin to lighting a fire; the Torah forbids kindling a fire on the holy day of rest.
Grandpa Belvin was tickled by the rumor and never did much to quell it. But his sons knew the real reason he didn’t drive on Sunday. He liked to walk the half mile to church with his wife, Fannie, by his side and his six sons in single file behind him like sentries. More than the deed to the house, or the car in the driveway, or the windup mantel clock or upright Zenith radio, more than the three black suits he owned (two more than most men on his block), my grandfather treasured this ritual of walking with his family to church.
In my mind’s eye I can see Belvin and Fannie leading their sons to the First Baptist Church on Avenue G, nodding at neighbors, walking slowly but with purpose in the Alabama heat, gently waving fans glued to Popsicle sticks. I see my grandfather, one hand in his pocket, the other intertwined with his wife’s. And I see six boys ambling behind them, all with slightly knock-kneed gaits, poking and elbowing each other as they secretly pass mints and chewing gum back and forth. The scene is easy to imagine, for on two occasions, the boys returned to First Baptist to bury their parents. As often happens at funerals, children revert to their earliest family roles. The jokester. The pacifist. The cheapskate. There they were, middle-aged men, each with one of Grandma Fannie’s lace hankies in his breast pocket, passing Chiclets and breath spray around. They stood i
n the church vestibule, joshing with one another about their expanding waistlines and receding hairlines, signifyin’ before assuming their pallbearer duties. Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying.
I spent part of every summer in Alabama from when I was in swaddling clothes until I entered junior high. When I turned five years old, my parents began sending me by myself. I would fly unaccompanied, and they would drive down to meet me two or three weeks later. It was complicated travel; the airlines had names that aligned with a compass: Northwest out of Minneapolis to Atlanta, then a flight on Southern Airways for the last leg to Birmingham. While the bombings and racial tumult at the time may have prevented us from going to certain parts of town, the chaos could not keep us away from Birmingham.
“You got off the train. You went to the black neighborhoods and you kept your butt in the black neighborhoods until it was time to go home,” my mother said. Whenever we ventured downtown, we’d always map out a route so that we’d know exactly where to find colored restrooms in case someone couldn’t hold their water. And when we visited relatives in the country, there was always a coffee can in the trunk.
Until recently, I never understood how much of Alabama lives in me. I always identify myself as Minnesotan. But the spirit of Ensley resides in my soul. The rock-solid sense of community. The way everyone on the street claimed you as their own. The safe harbor on every porch along the block. Neighbors who went out of their way to talk to each other every day, saying, “C’mon up here, girl, and have a cool drink” or “Why don’t you sit down and snap some peas with me?” or “I got the Braves game on the radio, want to sit for a spell?”
I sensed more communal love raining down on me in Ensley than at any other time in my life. Maybe it was a childhood illusion, but back in Alabama, I felt as if everywhere you turned someone cheered you on—and not just family members. Everybody was in the same boat, rowing in the same direction, determined to get somewhere better fast.
The Grace of Silence Page 5