The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  The irony is that when so many of us got there, the community bonds began to fray. A generation that had championed pioneers—the first professional black baseball player, the first black Supreme Court justice, the first black city council member, the first black this or that—knew all too well, in the early days of integration, that only a chosen few would get to the top.

  As universities and law firms tiptoed toward diversity, only a handful of slots would be available to blacks. So parents who’d publicly championed black progress in general would secretly kneel in prayer at night, begging the Lord to let their children be among the lucky few. “Let opportunities rain on all our children, but please, Lord, if they’re only taking one at the law or medical school, or just one in the National Honor Society or at the recital, please, Lord, let it be my baby.”

  Ensley was cocoonlike, and I would have spent almost all my time in the neighborhood if not for my grandfather. After he retired, he deputized me to join him on his daily errands. Grandpa was a huge man. Very tall. Very dark. Very proud. A former steelworker who wore suits every day after he stopped working at the mill, he’d tell us, “Dress for where you’re going.” I’m not sure he ever got there, but I guess his dark suit and skinny tie signaled where his grandkids were headed.

  He drove a big car. Really big. Shiny and dark, with doors that opened at the middle of each side—suicide doors, as they were called. They made it easier to load people and cargo. This was important, because Grandpa rode “jitney.” You see, few people had sedans in Ensley then. My grandfather, a lifelong saver, had waited until he could buy a very big car with cash, not simply for enjoyment but to help him earn money during his retirement. He drove people to and from the grocery store or the doctor or wherever they had to go. This was called riding jitney.

  During my summer stays in Birmingham, my grandfather usually carried me into town with him on trips to Bruno’s, the big grocery store. I would have to get dressed up for the day in a starchy little pinafore and patent leather shoes. And since this was before the days of car seats, I would sit next to him in the massive front seat, the two of us in what most people would call Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes. Some days, when we parked the car and walked into the business district, my grandfather would be approached by men in work uniforms. They lived in a section across a creek that I later learned was home to Irish and Italian families. They always looked rumpled. They had dirt on their faces, and their hair always seemed wet. They called my grandfather “boy” and “nigrah,” which was supposed to be slightly less offensive and confrontational than nigger. Slightly.

  Sometimes they’d ask him who he “thought” he was, driving a big car and dressing like a preacher. They would follow us, barking and sneering and spitting on the sidewalk. They would step in front of us now and then to block our way. My grandfather said little. He knew the men by name. I remember that he would sometimes tell them to give his regards to their parents or ask after someone he used to work with at the mills. This would often get the men to back off, allowing us to continue on our way—a man with hands the size of mitts holding on to an overdressed child.

  I now wonder whether the little girl in the lace socks and patent leather shoes was invited along for the ride to provide Grandpa with a measure of protection from Birmingham hostility. I can’t imagine putting my own kids into a similar situation, dressing them up as armor for their grandparents. I ran this by Mom, wanting her to say, “You’re crazy” or “Your imagination is running away with you.” But instead she allowed, “We lived in different times. People did what they had to do.” To get by, people had to rely on their wits and control their emotions.

  My father used to joke that he and his five brothers, both in looks and temperament, seemed to fall in line with Snow White’s seven dwarfs, except Dopey. “There are no dumb folks in my household,” my grandfather used to say. If you spent any time at all in the little wooden bungalow on Avenue G you would have heard Belvin Norris Sr. assert as much time and again, as if praying or making a promise. He might say it proudly, or spit it out like a stern warning to underscore a command, as in: “Boy, you better figure out how to fix that broken faucet so the eight people in this house can get washed in time for church.” Silence, then: “I may not know much, but I know one thing. There are no dumb folks in my household.” Grandpa Belvin repeated this so often that, if the little Birmingham bungalow had housed a business, the sign out front most likely would have read, GREAT FOOD. GOOD PEOPLE. NO DUMMIES.

  As I grew older I began to understand my dad’s joke about the seven dwarfs. Dopey aside, the personalities of these six black sons of Birmingham seemed to correspond to those of Snow White’s little friends. Sylvester, the oldest, would be Sneezy. He was the eccentric, always dabbing at his face with a white hanky as he sketched out music and poetry in a little notebook. Louis would be Sleepy, though all his brothers called him Nip, even though they knew it was a derogatory term, because the deep slant of his eyes made him look slightly Asian. Simpson was Grumpy because he often was grumpy. He was hot-tempered, hardworking, and tightly wound. When he laughed, only his eyes would smile. His chin remained tight—the sign of a man who never let his guard down; though he could be an absolute softie around kids. In contrast, Woodrow had an impish grin all his life, even when his skin wrinkled and his hair turned gray. The name Bashful suits him best. Doc? That would be Joe Nathan, the youngest and smartest of the bunch, who never let you forget it. My father, Belvin, would naturally be Happy, for his perennially upbeat disposition.

  Until the end of his life, Dad was an infernally cheerful man, always smiling, always trying to make others feel at ease. I am now ashamed to say that there were times when his demeanor made me uneasy, moments when he would smile at, and joke with, salespeople or waitresses who had shown disdain or disrespect. His manner may have suited him well for his job as a window clerk at the post office, but to a kid raised in the sock-it-to-me seventies, his penchant to please struck me as submissive. Only here’s the thing: years later, I now see the same trait in myself, and it no longer makes me cringe in quite the same way, for I now understand that his aversion to conflict and his compulsive need for calm are what got us through the roughest patches in our lives. What I did not understand until recently is that it also got him through his own darkest days.

  6

  A Secret

  I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION that when people start a sentence with “You know,” they’re trying to take the edge off unsettling news. Think about it. All those times you’ve heard “You know, I hate to tell you this” or “You know, this relationship has not been working out.” Or even “You know, I love you.” “You know” suggests a seed of doubt; maybe you don’t really know, after all. I was certainly in the dark when Uncle Joe surprised me over breakfast one morning a few years ago. Joe Nathan Norris is my father’s only surviving brother. He was supposed to be called Jonathan, but someone got it wrong on his birth certificate. These days he likes to call himself “the Last of the Mohicans” or “the Last Man Standing”—dignified titles that hint at the loneliness of a man who has too quickly run out of brothers to call when he needs advice or has news he wants to share.

  At breakfast that morning Uncle Joe blurted out a secret: “You know, your father was shot.” Six shattering words uttered in a matter-of-fact way before Joe shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth. “Shot in the leg,” he continued, churning the spoon in the bowl full of gruel, as if constant motion would enhance the flavor. I have always been close to Joe. When I was a kid, he rewarded my love of books with a steady stream of suggested reading, and now we have a special bond because I was the only one in our big, loud family who could huddle with him in a corner and talk about the jazz musician Jaco Pastorius or the Argentine dissident Jacobo Timerman.

  My work frequently takes me to Chicago, and whenever I blow through town, I swing by to see my uncle on the Far South Side, in Pill Hill, so named because many black doctors once lived there. On this parti
cular trip, though, my schedule was tight, and so that Thursday morning Joe drove to meet me downtown at the West Egg Cafe, an all-day breakfast spot near the Lake Michigan waterfront that’s popular with yuppies. He had ordered his oatmeal and I some Tex-Mex egg concoction, even as Joe made a point of reminding me that for the price of a piece of toast we could have both enjoyed a whole spread at any one of a dozen joints on the South Side. No sense in arguing. He was right, though his protest was a bit hollow.

  In truth, Joe didn’t mind heading downtown to break his routine. He had become the primary caretaker for my aunt Odiev, whose kidney disease required frequent dialysis, and he also doted on a firstborn granddaughter with cerebral palsy. In other words, he spent his retirement earning his sainthood and he never complained. He also needed to stop downtown at the Obama campaign office to pick up some yard signs and flyers. Like so many older black Americans, Joe felt that the hope Obama offered was much more than just a four-letter word.

  Uncle Joe’s news about my dad’s shooting was tangential; he went on a rant about a completely different subject, grousing about black men and black leadership and why so many black people had given up hope, even though their lives were so much easier than their forebears’ had been. Joe had the heart of an activist. He’d left a comfortable teaching job in Hyde Park to start a pilot project working with juvenile inmates in the Cook County Jail, kids whose rap sheets were so treacherous that they were tried and remanded as adults. The assignment would be hell on earth for most people, but Joe saw an opportunity to reach a captive audience; his pupils couldn’t skip class or threaten the teacher without inviting a beat-down by prison guards. He introduced his students to works by Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, and even Chinua Achebe and Mark Mathabane. When he knew he had won their trust, he made them read Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho, the better to understand an important life lesson: that a man is truly tough only when he can show his soft side. He turned criminals into readers, and in exchange he asked for only one thing: that they continue to read upon release from jail.

  His years with the Cook County cons had left Joe with some hard theories about young black men. “They have it too easy. They don’t know what struggle is. They always want to blame somebody else. They want a handout. They don’t take care of business.” If you didn’t interrupt him, he might go on for hours. Get an older black man riled up about today’s young folk and his vitriol might outdo that of even the most outrageous conservative commentator. At our Thursday breakfast, Joe was worked up. He’d asked the juvies which leaders they looked up to; they had rattled off the names of rappers and athletes. No surprise there. When he’d clarified that he was asking about elected officials, they’d cracked up and all but told him to go to hell. Politics, they’d said, is for white folks. So Joe was on a rant, upset at the juvies for throwing their lives away, upset at black leaders who couldn’t figure out how to inspire young people, upset that he had to work so hard as a precinct captain to get young black folk to vote. Even his own son was unregistered. “Don’t they know what people had to do to give them the right to vote?” he asked.

  Joe continued, on a roll, before dropping the bomb: “You know, your father was shot.” He must have seen the look on my face, the confusion in my eyes, the utter shock. In a world of my own, I heard the tap-tap of his spoon against the ceramic bowl. He pushed his breakfast aside and took a slow deep breath before puffing out his cheeks as if to suppress a belch, the kind of thing older men do all the time; but since I interview people for a living, I know this can also be a stalling tactic to take the measure of things. Uncle Joe had never been one to pussyfoot through uncomfortable conversations. When I was a kid, he’d had an outsized reputation for telling it like it was. If your legs were ashen, he’d be the first to say you forgot to use lotion, loud enough for everyone in church to hear. If an adult got up without taking his plate to the sink, well, they’d hear about that, too. If we were going to the movies on a Saturday afternoon and there were six cousins on hand and only four seats in the sedan, Joe Norris would just cut to the chase: “Two of y’all won’t be seeing a movie today. I don’t know which two, but whoever it is I don’t want to see any tears. You kids got too much to be crying about anything.”

  But Uncle Joe had ceased being the family hard-ass long ago, and his weary grin indicated that he took no pleasure in bearing bad news. “Mickey,” he said, reverting to my childhood nickname, “here’s what I know.” His anger about the juvies had melted, and though his voice could usually rattle the fish in Lake Michigan, his words were now slow and gentle. I had to lean in to hear his rasp. He didn’t so much tell a story as deliver a series of statements. “They were down somewhere near Fourth Avenue trying to get onto an elevator.… Woody was pushed.… Belvin intervened.… A cop pulled out his gun.… Woody swatted at the cop’s arm and the gun deflected downward.… In the end, Belvin was shot in the leg.… That’s what I know.” There was a lot to digest that morning in the restaurant, and none of it went down easily. Shot in the leg. By a cop. And in Jim Crow Alabama, to boot.

  I was furious. Confused. My head hurt, and I wanted to scream. I needed details. Why did the cop push Uncle Woody? Where were they going? How serious was the injury? I peppered Uncle Joe with questions, careful not to show the anger welling up inside me. It felt like the room was starting to spin. Acid rose in my throat, and the Tex-Mex egg dish felt like a terrible choice. I swallowed hard, trying to repress the one question I really wanted to ask: “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

  I was intent on gathering as many facts as I could before the waitress dropped the check, fearful that a window of opportunity might close. What if Uncle Joe’s revelation had been only a moment of senior disinhibition? I knew not to seem too shocked or upset because then he might hold back, sensitive to my emotional fragility. As the youngest of six brothers, he’d been the last to enter the military and the last to return to Birmingham after the war. So he hadn’t been there when the incident with my dad occurred. Perhaps for that reason, or because so many years had intervened, his facts were fuzzy, his story sparse. He had always been the most confident among the Norris clan, but this morning he appeared outside his comfort zone. As we talked about Alabama policemen, I spied a vestige of fear on the face of a man who worked with convicts every day, and who earned their respect by showing that he could do more than just talk about putting a foot up their behinds.

  Yet, this normally confident man was clearly disturbed by a hazy memory from more than sixty years ago. “The only reason they were not killed on the spot is because of the crowd,” he said. “If they were on a road or in an alley, they’d be gone.” With that he stretched his neck, looked away, and sighed. “We can talk more later,” he offered in closing. I couldn’t ignore what he’d told me. I phoned him time and again over the next few weeks, and in each conversation he seemed to regret having said the little he had; the details he offered were few, if not speculative.

  Apparently, it had happened in Birmingham somewhere around Fourth Avenue—the black business corridor. My father was still in his twenties and had just returned from service in the navy during World War II. He was not alone. My uncle Woody was with him and maybe one or two other friends. There was a charge of resisting arrest, and the family had just wanted the episode to go away. “Knowing your father,” Joe explained, “he would have wanted to downplay it. My mother would have wanted to be more aggressive, but it takes money and power to be aggressive. We had neither.”

  “Shot in the leg.” “Belvin was shot in the leg.” Every time I hear these words in my mind, I think of the ever so slight lilt in my father’s step, so minor you might miss it if you weren’t paying close attention, so subtle that I thought it was an affectation, the way some black men put a little music in their walk. Daddy had always had a distinctive gait. Come to think of it, all his brothers did, to varying degrees. Black folk call it putting a little English in yo
ur walk, using a pool hall term for something special or unique. When I learned of the injury, I realized that his gait might have been born of pain, not pride. But Joe’s account made no sense. My dad in a violent encounter with the police? It just did not compute.

  How could a man who always observed stop signs, a man who always filed his taxes early and preached that jaywalking proved a weakness of character have been involved in an altercation with Alabama policemen? Why would he hide it from his children? Why would he impart life lessons to us about looking the other way, turning the other cheek, respecting those who lived across the color line in spite of insults hurled our way, when he himself had not?

  I always knew that my father had had his mysteries, like the FBI Wanted poster for Angela Davis that I found inside his dresser drawer after he died. Or the way he would slip out of the house on Thursday nights, after he and my mother got divorced, to meet a date I was not supposed to know about. Or that odd encounter in the upstairs bathroom, when he walked in and asked if he could borrow my Afro pick, the thick, black plastic one with a handle shaped like a clenched fist. For a time, he slipped it into his back pocket, the Black Power fist peeking from his slacks. To me, the Alabama incident shed new light on this.

  My father loved music, yet there were certain types he could not tolerate. I went to high school at a time when seventies southern rock was all over the airwaves. Acts such as the Charlie Daniels Band, the Allman Brothers Band, and Lynyrd Skynyrd topped the charts with songs like “Free Bird” and “The South’s Gonna Do It Again.” Dad could stomach almost any kind of music we brought home: funk, metal, folk, even punk. But he had little patience for southern rock, the kind of music good ole boys would blare from the backs of pickup trucks outfitted with gun racks and Confederate flags.