The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  There was a long pause, then sniffles. She said she needed a moment; I heard her set the phone down. Soon she returned to the line and asked me if I had time to hear her out. “Let me tell you one of my strongest memories,” she said. “I remember your grandparents walking home, all in white. They were coming home from church. Probably a revival, because they had white on head to toe. And I remember some kids. Some white kids came zoomin’ down the street hanging out of car windows and they pelted them with rotten tomatoes. They threw tomatoes at churchgoing folks and they laughed and they called them names I am not going to say out loud. Their clothes were ruined and they were so upset. Those kids in that car were just evil. What happens to make young people feel that kind of evil so early in life? I have never forgotten that. People do what they can get away with, and in Birmingham they could get away with anything. My feelings toward Birmingham, toward white people, are wrapped up in what happened that day when those boys threw those tomatoes at folks coming home from Sunday prayer.”

  I was startled by her raw candor. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to Julia Beaton, and my question about life in the South had burst open a dam. “I don’t talk about this, and I barely know why I am talking about this now,” she said. “I am not a prejudiced person, but I do not trust American white people. When you have seen people treated that way and hurt and the shooting and the bombings and the constant disrespect, it bothers me. It really bothers me to this day. The theaters had an upstairs part for black folks, and you needed to go up front and pay and then go outside again and up the back stairs to get to your seats. All so they could just remind you what they really thought of you. On the buses they sometimes had boards to keep people from sitting certain places even if seats were available. I am sixty-eight, and I remember it just like it was yesterday. I can’t look at these civil rights documentaries, because it is not entertainment and it sure as hell ain’t ancient history.”

  I had planned on this being a quick phone call, but Julia didn’t give me a chance to interject. She was gathering steam, a freight train of rage: “I have no white American friends. I just don’t care for them. I just don’t trust them. I have always told my sons and my grandsons not to bring a woman in this house who does not look like me. That is a point of respect. I have a problem with the entertainers and the athletes. Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones. They can do what they want, but it was a sign of disrespect to black women everywhere.”

  I heard Julia Beaton exhale loudly, and I could almost imagine her slumping in exhaustion on the other end of the line. “Listen,” she said, commanding my attention. “I am not a mean person, but I am very firm in what I believe in. Birmingham was a very scarring place. Nothing per se happened to me. It was just the things you heard about that happened to other people. Everything for you was less than it was for other people, and though it is better today, my grandsons hate … and I say hate white people.”

  Julia went on to explain that her grandsons’ anger had resulted from their encounters with the police. They are car enthusiasts, she said, and they like to spend hours tricking out their automobiles with spoilers and flashy chrome grilles. This leads police in their hometown to mistakenly assume they’re members of a street gang. It never occurs to the police, she said, that they’re young men who work full-time, go to church every Sunday, and spend their free hours tinkering with cars in the garage.

  I asked her if she was bothered that her grandsons are consumed by hatred for whites. I suggested to her that hatred is hardly admirable, especially on the part of worshipful churchgoers. She agreed, though only to a point, saying, “I know that hatred can do more harm to you than to the other person, but frankly, I understand what they feel.”

  After twenty-five minutes on the phone with Julia, I was reeling. I felt honored by her frankness. But despite our shared history on Avenue G, she was far more distraught and full of rage about Birmingham than anyone in my immediate family has ever been—anyone related by blood to the churchgoing couple pelted with rotten tomatoes by young white hoodlums or to the serviceman shot by a Birmingham policeman.

  This anger and mistrust, the absolute disdain for members of another race, the hatred: these were the very sentiments that civil rights marchers in 1963 had tried to overcome. But if there is one thing I have learned while listening closely to hidden conversations about race in America, it is how complex that objective really was. Many people of color wanted to move the country forward, wanted to convince white people, by moral suasion, no longer to hate and subjugate black America, while they themselves secretly clung to festering, old grudges, the better to foster communal solidarity.

  You rarely hear the kind of loathing freely expressed by Julia Beaton. But sentiments like hers, if aired, would likely elicit empathy or understanding among black and even some white Americans, for they are rooted in abysmal pain caused by racial strife. A white American voicing such raw feelings would likely be met with swift condemnation and a demand for an apology. But hate is hate. Disgust is almost always a damaging emotion, and contempt eats away at the soul, no matter who you are.

  Race is often seen as a black issue in America. When any institution puts together a panel or symposium or committee on race or diversity, you can be sure that it will focus on reaching out to, hearing from, or being more inclusive of people of color. Reluctance among whites to talk about race and discomfort when doing so are usually seen as the chief obstacles to progress. Less explored is the legacy of distrust black parents pass on to their children. Many of us are advised by our elders to beware of whites. Rare is the black boy who has not been told to be on guard in all encounters with white police officers. This advice comes in many forms. Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes severe. Sometimes it’s imparted through humor.

  “You have to be twice as good to go half as far”; “Never give a white person a reason to question your honesty”; or, as Michael Smith of York, Pennsylvania, told me, a large black man has to be mighty jolly in the workplace. This kind of advice can be corrective but also corrosive. It’s as if one is being counseled to reject membership in a club before it rejects you. Some call this “keeping it real” but it can also lead to complicity in your own oppression. Here a certain honesty can slide into the muck of race. Can a black woman who tells her son to be wary of blond teachers or white police officers be sympathetic to a blond mother who warns her daughter to lock the car doors when she drives through black neighborhoods?

  As I listened to Julia Beaton, the mystery of my father’s story deepened. He’d done more than keep it to himself. He’d kept his anger, frustration, or shame—or whatever he’d felt that night in the elevator of the Pythian Temple—locked away in a secret place. Julia had displayed more anger on behalf of the Norrises than I had ever witnessed from him. How, I wondered, had my father been able to find balm for the emotional wound from his encounter with the Birmingham police?

  By the time I’d reached junior high school, our neighborhood was dotted with black men who were committed to family life. They coached sports and donned aprons for backyard barbecues. On Saturdays, they washed their cars by hand so that the chrome would sparkle like a pinkie ring when they drove their families to church the next day. But if you watched these men closely, you could see a certain brooding indignation that registered somewhere in a smile that seemed forced. It stemmed from the pain that comes with being admitted to a party only after you’ve forced your way in. That nagging disappointment arising from the knowledge that you weren’t on the original guest list. Dad was the exception. If he’d harnessed anger, and I suspect that he had, its traces were not evident. I needed to understand the nature of his self-control in a life stunted by the savage forces of Jim Crow, yet ultimately blessed by good fortune as a result of his packing up and moving north.

  I took Julia’s advice and called Morris Beaton. He’d been born in 1928, two years after his brother John, who was with my father that night. When I finally reached Morris on his cell, there was no hesitatio
n in his recall of the incident. He’d been home on Avenue G when his brother and the Norris brothers returned from jail, he told me. He remembered listening to them tell their story in breathless spurts, moving from the living room to the kitchen to the porch. John Beaton had grown up playing marbles and baseball with Woody and Belvin. Belvin and John had just returned from military service.

  It was my father’s second week back home. He had returned to Birmingham in late January, when the city and the entire state were riding high in the wake of the University of Alabama’s decisive defeat of USC at the Rose Bowl. Wet, unseasonably cold weather had swamped the city since his homecoming, turning the red Alabama clay into a thick, forbidding soup. Woe to anyone who tracked it into my grandmother’s house. She was a small, birdlike woman, always sporting a floral apron and clutching a household instrument in her small, delicate hands. A broom. A mop. A spatula. A hot comb for straightening hair. A switch to show the kids she meant business. She was feisty and forever fussing at her sons, as if her loving admonitions would follow them out the door as safeguards in a heartless world. I can see Woody and Belvin leaning down to kiss her good-bye, muttering dismissive “Yes, Mama’s” as she chattered at them. I can hear her cackling southern purr, warning Belvin and Woody to avoid flashy women and stay out of trouble, as they ambled down the porch stairs for a night on the town.

  During the second week of February, the bad weather ceased, and, as Morris Beaton tells it, Belvin, Woody, and Morris’s brother John headed downtown to an event at a public park near the Smith and Gaston Funeral Home, before deciding to go to the Pythian Temple. “They used to have dances or parties or something up there. It was a get-together that they was having upstairs, and they were standing in the lobby there trying to wait for the elevator to come down before the police walked up,” Morris explained.

  “And when the police come up, they were behind them, but when the elevator door opened, a policeman stuck his stick out there where he wouldn’t let them get on the elevator, and this is where your father knocked the stick down and stepped on the elevator, and this is where everything got started, the beating and the cursing and all that stuff. They got a good whupping that night.”

  The three young men were unarmed. The policemen, of course, were packing. Morris Beaton said he was told that one police officer reached for his gun after my father stood up to the cop who had tried to block their entrance to the elevator. My father physically tried to stop him from reaching for his holster. “When they was tussling on the elevator, this is when the gun went off,” Beaton said. “The police was trying to get it, and Belvin was trying to keep, trying to keep him from getting it. ’Cause he had it in a holster.”

  Beaton said that John, Woody, and Belvin all described the shooting as accidental. When the police officer succeeded in pulling his gun out, it was pointed at my father’s chest. Woody instinctively tried to knock the gun out of the cop’s hand. Amid all the commotion, the gun discharged, the bullet grazing my father’s leg.

  The mishap aside, Morris wonders whether my father might have been killed had he not tried to prevent the policeman from reaching for his weapon. This seems far-fetched to me. More likely than not, the police intended only to put some black men in their place, not six feet under.

  In retrospect, it is conceivable that the five white police officers in the Pythian Temple lobby might have been almost as spooked by the unfolding incident as the black men they tried to stop from getting on the elevator. They were outnumbered—the building was full of blacks—and in the heart of the black business district. The sound of a gun going off could have made for an explosive situation that Thursday night; the police officers had no idea how many people had gathered for the event upstairs.

  When word of the incident first reached Avenue G, my grandfather and John Beaton’s father assessed the risks of heading to the jail where their sons were incarcerated. They feared that the police might embroil them in the affair and throw them in jail as well. Instead, Grandma Fannie called a lawyer she knew from her work at the hospital to help get Woody, Belvin, and John released. Sylvester and Simpson Norris, meanwhile, started putting money together to make bond for their brothers. There was urgency, Morris Beaton said, to get the two men out of jail as fast as possible. “Some awful, terrible things happened to black men when they were behind bars with them police. They had total control and no one to answer to. They wouldn’t want them to be in that jail for one second longer than they had to be there.”

  The gunshot wound, Morris stressed, was superficial and did not require hospitalization. And though he didn’t say it outright, the way he told the story suggested that when Woody and Belvin got home, they faced some rough justice from their father, because Belvin senior was certain that he’d raised his sons to know better than to smack at a policeman’s hand—even if they felt the need to demand respect as men. “They didn’t talk much about it after that,” Morris said. They stayed away from downtown and eventually left town. “They wanted to move out and get out on their own,” he added. “Go to some better state, better place, I mean where people would be treated equal and everything else.”

  I asked Morris a question I wished I had been able to ask my father: “As a black man, what mind-set could have provoked you to go up against a Birmingham police officer like that back then?” “Well, you would have had to be in the mind-set of getting shot or getting killed, going up against them,” he replied. “I mean, they was extra mean to black people for some reason. I don’t know why. They just act like they was better than everybody and they felt like they could do anything they wanted to do.”

  While unraveling my father’s story, I interviewed other black veterans. I’ve come to understand how a man can break from character when he concludes that his dignity and self-worth are more important to him than anything else in life, regardless of the warnings, spoken or not, telling him where he can sit, sleep, shop, pee, work, ride, walk, learn, eat, pray, love, and live. These veterans had spent months proudly wearing the uniform of the most powerful military on earth. They were part of the campaign to protect human rights for all. They had learned to honor the uniform and themselves, and were keenly sensitive to freedom and fairness. There is a certain sparkle in a man’s eyes when he describes that moment when he decided to let his spirit fly, to refuse to allow his dreams to be held in check, subjected to the whims of others. I’ve seen that sparkle in the eyes of black veterans who talked to me. I wish I’d seen it in my father’s.

  “Why do you think he never told me, his daughter, about that evening?” I asked Morris. “Or never talked to my mother, his wife, about it?” “I have no idea, honey,” he said. “I guess some things like that, I mean … people misuse you, abuse you.… I mean, it’s better forgotten than to keep talking about it.”

  I don’t think my father ever forgot that night. How can you forget the rush of adrenaline, the crack of a gunshot, the pain of your wound? Your harrowing ride in a police car, your thankful walk to freedom after a night in a Birmingham jail. The disapproving stare from your father as you try to explain why you swatted at a police officer’s billy club. Surely Dad must have winced every time he spotted a police cruiser anywhere after that. Surely he must have remembered the trip to the courthouse to pay the fines three months later. Surely the lilt in his step, as a result of the gunshot, must have been a constant reminder of the incident. Why didn’t you tell your children any of this when you took them “down South” to visit relatives?

  I suppose that, like many veterans, Dad spent so much time trying to get beyond the unpleasantness of his military service that he also locked these memories away in his mind, much like the way he hid his medal and his navy photos. Maybe he feared that the telling of his ordeal on February 7, 1946, would so embitter his children as to compel them to hate whites, like Julia Beaton and her grandsons did. Dad taught us to look for goodness in everyone. Sharing that story might complicate or even undermine that lesson. Dad didn’t seem to have ever been un
der the spell of that evening. He had suffered a superficial wound, and his dignity may have been singed. But he had managed to move on, willfully ignoring memories that were like a pebble in a shoe: painful at first, but at some point you just stop noticing it.

  I suspect that Dad didn’t feel special about having avoided a terrible fate when the policeman’s gun discharged. He wasn’t the only lucky one that evening. Had he been seriously harmed or even killed, the five white policemen would have had some explaining to do to their superiors, however accidental the happening; or they might even have been haunted into their sunset years by having killed a man. Ever the optimist, my father believed in a certain kind of kismet. To be sure, now and then he probably cursed the cop who shot him. But more often than not, he would have thought he did the guy a favor by living. I’m sure of that.

  10

  The War at Home

  EVEN AFTER LEARNING ABOUT the incident at the Pythian Temple, I still don’t know exactly what role my father’s status as a veteran may have played in his shooting. I’m not even certain he was wearing a uniform at the time. Morris Beaton thinks he was wearing “sailor whites,” but he cautioned me that he’s not entirely sure.

  Here is what I do know. My father had a violent confrontation with the policemen at a moment when two social forces were coming to a head in Alabama’s largest city. Black veterans were returning to the Jim Crow South after having undergone a profound transformation in the service of their country. They were hungry for change, willing to take risks, and keen to assert themselves as men.