The Grace of Silence

by Michele Norris

  Mom said these barbers were great at creating the singular Afro best suited to the shape of a person’s face and lifestyle. Her fingers flew through my hair as she worked the rubber bands out, uncoiled my braids, and shook out my waves. She guided me toward a burgundy pleather chair, where a barber stood attentively. “Michele,” she said, “you’re going to look so cute in a kinky little Afro.”

  Was I not supposed to have a say in this? Wasn’t someone going to ask me if I wanted an Afro? I’d spent years growing my hair out so I could stand in the bathroom at night, undo my braids, and pretend I was Marilyn McCoo of the 5th Dimension or Ali McGraw or, for that matter, any of the long, straight-haired models who stared back at me from magazine covers. Now many of my style icons at the time wore Afros. I adored Get Christie Love. I was crazy about the Jackson 5. I pined for Michael Jackson, but I didn’t want to look like him.

  Mom tried to convince me that “the look” was right for me. She talked of how easy it would be to care for. As summer was just a few weeks away, she said, “Imagine being able to swim as much as you want without worrying about losing your press and curl. It just makes good sense.” And when she noticed that pushing the practicality of the new do was not winning over a thirteen-year-old, she switched back to flattery: “You have such a pretty little face. A cute little Afro will really show it off.”

  Whether I’d have a say in the matter or not, I, more than likely, didn’t want to rock the boat, as my outings with Mom, after she’d moved out, were sporadic. So I held my breath and tried not to cry as a barber sporting plaid pants, gold rings, and his own outsized Afro snipped inch after inch of my hair, from my elbows to my shoulders and past my ears, then going in for the kill: trimming the halo of fuzz that remained. I remember feeling slightly sick when I looked at the floor and saw all the hair I used to braid at night and toss over my shoulder or coil on my head. Mom in bell bottoms, standing at the doorway, didn’t understand how painful this was for me.

  Once the mounds of my hair had been swept away, Mom leaned in, put her face next to mine, and we both stared ahead at the mirror. “You look so cute!” she exclaimed, in a tone sincere enough to suggest a sales pitch. I remember thinking the Afro was, after all, kind of cute. But that was the problem: at thirteen I was done with cute. I wanted to be glamorous. I wanted to look like the models in magazines. I wanted to run out of the building and find Mary Tyler Moore’s tam and pull it down tight over my head. “Looking good,” the barber said. “Looking good, babygirl.”

  I’ve never liked the phrase “looking good.” It sounds lustful, lascivious, praise as complimentary as a pat on the tush. No thanks. Mom could see I was about to cry and she whispered, “You do look good.” The problem was, I didn’t feel good. It had all happened too fast. I felt nauseous. Mom paid the disco barber, and we headed home. On the way to the car, Mom stopped to buy me an ice cream cone. My favorite, peppermint bon bon. When she wasn’t looking, I threw it in a trash can.

  I was so mad I walked a few feet behind her, even when she slowed down to let me catch up. I stared at the ground and, as was my habit at the time, chewed my bottom lip. When I looked up, I noticed something: black people, especially black women, were nodding approvingly at me in passing, as if to say, in today’s parlance, “You go, girl!” This kept happening for weeks, even as my Afro got bigger and bigger, eventually growing so large that it reached past the frame of my school photos. Sometimes, when a be-Afroed woman would lean down at me and whisper, “Little sister, I like that ’fro,” I’d smile. But the fact that I looked more like a boy than a girl was not lost on the playground, where the kids were unmerciful.

  With the rise of Afrocentrism and black power in politics, music, and popular culture, my Afro had given me cachet long before I knew what the word meant. And it made life easier for Dad and me. He had no idea how to set, or braid, or smooth out hair that had a mind of its own. Afros, he understood. By the seventies, he had even let his own closely cropped hair grow an inch or two, and wore a slight goatee.

  I’ve asked Mom a hundred times why she cut my hair that day; she’s always breezy, ready with a pat answer: “It seemed like a good idea.” Or “I thought you would look cute in a ’fro.” But I think I know what she was doing: trying to do her part, while not living with Dad and me, to keep me from becoming that teenage ingenue I so badly wanted to be. She was not present consistently enough to offer guidance or to prevent boys from sniffing around. Or she may have been trying to make life easier for Dad regarding my hair-care regimen. Betty Norris was a mother looking out for her daughter’s best interest. It took me years before I figured out as much, and years before I made peace with it.

  Though I am loath to admit it, Mom may have been right about my hair, as she was about more important matters: for instance, that the shooting incident at the Pythian Temple and Dad’s secrecy about it went a long way toward explaining many a curiosity in our family, including the simmering tension between Uncle Simpson and Dad. While my father remained close to his brothers in Chicago, a mild conflict would flare up between Belvin and Simpson at unexpected moments. I never understood why until I dug into my father’s story. Simpson had planned to use his military stipend and back pay to buy property in Chicago or start his own business. But after Dad was arrested, my grandparents insisted that he use his nest egg to bail his brothers out of the Birmingham jail, pay for a lawyer, and dole out payola as needed to hasten his brothers’ departure from a legal system that was byzantine at best when blacks were involved. The idea was to make the whole thing go away.

  Simpson’s son Butch said his dad quietly seethed every time he told the story about the squelching of his dream. Simpson often ribbed Dad about an outstanding loan. Though he appeared to speak in jest, there was always a caustic undertone to his remarks that even a kid could detect. My father would look more pained than amused. The squabble between the two loving brothers would surface when they spent too much time together. It reached a head once during a summer trip to Itasca State Park. Simpson and his wife, Ernestine, drove to Minneapolis to join my parents and me for a long trip north to Itasca, in the northern part of the state. I was about ten; my older sisters had long outgrown mandatory summer vacation with the parents, as had Simpson’s two sons. So the two Norris couples and I embarked on our excellent adventure in Dad’s white Galaxie 500 sedan.

  Once at Itasca, I spent most of my time with my nose in a book, while the adults drank Scotch and sodas and played bid whist. After one singular late night of card playing and rambunctious laughter, Mom and Aunt Ernestine slept in, while Dad, Uncle Simpson, and I headed to the big dining hall in the Old Rustic Lodge to have an early breakfast. At some point that morning, the ribbing between the brothers intensified. Simpson relentlessly put salt in whatever wound there was until my dad stormed off, muttering under his breath, leaving behind a little black skillet filled with grilled trout and scrambled eggs. I’d rarely seen my father lose his temper. It unsettled me, but it tickled my uncle. Uncle Simpson invited me for a walk to the water, so that my father would have some time to shake off whatever was bothering him.

  Itasca is a gorgeous spot. There, the mighty Mississippi begins its meandering twenty-five-hundred-mile journey toward the Gulf of Mexico. Massive pine trees hug the shoreline, and the sun lingers at the close of the day, long golden rays piercing the lacework of branches. But the dark side of sunrise is so chilly—even in summer—that thick mist rises from the water. That morning, I skipped my way across the Mississippi in the time it takes to spell the word. The river there is only about twenty feet wide. The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, are separated by a yawn of roiling muck flowing beneath the massive bridges joining one town to the other. Up in Itasca State Park, you can walk back and forth, across big jagged rocks, from one shore of the Mississippi to the other. Uncle Simpson held my hand as we did this, he in his dress shoes, trying his best to keep up with me in my Keds.

  Simpson used to call his sons “Rusty-butt boys” and
held them in line by barking orders and taking no guff. He was, however, different around his nieces, slipping us peppermints and breaking out in applause when we sang silly songs or twirled until we fell. That morning, after we traversed the Mississippi, he leaned down to me and whispered, “You just crossed a river on your own two feet—now you can do anything.”

  I believed him with all my heart. And even though at the time I knew nothing about the events at the Pythian Temple, I must also somehow have believed the gist of his contention over money with Dad; their tart exchange that morning had a ring of truth because of its effect on my father. Dad spent his life making sure he didn’t owe anybody anything. He paid his credit card bills in full, and racked up as much overtime as possible at the post office. He was so averse to debt that he sent in extra money with his mortgage payment every month to help chip away at the principal. But cash alone could not settle the ledger with Simpson. Simpson had spent money earned in America’s fight for freedom to keep his brother out of jail, sacrificing his own dreams in the bargain. Short of that never having happened, it would be impossible for Belvin to repay his debt to his brother in full.

  Once the Norris brothers left their hometown of Birmingham, most remained only lightly tethered to the city. Dad, however, was for the rest of his life fiercely loyal to his parents and to the city of his birth. He may have fled Alabama, but he didn’t stay away. He visited more frequently than any of his brothers. It wasn’t apparent to his family in Minnesota, but the past had a strong pull on my father. His almost yearly pilgrimages to Birmingham and his insistence on sending me down to visit my grandparents every summer are perplexing in light of what happened to him after the war. But I suppose that, as Faulkner said, he must have believed that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For him the road ahead would always be much more rugged without the solace afforded by taking heed of where he’d been. Not only did Alabama pull him back; so did many checkpoints of his military career. San Francisco. New Orleans. Pensacola. Northern Virginia. Once I’d studied his military records, I realized that the better part of our family vacation destinations were places where he’d served. Not even my mom knew that, and I could tell she was unnerved when I revealed the fact.

  Dad had wanderlust. He loved to travel. Denied a chance for higher education, he was always on the hunt for new learning experiences. On a postal worker’s salary, he managed to set aside money for theater tickets, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, museum workshops, and a subscription to the Sunday New York Times. He was constantly telling us kids, “Learn all you can,” and to show us he meant business, he led by example. He and my mother read constantly. Novels. Plays. Trade journals. Textbooks they purchased during the annual lost-books sale at the main post office. And most importantly, vacations. While we’d hit the typical tourist sights wherever we went, the highlight for him was wandering off the beaten path.

  We’d head out in the morning with change jangling in Dad’s pockets to board a city bus or trolley bound for ordinary vicinities. Dad would always say he wanted to see how average folk lived. He wanted to eat in the restaurants they ate in and visit the parks where they taught their kids how to hit baseballs. But I wonder now if he wasn’t intent on visiting neighborhoods that had once been off-limits to black servicemen, much the way a child, denied ice cream, will gorge himself on it at the first possible chance. Perhaps he was retracing the steps of his early life out of mere nostalgia. Perhaps he needed to have the last word vis-à-vis his experiences of segregation. Perhaps he wanted to prove to those who’d stamped “Negro” on all his military records that the word alone did not encompass all he was or all he had to offer.

  We always returned from vacation with uncanny stories. An especially peculiar one concerned the Vietnam War. While traveling through Winnepeg, Manitoba, Dad would spot grungy young black men with enormous backpacks. He knew by instinct that they were in Canada because they were draft dodgers, and he would go out of his way to chat them up. On more than one occasion he’d offer them a deal. He’d buy them dinner if they agreed to tell him why they chose to flee the United States rather than fight for their country overseas. At the time I thought his obsession was just one of his eccentricities. A sage trying to understand youthful impulsiveness. I had no idea that his “let me buy you a burger” altruism might have provided an opening into his hidden past. When he sat there quizzing those bedraggled fugitives, I rolled my eyes in pubescent perturbation.

  In spite of his experiences in the military, my father was unwaveringly patriotic, which manifested itself in myriad little ways. He planted small flags throughout the yard on the Fourth of July. And during the summer parade season he would retrieve them from the hall closet so we could wave them from the side of the road as the floats and marching bands passed by. These were the very flags he pulled out one Sunday night, as he and I watched a TV special on the American bicentennial. It was 1976, and I was fourteen years old. Dad was in his fifties and all decked out in red, white, and blue, down to a pair of socks adorned with stars and stripes. He sat in his favorite armchair in front of our black-and-white TV (Dad refused to splurge on a color set) so he could watch a star-spangled affair that would culminate with stunning fireworks above the National Mall. He loved fireworks—even when transmitted in shades of gray by a nineteen-inch Magnavox.

  At the time, the prospect of sitting with my father while indulging in corny jingoism, as it seemed to me, was horrifying. But Dad’s enthusiasm was contagious. In truth, so, too, was the pull of his loneliness. I found myself declining invitations to go on dates or hang out at the 7-Eleven with my friends, so that I could be with him to watch TV or play bid whist. Sometimes we’d go hit golf balls after dinner, then stop by the Dairy Queen. It would have been a little too pitiful to imagine him, in front of the TV, waving his miniature star-spangled banner by himself to celebrate the bicentennial. We wound up in the living room, waving silly flags and eating peanuts from the shell—something Mom would never have allowed. The marginalized veteran, in his own way, insisted, “I, too, sing America.”

  In celebrating America—or, as he called it, “the U.S. of A.”—Belvin Norris collected stamps and spent sixteen dollars every pay period to purchase a new coin from the Franklin Mint History of the United States series, until he amassed the entire set. He took great pride in his work at the post office, and in the fact that he worked for the federal government. While he may have hidden his World War II medal in the back of a bureau drawer and forgotten it, he lovingly arranged, in the little wooden valet in its top drawer, his twentieth- and thirtieth-anniversary postal service pins and his Mr. Zip tie clasps.

  My father never sought wealth, fame, or power. Well, maybe he wouldn’t have minded more money. His goal in life, instead, was to be the Average Joe of the American dream. He aspired to be ordinary. His brass ring was a solid middle-class life. And his pride was the house on Oakland Avenue and watching his family do all those little things that were beyond his reach when he was a young man. Now when I look at pictures of him I see a “we can do this too” twinkle in his eyes. He pushed us toward those things that were especially prized by white society. Perhaps it’s why I wound up taking art history lessons at age ten, learning gymnastics on ice (and, as a result, earning a spot on the hockey cheerleading squad), and attending the University of Minnesota on weekends, while still in high school, for courses in science and engineering. Dad was my guiding star.

  Having achieved working-class comfort, my parents always sought black middle-class affirmation in the neighborhood, on the news, and in popular culture. Seated on the matching sofa and love seat in our living room, in our integrated neighborhood in South Minneapolis, we would every week watch a television show called Julia. It debuted in 1968 featuring Diahann Carroll, the first African American actress to star in her own network sitcom. She played a hardworking Vietnam War widow who slept on a sofa so her little boy, Corey, could have his own bed. Julia was a nurse. She was beautiful and stylish and funny.
She worked for a wise and crotchety old doctor played by Lloyd Nolan, and she had a way of standing up to her critics without getting their goat—a skill that many black Americans were trying to master themselves as they edged into an integrated society.

  Julia was a crossover hit, eagerly watched by black and white families alike. My parents laughed at the jokes that went right over my head, delighted to see a show using comedy to tackle salient issues of the day. For my part, I focused on the weekly storyline concerning Julia’s young son, Corey, and his white best friend, Earl J. Waggedorn. I was over the moon when I discovered a Julia Barbie doll under the Christmas tree and, for weeks, dragged it everywhere I went.

  As much as we enjoyed Julia’s three-season run, my mother wondered, “Why can’t she have a husband? How hard is that? It can’t be about the salary, because she has boyfriends who take her out on dates almost every week, so they are paying someone. Why can’t there be a man in the house?” At the time I thought Mom was being unduly harsh. Years later, when I interviewed Diahann Carroll, I discovered that she, too, had wanted to have a TV husband, but, for whatever reason, NBC and the show’s creators were of a different mind. Hit though it was, the show was lambasted by some critics. The Saturday Review, for instance, claimed that the show was lacking in verisimilitude, opining that it was a “far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto.”1