My father’s parents, Roosevelt and Josephine Jones, already had two other children when my dad was conceived. For some reason, people around town started a rumor that the unborn baby couldn’t possibly be Roosevelt’s, who in the end chose to believe the gossip. He left my grandmother, married someone else, and built a new family in the same community as the family he’d left behind. Years later, there was no question about who’d gotten Josephine pregnant, because none of Roosevelt’s children looked more like him than my dad, Leroy.
Most of the people living in Money were sharecroppers who lived in houses or shacks located on the plantations that employed them. Most farm managers required each family to have a man living in the house. Because of that rule, when Roosevelt left, Josephine had to move. She ended up finding someone who agreed to let her live on their farm as long as she and her children worked the fields.
It seemed like a decent deal, but it wasn’t, because the farm manager was cheating her. At the end of every season he told Josephine that she owed him money, that she hadn’t picked enough cotton that year to cover her expenses. One year, she took copious notes so that when the time came to settle up she could challenge his math. After she shared her calculations with him, the manager told her that if she didn’t like his math, she could leave, but then added, “I don’t know where you gon’ go, a woman alone with all dem kids.” He was right, of course. Josephine had to accept whatever he gave or did not give.
My dad wasn’t sure which came first: the graveyard or the shotgun shack they lived in. He just remembered spending the first nine years of his life playing in a yard surrounded by tombstones. The shack they lived in didn’t have indoor plumbing or electricity. An outhouse filled with flies and maggots sat several yards off from the house.
Water for food, cleaning, and bathing had to be collected several times a day from a well that was a long hike away from their home. When my father turned five, gathering water from the well became his job. Everyone had to work, life was hard, and food was scarce. “My mom would do stuff to try to get food,” he told me. “She’d go on the side of the road pickin’ up pepper grass. It’s a green that grows wild. You never hardly seen ’em anymore, but back in the ’50s it was plentiful. It was beside the gravel road and every time we ate it, it was so gritty because that sand was on it.”
Eventually, Josephine remarried. With a man living with her, she was able to move to a better plantation on the other side of Greenwood, into a new house with electricity and indoor plumbing. When the farm manager demanded that Josephine’s kids miss school to work the fields, her new husband refused. He told the manager that the children weren’t going to miss a single day of school to pick cotton. Any picking they did would have to be done after school or on the weekends.
On this new plantation, when the kids weren’t picking cotton they were playing all kinds of sports. Before my dad was even in high school, people began to notice his uncommon athletic ability. In the coming years, after decent coaching, encouragement, and constant practice, my father became known all over Greenwood as someone who was going somewhere.
“We started to win games and my name started to get around,” he told me one night on the phone. “I was in the newspaper and it started to take off, and my stepfather, he used to tote all of my pictures around in his pocket and he’d say ‘That boy going somewhere one of these days.’ ”
By the time he was in tenth grade, his coach informed him that he was one of the best players in the country. College scouts began coming into Greenwood to take him out to lunch. Some offered him money; others let him drive their cars even though he didn’t have a license.
My father’s body seemed designed for sports. For starters, he was incredibly tall. When he finally stopped growing he measured in at a full six feet eight inches. In spite of his height and his muscular physique, he was also fast and agile. Football, a game of speed and strength, seemed designed specifically for him.
There was just one problem. He struggled to read. In the backwoods of the Mississippi Delta, no one knew what was wrong. His illiteracy became a source of shame, something he tried to hide. His inability to read on grade level meant that he wasn’t going to graduate from high school on time. As an adult, he’d learn that his reading problem had a name. It was called dyslexia.
A lifetime later and he still sounded upset about those early years. “When I got to twelfth grade I needed a half semester of English, but they didn’t offer it during the summer. So I had people from UCLA, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Michigan, I had all of the fifty major colleges offering me scholarships. I got a letter from everywhere. People came to Mississippi who had never been to Mississippi before. And once they found out that my grades wasn’t good, they never came back.”
Norfolk State was the one school willing to sign him. Their coach made arrangements for my father to graduate during the summer from a local high school in Virginia. The only stipulation Josephine insisted on, before sending him off with a few pieces of clothing rolled up in a paper sack, was that all seven of my father’s siblings receive free-ride scholarships to Norfolk State as well. He would finally have the means to lift his family out of poverty. And not only that, playing at Norfolk State got him one step closer to his dream of playing for the NFL.
When he lived in Greenwood, eating at Booker’s Place was financially out of reach for him. But when he was back in town visiting from college, my dad decided it was high time for him to experience the place he’d heard so much about. When he entered the restaurant, it was late in the evening, and, according to the rules, he was too young to be there. Familiar with Booker’s reputation, he was fearful that he’d get kicked out, but hopeful that his height would make him look older or that his small-town celebrity status would make Booker want him to stay.
He sat down in a booth and watched as Booker, not one of the waitresses, approached his table. Booker stood next to my father’s chair, looked down at him, and asked, “Well, what do you want to eat?” My dad figured Booker was irritated because he knew the young football player was trying to sneak his way in in spite of his age, but the barked greeting was the only punishment he gave my dad.
Back in Norfolk, things continued to go well for my father until 1972, when his stepdad died. His mom immediately lost her job as a sharecropper because she no longer had a man living in the house with her. Without warning, Josephine was suddenly a widow, unemployed, and about to be homeless. My dad started spending more time away from school and more time in the pool halls hustling so that he could pull together money to send to his mom and siblings. The money he made in a few nights was enough for Josephine to feed herself and her children for weeks. All this hustling meant spending even less time on schoolwork and in classes. His teachers were unwilling to pass him if he wasn’t even making an effort.
Facing a season on the bench at Norfolk because of his grades and concerned about how to help his mom, my dad dropped out of college and accepted an offer to play with the Canadian Football League.
The life my father experienced in Canada was unlike anything he’d imagined. “In Canada, a man is a man is a man.” He’d finally left behind racial prejudice. He could go where he wanted to go, eat where he wanted to eat, and no one asked him any questions or treated him as if he didn’t belong. It wasn’t until he was living in Canada that my father realized just how racist Greenwood was.
He played for the Edmonton Eskimos from 1973 to 1975. NFL scouts regularly flew to Canada to watch his games. He was confident that he’d get signed to play for the pros as a first-round draft pick. Toward the end of his second season, all that hope vanished during a simple play on a wet field.
“I was going to make a tackle,” he explained, “and it was wet and I slid. I had the guy that I was throwing down in front of me. Some kind of way I slipped and slid, he ended up on top of me. But I’m still standing, I’m almost on the ground but I’m still standing. I’m crunched down and I can’t move. Now the pile is falling on me; I was in so m
uch pain that I kicked my leg, and when I did that I broke my ankle and I wrenched my knee and I screwed my back up.”
Afterward, he was told he’d never play again. The scouts were gone. Word went through the NFL that he was finished, too injured to play, but he fought back to recovery. He was able to play again, but he was never able to deliver the same level of performance. His dream of being an NFL star was fading fast.
Miraculously, the Rams invited my dad out to Los Angeles, where they tested his body to see if he really could play. They bent his leg in different positions and made him run on a treadmill. My father laughed when he told this to me and said it reminded him of the scene from the movie Rocky IV when the Russian boxer was on the treadmill and punching machines to show the media how strong he was. Throughout all of this, my father was in pain, but he ran and smiled and told jokes because he had a family to provide for.
The Rams picked him in the second-round draft, and then subsequently traded him to the San Diego Chargers. My father had a decent career, but I could sense he believed that if he’d gone to the NFL before being injured, he would’ve been one of the greatest players of his generation, maybe even a household name.
When I was in high school, after my parents had separated, my mother told me once that the light left my father’s eyes when he began playing for the Chargers. He never wanted to say anything to disparage his team, but I got the sense that he didn’t feel the level of racial equality working in San Diego that he’d felt in Canada.
In our nightly calls, he told his story to me with sighs to illustrate his shame and punctuate his regrets. Everyone believed my dad did poorly in school because he was lazy. Teachers accused him of just wanting to coast by on his athletic talent. What left me speechless was that, after all these years, he believed it, too. Even though he’d been diagnosed with dyslexia in adulthood, he thought that if he’d worked just a little harder, he could’ve done entirely better in school.
I knew enough about dyslexia to know my father was wrong. Even after working with tutors as an adult, he could still barely read. Over the years, I’d seen him struggle to make out simple labels in the grocery store. And in the dark days, when I was a little girl and my father was ruled by his addiction, there were times when he wanted to steal money from my mom’s checking account. His literacy levels were so low that he had to get my sister to forge my mom’s signature, even though her name was printed right there on the top of the checks.
There are varying degrees of dyslexia, and his was quite severe. No amount of staring at secondhand textbooks discarded from the White schools could change the pathways in his brain. No matter what the stakes were, it was unlikely that he would learn to read through sheer will. He needed someone to slow down and take the time to understand the way his mind worked.
I’d always been told a fairy-tale version of my father’s ascent from poverty to a world of riches. In actuality, he knew from the time he was a boy that he had to play his cards right and hone his skills so he could find a way for his family to escape hunger. As a boy, he watched each night as Josephine removed tape from the tips of her fingers, made raw from picking cotton. She winced as she cleaned and rewrapped them. He knew she couldn’t pick cotton for the rest of her life.
The minute people recognized his uncommon athletic ability, whether spoken or unspoken, he became the hope for his family’s future, and he didn’t disappoint. After his stepfather died, my father bought his mother a house, where she lived until she passed away.
Maybe it was the weight of responsibility placed on a boy who couldn’t even read that led my father to feel the best years of his life were the ones that came before football. “It was a rough ride but I loved it, the cotton field,” he said. When he was little, he worked the fields, played under the burning sun with his siblings, swam in a pool of water made by a natural dam, and was too young to see that his family was barely surviving, subsisting on the edge of life.
When he got older, there was pain, both physical and mental. Once he went pro, it seemed to him that people only cared about whether or not his body was well enough to play—if his tendons would hold together for a few more tackles. My father spent most of his life slamming his body into other men, wrapping his arms around them and then flinging himself—with his human cargo in tow—as fast as he could into the hard earth while people cheered.
When his career was over, he turned to substances to silence the physical pain that remained. And it worked. By the time he cleaned himself up, the family he’d built was long gone.
When I was a girl, I thought I wasn’t interesting or engaging enough to capture my father’s attention. After those calls, I understood that when I was growing up he was overwhelmed, struggling to make it through life. He’d gone from extreme poverty one day to having enough money to buy multiple cars with cash the next. He’d gone from the cotton field to the football field with no one to help him make sense of it all. As a father, he could’ve done better, but I no longer believed it was my fault that he didn’t.
Fever
I never quite knew how to relate to other Black people. At some point during my childhood, I think my parents realized I was having problems fitting in, so they did what they could to help. One year, my mom bought me a Black Cabbage Patch doll named Garnet. It was supposed to be exciting. Cabbage Patch had finally made a product for all the little Black girls who wanted their dolls to look like them. My mother was beaming when she gave Garnet to me. The look on her face told me that she believed she’d solved a major problem.
I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen an uglier doll than the one I was holding in my hands and I’d never heard of such a strange name for a girl. Aside from Garnet’s color, I couldn’t find anything different about her from the White Cabbage Patch dolls. Her hair, her lips, her nose, and even something in the structure of her cheeks still seemed White to me. I didn’t believe the toy makers had made a new, Black doll. I was convinced they’d taken a White doll and just made it darker. Garnet was the perfect symbol of a hand-me-down life. No matter how much money my parents had, they couldn’t make the world think of us first.
My mom kept trying to fix it. When she thought I wasn’t listening, she whispered with my dad about what to do. When I reached middle school, they had a radical idea: Have her bussed to a place where they look like her, an inner-city school where she’ll be the same. There she will thrive.
So one day I got on a bus and left my affluent, predominantly White neighborhood and traveled through the military housing, the business district, the industrial part of town with its pungent odors, and into a neighborhood with two-room houses, where pit bulls roamed the streets. I was dropped off at a school where the children were locked in or bad people kept out by thick, towering black bars that enclosed the campus. Immediately, I noticed I was the same color as most of the kids at my new school, but race was the only thing we had in common, and pretty soon they noticed it, too.
With my proper English and love of Phil Collins, I was accused by my new classmates of “acting White.” It didn’t help that when my mother visited campus she drove a shiny Mercedes Benz, wore high heels, scarlet-red lipstick, and carried a different Louis Vuitton bag every time.
Many of my classes were populated with kids who had parents in prison, loved rap, knew drug dealers and gang members, wore gold chains, had relatives who’d been shot, and fiercely hated the police. What really separated us, though, was that they were comfortable in their skin, as if they had stepped out of a world where Black really was beautiful.
I didn’t get their jokes; I’d never heard of the chips they liked to eat or the grape drinks they gulped. At my old, mostly White school, I’d been different because I was Black, but at my new school I was different because I wasn’t “Black enough.”
In the summer of 2010, I found myself thinking a lot about my discomfort with other Blacks because I was planning to travel to Greenwood. During one of our nighttime calls, my dad asked me if I’d bring my
husband, Milton, and the boys to an upcoming family reunion. When I told him that we probably couldn’t afford it, he offered to pay the kids’ airfare and to find a place for us to stay with family.
My cousin Rena agreed to put us up. She was married and had one daughter. I hadn’t spoken to her since the visit to Greenwood with my sister almost fifteen years before. We pulled up in front of Rena’s house on a warm evening in June 2010. I didn’t know much about architecture, but I knew that Rena’s house was old in a special kind of way. The house had a sense of history, as if it owned itself and the people inhabiting it were just passing through. Inside there were two bedrooms, a claw-footed tub in the bathroom, and a spacious kitchen. Her husband and her daughter were there, as well as my father and his brother Roosevelt, Rena’s father.
After saying hellos, I went back out to the car to make sure we hadn’t left behind sippy cups or insect repellent. My father came with me and we talked about plans for the weekend. Rena’s husband leaned his head out the front door and asked us what kind of pizza we wanted for dinner, and I said, “Vegetarian.” The two of us proceeded to have an awkward back-and-forth exchange in an effort to understand each other. He thought I just wanted a cheese pizza. My father finally interrupted and told him to ask for tomatoes, mushrooms, and peppers. Rena’s husband took one last look at me, shook his head, and ducked back into the house.
The Song and the Silence Page 11