He referred to his three months in Mississippi as “a rough experience for the NBC crew. It was not a congenial atmosphere. We knew at all times that we were being trailed and watched by the Klan.”
The Tiffon, Ohio, Advertiser Tribune captured a moment in which Frank De Felitta may have been trying to explain how such conditions, such prejudices, such violence were allowed to continue for so long when he said that “Until recently . . . most responsible white citizens of the state who did not approve of the injustices and violence of this closed society remained silent.” However, it was a reporter named Eleanor Roberts with The Boston Traveler who was able to get the most intimate portrait of how Frank really felt about the motivations behind that Southern silence.
It is painful for the white man in Mississippi to adjust his thinking . . . They say we’re not prejudiced against the Negro, we like him. Yet in the next breath they add, “But why should we integrate our schools?” They complain that Negro children know all about sex and the seamy side of life by six and seven, that it would be bad to have them mix with white children at that age. But they refuse to “recognize that the Negro child’s lot is a direct consequence of the white man’s actions.”
What emerges in this documentary is a degree of inflexibility in their thinking. They find it hard to realize that their attitude towards the Negro is morally wrong.
“Every time I go over the film I get more depressed,” but by the end of the article the filmmaker acknowledged that “there is also a feeling of sorrow for the southern white man who is embroiled in this untenable situation.”
It’s difficult to know if word of these articles made their way back to the residents of Greenwood by way of calls from distant relatives or friends. The Greenwood Commonwealth only included a listing of the film with other shows scheduled to come on television that day. Regardless of whether or not Greenwood Whites were excited or apprehensive about the documentary, they treated its airing as if it was an important event.
The night Mississippi: A Self-Portrait aired, Booker was waiting tables at Lusco’s, and as usual, the restaurant was packed with customers, many of them members of the planter class. When the documentary came on, people began crowding around the extra-large black-and-white television in the foyer. Frank had edited the film in such a way that Booker’s scene delivered a potent punch, a wake-up call of sorts sent out to viewers around the country. But in Greenwood and inside Lusco’s that night, the punch was not a wake-up call. It was a devastating, leveling blow.
In an article that appeared in the Houston Chronicle, Ann Hodges described exactly what was happening in the film before Booker shared his personal story. To set it up, Hodges quotes McGhee’s assessment that many of the Whites he’d interviewed saw themselves as “the last defenders of society as they have always known it.” The article proceeds:
To prove McGhee’s thesis, the program interviewed a number of leading Mississippi citizens, including a group at a business man’s luncheon . . . “It is difficult for me to understand why the entire country is so intent on integrating our schools,” said one of them. “We don’t hate Negroes. We love them as individuals.”
But their conversation was negated by the powerful appearance of Booker Wright, a Negro restaurant owner, whose candid words packed a potent message: “Some White men are nice and some are mean.” He smiled. “Some call me Booker and some call me nigger. All that hurts, but you’ve got to smile. The meaner the man, the more you smile. Why do I do it? I got three children. I don’t want them to go through what I go through. ‘Come here, nigger, get that coffee,’ yes sir, but remember, keep that smile.”
The film was cut to make Booker’s words act as a direct response to the claim of Whites that Blacks in the Delta were happy to live in shacks, go to dilapidated schools, and live with the constant threat of violence. That night at Lusco’s the response to Booker’s words was swift and harsh. The customers he was serving began calling out, proclaiming that they didn’t want Booker to be their waiter. Then the phone began to ring. Some of Lusco’s longtime customers were calling in to say they never wanted Booker to wait on them again.
In the rising noise of the restaurant, Booker turned to its owner, Miss Marie, and said, “Well, I think it’s time for me to go.”
The dark-haired woman looked up at him and simply said, “Yes, Booker, I think it is.”
In the days that followed, newspapers from Washington State to Florida carried stories about Frank De Felitta’s cinematic achievement. Percy Shain of the Boston Herald began his article by saying, “It is hard to believe that NBC could go into the heart of Mississippi (I use the word heart advisedly) and draw from it an hour-long documentary of inspiration and hope and feeling in exploring the race issue.”
A reviewer with RTD said the documentary was “easily the best of its kind ever done on race relations in the Deep South.” Danbury, Connecticut’s News Times called it “a superb documentary which actually succeeds in telling both sides of the Civil Rights battle in a state which has the deepest traditions of the old South.”
The Flora, Illinois, News Record described the film’s tone as “a lesson in controlled good taste and careful diplomacy,” and the Atlanta Journal and Constitution called it “a many-sided and many-faceted exposition of Mississippians’ thinking,” and ended the piece by declaring that Mississippi: A Self-Portrait was “television journalism at its best.” Many of the newspapers reported on a sense of hope that ran through the documentary. A writer with the Sharon, Pennsylvania, Herald spoke of how the film sought to “keep in mind the compassion that is necessary to solve all such entangled human dilemmas.”
The majority of the stories mentioned specific scenes, and many of them referred to Booker. A newspaper out of Fort Wayne, Indiana, reported that, in an extremely telling moment, “Booker Wright, Negro restaurant owner by day and waiter by night, tells how he plays ‘Uncle Tom’ and keeps smiling so that he can earn the money to give his children an education.”
Another Indiana paper described a “wrenching moment when a Negro waiter named Booker Wright recited—in beaming, cadenced pride—a long and complicated menu, then for a moment bared his soul.” Another simply expressed that “the words of Booker Wright . . . offered material for additional exploration.” A critic for Newsday reported that one of “the most telling segments of the film” was when “a Negro waiter [was] recounting his ‘Uncle Tom’ technique,” and the Boston Herald made note of “the Negro waiter who told what was really going through his mind while he bowed and kowtowed to his clientele.”
The Philadelphia Inquirer described that in the film, “Several prejudice-denying Whites insisted that all Mississippi Negroes have always been very ‘happy,’ but one of them, a waiter, gave moving testimony of what lay behind his fixed smile.”
The Journal and Courier out of Lafayette, Indiana, focused an entire article on Booker by taking six paragraphs to print, word-for-word, what he’d said about his relationships with his customers. The Seattle Times reported that “unforgettable were the comments of a Negro who worked in his own restaurant by day and moonlighted as a waiter at a White restaurant. He insisted that however insulting his White customers might become, the one thing he had to remember was to ‘keep that smile.’ ”
For a moment in time, people throughout the country were abuzz with the words of an illiterate Black waiter from a small cotton town who’d managed to capture their hearts. Hodding Carter III would describe Booker’s scene as “the most stunning, absolutely pitch-perfect, straight-on rendition of one humiliation that was his regular existence as a waiter in that place which was of course the seg’s favorite place . . . When I saw it, I thought to myself, ‘He’s a dead man.’ ”
It turned out that Frank was right on all counts. Booker’s scene made for excellent filmmaking: It gave people insight into the deep emotional pain caused by segregationist policies, and it also put Booker in danger. Whether motivated by the initial broadcast or the way it reignited nat
ionwide critiques of White Southerners, not long after the film aired, a White cop overtook Booker one night when he was alone. The officer beat him—pistol-whipped him, to be precise. As far as anyone can tell, Booker never spoke of the broadcast or the beating, not even to his children.
Possibly because so few Blacks owned televisions, Mississippi: A Self-Portrait appeared to have gone unnoticed in Black Greenwood.
Almost thirty years later, when John T. Edge was conducting research on Lusco’s for an assignment in a graduate seminar class, he found that when he asked people “about the civil rights movement, almost without exception people told me that they remembered Booker being interviewed on the NBC news.”
Many Whites who believed they’d shared true friendship with Booker were insulted by his explanation that he only spoke the way he did to make his customers happy. It was a detail they could not or would not get beyond. They felt defrauded. They found out on national television that the one Black man they trusted, the one they saw as upstanding and respectable, had built relationships with them out of a kind of counterfeit affection.
By the end of the twentieth century, scholars viewed Greenwood, Mississippi, as a critical town during the civil rights movement. It was a town Martin Luther King Jr. visited, a place of marches, murders, and triumphs, but for local Whites it was a single man who’d gone on television and spent two minutes sharing how he felt, who was remembered long after others were forgotten.
When John T. finally saw the footage, well over a decade after he’d completed his research, he considered why Booker’s moment may have been so profound and so memorable. “Booker was not necessarily an activist, maybe Booker was a moralist. Because if you think about what he did, he spoke about how he was being treated and what he wanted for his children. He made a basic moral argument. ‘I’m being mistreated. My children don’t have the opportunities they should have. That’s what I want for the future.’ That’s a basic moral argument.”
Apparently, this simple notion was powerful. Several of the Whites John T. interviewed expressed that it was when Booker unloaded his emotional burden on the national news that “the civil rights movement came home for them; that was the moment of impact for them.”
Part Six
Mothers
It wasn’t my surface most defiled.
Eddie Vedder
A Crack in the World
When I spoke with John T. in 2007, he’d heard stories about Booker’s news appearance, but he hadn’t seen the footage himself. From what he described, I imagined a classic “man-on-the-street piece,” in which Booker was randomly stopped by a newsman who put a microphone in front of his face, and then Booker—out of anger or without thinking—made provocative statements about life in the Delta. That’s what I believed for four years until I had the opportunity to see it for myself.
I made several attempts to find the footage he’d appeared in, but always to no avail. When I first learned about Booker from John T., I started a blog where I’d post a few times a year with random updates about my search. Then in April 2011, I was contacted by a man named David Zellerford. He said he was a good friend of a filmmaker named Raymond De Felitta whose father, a retired filmmaker named Frank, was the person who’d originally filmed Booker in 1965. David had found my blog and said he had the footage of Booker appearing on NBC News. A few days later, he emailed the video file to me.
When I sat down to watch the footage, I tried to prepare myself for the shock of seeing my grandfather and hearing his voice, but I was completely unprepared for how much he revealed about himself.
After watching Booker’s monologue for the first time, I heard myself say, “This isn’t what I thought it would be. This isn’t what I thought it would be.”
My grandfather had lived a humiliated life, and whatever he experienced was so bad that he lay awake in bed at night fearing that his own children might have to go through the same thing. When Whites who thought they were friends with my grandfather referred to him as “my nigga,” he had to degrade himself by taking on a high-pitched, idiotic voice and proclaiming, “Yes, I’m yo nigga.”
It broke my heart. I was so proud of him. And I knew that he was not an accidental activist, because his interview wasn’t spontaneous. It was clear from the lighting, the camera angles, and the setup that the moment was well planned. My grandfather had the chance to think about what he would say. He took a calculated and courageous risk.
But why? He wasn’t a full-time, speech-giving activist funded by a nationwide organization. After the broadcast, he wasn’t going to be walking through town with strong Black men who’d pledged to keep him safe or moving on to give another speech in another city. Booker pulled back the curtain on his own town. He exposed the people he worked with and whose tips had helped fund his dream of restaurant ownership. He knew he’d have to face them, and he had to know they wouldn’t be happy.
It was just a moment—a beautiful, thoughtful, well-executed moment—of stark honesty in which one man who had nothing to gain removed the mask of his everyday existence to show his most basic, raw humanity, and in doing so, he was able to touch the most basic, raw humanity of everyone who saw it. Long before reading any of the news articles that came out, long before listening to anyone else describe the impact of Booker’s words, I understood their power because of how the piece touched me not as a granddaughter but as a human being.
But the question remained: Why did he do it?
I viewed the film footage over and over again, each time noting something different. One time, I noticed how closely my son resemble Booker. At the time, Dexter was four, and his thick brown skin was taut over his cheekbones. Whenever Dexter smiled, the skin on his cheeks got thinner and took on a lighter shade, making his face appear to light up from the inside. Booker’s face did the same thing.
Each time I watched him say, “Well, that’s what you have to go through with, but remember, ya gotta keep that smile,” I’d press pause and gaze into his eyes. I wondered what it would have been like to have known him, to have grown up with him in my life like my mom had. That thought always led to the sinking realization that, sooner or later, I was going to have to connect with my mom to share this with her.
* * *
MY MOM, SISTER, AND baby brother had all moved to Phoenix a few years after I did. Even though we were within an hour’s drive of one another, we almost never interacted.
The previous fall, after eighteen months of silence, she’d called to ask me if I wanted to bring the family over. She was looking at her calendar and she mentioned meeting on November 15, then said, “No, how about November 22?”
“I’m not sure about that day, November 22,” I responded.
“Oh?”
“No . . . well . . .” I held out for as long as I could, but it didn’t help her memory. Finally, I said, “That’s my birthday, and I don’t know what Milt has planned.” It had been years since she’d called or sent a card, but I never thought she’d forget on which day I’d been born. Each of those little occurrences, those minor slights, was a cut made with the finest of blades. The more time I spent with her, the more likely it was that I’d bleed out. We didn’t get together that time, and I was glad.
In the days when I was watching Booker on video over and over again, I knew I’d end up sharing it with her. Although I was reluctant to connect with my mom, I was also curious about how she would respond to the video. When I first told her in 2007 that I was looking into Booker’s life, she said wonderful things about him, but seemed to feel somehow cheated out of what the two of them could’ve shared, because she never quite got along with Honey.
Every time I watched my grandfather talk about his love for his children. I thought of my mother. I’d imagine myself being there when she watched the video for the first time. I wanted to see her face when she once again saw his. But I was afraid that I’d mess it up somehow. Maybe I’d say the wrong thing and upset her. I figured it would be easier for both of us if I just em
ailed the video file of Booker’s television appearance, but I didn’t have her email address. Four days after I first watched it, I decided to call her from the car when I only had a few minutes to talk. As I dialed, I was half hoping she wouldn’t answer.
“Hello.” She sounded as though she’d rushed to the phone. I wondered if her caller ID let her know it was me. My heart lifted. Maybe she’d missed me.
I asked her how she was. Fine. She asked me how I was. Fine. She asked about the kids. Getting bigger. Then, silence. Before the awkwardness could overtake us, I decided to tell her why I’d called. I felt a little guilty, though, because it dawned on me that she may have thought I was calling to say hello or even to reconnect.
“Remember a few years ago when I heard about your father appearing in the news?” I sounded like I was introducing a studio audience to a mystery that would begin after these messages.
“Yes,” she responded, with an equally cryptic voice.
“Well, the man who filmed it has a son, and his son’s friend called me and sent me the film.” It was clunky. I should’ve rehearsed.
“And it’s Daddy?” I’d never heard her use that word before.
My voice softened. “Yeah, Mom, it’s your dad, Booker Wright.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered.
“I can email it to you, if you’d like to see it.”
“Yeah.” She was distant. “Send it to me.” I could see the lines popping up on her forehead. I pictured her lips next to the receiver, moving without sound coming out. I wondered if I hung up right then whether she would even notice.
I spoke louder, hoping to bring her back. “I don’t have your email address, Mom. I can write it down.”
“Why don’t you and Milt and the kids come over for dinner?” Her voice was airy, like she was in a dream.
“Sure,” I heard myself say. “When would you like us to come over?” My hand, the one holding the phone, did a violent, involuntary shake. Normally I would say yes and then act as though we’d set up a time at some later, never-to-come date. Maybe some part of me was calling her bluff, seeing if she’d actually have us over.
The Song and the Silence Page 15