“How about the third Sunday in April?”
“Sure.”
She gave me both of her addresses, email and home. I wrote them down in the car, and when I got back to my house, I emailed her the video file.
I closed my laptop. In the time and silence that had grown between us, I’d removed my mom from the parts of my life that mattered to me by not telling her about them. She never asked and I never offered details about my children, my marriage, my work, my neighborhood, my friends, my hobbies, or anything else. Every new thing that came into my world made me more of a stranger to her because she had no knowledge of it. While I hadn’t intentionally constructed the distance between us, I enjoyed being free from feelings of rejection. I’d forgotten to miss her, and I’d stopped being paralyzed by her absence.
I glanced at my closed computer and wondered if I’d left the back door to my life unlocked.
* * *
WE WENT TO MY mom’s house on a Sunday afternoon. When she opened the door, I couldn’t believe what I saw. She had changed so much. She’d lost a lot of weight and looked tired, older. She was wearing a wig and lipstick, but no other makeup. Her eyes looked like someone else’s. Throughout the afternoon, she maintained a warm smile and made awkward jokes that Milton and I were quick to laugh at.
Bishop was excited about meeting my mother. He acted as if she was a new toy, something he wanted to spend hours playing with. Every time she asked either of the boys a question, Bishop would answer with a lively smile dancing on his lips. Dexter was quiet. When she hugged him, he pulled away and leaned into me and told me in a whisper that she smelled funny.
I felt strange around my mom. To me, motherhood was invigorating. I loved my sons with a love that was more than love. I often told them that if my affection for them was a sound, it would be so loud that it would leave a crack in the world. Everything on earth would shift, skyscrapers would collapse into the sea, sleeping volcanos would erupt, and rain would cease to fall because my love for them was greater than any planet could contain.
When I tickled them, I’d say between giggles, “Remember how big my love for you is.” When they were drifting off to sleep, I’d lean in close and whisper, “My love for you knows no bounds.” When they were wiping their mouths on their sleeves, I’d kiss the tops of their heads and say, “I can’t believe how lucky I am to have you as my sons.”
Becoming a mom had awakened a strength in me that I hadn’t known before. Mother love is primal. Indestructible. Yet here was this woman who’d become a stranger to me because she didn’t feel like picking up the phone and dialing my number. I pushed against the temptation to feel all the things I’d felt as a girl—that something must be profoundly wrong with me, something so terrible that it could destroy the most powerful thing in the universe, a mother’s love.
As we ate our lunch, a familiar feeling was coming. I could sense it, smell it in the air like a wave moving toward land. Worthlessness wanted to wash me away. Seeing my mom live a life without me, as if she’d never given birth to me, was painful. I couldn’t detect anything in her tone, in her eyes, or her movements to indicate that she’d missed me at all. I focused instead on what was wrong with her. I searched for her flaws so that I could convince myself that I didn’t want her love anyway.
The kids finished eating before we did, and my mom said, “I’ve got a new movie, Rio. How about I put it on for the kids?”
“That’s okay, I brought toys for them,” I said. I didn’t like for my kids to watch too much television and they never watched movies before I’d researched their content on different parenting sites. Plus, letting her know that my kids were smart enough to entertain themselves felt like a jab to her parenting abilities. I started pulling their toys out while my mom walked over to the television. She turned on Rio. Bishop rushed over to watch it and Dexter followed suit.
“It looks like they want to watch it, Yvette,” she said. I tried to smile as I repacked their toys. My mom, Milton, and I continued to eat while the kids watched the movie. Milt talked about his students and we listened intently. I was thankful someone else was there to keep my mom and me from falling into silence. I wanted to ask questions about Booker and about Greenwood, but I hadn’t written anything down and, for whatever reason, sitting there that day it felt strange to talk about Booker or Greenwood. The two of us never talked about race or about anything vaguely related to it. That Booker’s story was centered on his experiences as a Black man in the South was undeniable. So, even if we did want to talk deeply about him, the roles we’d assigned for ourselves over the years made it almost impossible. My mother and I did not talk about race.
Most of the afternoon it felt as if we were together but trying to avoid land mines. The conversation never dipped below the surface. When the credits on Rio began to roll, Milton and I began gathering the children’s things. Bishop and Dexter said good-bye to their grandmother. When we were walking to our minivan, my mom followed. She and I made promises to do it again.
As we drove away, I thought about the afternoon I’d just spent with my mom. We were family, but we communicated as if we were citizens from warring nations, loyal to the cause, turning every single interaction into an opportunity to fight or defend.
Had we ever been close? I thought about the moments I’d shared with my children when they were newborns, the ones they’ll never remember. Moments of tenderness, cuddles, holding up their heads when their little necks were still too weak to do it on their own.
Surely my mother and I had moments like that. There must have been a time when we were citizens of the same nation, before the ground we were standing on began to shift. When did we become so different?
When I’d gone back to Greenwood, almost a decade before, I’d walked into a JCPenny and was greeted by a cashier with bright eyes and a shocked expression on her face. “You must be Kathereen’s daughter!” It took me a second to remember that was how people in Greenwood said my mom’s name: “Kath-er-een.”
We still looked like sisters, but my mother was reared in the South and had chosen to raise me in the West. In California, where the sun is always shining, I never understood why she turned so many things into a cause to fight for, why she saw race in simple everyday interactions when I did not. The tectonic plates below our feet had shifted. Now we were standing on either side of an angry sea, staring at each other from distant islands.
I thought of Booker. The way some of his customers spoke to him, their tone and demeanor, and oftentimes their choice of incendiary language, were all drenched in racial stereotypes, power, and hate. If he was a stranger and he’d come to me to share the pain he felt because of the treatment of his customers, would I have understood, or would I have accused him of taking a small thing and making it about race?
A Specific Kind of Pain
The lunch at my mom’s house brought back so many things for me. I’d forgotten how difficult it was for us to be around each other. I’d also managed to forget how much I used to long for her affection. I spent almost every day in April 2011 wondering not so much what I’d find as I looked deeper into Booker’s life but how those findings would make me feel. The only way I knew how to make it through life was to look away from family pain. Yet here I was embarking on an effort to stare it right in the face.
A few weeks later, I met the two men responsible for sending me the footage of Booker, Raymond De Felitta, Frank’s son, and one of his producing partners, David Zellerford. They flew into Phoenix for a day so that we could meet and talk over breakfast. David was slender, with thinning blond hair. Raymond had a thick mane of wavy salt-and-pepper hair. Everything about Raymond—from his smile to his tone of voice to the warmth in his eyes to how he talked by waving his hands in large arcs—was disarming. He was quick to laugh at himself and told stories about conversations he’d had with famous people like John Travolta and Mark Harmon with a casualness that made it seem normal. We hit it off.
Just as I was wanting to learn more
about Booker, Raymond was also curious about who his father had been four decades before when he’d made the choice to travel into the Delta to capture the deeper story of the movement. Raymond told me that Mississippi: A Self-Portrait only aired once because some of the affiliates in the Southern states complained about the content. So, aside from the people who’d been watching that night and the members of Frank’s family, no one else had seen the film since the day it aired in 1966.
Afterward, Frank made a few more documentaries for NBC before becoming a full-time novel writer and filmmaker. When Raymond was a kid, Frank would often call the family together to have them watch his documentaries, since there was no longer an audience for them. Whenever he showed the Mississippi film, he would say, “Watch this, look at what Booker gave me. Look at what he did for me.” So, Raymond had grown up with Booker’s name as part of his childhood, knowing that it was connected to the man his father used to be.
Toward the end of our lunch together, Raymond reached over, touched my arm, and said, “I want to make a documentary about Booker’s life, and I don’t want to do it without you.” He explained that we’d conduct research and interview people, only we’d be doing it on camera. I was ecstatic.
While we ate, Raymond shared what his father had told him about Booker and their encounter in the 1960s. In turn, I decided to share with Raymond what I’d learned about Booker from his second wife, Honey. I told him about how Rosie had lost Booker, how Booker longed for her his whole life, and then how Booker finally found his mother.
* * *
AS HE GREW OLDER, Booker often found himself wondering about the type of woman his mother was, what kind of person would abandon her own child that way. Had she been young? Single? Slowly, he began to pull together what little he knew of her. Since it was while they were still living in Grenada when the Wrights discovered Booker on their doorstep, the young restaurant owner figured that his mother was probably also residing in Grenada at that time. Grenada had a population of about four thousand residents in 1930, when Booker would have been about four years old, so it was possible—not likely, but possible—that someone in the Black community might recall a woman who had a child one day and then didn’t the next.
In the 1960s, Blacks from all over Mississippi often traveled to Greenwood, and most made it a point to visit Booker’s restaurant. There was one young woman who frequently made the trip from her hometown of Grenada to go shopping, and she always made it a point to stop in at Booker’s Place. Each time she came in, Booker would ask her if she knew anything about his mother. Her answer was always “no” or “I don’t know, sir.” She would remind Booker that she wasn’t old enough to have known his mother, but Booker was undeterred. Eventually, he wore her down. One day when he asked the girl about his mother, she gave a different reply. This time she said, “I’m gonna ask my mother when I go back. I don’t know, but she might know.”
Elated, Booker asked her to have her mother call if she did happen to remember anything that might be useful in his search. “She can call me collect,” he said repeatedly. When the girl went back to Grenada, she provided her mother with the few details Booker had given her about the woman he was searching for.
Her mother said, “Yeah, I know this lady.”
The following Sunday, the girl’s mother called from Grenada and spoke to Honey. She explained that years ago, there was a man trying to date two girls at once, and one of the girls may have been Booker’s mother.
“Where did that woman go?” Honey asked her.
“She went to Gulfport somewhere,” the woman told Honey, “but she [Booker’s mother] got a sister, a daughter or somebody live up the street up there.” After they hung up the phone, the woman asked around and was able to find out where Booker’s relative worked. Her name was Julia, and she was a teacher at a school in Grenada.
When Honey saw Booker again, she told him everything she’d learned on the call. He said, “You call her back and tell her we’ll be up there in the morning. Tell her we’ll go there about seven o’clock.”
The next morning when they woke up, Booker told Honey to “call and tell everyone they don’t need to come to work because it might be twelve o’clock before we get back, and we can open then.” Honey made the calls; then she and Booker got in the car and drove to Grenada, arriving at 6:45 a.m.
When they pulled up to the house, Honey said, “Booker, we can’t go to nobody’s house this early. Everybody don’t get up as early as we do, now.” So the two of them drove around, and when it was seven o’clock, they knocked on the woman’s door. She told them that she thought Julia was either Booker’s mother’s niece or cousin.
“Will you come with us?” Booker asked.
“Yeah, I’ll go with y’all,” she said. The three of them loaded into Booker’s car, went to the school where Julia worked, and headed straight for the principal’s office, where they asked if they could speak to her. The principal took the three of them down to her classroom. He had them wait in the hall while he went inside to let Julia know that someone was there to speak to her.
After a few moments, Julia came out, and right there in the hall, Booker shared with her the few details he knew about his mother. Julia remembered that her own mother had told her years before that her sister’s son had had to go to the doctor to have a sore lanced. While Booker had no recollection of Julia, he still had a vague memory of the lancing procedure.
“Well, do you know where she at?” Booker asked.
“Yes.” Julia told him that his mother was living in Chicago.
“Has you got her number?” Booker asked.
“Yeah, but it’s a neighborhood number where she gets her calls at, and she work. I don’t think she’ll be home until five o’clock in the evening; that’s when she get off.”
“Well, you give her my number, tell her to call me, call me collect. I’ll pay for it,” Booker replied, and then turned to Honey and said, “I’m going back to Lusco’s and I’m gonna tell ’em that I won’t be at work today.”
That evening, while he waited for Rosie to call, Booker was a bundle of nerves. The telephone at Booker’s Place was back near the bathrooms. It was a public phone, and anyone could make calls on it using their own money. As five o’clock approached, Booker took a seat on the stool next to the phone. A few times, customers came back to use it, but Booker looked up and said, “No, y’all can’t use the phone now. Can’t use the phone.”
The clock struck five o’clock, but the phone did not ring.
“It’s five o’clock, she ain’t called,” he said to Honey.
“Well, maybe she got to get off of work maybe and come home,” Honey replied. “Give her a little time.” But he wanted her right then.
About thirty more minutes passed, moving as slow as molasses, before the phone rang. Booker looked at Honey and cried, “You answer it!” Honey picked up the phone and nodded at Booker. It was her. It was Rosie.
Booker began to cry. He took the phone from Honey, and after a few words said, “I thought you didn’t want me and just throwed me away, I never would see you no more.”
After several minutes he said, “Look, I’m a let you talk to my wife, now you give her the telephone number and everything and you call me collect. Look, when you coming down here?”
Rosie told Booker that she’d have to wait at least two weeks before traveling to Greenwood because she had to give notice at her job before taking a vacation.
“Well, you just come on, I’m a send you the money and everything,” Booker told her.
Honey said, “Look, people can’t just do like you think they can. That’s her job. She got to let them know.”
Booker handed Honey the phone, and she spoke with Rosie, who was also crying. Then Honey handed the phone back to Booker, who talked and cried, and then handed the phone back to Honey. They did this over and over again.
When Honey was on the phone with her, Rosie tried to explain that she never wanted to leave Booker.
“I understand,” Honey told her.
“Well, he doesn’t,” Rosie cried.
“He’s just upset because he’s been wanting to see you so much,” Honey said, trying to soothe her. “Night after night he always talked about he wish he could find his mama. He reckon his mama was dead, his mama didn’t care nothin’ about him.”
But Rosie explained to Honey about the White man that was coming to whip her and how she feared they might also whip Booker.
After a few more minutes of conversation, they said their good-byes. The following night Rosie called again and told Booker she’d made the arrangements with her job to take time off, and Booker told her he would send her the money for her trip down to Greenwood. Mother and son talked for so long that night on the phone that Honey finally said to Booker, “Now you got to let her go to bed, ’cause she got to get up and go to work in the morning.”
The next day, Honey went to the bank and withdrew travel money for Rosie.
Every night, until she left Chicago for Greenwood, Rosie and Booker spoke on the phone and reviewed the plans for her trip. Finally, the day came for Booker and Rosie to meet face-to-face. He invited a crowd of people to a party he was planning to throw at the restaurant that afternoon. He and Honey prepared dishes all morning long, but at 3:00 p.m. they closed Booker’s Place and, along with one of their friends, got in the car and headed for the train station.
When the train pulled in, Booker began making his way toward it, pushing past people so that he could be in front when the doors opened. There was something comical about the way Booker just assumed that his mother would be the first one off the train. His unrestrained eagerness was almost childish, clearly hopeful, and infinitely sad.
The Song and the Silence Page 16