The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  So, when my own son hasn’t been able to sound out the word “sun,” even though he was approaching seven and I’d done years of phonics with him, images of my father and brother would creep into my mind, gripping me with panic. I would have done anything, become anyone, to help him learn to read and to shore up a good future for him. Many nights I lay in bed crying, wondering what to do.

  That’s what I thought about every time I watched the man by the river. When he expressed that it was concern for his children that kept him from embracing change, a part of me understood. If I believed—truly believed—that an act or a new law would keep my child from having a chance to learn to read, I would rage against it. If people called me a racist, backward, or ignorant, I wouldn’t have cared. If activists came into my community, I would have ignored them if I believed it would protect my children and their future.

  Every time I watched Frank’s film, I felt uncomfortable because of the man by the river. Was the seed of his complacency and unwillingness to help Blacks a twin to a seed living in me? Did love for my children mean that I had something in common with monsters?

  Descendants of Master and Slave

  The screening of Frank’s film ended. I pulled myself out of my head to look around the room and gauge the reactions of the audience. People were clapping, nodding their heads, and whispering to one another. Raymond went back up to the front of the room, where he thanked everyone and then introduced me. We asked the audience to respond to Frank’s film but also to share any memories with us that they had of Booker.

  The first person to speak was Anita Batman, a White woman with soft, short blonde hair that gently caressed her face. Behind glasses, her large eyes looked out with an almost constant expression of wonder. Softly, but with confidence, she said, “He was the nicest man I ever met.”

  Then, a White man named Hiram Eastland stood up to my right. He was wearing cream-colored pants, a matching shirt, and a blue business suit jacket. “I wasn’t privileged enough to know your granddad, Booker, but in many ways I’m glad he brought us here together tonight, and I have to say about this documentary that I was really struck by his story, how historic it is. It actually shows the beginning of open-mindedness to change.

  “I was struck by the fact that that White man in many ways was put in a position of quickly realizing how ideological it would be to not go in and have dinner with these people that had helped feed his children, who had helped raise his children. I can totally identify with that; I have a Black mother just like I have a White mother.” As he said that I glanced around the room as if the expression on a stranger’s face might provide clarification. But as Hiram went on, I realized that he’d had a mammy, a Black woman who worked full-time as a nanny in a White family.

  “And she was always determined she was going to the cotton field to compete with her sisters, and she took me with her, and some of my fondest memories are being there in the cotton fields with her and her sisters and her making me take a nap on the top of her cotton sack. I wasn’t even taller than that chair right there, and I can remember looking up through the cotton, so I know where he got those feelings to make that decision even back in 1966.”

  Before Hiram finished his last statement, a Black man named Bill Ware stood up. Bill had short hair and was wearing glasses and a Hawaiian-style button-up shirt. He said, “Let me talk about the hostility I have after hearing this man talk about Black women who neglected me to raise him. That’s an awful, awful, awful experience, especially if you’re a young Black boy running around the streets of Greenwood. My aunt [and] my mother earned two dollars a day working on Park Avenue or Grenada Boulevard or wherever they were. We suffered the indignity of having parents who couldn’t spend [the] time that they wanted to spend with us.”

  I looked around; the faces in the room were without expression. I sensed that Bill’s story was no different from ones they had either heard before or lived themselves.

  Bill went on, “I’m told that my granddaddy was freed at nine years old. How does a nine-year-old survive in the hostile county that we had in Mississippi and Leflore County? I respect the Bridge and what it does, but I still reflect often on how it could’ve been had things been different. Now, Anita tells me we watched the same guys rolling out the cotton to load them on barges to roll down the river. She skips the part where I was on the south side of the river and she was on the north side. We found ways to separate ourselves. I’m not so sure that we don’t now.”

  Smiling and nodding with affirmation, Anita responded, “Well, when Bill and I got to know each other, we started saying, ‘Remember when this and remember when that’ and he was there and I was there; we didn’t even see each other, but we lived a very parallel life growing up at the same time in Greenwood.” Then she began reflecting on the film. “I guess one thing that really touched me—and it’s not what the film meant to do—is I saw people I loved, and”—with her hands clasped to her chest—“I loved Booker and I love Stanny Saunders and I love Hardy Lott and I love Charlie Sampson; his wife taught me fifth grade.”

  When Anita was young, one of her best friends was one of the Lusco daughters. Many days after school or in the summers, she and her friends would play inside Lusco’s while the adults were trying to get everything ready before opening the restaurant up for dinner. During those days, she got to spend a lot of time with Booker. She said that he “would keep up with us and slip us snacks, and he showed us a great deal of kindness, as did some of the other men that you showed. You’re left with a feeling of, it was a really bad system, and you could see good people working well within a system that needed changing and you could see bad people working badly within a bad system that needed changing . . . There were a lot of good people caught in a system that was flawed, and they were with the best of will trying to work their way through it.”

  I felt myself nodding. I wanted to believe that, too, that it was just a handful of radicals who were to blame for one of our nation’s darkest periods. The idea comforted me because it meant the majority of people weren’t as evil as the deeds they allowed to happen in their midst. The idea also terrified me, because it meant most people lacked the will to do what they knew was right.

  Then a Black man stood up. “My name is Edward John Miller; I’m from Money, Mississippi.” My father’s hometown. I felt myself paying closer attention to him, thinking he might have some real anger, but instead he said, “The Delta is one of the best places in the world to live . . . regardless of where you live you gon’ have some difficulties, but one thang about it, one certain amount of us, once you start getting promoted, getting better jobs, you start putting your own people down ’cause you beginning to think you getting a little better than them. And you start to think if you can’t keep up with them and be in they style and then it gon’ be that kind of situation probably wherever you go at.”

  He’d opened another door—conflict between Blacks. Before I could really even process what he’d said, Hiram Eastland stood up again and turned to Bill Ware. “I just want to say that I’m really sorry it offended you that I’m talking about my Black mother, but that’s just the way it was and that’s the way it is. In fact there’s a whole movie just filmed here in Greenwood called The Help about this whole phenomenon, and what I’m about to say, I’m saying for Rosalie Lackey, because she would spank me if I didn’t say what I’m about to say.

  “The truth is that I wouldn’t take anything in the world for that relationship and that love, and I truly believe that because of relationships like that all over the Delta and all over Mississippi and all, it was people like my Black mother that planted those seeds of love that they were speaking about . . . that helped bring about that change. I love her like I love my own mother. I was there when she passed away, and I was holding Lie’s hand this past November just like I did my White mother, and she knew she was dying. I did not know this until I got to her services, but she specifically requested to ask that my brother and my sisters and I be put o
n the services as her children.”

  Bill Ware sat in his chair and said, “No apologies needed,” without looking at Hiram. I wondered if Rosalie Lackey felt as though she was able to be more of a mother to Hiram than to her own children, if she had any. I also wondered if Hiram was right. Mammies probably did help to humanize Blacks for a generation of Whites who were forced to swallow laws that expanded the rights of Black people.

  I’d read The Help, and I knew the movie had been filmed in Greenwood the previous summer. The more I thought about it, Hiram’s use of the phrases “White mother” and “Black mother” struck me as curious and beautiful. Curious because, as a mother myself, I didn’t know if I’d allow any other woman to have such a precious place in my child’s heart. But it was a thing of beauty to me that while Rosalie was away from her own children, she was able to give so much love to Hiram, a man whose uncle, Senator James Eastland, had once handed out a document in which he proclaimed Whites had the right to pursue “dead niggers.”

  Another Black man stood up. His name was Troy Brown, and he said, “I’m still pissed off.” This was followed by clapping and people saying “Mm-hmm.” It was the loudest response to any of the statements that had been made so far.

  As Brown continued, I got the impression he was enjoying his effect on the crowd. “The very people that are talking about ‘love fest,’ the very people that were oppressed in that film, are oppressing Black people right now, and they’re the same color. All you gotta do is just change the color of those White folks and make ’em Black. Something has gone wrong.”

  He’d been looking to the crowd, but then he turned to face me where I was still standing in the front of the room. “I’m happy that you’re here, because I want you to know, when this film is being shown again, that I’m holding my children responsible. I don’t want you all to be able to look back fifty years from now and see the same thing, I want it done. I want it gone. I don’t want to see little kids that have a substandard education. It’s my generation that’s having this problem with wrestling with my parents to give us the responsibility; they don’t want to let it go. They continue to want to live in the past.

  “There are people right now that don’t want Black and White . . . This organization is called the Bridge, and there are people on the Bridge who don’t want you to cross. Our wall has not come down yet in Mississippi. There are still some people who have to work those menial jobs . . . Your grandfather was better off because he owned his place. No Black gas station here; maybe one Black restaurant left.”

  He was working the room, looking around and gathering its energy. He continued in a voice that reminded me of a comic delivering a punch line. “The Indians sell soul food!”

  This brought loud laughter. “And the very people that we had this big push, big civil rights push to put Black folks at the table politically so that we can have some of the economic power—our average political leader’s car costs more than the house of the people they represent.” He said it again, only this time with even more emphasis, clearly pronouncing each word so there could be no misunderstanding.

  “Their car that they drive cost more than the average house of the people they represent. You can’t be in the majority and still blame White folks . . .” He continued as my thoughts wandered off. A local Black political leader, Senator David Jordan, was in the room that night. Was his comment about politicians driving expensive cars a shot at the senator? Brown was looking at me again.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t think your [grandfather] would be so proud, because he went through the humiliation that he had to go through so that his children wouldn’t have to go through—and you know what? Some kids of that generation are still going through the same thing, and I wish I could apologize to your grandfather myself.”

  As Troy Brown came to the end of what felt like a sermon, a thin Black woman stood up and said, “I just have a question. You’re saying the documentary is about the change that has happened since sixty-six until now. And I’ve lived the greater part of my life here, and as I look, there isn’t a whole lot of change.” She explained that when she was a child she wasn’t allowed to shop in certain parts of downtown Greenwood because of the color of her skin.

  She went on to describe life after integration. “Now, sure, we’re welcome to come over here, but what’s here for us?” She described Whites moving across the river and taking the vitality of downtown Greenwood with them. In comparing the Greenwood of the sixties to the Greenwood of today, she said, “It’s the same soup served in a different bowl. It hasn’t changed.” As she sat down the room was filling with noise, some people agreeing while others disagreed.

  Bill Ware spoke over the crowd. “Things are somewhat different.”

  The woman quickly responded, “Very little.”

  Bill Ware went on, “In the sixties, Black folk owned a lot of businesses in Greenwood. When we integrated, we were integrated out of our businesses. There were stores starting at New Zion Church down Johnson Street . . . a drug store over on Carrollton Avenue, a dentist above that. We lost our economic clout when we integrated.”

  In that instant, I felt the same way I’d felt four years earlier when Vera told me that the schools didn’t really integrate. It seemed so obvious that I was surprised it hadn’t occurred to me before. In my mind, I saw Blacks rushing with excitement in their hearts and dollars in their hands over to the stores that had once been Whites only. I could not, however, envision Whites doing the same, rushing to Black-owned businesses or taking their children to Black dentists and doctors. Of course, Black business owners would have lost a significant number of customers, not because of the quality of their services or products but because of the joyful surge their customers were experiencing, finally knowing what it felt like to have a choice.

  I learned later that Bill Ware had spent several years living in California. Eleven years after the Supreme Court ruled that school segregation was illegal, the schools were still divided along color lines, with Black kids getting the short end of the stick in regard to resources and education quality. By the mid-1960s, Bill had children of his own, children he wanted to see receive a solid education. He took his family and moved to Los Angeles, only returning to Greenwood when he was done raising his family.

  There were lots of Black families who did the same thing. They were members of the Black middle class in Greenwood. They were people who kids like my dad could look up to. They were role models and community builders, but once the promise of equality continued to get pushed farther down the line and their businesses began to suffer as more and more Blacks took their dollars to White stores, these stellar community members left.

  There was one more person who wanted to have a say that night. State Senator David Jordan stood up and said, “You cannot blame anybody but oneself.” Just as his words began to leave his mouth I could feel something in the room shift. A few people—just a few—got up to leave, but it was enough. Everyone had been holding on to something, trying to undo it, to work it out, to understand it, but when the senator stood up, I had the sense that some people just stopped trying. Somehow, he’d managed to remove all the air from the room.

  “I am responsible for myself,” the senator went on, “and my family, and to help others as well. But if you do nothing and wallow in despair and blame everybody else, that’s cursing the dark. Light a candle. I remember in the Black community when most of the homes were rented homes, but they had flower yards. They had pride. They had flower yards and they had swings and they kept that place neat.

  “Now that generation is gone, and they have turned it over to the next generation and they’ve torn it up completely. Cars parked up in the yard. So it’s a mind-set. You cannot hold anybody responsible for your welfare but you.”

  The room was mostly silent while he spoke. I got the sense he had few supporters there that night. I knew the senator still held meetings of the Voter’s League, which had begun in the early years of the movement. I wonde
red if Troy Brown, the one concerned about politicians’ salaries, had a point. Troy said that the older generation won’t let go. One thing was clear: tensions in the room were rising. Even in the silence surrounding Senator Jordan’s comments, hopelessness was coming off the people in the room like steam rising off hot pavement.

  * * *

  AFTER THE MEETING WRAPPED up, we drove through the quiet streets of Greenwood, past the buildings that looked as though they’d been built for commerce so long ago but now stood empty, with no signs above to say what they may have sold. Something tugged at me, and I had the feeling of being followed by orphans asking for change that I knew would never be enough to change the course of their lives. The empty, dilapidated buildings pulled at the edges of my sight line, willing me to look at them, to at least acknowledge that even though they were useless now, that had not always been the case.

  Almost all the businesses that were opened almost a century before during the Second Cotton Kingdom, Greenwood’s season of newness and innovation, had shut down. Most weren’t sold, they just closed their doors and went out of business. Even Fountain’s Big Busy Store’s reign had ended. Greenwood was a marvel to me. Within a few decades, the town had built itself up from just a few businesses to a bustling destination, and then, after the civil rights movement, it took just a few decades for the whole thing to crumble to the ground.