The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  In the years before I saw Booker’s video, when I was just beginning to learn about Black life in the South, I was sharing some of my findings with a friend. When I described Black boys not being allowed to attend a full year of school and the regular violation of Black female bodies, I called the situation a tragedy. She quickly suggested that I be more careful with my words, because for many people “tragedy” might be too strong a description.

  During those lonely summer days in Greenwood, when the intensity of the sun’s rays was never strong enough to brighten the spirit of the day, I found myself thinking a lot about what my friend said. As I drove through those stagnant, silent streets and did research at the local library and visited with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, my friend’s words kept coming back to me. After all I’d seen, I agreed with her. Somewhere there is always a more heartbreaking story.

  But this wasn’t a story from a history book or something I read in a headline and then forgot by lunch. For me, at least, Greenwood’s story was personal.

  While I understood that the system my ancestors lived through was not uniquely designed to harm only them and that, like countless others, they were caught up in the growing pains of a nation as it wrestled with its own fractured beliefs about race and difference, that knowledge was of little comfort to me, because we each get only one life. For Booker and Rosie, their lives weren’t necessarily about major political and social movements. They had their own hopes and dreams, just like everyone else—hopes and dreams they were forced to pursue as the world stood on the sidelines throwing social and economic obstacles in their paths again and again, and then ridiculing them for not achieving more, for not going farther.

  Those last few days in Greenwood, I was filled with a sense of sadness, but also a sense of wonder about who Booker and Rosie, and even my parents, might have been, the lives they could have enjoyed if they’d only lived in a world where they were seen as people, in a world that recognized their basic right to human dignity.

  Finally, the day arrived when I needed to leave. As I was driving out of town, I remembered how Greenwood had once seemed so small to me. It didn’t have a Sephora or even a Target. For as long as I could remember, I’d always viewed the town as small and simple, like a child’s puzzle that I could hold in my hands, turning it over and around to examine from any angle I chose. Before that summer, I really thought I understood the deep complexities of this place because I’d done some research. It was a foregone conclusion to me that integration was completed long ago and that what pained the town now was nothing but racism and resentment.

  I finally saw what had been right in front of my face the entire time: Greenwood didn’t truly integrate. Laws were side-stepped, new schools opened, and people moved north or out of town altogether to escape change. This idea seemed so obvious now that the town was disappearing in my rearview mirror. Greenwood wasn’t simple at all. The town had a way of casting details in a new light, revealing new dimensions to explore.

  Hours before Medgar Evers was murdered, President Kennedy spoke about the discrimination, violence, and the all-but-insurmountable economic barriers facing Blacks. The president said, “Legislation cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American in every community across our country.” When I first read that sentence, it seemed like beautiful rhetoric, a way to get people to be a little more engaged. I hadn’t yet grasped just how critical the individual citizen is when it comes to any sweeping change.

  Greenwood taught me that a new law often just serves to highlight the moment in history when someone with power decided a system was wrong. But the dates I’d memorized in school—the ones I was told were the markers of monumental victories in the Black struggle—those dates didn’t necessarily indicate the end of anything.

  Creating new laws was only the beginning. Civil rights legislation couldn’t keep one group from devaluing another; it couldn’t stop them from maintaining distance and nurturing ideas that only served to deepen divisions. No law is complex enough to address the myriad, nuanced ways in which a group of people can be systematically held back, degraded, and quietly denied the right to a life of respect, safety, prosperity, and peace.

  The Greenwood I was leaving that day was like an excavated city, half-destroyed by a human disaster, its remains serving as the archaeological evidence of what happens when integration is piecemeal at best, when people change laws without changing themselves. Half of Greenwood was as beautiful as a living dream; the other half was as warped and twisted as the vilest corners of the human heart.

  As I turned onto the road that would lead me out of town, I expected myself to be overcome with sadness about the reality of the place I was from, but I wasn’t. If nothing else could be said, I now knew my place in the grand story, and my children would know theirs.

  Thinking of my two sons made my throat tighten. When I’d first learned about Booker, it was during a time in my life when I was pretty convinced that I’d come from nothing, that I’d come from people who didn’t care about family at all. Raising my own kids had often felt like trying to write a symphony after just a few music lessons.

  I’d had no idea that I came through a tradition of overcomers. I’d had no idea of the trauma, the pain, and the horrors they’d survived.

  Eventually, I was on a road that reminded me of the night my aunt had driven my sister and me from the airport into Greenwood. It was a lonely road flanked by trees so tall they seemed to skim the sky. I pulled the car over, climbed out, and sat on the hood.

  Wind was rustling through the leaves, and I knew I was not alone. As I sat there, looking up into the trees, searching them with my eyes, I knew there was something alive in Greenwood, an inherent paradox, a sorrowful spirit that had haunted me and called me home. Greenwood is where I’m from, both figuratively and literally. I will always wear its mark.

  After a few more minutes, I climbed back into my car and started driving. I felt small next to those trees, but not afraid like I had when I was younger. This time I felt saved.

  To me, those trees were generations of aged mothers and fathers watching over me, their legacy. The trees were so close together. All I could see up ahead, and all I could see in my rearview mirror, was a wall of green. It felt as though the dense trees were momentarily parting to allow me to pass before quickly coming back together again.

  I thought of the fields, the ones hidden behind the trees. I imagined men, women, and children dressed in rags, stooped over and dripping with sweat from the relentless heat, all the while singing the blues. Strangely, for the first time, that image wasn’t distressing. It comforted me, and I knew then what I had never known before.

  The song of the slave is my soul’s lullaby.

  And then I heard myself say, “There is magic here.”

  Part Nine

  Inheritance

  Did I learn of roses and aircraft and snowfall because my mother’s dreams had traveled her body with their images intact and electric and full of messages from the outside world?

  Pat Conroy

  The Lords of Discipline

  Booker’s Song

  I have four film clips of Booker, three of which have no sound. The soundless clips are all from the Lusco family’s collection of home videos. Two of them appear to have been taken around the same time, possibly in the 1950s when Booker was in his late twenties or early thirties.

  In one, he’s hanging out in the kitchen with some other men who are all White. Everyone, including Booker, is passing a cup around and taking sips from it. Their reactions are humorous. Either the drink is strong and sour or just disgusting. Whoever has the camera is capturing their scrunched-up faces after each sip. They’re all laughing. Booker spits his out in the sink. The video feels like a bunch of coworkers letting loose after work.

  The other video from about that same time period is one of Booker and Andy Pinkston. Andy is in Booker’s arms. The little boy is too shy to look up at the camera, until Booker t
ickles him and gets him to laugh and look into the lens. The trust that flows between Andy and Booker in those few moments is almost palpable. Booker is comforting Andy with his body and coaxing him gently, giving the child a kind of affection Booker himself may have only ever received in the earliest years of his life from Rosie.

  In the last film clip, Booker is dancing at what appears to be a family Christmas gathering, recorded not long before Booker’s appearance in Frank’s film, in the early 1960s, when the citizens of Greenwood—both Black and White—were being forced to choose sides. There’s something awkward about the footage. People appear to be dancing, celebrating, but Booker isn’t joining in. When he does join, he seems reluctant, as if he doesn’t really want to. The setting of the film clip is relaxed, but something in Booker’s face belies discomfort. It’s subtle, but it’s definitely there. He is unsettled.

  I have two digital audio recorders filled with conversations I’ve had about Booker, in addition to all the interviews Raymond and his crew captured on film. Plus, I can’t even begin to quantify all the phone conversations and unplanned moments I’ve had in which people shared their memories of my grandfather with me.

  From what I can tell, aside from what he said in Frank’s film, most of which was about his customers, Booker never uttered a single unkind word about the Lusco family.

  I don’t know why. Maybe because they were there, even if it was only about physical proximity, when Booker was a boy, all alone, struggling to make it. They were there when he fell in love, became a father, got divorced, and then fell in love again. They were there when he opened Booker’s Place, a restaurant of his own. For twenty-five years, the Lusco family, and at least a few of their regular customers, were the only constants in his life.

  Booker understood something that I hadn’t even begun to consider until I met Noll Davis, and didn’t fully grasp until sometime later. Empathy is powerful. When Booker appeared in Frank’s documentary, he set alight a fire of compassion in the souls of complete strangers throughout the nation. He didn’t speak about voting rights or access to public spaces, as important as those issues were—instead he won them over with his vulnerability. He stood in front of a camera and revealed the deepest parts of himself as if he believed that if people could really see him, really understand what it felt like to be Black in his world, that it would arouse in them not just sorrow but indignation and a commitment to action as well.

  More than anything, I wanted to be just like him.

  In the years that followed my summer in the Delta, I returned to Greenwood again and again. I was delighted with what I’d learned about Booker, but what I saw in him so amazed me that I continued to long for more. More memories, more stories, more pieces of him from the people, both Black and White, who were blessed enough to have known him.

  On one of those trips, I spent a long, lazy afternoon with a woman whose name I won’t mention. She’d grown up in Greenwood and moved away, only to return later in her life. Her house was filled with her mother’s paintings. Every wall in the living room and hall had paintings hung from the ceiling on down. More paintings lined the floor, leaning up against the wall. Others, which weren’t in frames, were stacked on tables.

  She’d known Booker when she was as child. She’d been friends with some of the Lusco girls and would often play in the restaurant before it opened in the afternoons when school had let out. She told me about how Booker played with the children and helped to take care of them. I smiled and tucked away a pretend memory of me at five years of age playing with Booker.

  Toward the end of our time together, we were saying our good-byes and I was walking behind her as she led me to her front door when I heard her say, “You must miss him very much.”

  I was surprised. We’d been together for hours, and somehow I’d failed to mention that I had never met Booker. I told her he died before I was born. She immediately spun around and exclaimed, “Oh, no!”

  For a beat longer than was comfortable, she just stared at me. Then she said, “My mother was not a woman of touch. She rarely hugged me. What I remember about Booker is that he would hug us and he would play with us.”

  I wasn’t sure if it was what she’d said or how she’d said it, but I felt a rush of emotion as I held her gaze, which, for a moment, was flooded with grief.

  She lived on an incredibly quiet tree-lined street just west of the lovely oaks that still line Grand Boulevard in North Greenwood. As I drove off, the only sound I heard was the crunching of dried leaves that had fallen on the ground. Like in my meeting with Noll Davis, she’d tripped up and said a few things she probably didn’t mean to. While trying to convince me that Greenwood was no longer segregated, she explained how several Black families had moved into her neighborhood. “My friends ask me why I don’t move over to the other side of Grand to get away from them, but they’re good—”

  She stopped herself and then said, “People don’t come in good or bad.” I wondered if she was going to say that her neighbors were “good niggas,” as some of Booker’s customers said about him so many years ago. She tensed up, as if she feared I might call her out on what she’d almost said. But I didn’t.

  I was trying to be like Booker. I was struggling to look straight on, without a filter, at a woman who’d missed the deep suffering that had taken place right in front of her. As she tried to convince me that everything in Greenwood had changed, I did something that she and so many others had refused to do for people like me, for Rosie, or for Booker. I chose to see her—her flaws, her prejudice, and her humanity—whether or not she chose to see me. My choice had nothing to do with her and everything to do with the kind of person I was choosing to be.

  I was still wrestling with—and may always wrestle with—my feelings toward Whites who did next to nothing to help Blacks, who continue to look back on their own biographies through a filter of good intentions. I’d just finished reading Sara Criss’s memoirs of the civil rights movement. At one point she described “Negro crowds gathering in front of White-owned stores in their section of town and taunting the owners.” When describing the Blacks who were determined to integrate the Lefore Theater and the Whites who didn’t want it integrated at all, Sara referred to them as two “groups who were trying to stir up trouble,” making life difficult for the “decent, respectable citizens” of Greenwood.

  Sara wrote her memoirs in the 1990s, and historian Charles M. Payne published I’ve Got the Light of Freedom in 1995. While Payne was looking back and seeing activists, Sara still saw taunting and people stirring up trouble. It’s as if she was stuck in the emotions she felt when she was driving down Grand Boulevard on April 1, 1963—lamenting the loss of the town she loved so dearly and hoping against hope that things could just go back to being the way they were before.

  With the hindsight of decades, she still missed that, at its core, the civil rights movement wasn’t about going to the movies or sitting in the front of a bus. For many, it was about having the ability, the right, the dignity to go or to sit anywhere that anyone else could. She spent her entire life living among people of color but still somehow had managed to miss their basic humanity. Sara loved her family, wanted to protect it, and had dreams for her children. Like many others in her community, she seemed blind to the simple fact that Blacks had the same dreams.

  While Sara raised her own children on a modest budget, many of her contemporaries were enjoying lives of comfort, seasoned with extras like bridge and garden clubs, mentions in the society pages, live-in maids and childcare providers, lavish parties, country club memberships, vacation homes, and much, much more. The Southern way of life was an expensive way of life. Maintaining its accoutrements required a class of people who would work without complaint under unfair labor practices and squalid living conditions.

  It’s true that many Blacks were silent about the harsh working conditions, the lack of investment in educating their children, and the general absence of respect and dignity they received from society.
r />   But their silence did not equal consent.

  As Southern Whites were building economic security for their own families, there must have been moments in which something from deep inside themselves cried out, reverberating like a never-ending echo, originating in a shared sense of humanity. It was this very thing, this sense of commonality—as seen in human longing, the capacity for hope, the slow-healing nature of wounds inflicted by humiliation, the natural inclination to flinch at pain and retreat from violence, the persistent nature of shame, the sense of healing that comes from free-flowing laughter, the colossal feelings of impotence felt when one cannot protect their own children, and so much more—it was this unchanging undercurrent of human life that Booker so deftly connected to in strangers far and wide. My grandfather spoke to something alive in each of us that, like the green foliage that blanketed his town, always, always bends toward the light.

  I wasn’t sure if it was a daily act or something that occurred here and there over a lifetime, but I was becoming more and more convinced that at some point, Whites were faced with a choice. They had to choose to either act upon or ignore the basic and obvious fact that no one would be forever content with the life forced on Blacks by the South’s economic structure and unpunished racial crimes.

  After I returned home, I began sharing my experiences with people, and there were two responses I encountered again and again. The first was a discussion about whether or not looking back was worthwhile. People would ask, “What good does it do to resurrect the past?” “Why not just celebrate how much the world has changed since Booker was growing up in the Mississippi Delta?”