The Song and the Silence

by Yvette Johnson

  The world has changed.

  Decades ago, even while being made rich by Black labor, Senator James Eastland alluded to a yet-to-come season in human events when it would be “necessary to abolish the Negro race.” It’s no wonder that many viewed Eastland as the perfect representation of racial hatred. But he was also a practiced expert in the exploitation of Black workers. In 1961, Eastland spent “$566,000 to produce his cotton for a profit of $324,000 (equal to $2,130,000 in 2006). This represents profit of 57%.” While traveling throughout the nation and making speeches about imagined deficiencies in the basic nature of Blacks, it was Black men, women, and children who were building his empire. Working on his farm for “30 cents an hour,” or “$3.00 for a 10-hour day, $18.00 for a six-day, 60-hour week.”

  In spite of this gross history of injustice, it’s been said that even Senator Eastland had a change of heart after the civil rights movement. The vile rhetoric he spewed against Blacks slowly eroded as he aged. Many argued that Eastland’s shift was made to keep himself alive politically, but others close to him believe his softening was sincere.

  The spark that set the civil rights movement aflame has undergone a change of its own—a change to the story. Carolyn Bryant, the woman whose words led to her husband brutalizing and then murdering fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1954, recanted her courtroom testimony six decades after the fact. Her admission that she’d lied on the stand cast even further doubt on the notion that Till did anything at all on that fateful day in her store. Bryant had managed to essentially avoid publicity in the years after the trial. Nevertheless, she chose to revisit the story. I found myself wondering why. She was free from it, free from responsibility, free from public disgrace.

  Maybe Carolyn Bryant’s freedom belied an internal punishment of memory.

  Just as some things changed, others were exactly the same.

  In the summer of 2012, a reporter for the Greenwood Commonwealth interviewed Judge Gray Evans, who once again spoke of his recollections of what happened to my grandfather at the hands of a police officer, someone who was supposed to protect and serve. Evans said that on the night in question, Curtis Underwood “was on a motorcycle” and that “he stopped and just beat the hell out of Booker. For no reason. There were no words spoken. Nothing. And he was not prosecuted for it.”

  Evans also shed some light on why he didn’t do something himself about the violence perpetrated against my grandfather all those years ago. The retired judge explained that he was instructed by both the chief of police and the city judge “to let the matter drop.”

  The officer, Curtis Underwood, was still alive and resided in a town about forty-five minutes outside Greenwood. The reporter reached out to him, and about the Judge’s claim that he’d beaten my grandfather, Underwood said, “I never touched him. He should have been. He was drunk as could be. It was a heck of a confrontation, but he was not touched.” Maybe to make his position abundantly clear, Underwood went on to explain to the reporter that Booker “was not a bit more pistol-whipped by me than you were pistol-whipped by me.”

  And so it goes. If some are marked by nostalgia, others shame, and others regret, maybe some continue to be inflamed by the fires of change that came along and swept Greenwood up, dreams and all.

  * * *

  THE OTHER RESPONSE I received again and again when I returned home from Greenwood and began sharing the experience with people was a critical assessment of White Southerners. While shaking their heads and making “tsk” sounds to highlight their disapproval, I found people who were eager to make declarative statements about the basic nature of White Southerners.

  They were convinced that, had they been the ones living in Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, or any of the other states where tangible and intangible crimes against Blacks flourished, they would have taken up the cause. They believed, without a doubt, that they would have done the right thing. From their vantage point, it was a given that Southern Whites were despicable and their actions unfathomable.

  I couldn’t keep myself from wondering how this blanket assessment was any different from Eastland’s proclamations about Blacks all those decades ago.

  Sometimes if I was having this conversation with someone at a play date, art class, or other homeschooling activity, I’d look over to where our kids were playing together and I’d wonder if they really would have taken their blond-haired, blue-eyed children across the tracks to live in the rundown shacks in Black neighborhoods, where they’d attend ill-equipped schools with poorly trained teachers and outdated materials. Would they use their children as an experiment to find out if the dishonest propaganda was really true, that Blacks were oversexed and intellectually inferior?

  They assume that I hate Southern Whites, and that I enjoy disparaging them, but I don’t. I’d spent my entire life lamenting the emptiness I felt because I wasn’t close to my family. In White Southerners I saw lovers of family running scared, threatened by false ideas, haunted by the atrocities their ancestors committed, who were spending their energy standing in resistance to change, all in an effort to preserve a way of life that died long ago and that was always perverted with injustice. The meeting I had that afternoon with the woman who didn’t realize I’d never met Booker was not a singular event. The way the two of us shared a deeply emotional moment even though we hardly knew each other was something I experienced over and over again with White Southerners.

  When I met Whites who’d known Booker, their faces would light up at the memory of my grandfather singing the menu. I believed, because I could feel it, that some of them had true affection for him. It was a complicated kind of affection to be sure, one that had to be marred with shame and regret as the shifting world around them made it impossible to continue denying the infectious strain of cruelty and inhumanity in the town they cherished and adored.

  In spite of the emotional history that will always hang between me and the White citizens of Greenwood, the honest truth is that I can’t help but love anyone who loved Booker Wright. Their affection for him—their sweet, unchanging, delightful affection for him—wins me over every time.

  Remembering

  By 2012 I was thinking seriously about writing a book, and I wanted to look more closely at the work Raymond and I had done together in Greenwood, so he arranged for me to have access to all the interviews we’d filmed. One afternoon, I was sifting through some files when I came across an interview we’d done with my mother. We’d shot it in a restaurant the day after my meeting with Noll Davis.

  Whenever I was in Greenwood, I struggled to place my mother there. Even though my father hadn’t lived in Greenwood in four decades, he was clearly comfortable in the Delta. He had a persona, a way of relating to his hometown that he could slip on, and it fit just like a glove.

  My mother, on the other hand, seemed stifled by the Delta, as if she’d never been anyplace so small, so dusty, or so poor. Mississippi seemed to assault her senses. I often caught her smiling politely at people as if to avoid hurting the feelings of the desperate souls who actually had to live there.

  As I watched the clip, I remembered the moment she walked into the restaurant looking like she’d just stepped out of a magazine. Her hair was shiny and thick, her eyes barely peeking out from beneath a layer of black bangs. Her high, well-defined cheekbones held the perfect amount of blush, as though carefully placed there by an expert makeup artist. She moved gracefully in her high heels and seemed to shift the weight of every room she entered with an irresistible gravity. My mother was sixty-one years old, and she was simply stunning. At one point, when she was out of earshot, a member of the crew—who was twenty years younger than she—asked me if she was single.

  Raymond and I sat down on one side of a table facing my mom and my aunt Vera. The two of them wore coordinating outfits of dark blue. The table was set up to look like we were eating lunch. Delta-style tamales, indecipherable from soggy cigars, lay ignored on oval-shaped, beige-spotted plates before us. Napkins, wate
r glasses, coffee mugs, and a randomly placed bottle of orange soda crowded the tabletop.

  The crew was silent, ghostlike. Nevertheless, like everyone else we’d interviewed before them, my mother and aunt were painfully aware of the large camera pointed toward their faces and the microphone wires that snaked beneath their clothes. With Raymond’s disarming demeanor, they both eventually relaxed, and we all descended into a moment. My mom and Vera shared stories about their father that I’d never heard before. They laughed and cried, and for a sliver of time, we felt like family.

  Raymond wanted to learn what Booker shared with them in regard to his views on civil rights. My mother explained that her father shielded them from what was happening in their town. They spent most of their time in a community that Whites never entered; therefore, they had little experience with being made to feel ashamed because of the color of their skin.

  “When we were with him,” Vera said, “he was always so happy, no matter what was going on. He always had that smile. Always. He was famous for that smile. When we were younger, we went to the elementary school that was actually right down the street from the café, McLaurin Elementary School.”

  “Right down the street. McLaurin Elementary,” my mom joined in.

  “And when we would get out of school, sometimes in the afternoon we would go down there,” Vera went on. “So, he would always tell us, you know, to make sure when we cross the street that we’re careful. So we cross the street . . . when we would get halfway down that walk, we could see Daddy standing in front of the café. He would stand there and we’d just be walking, and then when we get almost there, he would hold his arms like this”—she spread her arms out as wide as she could—“and then Kat and I would just run and jump in his arms, and he’d just grab both of us and hold us together, and then he’d—”

  “Twirl us around,” my mother said, leaning her head back and smiling.

  “Twirl us around,” Vera continued, “and he did that all the time. Whenever we came down that walk, we couldn’t wait, because we knew he was going to have open arms.”

  I rewound the clip and watched it over and over again. I’d never before heard my mother speak of her father with such affection.

  * * *

  ONE AFTERNOON WHILE VISITING Greenwood, I decided to stop by the house where my mother was raised. I entered Baptist Town and drove past one of the other suspected burial sites for Robert Johnson, and past the large building of McKinney Chapel Baptist Church, built in the late 1800s and after which the neighborhood was nicknamed. The houses and buildings in Baptist Town were among some of the most run-down in Greenwood.

  I slowed my car down as kids rode bikes and played chase on the road in front of me. The day wore a heavy silence, but the smiling children and the ever-growing bushes, trees, and vines that crept up walls, shaded porches, and cradled the lives of the citizens of Baptist Town were like a crown of defiance in an image of deep poverty. As the last child passed my car, I made a right turn onto McConnell.

  There were only two, maybe three housing plots on the street before it dead-ended. Her house was supposed to be the last one on the left. When I pulled up to it, I gasped and heard myself say, “They’re tearing it down.” It wasn’t until I was standing right there, in the place where a house should be, that I remembered my mother telling me during our preproduction conversations that the house she’d grown up in was condemned by the city and that she and all her siblings were pulling together the money to pay for it to be demolished.

  The house was now a large mound of debris. Wood pieces that were once part of the walls, the floor, or the porch had been ripped or shredded into varying shapes and sizes and then tossed onto the ground. Mixed in with the scattered pieces of my mother’s childhood home were leaves and chunks of branches from recently chopped-down trees. All of this was covered with hunks of wet paper, fabric, and other detritus. That expanse of disorganized destruction was all that remained of the house my mother grew up in.

  Most of what I knew of my mother’s childhood she’d revealed in unexpected moments of emotional honesty, not unlike what Booker did on the news, followed by a disappearance in plain sight—those moments when her body was still in the room but it seemed as though her soul had been carted off.

  When I was young, the little my mother shared about her past affected her in a way that frightened me. She rarely offered up any details of her life before California, and I didn’t ask, in part because what she did share left me speechless. Her life before motherhood struck me as something fractured, like a bone splintered with cracks so deep it barely held together. When I did have questions, I normally sought out her cousins and siblings to fill in the gaps in the story.

  My great-grandfather, a man named Lonnie Cooley, had built the house himself. More of a carnival funhouse than well-designed living quarters, the floor sloped down in certain places and up in others, the walls were uneven, and the rooms sat at awkward angles.

  After divorcing Booker, my grandma Doris moved back into the house with her parents and went on to have four more kids. Doris worked during the day and liked to go out at night, so my mother and her siblings were raised primarily by their grandparents.

  I gathered that my great-grandparents weren’t delighted about having to rear their daughter’s children. My mother told me once that she was seven when her grandmother started calling her “whore.”

  Whippings, sudden outbursts of violence, and humiliating tasks—like cleaning up after my great-grandmother when her bowels failed and she’d walked through the house, leaving her waste on the floor—were not uncommon in my mother’s childhood.

  She and her siblings woke every morning, hours before school, to tend to the garden, which served as their primary food source. They lived on tomatoes, collard greens, potatoes, and anything else the ground would gift them with. There wasn’t a lot of money for the purchase of toys, but my mother, her siblings, and her cousins would stuff soda pop bottles with thread or old fabric to make dolls for themselves. The dolls always had blonde hair.

  My mother’s siblings described her as a having a natural determination, like she was born to stare down whatever circumstances threatened her with. Vera said that when they were younger and she went with my mom to the department store in Greenwood, the saleswoman would follow them around. It made Vera nervous, but it made my mother angry. She would turn to the woman and say, “Why are you following us? You’re not following those people over there.”

  In my twenties, I’d imagined how she might have responded if she were in my shoes, going into the department store again and again and being looked over while White customers were helped. At the time, I imagined her pointing it out, even making a scene. In retrospect, the response I imaged she might have felt right to me. Calling them out at the risk of being labeled requires boldness.

  For years, I thought she made too many things about race, but she was right all along. I’d convinced myself that being ignored in department stores or singled out at work were situations that were unrelated to race because I wasn’t strong enough to face the truth. Like Booker, my mother was ready for the fight wherever, whenever it cropped up.

  She was from Greenwood. She was a survivor. Her father protected her as much as he could, but there were times when she still had to make her way in a town that resented her because of her caramel-colored skin.

  In that world of racism and inequality, the thing that illuminated her life, flooding her sepia-tinted days with Technicolor, was her father, Booker—the man who would stop his work to stand out on the sidewalk in front of his café, day after day, just so that she could run into his arms on the way home from school. The man who couldn’t tell her enough how much he loved her. And then, he was gone.

  The night Booker was shot, my mother was living in Indiana. She hadn’t yet met my father, and she was trying to salvage a relationship with her current boyfriend, the father of her first child, my older sister. Before leaving, she went to Booker’s Place to say
good-bye to her father. The two of them had one of those life-changing arguments. My mother was finally confronting him with her own wounds from growing up with divorced parents, only being with her father during the summers. Watching him build a life apart from her.

  It was a fight she’d never forget. By the end, they’d both calmed down and said good-bye before she moved to Indiana. But she always thought she’d see him again.

  When he was lying in his hospital bed, Vera and Rosie both asked Booker repeatedly if they could call my mom, to tell her to return to Greenwood. Even as his life was sliding out of him, Booker was persuasive, commanding, and he swore to them that he’d be better by the time she got back to town. It was a waste of time and money for her to come all the way back to Mississippi with her young child in tow.

  He made them both promise not to call my mother. He was convinced he’d recover and that he’d be able to tell her about it himself. Why should she worry?

  When they finally called my mother, it was to deliver the news that her father was dead.

  She came back to Greenwood, but before she even had time to truly mourn, she won what can only be described as the “marriage lottery” for a little Black girl from Baptist Town. A professional football player moved her to a land of abundance, placed the keys of a Cadillac in her hand, and filled her purse with cash.

  My mother was broken and made new in the blink of an eye.

  She gathered up as many of her shattered bits as she could and then began the lifelong ritual of the walking wounded, which for her meant donning a California costume of high heels, expensive handbags, and flashy smiles. But otherwise, she was outwardly silent, hiding the hymn of mourning and memories that lingered in her soul.

  She was a survivor whose loved ones expected her—needed her—to settle into an existence of bright, happy tomorrows. To placate us, she did not speak about what came before, because there was no place to lay those stories in our new world. There can be no complaining in the land of milk and honey.