The Grace of Silence (2 page)

My father preached that he would always help me as long as I helped myself by working hard and spending smart. I was better at the former than the latter. When he visited me in Chicago in June 1988, he saw that I had earned high marks on both fronts. He appeared healthy during that visit. A week later, when I got the call from Indiana, it seemed I was talking to a man I didn’t know. As soon as I put the phone down, I started packing a bag. I had to get to Fort Wayne fast. By the time I arrived, Dad had already checked into the hospital. The doctors there didn’t know exactly what was wrong, but they knew that something was very wrong and that most likely it had to do with his brain or his central nervous system. The doctors spoke among themselves about anaplastic astrocytomas and radiation therapy. It was a code that could mean only one thing: cancer.

Even in the most terrifying moments at a sterile hospital, there is some comfort in knowing that a world you recognize is just outside and beyond the parking garage. You can fixate on a familiar image as a doctor shaves years off your life with each sentence. He can talk all he wants about therapies and operations, but you’re thinking of the parking lot where you taught your daughter to drive, or the gas station that uses red reflective press-on letters to spell out a different Bible verse each week, like “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” While the doctor yammers on, you’re thinking of the grizzled gas station attendant who climbs the ladder to change the sign, and wondering what pearl of wisdom he might offer in light of the news you just got.

In Fort Wayne, in a large hospital in an unfamiliar city, we were confronting an unknown illness that had swiftly robbed my father of his ability to carry out the most basic functions. We were looking at complicated surgery and, at best, a long and complex recovery, so the doctors suggested that we quickly
move Dad back to Minnesota, where he could be treated closer to home.

We wanted to get Dad on the first flight to the Twin Cities, but his gait was unsteady and he seemed increasingly disoriented. He clutched my arm as we walked through the airport; he kept shooting me tight little smiles: reassurance. I wasn’t buying it. By now his speech was so slurred that only I could understand him, and so labored that he wasn’t able even to whisper. It took him so much effort and focus to spit out a sound that it was slightly explosive when it arrived, like a sputtering engine in a hushed area.

At the airport we sat across from two stout middle-aged blond women with wet-set curls and matching pink satin jackets. They must have been on their way to a convention or a sorority gathering; they were electric with excitement and frosted up like high-calorie confections, constantly rifling through their pocketbooks for mirrored compacts, then checking their makeup or blotting their lipstick. I remember them so well because they were sitting next to a large Amish or Mennonite family.

The men had long beards and wore suspenders. The women had long braids and long dresses, and their heads were covered by little white hats that looked like fancy French fry baskets. They seemed uncomfortable with the constant chatter of the satin dolls. They, too, noticed the women’s prying eyes and “get a load of this” gestures, though the taciturn demeanor of the Amish rendered them perhaps slightly less interesting specimens than Dad and me.

When my dad tried to lean toward me to ask a question, his words sputtered forth like bricks tumbling from a shelf. The satin dolls found it hard to mind their own business. They stared and pointed every time Dad attempted to speak. They didn’t try to hide their disparagement, one of them harrumphing
loud enough for anyone to hear, “Goodness sakes, it’s not even noon yet!”

After spending a lifetime trying to be a model minority—one of the few black men in his neighborhood, at his workplace, or on his daughters’ school committees—my father now sat facing the condemnation of the two blond scolds. They had apparently concluded that he was an early morning lush instead of a gray-haired man fighting a losing battle with a devastating disease.

Here is the conundrum of racism. You know it’s there, but you can’t prove, beyond a reasonable doubt, how it colors a particular situation. Those pink satin ladies were strangers to me, so I have no idea if they would have been as quick to judge a gray-haired white man with impaired speech. However, I do know this: the fact that they were white women added mightily to my father’s humiliation. I knew my father felt the sting of their judgment. I knew it because he kept pushing up his cardigan sleeve and futzing with his wrist, as if he’d left home without his Timex. But it was not the wrist on which he wore his windup watch. It was the wrist where the plastic bracelet had been affixed at the hospital. His awkward gestures were a silent plea to the satin dolls to notice the hospital bracelet. My heart breaks every time I think of the look on his face that day.

The jut of his chin showed indignation, but the sag of his shoulders and the crease in his brow conveyed something different. Something hovering between anger and shame. There was also, however, a hint of grace. I see that now that I have come to understand my father better, as a man who was always in tight control of his emotions. I believe now that he was trying not just to salvage his dignity but also to absolve the two women from dishonor. A less controlled, more impulsive man might have responded by giving those women the finger to shut them up. My father drew strength from reaching past anger.

The aphorism “Kill them with kindness” might have been penned with a man like Belvin Norris Jr. in mind. By fiddling with his wrist he was saying, “If only they knew,” rather than “Shame on you.”

Dad boarded the plane early because the flight crew knew he would need extra time to settle into his seat and because they wanted to check his medical release from the hospital. He was flying alone that morning. I planned to drive his Oldsmobile back to Minneapolis and meet him there the next morning, a decision I have spent a lifetime regretting. Before walking down the jetway, he motioned for the nurse and the flight crew to wait a second. He leaned toward me as if he wanted to tell me something, but he couldn’t get words out. He kept looking over his shoulder, aware of the flight crew watching and waiting, and perhaps wondering whether the satin dolls were also taking it all in. He kissed me on the cheek, a loving but clumsy gesture. His balance was off, so it was almost as if we were bumping heads. I didn’t mind, and I certainly didn’t care who was watching as we locked in a long embrace. My eyes were closed, fighting back tears, so I barely noticed when the flight attendant crept into our circle of grief to gently remind us that they had to stay on schedule. The attendant lightly cupped my father’s elbow and led him away. It is disturbing to see your parent treated like a schoolchild, yet amusing to watch a man grin like a lucky teenager when a pretty woman takes his arm.

As I walked away, the satin dolls gazed at me. They must have overheard the chat about Dad’s medical release because now they wore pouty, ingratiating smiles. Lipstick contrition. I walked past them and smiled back. It hurts to recall my response; I, like my father, had reached beyond anger to offer conciliation instead. I had every right to throw my father’s humiliation in their faces. Spitting at them was, of course, out of bounds, but at the very least I should have served up a scowl.
I should have made them squirm. I should have been the black girl that certain white women are conditioned to fear most.

I didn’t do any of that. I am my father’s daughter, and such caustic gestures weren’t in my DNA. I was raised by a model minority to be a model minority, and to achieve that status, certain impulses had to be suppressed. Years later, I understand both the reason and its consequence.

I was almost out of the waiting area when I felt someone touch my shoulder. I turned, thinking it might be one of the women, intent on apologizing, but there was no nail polish on the hand touching my arm. The hand was large and calloused, marked by raised splotches resembling coffee stains. A bearded man held my forearm; he called me “ma’am,” though it sounded like “Mom.” “I’ll watch over your pa,” he said before darting back to join his family.

I wonder what my father had wanted to tell me, but couldn’t, right before he’d boarded the plane. More of his classic lunch-box wisdom? “Learn all you can” or “Save your money” or “Don’t eat too much late at night”? More than twenty years later, as still I mourn, I wonder if he was trying to impart some eternal verity before his final flight home to Minneapolis. This would be the last time I saw him alert. Within a day Dad slipped into a coma. Within a week a fast-growing brain tumor took his life.

BEFORE THE ALARM CLOCK GOES OFF
, before the smell of coffee or bacon finds its way to your bedroom door, there’s often a sound outside your window that jolts you out of slumber during winter months in Minnesota. It’s the scrape of a snow shovel against wet cement. I know the sound so well. The thwack of the blade cutting through snow, the drag of metal across pavement, the thump of the payload landing somewhere on the lawn.

Thwack, swoosh, thud! Three steps in four-quarter rhythm, over and over, until the job is done. The thought sends an all-too-familiar ache through my shoulders. All the same, in my house as a child, I myself rarely awoke to the sounds of snow being shoveled. I listened to it going on outside my kitchen window while wolfing down Malt-O-Meal or scrambled eggs. You see, by the time the rest of the neighborhood began their collective assault on the snow, our walkway was already whistle clean. That was a point of pride for my father. When the Westvigs and the Murrays and the Bowmans and the Pratts ventured out of their stucco homes, they would look over and see that the sidewalk around Belvin and Betty Norris’s lot was already free of snow and ice. Dad would be in the house, sipping coffee, a self-satisfied grin on his face, tiny icicles still dangling from his mustache. My parents were always house proud.

We lived on a corner lot on the South Side of Minneapolis,
which was at once a blessing and a curse. In the summer, it meant we had a larger yard to play in and nearly an extra hour of daylight. Oakland Avenue was lined with towering elms that formed a thick, protective canopy. But our intersection broke up the tree line and toward the end of day we could look to the sky from our two-story Tudor house with its curved ten-foot bay window. At sundown the glow would radiate through that window like lemonade spilling out of a pitcher. We called it the golden hour.

In winter the corner lot meant extra work. We didn’t just have to clear the T-shaped stretch of sidewalk that led from our stone steps to the street. We also had the fan-shaped curve at the corner to contend with, the long stretch of cement along the side of the house, the driveway leading up to the garage, and the opening to the alley. All that, and no sons in the house. So as soon as I could walk I was given an itty-bitty shovel. First a plastic one to get the feel of the thing, but within a year or two, a junior version of an adult shovel, wood and metal. A shovel was a tool for survival in Minnesota, so you had better get the hang of it early on. Though it’s not written down anywhere, there is strict shoveling etiquette in Minneapolis. No matter how much snow falls the night before, you are obliged to clear your walkway and driveway before leaving the house in the morning. No exceptions. My father went one step further and decreed that snow had to be cleared before our neighbors arose. No matter what, you had to adjust. Six inches of snow: wake up forty-five minutes early. Twelve inches of snow: better make that two hours. If it was a whopper of a storm, you’d do some shoveling before bedtime to skim the first few inches, then rise early to shovel the rest, satisfied that your work the night before had reduced the morning’s accumulation.

For a man raised in the Birmingham heat, my father took to this with alacrity. He’d suit up in big black galoshes and a tight
little watch cap and head outside like Teddy Roosevelt preparing to charge San Juan Hill. Everybody shoveled. Mom. Me. My two half sisters, Cindy and Marguerite. No use complaining or you’d pull double duty. This, too, was a point of pride. We were a family of hardworking folk, and my parents looked for every opportunity to trumpet the note. Belvin and Betty Norris were block busters when they purchased their stucco home near the Minnehaha Parkway in South Minneapolis. “We weren’t trying to be activists,” my mother said. “We just decided it was time to live someplace nice. We worked hard and we worked with white people at the post office who could live wherever they wanted. We wanted to do the same thing and we wanted to show them that we could do the same thing. We wanted to show them that we were just as good as they were.”

The Twin Cities, especially Minneapolis, were known for tolerance. Even so, blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and, later, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees would cluster in a few ethnic fiefdoms. My parents wanted to be on the far South Side, where the best schools were located, and they wanted to be close to water. Finding a house wasn’t going to be easy for a brown-skinned couple. Realtors would “forget” appointments or make hasty exits when my parents walked into their offices. So my parents decided to sidestep real estate agents and focus on other ways to buy a house, like reading newspaper obituaries. After all, a family in mourning might feel pressured to entertain a strong offer, regardless of the race of the bidder, as long as the money on the table was green. Ghoulish, but Belvin and Betty did what they had to do, and eventually things worked out for them.

In January 1961, they found a three-bedroom, two-story, Tudor Revival on a corner lot with a large yard, an open kitchen, a large limestone fireplace, and a finished basement
with knotty pine paneling. After her first marriage, Mom, with two daughters, had been a little gun-shy about relationships when she’d met the handsome man from Alabama. As she watched Dad cut the real estate deal, she said she was reminded why she’d married him. When my parents showed up to make their offer, they saw discomfort on the white sellers’ faces. Mom and Dad explained that they had been preapproved for a loan and could make a decent down payment. And just when they sensed that the sellers and their agent were about to bolt, Dad stood up and said, “Do you really want to lose a sure thing for only a possibility?” The sellers were close in age to my parents. I have since discovered that the husband came from a small town in southwest Minnesota. He was the son of an insurance salesman and had enlisted in World War II two months after my father joined the navy. The two men were discharged from the armed forces around the same time. I can imagine that Cecil Fuller may have looked at Belvin Norris and seen more than just a “Negro.” Perhaps he also identified with a fellow veteran eager to use the G.I. Bill to pull himself and his family up.