The Grace of Silence (21 page)

I believed him with all my heart. And even though at the time I knew nothing about the events at the Pythian Temple, I must also somehow have believed the gist of his contention over money with Dad; their tart exchange that morning had a ring of truth because of its effect on my father. Dad spent his life making sure he didn’t owe anybody anything. He paid his credit card bills in full, and racked up as much overtime as possible at the post office. He was so averse to debt that he sent in extra money with his mortgage payment every month to help chip away at the principal. But cash alone could not settle the ledger with Simpson. Simpson had spent money earned in America’s fight for freedom to keep his brother out of jail, sacrificing his own dreams in the bargain. Short of that never having happened, it would be impossible for Belvin to repay his debt to his brother in full.

Once the Norris brothers left their hometown of Birmingham, most remained only lightly tethered to the city. Dad, however, was for the rest of his life fiercely loyal to his parents and to the city of his birth. He may have fled Alabama, but he didn’t stay away. He visited more frequently than any of his brothers. It wasn’t apparent to his family in Minnesota, but the past had a strong pull on my father. His almost yearly pilgrimages to Birmingham and his insistence on sending me down to visit my grandparents every summer are perplexing in light of what happened to him after the war. But I suppose that, as Faulkner said, he must have believed that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” For him the road ahead would always be much
more rugged without the solace afforded by taking heed of where he’d been. Not only did Alabama pull him back; so did many checkpoints of his military career. San Francisco. New Orleans. Pensacola. Northern Virginia. Once I’d studied his military records, I realized that the better part of our family vacation destinations were places where he’d served. Not even my mom knew that, and I could tell she was unnerved when I revealed the fact.

Dad had wanderlust. He loved to travel. Denied a chance for higher education, he was always on the hunt for new learning experiences. On a postal worker’s salary, he managed to set aside money for theater tickets, Book-of-the-Month Club selections, museum workshops, and a subscription to the Sunday
New York Times
. He was constantly telling us kids, “Learn all you can,” and to show us he meant business, he led by example. He and my mother read constantly. Novels. Plays. Trade journals. Textbooks they purchased during the annual lost-books sale at the main post office. And most importantly, vacations. While we’d hit the typical tourist sights wherever we went, the highlight for him was wandering off the beaten path.

We’d head out in the morning with change jangling in Dad’s pockets to board a city bus or trolley bound for ordinary vicinities. Dad would always say he wanted to see how average folk lived. He wanted to eat in the restaurants they ate in and visit the parks where they taught their kids how to hit baseballs. But I wonder now if he wasn’t intent on visiting neighborhoods that had once been off-limits to black servicemen, much the way a child, denied ice cream, will gorge himself on it at the first possible chance. Perhaps he was retracing the steps of his early life out of mere nostalgia. Perhaps he needed to have the last word vis-à-vis his experiences of segregation. Perhaps he wanted to prove to those who’d stamped “Negro” on all his military records that the word alone did not encompass all he was or all he had to offer.

We always returned from vacation with uncanny stories. An especially peculiar one concerned the Vietnam War. While traveling through Winnepeg, Manitoba, Dad would spot grungy young black men with enormous backpacks. He knew by instinct that they were in Canada because they were draft dodgers, and he would go out of his way to chat them up. On more than one occasion he’d offer them a deal. He’d buy them dinner if they agreed to tell him why they chose to flee the United States rather than fight for their country overseas. At the time I thought his obsession was just one of his eccentricities. A sage trying to understand youthful impulsiveness. I had no idea that his “let me buy you a burger” altruism might have provided an opening into his hidden past. When he sat there quizzing those bedraggled fugitives, I rolled my eyes in pubescent perturbation.

In spite of his experiences in the military, my father was unwaveringly patriotic, which manifested itself in myriad little ways. He planted small flags throughout the yard on the Fourth of July. And during the summer parade season he would retrieve them from the hall closet so we could wave them from the side of the road as the floats and marching bands passed by. These were the very flags he pulled out one Sunday night, as he and I watched a TV special on the American bicentennial. It was 1976, and I was fourteen years old. Dad was in his fifties and all decked out in red, white, and blue, down to a pair of socks adorned with stars and stripes. He sat in his favorite armchair in front of our black-and-white TV (Dad refused to splurge on a color set) so he could watch a star-spangled affair that would culminate with stunning fireworks above the National Mall. He loved fireworks—even when transmitted in shades of gray by a nineteen-inch Magnavox.

At the time, the prospect of sitting with my father while indulging in corny jingoism, as it seemed to me, was horrifying. But Dad’s enthusiasm was contagious. In truth, so, too, was the
pull of his loneliness. I found myself declining invitations to go on dates or hang out at the 7-Eleven with my friends, so that I could be with him to watch TV or play bid whist. Sometimes we’d go hit golf balls after dinner, then stop by the Dairy Queen. It would have been a little too pitiful to imagine him, in front of the TV, waving his miniature star-spangled banner by himself to celebrate the bicentennial. We wound up in the living room, waving silly flags and eating peanuts from the shell—something Mom would never have allowed. The marginalized veteran, in his own way, insisted, “I, too, sing America.”

In celebrating America—or, as he called it, “the U.S. of A.”—Belvin Norris collected stamps and spent sixteen dollars every pay period to purchase a new coin from the Franklin Mint History of the United States series, until he amassed the entire set. He took great pride in his work at the post office, and in the fact that he worked for the federal government. While he may have hidden his World War II medal in the back of a bureau drawer and forgotten it, he lovingly arranged, in the little wooden valet in its top drawer, his twentieth- and thirtieth-anniversary postal service pins and his Mr. Zip tie clasps.

My father never sought wealth, fame, or power. Well, maybe he wouldn’t have minded more money. His goal in life, instead, was to be the Average Joe of the American dream. He aspired to be ordinary. His brass ring was a solid middle-class life. And his pride was the house on Oakland Avenue and watching his family do all those little things that were beyond his reach when he was a young man. Now when I look at pictures of him I see a “we can do this too” twinkle in his eyes. He pushed us toward those things that were especially prized by white society. Perhaps it’s why I wound up taking art history lessons at age ten, learning gymnastics on ice (and, as a result, earning a spot on the hockey cheerleading squad), and attending the University
of Minnesota on weekends, while still in high school, for courses in science and engineering. Dad was my guiding star.

Having achieved working-class comfort, my parents always sought black middle-class affirmation in the neighborhood, on the news, and in popular culture. Seated on the matching sofa and love seat in our living room, in our integrated neighborhood in South Minneapolis, we would every week watch a television show called
Julia
. It debuted in 1968 featuring Diahann Carroll, the first African American actress to star in her own network sitcom. She played a hardworking Vietnam War widow who slept on a sofa so her little boy, Corey, could have his own bed. Julia was a nurse. She was beautiful and stylish and funny. She worked for a wise and crotchety old doctor played by Lloyd Nolan, and she had a way of standing up to her critics without getting their goat—a skill that many black Americans were trying to master themselves as they edged into an integrated society.

Julia
was a crossover hit, eagerly watched by black and white families alike. My parents laughed at the jokes that went right over my head, delighted to see a show using comedy to tackle salient issues of the day. For my part, I focused on the weekly storyline concerning Julia’s young son, Corey, and his white best friend, Earl J. Waggedorn. I was over the moon when I discovered a Julia Barbie doll under the Christmas tree and, for weeks, dragged it everywhere I went.

As much as we enjoyed
Julia
’s three-season run, my mother wondered, “Why can’t she have a husband? How hard is that? It can’t be about the salary, because she has boyfriends who take her out on dates almost every week, so they are paying someone. Why can’t there be a man in the house?” At the time I thought Mom was being unduly harsh. Years later, when I interviewed Diahann Carroll, I discovered that she, too, had
wanted to have a TV husband, but, for whatever reason, NBC and the show’s creators were of a different mind. Hit though it was, the show was lambasted by some critics.
The Saturday Review
, for instance, claimed that the show was lacking in verisimilitude, opining that it was a “far, far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto.”
¹

Who said all Negroes lived in the ghetto? We didn’t! “The question that kept coming up at the time was, ‘What kind of single black mother was I supposed to be as Julia anyway?’ ” Diahann Carroll wrote in her recent memoir. “Twentieth Century Fox and NBC expected the kind that got top Nielsen ratings! And yet the pressure to be someone else never let up in my three years on the show.… I was under the political microscope for Julia like you wouldn’t believe. But I did not have the expertise to discuss the socioeconomic situation of the African-American community. Nor did I feel I should have to defend the character of a polite nurse with excellent taste in clothes, some of which I brought to the set from my own closet. I was simply trying to get comfortable playing a hardworking, financially strapped single mother who slept on a living-room sofa in a one-bedroom apartment.”
²

It would be several years after
Julia
’s last episode before black upper-middle-class life was portrayed on network television: first in
The Jeffersons
, about a family who struck it rich in their dry-cleaning business and moved on up to New York’s East Side to a “dee-luxe” apartment in the sky. The show ran for eleven seasons, starting in 1975. Then, there was
The Cosby Show
, which ran from 1984 to 1992 and featured a blissfully happy family. Mom was a lawyer, Dad was a doctor, and the grandparents were proud graduates of historically black colleges.

Unlike on
The Jeffersons
, race was rarely overtly mentioned
on
The Cosby Show;
nor was it necessary, for almost all of the show’s story lines were inspirational, championing values embraceable by any race, culture, or nationality. This was its subversiveness at the time. Nowadays
The Cosby Show
is credited with tearing down barriers and creating opportunities for new shows featuring black casts and story lines. Upon the inauguration of Barack Obama, which happened to occur only a few months before the twenty-fifth anniversary of the start of the show, it was perhaps inevitable that pundits and critics would hyperventilate about how the Huxtables had somehow paved the way for the country to elect its first African American president. “When
The Cosby Show
was on, that was America’s family,” Karl Rove was quoted as saying after the election. “It wasn’t a black family. It was America’s Family.”
³
I’m afraid it
was
a black family, one adored by America. Yet, more than a quarter century after the inception of the show, there are few, if any, families like the Huxtables on TV or movie screens.

My husband, Broderick Johnson, and I honeymooned in Italy, where we noticed something odd about the greetings we got everywhere we went. People kept calling us “the Robinsons.” The restaurateur, the woman serving gelato, the police officer in the town square, the bank manager who looked vaguely like Omar Sharif—all bubbled with hospitality as if they’d known us, welcoming us, to our puzzlement, as “the Robinsons.”
“Abbiamo sentito che si trovavano in zona
. [“We heard you were in the area.”]
Benvenuti! Benvenuti,”
the storekeeper would yell, telling passersby to come meet the Robinsons!

We were staying along the shores of Lago d’Iseo, a picturesque lake in Lombardy. The mystery was solved near the end of our visit, at the home of our friends Rosa and Bepe. On their coffee table was a television guide, with Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad smiling on the cover under the headline “I Robinsons,” Italian for “The Robinsons.” We apparently reminded the Italians of Cosby and Rashad. But why were the Huxtables
no longer the Huxtables? When I returned to the States, I got the answer from friends who worked for NBC. I learned that Huxtable had been changed to Robinson because Italians find the latter much easier to pronounce. But why Robinson? The surname was apparently associated with black success, thanks to Jackie Robinson’s groundbreaking baseball career.

The whirligig of black success can be a curious thing. Saturdays are usually movie night at our house. My husband and I, our two kids, and various guests usually gather after dinner in the Red Room, a small den with lipstick-colored walls and bulky seating. After the long haul of the week, we spread out and munch popcorn and salty snacks while watching the DVD of the week—always a subject of protracted and self-interested give-and-take, as in any other American family. But I’m not sure that the conversation in our little red room one Saturday night was the sort that takes place in most American households—certainly not among white families.

Three generations had gathered for movie night that Saturday: my husband and I, our kids, their godfather James, and my first cousin’s daughter Sophia, a college freshman. We were watching
Freedom Writers
, a feel-good drama about a white teacher trying to reform a classroom of minority kids caught up in southern California’s gang life. The students have no appreciation for the school system, no use for education, and so no interest in reading, much less writing poetry. Yet their instructor, played by Hilary Swank (the story is based on the real experiences of a woman named Erin Gruwell), teaches them to respect themselves and each other. A savior in the hood, as it were. At one point, Erin Gruwell tries to order copies of
The Diary of Anne Frank
for the class, but a pert, blond administrator denies her request. The kids, the blonde says, are not worth the expense.