The Grace of Silence (8 page)

At breakfast that morning Uncle Joe blurted out a secret: “You know, your father was shot.” Six shattering words uttered in a matter-of-fact way before Joe shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth. “Shot in the leg,” he continued, churning the spoon in the bowl full of gruel, as if constant motion would enhance the flavor. I have always been close to Joe. When I was a kid, he rewarded my love of books with a steady stream of suggested reading, and now we have a special bond because I was the only one in our big, loud family who could huddle with him in a corner and talk about the jazz musician Jaco Pastorius or the Argentine dissident Jacobo Timerman.

My work frequently takes me to Chicago, and whenever I blow through town, I swing by to see my uncle on the Far South Side, in Pill Hill, so named because many black doctors once lived there. On this particular trip, though, my schedule was tight, and so that Thursday morning Joe drove to meet me downtown at the West Egg Cafe, an all-day breakfast spot near the Lake Michigan waterfront that’s popular with yuppies. He had ordered his oatmeal and I some Tex-Mex egg concoction, even as Joe made a point of reminding me that for the price of a piece of toast we could have both enjoyed a whole spread at any one of a dozen joints on the South Side. No sense in arguing. He was right, though his protest was a bit hollow.

In truth, Joe didn’t mind heading downtown to break his routine. He had become the primary caretaker for my aunt Odiev, whose kidney disease required frequent dialysis, and he also doted on a firstborn granddaughter with cerebral palsy. In other words, he spent his retirement earning his sainthood and he never complained. He also needed to stop downtown at the Obama campaign office to pick up some yard signs and flyers. Like so many older black Americans, Joe felt that the hope Obama offered was much more than just a four-letter word.

Uncle Joe’s news about my dad’s shooting was tangential; he went on a rant about a completely different subject, grousing about black men and black leadership and why so many black people had given up hope, even though their lives were so much easier than their forebears’ had been. Joe had the heart of an activist. He’d left a comfortable teaching job in Hyde Park to start a pilot project working with juvenile inmates in the Cook County Jail, kids whose rap sheets were so treacherous that they were tried and remanded as adults. The assignment would be hell on earth for most people, but Joe saw an opportunity to reach a captive audience; his pupils couldn’t skip class or threaten the teacher without inviting a beat-down by prison guards. He introduced his students to works by Paul
Laurence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, and even Chinua Achebe and Mark Mathabane. When he knew he had won their trust, he made them read Rudolph Fisher’s
The Walls of Jericho
, the better to understand an important life lesson: that a man is truly tough only when he can show his soft side. He turned criminals into readers, and in exchange he asked for only one thing: that they continue to read upon release from jail.

His years with the Cook County cons had left Joe with some hard theories about young black men. “They have it too easy. They don’t know what struggle is. They always want to blame somebody else. They want a handout. They don’t take care of business.” If you didn’t interrupt him, he might go on for hours. Get an older black man riled up about today’s young folk and his vitriol might outdo that of even the most outrageous conservative commentator. At our Thursday breakfast, Joe was worked up. He’d asked the juvies which leaders they looked up to; they had rattled off the names of rappers and athletes. No surprise there. When he’d clarified that he was asking about elected officials, they’d cracked up and all but told him to go to hell. Politics, they’d said, is for white folks. So Joe was on a rant, upset at the juvies for throwing their lives away, upset at black leaders who couldn’t figure out how to inspire young people, upset that he had to work so hard as a precinct captain to get young black folk to vote. Even his own son was unregistered. “Don’t they know what people had to do to give them the right to vote?” he asked.

Joe continued, on a roll, before dropping the bomb: “You know, your father was shot.” He must have seen the look on my face, the confusion in my eyes, the utter shock. In a world of my own, I heard the tap-tap of his spoon against the ceramic bowl. He pushed his breakfast aside and took a slow deep breath before puffing out his cheeks as if to suppress a belch, the kind of thing older men do all the time; but since I interview people
for a living, I know this can also be a stalling tactic to take the measure of things. Uncle Joe had never been one to pussyfoot through uncomfortable conversations. When I was a kid, he’d had an outsized reputation for telling it like it was. If your legs were ashen, he’d be the first to say you forgot to use lotion, loud enough for everyone in church to hear. If an adult got up without taking his plate to the sink, well, they’d hear about that, too. If we were going to the movies on a Saturday afternoon and there were six cousins on hand and only four seats in the sedan, Joe Norris would just cut to the chase: “Two of y’all won’t be seeing a movie today. I don’t know which two, but whoever it is I don’t want to see any tears. You kids got too much to be crying about anything.”

But Uncle Joe had ceased being the family hard-ass long ago, and his weary grin indicated that he took no pleasure in bearing bad news. “Mickey,” he said, reverting to my childhood nickname, “here’s what I know.” His anger about the juvies had melted, and though his voice could usually rattle the fish in Lake Michigan, his words were now slow and gentle. I had to lean in to hear his rasp. He didn’t so much tell a story as deliver a series of statements. “They were down somewhere near Fourth Avenue trying to get onto an elevator.… Woody was pushed.… Belvin intervened.… A cop pulled out his gun.… Woody swatted at the cop’s arm and the gun deflected downward.… In the end, Belvin was shot in the leg.… That’s what I know.” There was a lot to digest that morning in the restaurant, and none of it went down easily. Shot in the leg. By a cop. And in Jim Crow Alabama, to boot.

I was furious. Confused. My head hurt, and I wanted to scream. I needed details. Why did the cop push Uncle Woody? Where were they going? How serious was the injury? I peppered Uncle Joe with questions, careful not to show the anger welling up inside me. It felt like the room was starting to spin. Acid rose in my throat, and the Tex-Mex egg dish felt like a
terrible choice. I swallowed hard, trying to repress the one question I really wanted to ask: “Why am I only hearing about this now?”

I was intent on gathering as many facts as I could before the waitress dropped the check, fearful that a window of opportunity might close. What if Uncle Joe’s revelation had been only a moment of senior disinhibition? I knew not to seem too shocked or upset because then he might hold back, sensitive to my emotional fragility. As the youngest of six brothers, he’d been the last to enter the military and the last to return to Birmingham after the war. So he hadn’t been there when the incident with my dad occurred. Perhaps for that reason, or because so many years had intervened, his facts were fuzzy, his story sparse. He had always been the most confident among the Norris clan, but this morning he appeared outside his comfort zone. As we talked about Alabama policemen, I spied a vestige of fear on the face of a man who worked with convicts every day, and who earned their respect by showing that he could do more than just talk about putting a foot up their behinds.

Yet, this normally confident man was clearly disturbed by a hazy memory from more than sixty years ago. “The only reason they were not killed on the spot is because of the crowd,” he said. “If they were on a road or in an alley, they’d be gone.” With that he stretched his neck, looked away, and sighed. “We can talk more later,” he offered in closing. I couldn’t ignore what he’d told me. I phoned him time and again over the next few weeks, and in each conversation he seemed to regret having said the little he had; the details he offered were few, if not speculative.

Apparently, it had happened in Birmingham somewhere around Fourth Avenue—the black business corridor. My father was still in his twenties and had just returned from service in the navy during World War II. He was not alone. My uncle Woody was with him and maybe one or two other friends.
There was a charge of resisting arrest, and the family had just wanted the episode to go away. “Knowing your father,” Joe explained, “he would have wanted to downplay it. My mother would have wanted to be more aggressive, but it takes money and power to be aggressive. We had neither.”

“Shot in the leg.” “Belvin was shot in the leg.” Every time I hear these words in my mind, I think of the ever so slight lilt in my father’s step, so minor you might miss it if you weren’t paying close attention, so subtle that I thought it was an affectation, the way some black men put a little music in their walk. Daddy had always had a distinctive gait. Come to think of it, all his brothers did, to varying degrees. Black folk call it putting a little English in your walk, using a pool hall term for something special or unique. When I learned of the injury, I realized that his gait might have been born of pain, not pride. But Joe’s account made no sense. My dad in a violent encounter with the police? It just did not compute.

How could a man who always observed stop signs, a man who always filed his taxes early and preached that jaywalking proved a weakness of character have been involved in an altercation with Alabama policemen? Why would he hide it from his children? Why would he impart life lessons to us about looking the other way, turning the other cheek, respecting those who lived across the color line in spite of insults hurled our way, when he himself had not?

I always knew that my father had had his mysteries, like the FBI Wanted poster for Angela Davis that I found inside his dresser drawer after he died. Or the way he would slip out of the house on Thursday nights, after he and my mother got divorced, to meet a date I was not supposed to know about. Or that odd encounter in the upstairs bathroom, when he walked in and asked if he could borrow my Afro pick, the thick, black plastic one with a handle shaped like a clenched fist. For a time, he slipped it into his back pocket, the Black Power fist peeking
from his slacks. To me, the Alabama incident shed new light on this.

My father loved music, yet there were certain types he could not tolerate. I went to high school at a time when seventies southern rock was all over the airwaves. Acts such as the Charlie Daniels Band, the Allman Brothers Band, and Lynyrd Skynyrd topped the charts with songs like “Free Bird” and “The South’s Gonna Do It Again.” Dad could stomach almost any kind of music we brought home: funk, metal, folk, even punk. But he had little patience for southern rock, the kind of music good ole boys would blare from the backs of pickup trucks outfitted with gun racks and Confederate flags.

One rock anthem in particular pushed him past the edge: “Sweet Home Alabama.” I remember one morning when I was loudly accompanying the song on the radio while fiddling with my curling iron. The group Lynyrd Skynyrd was singing about Birmingham and how much they loved the “guv-ner.” The song referred to Governor George Wallace, who blocked school integration despite JFK’s orders. It was more than he could bear. He leaned into my bedroom, gritting his teeth, and shouted, “Turn that trash off now!” My father was a quiet man, thoughtful, funny, bookish. He loved to listen to jazz and read the Sunday
New York Times
. He rarely raised his voice and spoke with profound economy when he said anything at all. You could say he was very Zen. Loud talk or power-to-the-people defiance was not his style, though he must have had some steel in his spine to leave Alabama, head north, and use the G.I. Bill to become a block buster on the South Side of Minneapolis.

He had to have had some grit to secure a mortgage and move his family to the far South Side, on Oakland Avenue, where all the lawns were green and all the families white. He had to have had fortitude to endure a bullet wound, even a minor one. All the same, the incident must have battered his dignity, while setting an internal compass that allowed him to move forward and
shut out anything that might refresh that painful memory. His leg may have been injured, but his pride was intact.

I’m reminded of a film I watched time and again in high school,
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
. In one hilarious scene, a character called the Black Knight is stuck in mud, outmatched and wounded, yet still keeps mouthing off at his enemy. His arms and legs have been severed. Blood is spurting from his wounds. He’s a wreck, but in his jaunty English accent he insists that he’s invincible.

“Merely a flesh wound,” he chirps.

“I want to meet the man who shot my father.” Even as I said this to myself over and over, nothing about the sentence felt right. This is the kind of thing gangsters or gunslingers say, not middle-aged women from Minneapolis whose parents trudged off to work at the post office. Yet the desire to confront my father’s shooter became an obsession, and then an ache. I hectored my relatives and some of my father’s high school classmates to tell me what they knew; I was astonished when some acknowledged that they’d heard about the shooting yet brushed aside my questions with utter nonchalance. One of my father’s cousins was so rattled by my importunity that he fussed at me as if I were still a six-year-old. “Girl, stop pestering me about details,” he said. “Stuff like that used to happen, but we never really dwelled on it. We moved on, and so should you.” He was wasting his breath. There was no going back for me. I needed answers.

But the details of the shooting grew more vague with each telling. Dad was alone with Woody. No, wait, that’s not how my third cousin in Alabama remembered it. He was certain Dad was with a group of young men. Some of his high school classmates believed that a white woman was involved and that my dad failed to step aside fast enough when she passed. However, this account was roundly dismissed by relatives still living in Birmingham.