The Grace of Silence (10 page)

An hour or so later another Norris was booked. My father, Belvin Norris Jr., a twenty-year-old black male. He was signed in at 10:45 p.m. by three arresting officers. Lindsey and Espy again, and another named Pate. Nothing suggested which officer had shot my father. In fact, there was no mention of a gunshot wound at all.

I was struck by the hour lag between the arrest of my uncle Woodrow and that of my dad. What had happened? Had my father been treated for his injury before being booked? Since my father had supposedly intervened when Woody was pushed by a cop, did the cops take him somewhere to teach him a lesson? Was he in pain when they threw him into the jail cell? I have spent hours staring at these docket entries, trying to piece together the story they tell—obviously a complex one that had unfolded as the evening wore on.

It appears that the Norris men were first arrested for robbery, the charge ascribed in the docket to both men, the word written in separate hands and different ink—blue and black. Someone else had scribbled “drunk” under each name, again in different handwriting and ink. On a third line appeared “resisting arrest” under each name, the handwriting suggesting yet another officer. I would later discover upon reviewing the records for my father’s court appearance that there was a total of five arresting officers: Lindsey, Espy, Pate, and two others named Neil and Baggett. Despite coincidence, the officer Baggett has no relation to the Birmingham archivist Jim Baggett, who helped lead me to this discovery.

I noticed something else while examining the warden’s docket—or, I should say, someone else. Below Woodrow’s entry was one for John Beaton, a twenty-one-year-old black male from 904 Avenue G, two doors down from the Norris house. He was signed in at 9:40 p.m., ten minutes before Woodrow. The Beaton and Norris families were close, and John had attended Parker High with Woody and Belvin. The docket showed that John Beaton had also been charged with robbery, the word “drunk” also added to his record after he was booked. That was all. Beaton was not charged with resisting arrest.

John Beaton gave me another path to pursue. Woody and Belvin had taken the story of what happened that night to their graves. Woody kept it to himself, and my father never said a
word to his family about the night he had spent in a Birmingham jail. But if John Beaton or other Beatons were alive, I might have another avenue to pursue.

The Norris brothers appear to have had no cash when arrested, but Beaton had sixteen dollars on him. Woody’s prisoner effects were an overcoat and a fedora. “Disc. Papers” appeared under my father’s name. The term didn’t click with me at first, but eventually I figured out what it meant: military discharge papers. Belvin Norris’s service in the navy, it appeared, had recently ended, for he was still carrying his papers around. His welcome home had been perplexing, in light of the events on February 7, 1946. He escaped the war without injury. He wasn’t so fortunate when he returned home.

YEARS IN THE MILITARY HAD MARKED
the men ruling the households in our neighborhood in Minnesota. Every time you stepped into someone’s living room, a distinguished man in uniform stared back at you. No matter how jowly or bald my schoolmates’ fathers were in middle age, the military portraits proudly placed on mantels and dining room buffets preserved their chiseled youth. Men fighting a sedentary lifestyle’s battle of the bulge would loosen their trousers and settle into their recliners to throw back a cold beer while watching the evening news or chuckling along with Johnny Carson. Every so often, when the daily grind would cease, they would gaze upon the old picture of a younger man looking past the camera, into the middle distance. Whether smiling or serious, their confident expression seemed to say, “We saved the world and we know it.”

These World War II veterans didn’t need Tom Brokaw to tell them that theirs was the greatest generation. They had only to look at those vintage eight-by-tens to feel a shimmer of pride and gratitude. Perhaps they also felt a thud in their gut, remembering the berserk scrum of war. Now the boys in the photos were working-class men who had learned to compartmentalize their feelings with grim efficiency—a common survival tactic after climbing out of foxholes or submarines. Tending the nest is often women’s work, but I suspect it was the men who took it upon themselves to display their wartime portraits. They were the ones who nailed the hooks in the wall
or created altarlike arrangements of their photographs and service medals.

I remember visiting one of my father’s best friends, a fellow postal worker named George Newcombe. I loved going to the Newcombe house. Everything there was slightly exotic. Mrs. Newcombe was from the Ukraine, and her accent was as delightful as the sweet and sticky noodle kugels she churned out. The Newcombes had a bunch of rowdy kids who were all wicked smart. An afternoon at their home felt like a marathon session of the game show
Jeopardy!
because the kids were always involved in some sort of smarty-pants one-upmanship.

“Name all the capitals of all the states that start with the letter
M.”

“Quick—Henry the Eighth had six wives. Name them—in order!”

“What’s the difference between Euclidean geometry and Riemannian geometry?”

“Who’s the voice of Foghorn Leghorn?”

Dad liked to retreat to the relative quiet of the basement and ogle the latest addition to Mr. Newcombe’s impossibly elaborate train set. If you know anyone who has kept a train set, you can fix a picture in your mind. If you’ve never seen the work of a model-train obsessive, then imagine the layout of a miniature Norman Rockwell town, with dime stores, pie shops, and kids carrying books tied together with leather straps, a town that fits on a dining room table. Mr. Newcombe’s town sat on a ten-by-twelve-foot raised platform, slightly higher than a big dining room table. In that compact little metropolis, the excruciatingly detailed buildings were all about six inches tall. The trees “growing” out of the Astroturf even changed colors according to the seasons. A neon sign glowed outside the diner. The pole at the barbershop rotated. Fireplaces glowed in the houses along Main Street. A tiny train snaked through the elevated
hamlet—over hills, through tunnels, and across pastures of Astroturf, blowing its whistle and belching little puffs of smoke.

In the seventies, the South Side of Minneapolis was filled with train enthusiasts. They were always men who would meticulously transform their basements into hideaways, where they exercised complete control over a noisy little world of their own making. Perhaps that was the draw for working-class men whose lives revolved around forty-hour workweeks, thirty-day mortgage cycles, and fierce Minnesota cold fronts swooping in without warning.

When George and my dad finally emerged from what we would now call “the man cave,” my father would yell upstairs, “Hey, squirt, get your stuff together, it’s time to get on home.” We always said our good-byes in the Newcombes’ formal living room, with its overlay lace curtains and replica oil lamps, a parlor that recalled the world of
Doctor Zhivago
. Mr. Newcombe would usually display a tic as we were leaving. I’m not sure that he was even aware of it. Walking us toward the door, he would pass by a low, long table where his army photo sat. His hands would slip out of his pockets for just a second. He would pause just long enough to reach out and slightly adjust the crystal frame, the way a mother, without thinking, might reach out to brush a stray eyelash off her young one’s cheek. In one small gesture, an involuntary surge of love, pride, and vulnerability. An essential part of his manhood was trapped in that frame.

My father’s military service had always been a bit of a mystery. I had no idea how the experience had shaped him. He never spoke much about it, and although we had many pictures displayed in our home, there were none from his stint in the navy. His military photos were shoved in a box buried in a basement closet where we stored the Christmas ornaments. His service medal was hidden in a back corner of a bureau drawer,
beneath a pile of letters and greeting cards, mostly from my sisters and me, drawn with crayons or adorned with tissue-paper rosettes. I discovered Dad’s medal when I cleaned out his bedroom after he died.

But I was a child when I stumbled on the treasure trove of black-and-white vintage photos in the closet behind the basement stairs. Several showed Dad in a dark uniform. Sometimes he wore a white sailor’s hat. Sometimes a black tam with
U.S. NAVY
embroidered on the band across his forehead. I forget what I was looking for in that dank space when I found the photos. As I held up the pictures under the naked closet light bulb, a kid, it seemed, was staring back at me. In every shot, Dad looked directly at the camera, the way nine-year-olds pose and wait to yell “Cheese!”

His grin was almost as wide as his sailor collar. His shoulders were so slim and his neck so twiggish that he resembled a boy who had just raided his big brother’s closet to play Let’s Pretend. To understand my father—a man I thought I knew so well—I had to understand the man-child in these pictures. I had to comprehend the journey he had taken to become the quiet man who taught me the most important lessons of my life.

On August 6, 1943, convulsions of war were felt around the globe. Near the Solomon Islands, six American destroyers intercepted and all but demolished a small Japanese fleet attempting to deliver troops and supplies to an enemy base at Kolombangara.
¹
Also on that Friday, Italian government officials met with the German foreign minister to offer assurances that they would not negotiate a separate peace with the Allies. In Lithuania’s Vilna ghetto, more than a dozen Jews were shot while attempting to resist deportation orders. In Berlin, nonessential residents were evacuated from the city.

On that day Belvin Norris Sr. proudly escorted his namesake to the navy recruiting station in room 25 of the Federal Building in Birmingham. Belvin Jr. was five days shy of his eighteenth birthday, so his father had to be on hand to sign the consent and declaration form for enlistment of a minor under eighteen.

That afternoon they had set out from a home that had grown much quieter in recent years. Sylvester, the oldest brother, was working as a Pullman porter, spending most of his time traveling all over the country by rail. Simpson and Louis had joined the army, leaving just three of the Norris boys on Avenue G. Soon there would be only two. Though his brothers were in the army, Belvin set his sights on the navy, perhaps because the navy had set its sights on men like him.

Though top leadership in the navy had long been opposed to the use of “Negroes in the Fleet,” things were changing by 1943.
²
The navy was under tremendous pressure to loosen its policy. The pressure was coming from the White House, the War Manpower Commission, and even the army, whose commanding officers felt that their branch had accepted more than its share of black enlistees. It was also coming from surprising places. Elected officials from cities and towns throughout the South had expressed worries about population imbalance and social unrest: legions of able-bodied white men had marched off to war; most able-bodied blacks had stayed behind.

The chairman of the War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, echoed this concern in a memo to the secretary of the navy. “The low percentage of Negroes in the Army and in the Navy has resulted in a higher percentage of Negroes in the civilian population,” McNutt wrote. “This condition has been the cause of continuous and mounting criticism. It poses grave implications … as the single white registrants disappear and husbands and fathers become the current white inductees, while single Negro registrants who are physically fit remain uninducted.”
³
The message was clear: the combination of disproportionate numbers of single or unprotected white women and masses of single “physically fit” Negroes was cause for deep concern. Needless to say, this was not the only reason the navy shifted course.

By mid-1942, only a little more than 5,000 black men were serving in the navy, representing a mere 2 percent or so of the navy’s male enlistees. Almost all were mess attendants or stewards. Now bowing to pressure, the navy, in January 1943, began admitting blacks to match their percentage of the total population. By February, black men in the navy amounted to 26,909; by the end of the year, more than 100,000 were on active duty.
⁴

To reach its goals, the navy sought men with the right temperament, education, and maturity. A. H. Parker High, in Birmingham, was a natural place to look. Founded in 1899 as Birmingham’s only high school for blacks, it was from its opening day held up as a citadel of excellence. With limited opportunities elsewhere, many of Birmingham’s sharpest minds turned to teaching, so the Parker faculty resembled that of a small college. Nearly every instructor had a master’s degree or a doctorate. Students from all over Alabama flocked to Parker, bunking with friends and relatives. Many walked miles to and from school every day. A. H. Parker High was so crowded that classes were in session both day and night, and graduation ceremonies were held in January and June.

With its rigorous academic program, no-nonsense discipline, and vocational classes in printing, mechanics, and nursing, Parker was the most reliable ticket to a better life for blacks in Birmingham. The school also had a storied college prep program. Universities across the country took notice, and so did the military. Newspapers at the time said Parker was the place to find men of character.

My father graduated from Parker in May 1943, and whatever
ambitions he had were informed by the war raging across the ocean. Reminders of service and sacrifice were everywhere. Though he was on an accelerated-education track (taking physics, chemistry, and advanced math courses), college was beyond consideration. Money was tight. The nation was at war, so able-bodied men were expected to report for duty or to take an industrial job to aid wartime production.

Dad had grown up in the shadow of the steel mills and the blast of furnaces that made the night sky glow orange for hours before dawn, illuminating the little bungalows of relative prosperity along Avenue G. Birmingham still had its share of mill- and mineworkers who lived in shanties or company-owned tenements. But the simple houses in my family’s neighborhood had a kind of aspirational charm, with curtained windows and proper outdoor furniture on the porch. If you stood at a corner and looked down Avenue G on an evening after the workday, you’d see cars parked in almost every driveway. To men and women whose parents or grandparents had been slaves, the stability must have afforded a peek of heaven.