The Grace of Silence (20 page)

As things turned out, Dad, too, would marry a Minnesotan. In 1960, Jimmy Brown’s best friend became his brother-in-law. Everybody called Elizabeth Brown McGraw either Betty or Bets. A divorcée with two adorable girls, she was tall, stoic, and slightly bookish. “Regal” was the word my dad used whenever he showered her with compliments. And she, like Dad, was a saver. While many of the women Dad had dated yearned for fancy dinners or nights out on the town, Mom preferred simple things. Walks in the park. Trips to the library. Picnics with my half sisters, Cindy and Marguerite. All the better to save money toward buying and furnishing a nice house. She was a woman who spoke his language. Dad was smitten.

Life is full of little ironies. Even after their marriage fell apart, Mom and Dad seemed to get along better than many of the parents who chaperoned our events. They talked to us kids and to each other, while other parents stood side by side in the gym but appeared to be galaxies apart. In retrospect, the forces that had stifled my father’s military career prepared him, in an odd way, for single parenthood. I’m not sure he would have been capable of running such a tight ship at home had he not spent much of his naval service in mess halls. Often the indignities
and despair we endure can serve us in surprising ways. The U.S. military, while deserving of reproach for its treatment of men and women of color, has paradoxically become an institution that best models the concept of equal opportunity.

Here’s another little irony: while Dad was the steadfast parent, keeping the ship afloat when Mom decamped, he was a mourned absence when I myself became a parent. He didn’t live long enough to meet my husband or hold his grandchildren or listen to his daughter on the radio. Now it’s my once absent mother who has become the mighty ballast for all of us: her siblings, my sister, my husband and I, her grandchildren, and the elderly ladies in her condominium, who always seek her wisdom and recipes.

Now I understand that she has always been there for me, even when her actions caused me pain and confusion. Like most black mothers in our neighborhood—indeed, all of America—Mom was hyperattentive about taming my long, thick, kinky hair. With the exception of Easter Sunday, she kept my hair in braids. When I was young, she tied a profusion of teeny ones. I would sleep with a little pink sponge roller hanging on my forehead to effect little sausage roll bangs, which would frizz like antennae the minute I stepped on the playground. It didn’t matter that my bangs never lasted beyond lunchtime. When I got home, Mom would hit those tufts of hair with a dollop of DuSharme or VO5 and pull out the sponge roller to commence the process all over again.

When I was older, we set aside the rollers and the gum-ball hair ties and went for two long Pocahontas braids separated by a center part. As my hair got longer and seemingly thicker, with each passing year, Mom stopped washing it herself in the kitchen sink and sent me instead to various neighborhood “kitchen beauticians,” women who could work magic with a hot
comb and a hair dryer in the same space where they churned out fried chicken and coleslaw. Over time, some of these kitchen beauticians became proper businesswomen, like Miss Olivia and Miss Debbie, who got their husbands to turn their basement recreation rooms into full-service salons, with reclining shampoo chairs and upright dryers. After years of hearing me wince and cry as Mom worked her way through my tangles on Saturday night, Dad did not complain when my hairdresser visits were added to the family budget. The hairdressers would wash, dry, and straighten my hair and then quickly work it into a hairdo, always involving braids.

A few months after Mom left, she announced that she was taking me for a haircut. I assumed she meant a trim, because most of her hair-care advice revolved around helping my hair grow. “Eat your vegetables.… Here’s a spoonful of cod liver oil.… Make sure to wrap your head up at night.… Don’t wear a wool hat any longer than you have to.… Make sure to put curler paper over your sponge rollers so that congealed foam won’t pull your hair out.… Don’t play with your ends.… Wear a swim cap.… Forget about bobbing for apples at that birthday party just ’cause the other kids are doing it.… Use a boar-bristle brush.… Thank the Good Lord you have a healthy head of hair.” I’ve always wondered whether there is some kind of encyclical spelling out the cardinal commands of black hair care, rules my mother followed to the letter.

That spring day, when we left our neighborhood and headed downtown, she had something else in mind. I thought maybe we were going to one of the “real” salons, where lawyers and newscasters got their hair and nails done. I soon realized that Mom had a different plan when we arrived at a barbershop. I’d spent enough time with my father at barbershops on the South Side of Minneapolis to know that women rarely entered these sanctums. If they did, they were usually, like me, accompanying a customer. Or they were young women who’d freed themselves
from the tyranny of the hot comb to go natural with an Afro.

When Mom and I made our way into the downtown barbershop, I would soon be, unbeknownst to me, of the latter category. The barbershop was nothing like the place where Dad spent an hour every Saturday morning. It was in the IDS Tower, which at the time was the tallest building in the state. Even if you’ve never been to Minneapolis, you might recall the glass skyscraper, for in her weekly television sitcom Mary Tyler Moore would take the measure of it and toss her tam in the air. The barbershop was inside the building’s cavernous lobby, and it was so much fancier than any place the men I knew went to get their hair cut. While a few barbers there wore the standard short-sleeved white coats, most were dressed like disco kings, in bell bottoms and shirts with wide collars. This, Mom explained, was where the truly cool came to get their Afros shaped and refined. Afros?

Mom said these barbers were great at creating the singular Afro best suited to the shape of a person’s face and lifestyle. Her fingers flew through my hair as she worked the rubber bands out, uncoiled my braids, and shook out my waves. She guided me toward a burgundy pleather chair, where a barber stood attentively. “Michele,” she said, “you’re going to look so cute in a kinky little Afro.”

Was I not supposed to have a say in this? Wasn’t someone going to ask me if I wanted an Afro? I’d spent years growing my hair out so I could stand in the bathroom at night, undo my braids, and pretend I was Marilyn McCoo of the 5th Dimension or Ali McGraw or, for that matter, any of the long, straight-haired models who stared back at me from magazine covers. Now many of my style icons at the time wore Afros. I adored
Get Christie Love
. I was crazy about the Jackson 5. I pined for Michael Jackson, but I didn’t want to look like him.

Mom tried to convince me that “the look” was right for me. She talked of how easy it would be to care for. As summer was just a few weeks away, she said, “Imagine being able to swim as much as you want without worrying about losing your press and curl. It just makes good sense.” And when she noticed that pushing the practicality of the new do was not winning over a thirteen-year-old, she switched back to flattery: “You have such a pretty little face. A cute little Afro will really show it off.”

Whether I’d have a say in the matter or not, I, more than likely, didn’t want to rock the boat, as my outings with Mom, after she’d moved out, were sporadic. So I held my breath and tried not to cry as a barber sporting plaid pants, gold rings, and his own outsized Afro snipped inch after inch of my hair, from my elbows to my shoulders and past my ears, then going in for the kill: trimming the halo of fuzz that remained. I remember feeling slightly sick when I looked at the floor and saw all the hair I used to braid at night and toss over my shoulder or coil on my head. Mom in bell bottoms, standing at the doorway, didn’t understand how painful this was for me.

Once the mounds of my hair had been swept away, Mom leaned in, put her face next to mine, and we both stared ahead at the mirror. “You look so cute!” she exclaimed, in a tone sincere enough to suggest a sales pitch. I remember thinking the Afro was, after all, kind of cute. But that was the problem: at thirteen I was done with cute. I wanted to be glamorous. I wanted to look like the models in magazines. I wanted to run out of the building and find Mary Tyler Moore’s tam and pull it down tight over my head. “Looking good,” the barber said. “Looking good, babygirl.”

I’ve never liked the phrase “looking good.” It sounds lustful, lascivious, praise as complimentary as a pat on the tush. No thanks. Mom could see I was about to cry and she whispered, “You do look good.” The problem was, I didn’t feel good. It
had all happened too fast. I felt nauseous. Mom paid the disco barber, and we headed home. On the way to the car, Mom stopped to buy me an ice cream cone. My favorite, peppermint bon bon. When she wasn’t looking, I threw it in a trash can.

I was so mad I walked a few feet behind her, even when she slowed down to let me catch up. I stared at the ground and, as was my habit at the time, chewed my bottom lip. When I looked up, I noticed something: black people, especially black women, were nodding approvingly at me in passing, as if to say, in today’s parlance, “You go, girl!” This kept happening for weeks, even as my Afro got bigger and bigger, eventually growing so large that it reached past the frame of my school photos. Sometimes, when a be-Afroed woman would lean down at me and whisper, “Little sister, I like that ’fro,” I’d smile. But the fact that I looked more like a boy than a girl was not lost on the playground, where the kids were unmerciful.

With the rise of Afrocentrism and black power in politics, music, and popular culture, my Afro had given me cachet long before I knew what the word meant. And it made life easier for Dad and me. He had no idea how to set, or braid, or smooth out hair that had a mind of its own. Afros, he understood. By the seventies, he had even let his own closely cropped hair grow an inch or two, and wore a slight goatee.

I’ve asked Mom a hundred times why she cut my hair that day; she’s always breezy, ready with a pat answer: “It seemed like a good idea.” Or “I thought you would look cute in a ’fro.” But I think I know what she was doing: trying to do her part, while not living with Dad and me, to keep me from becoming that teenage ingenue I so badly wanted to be. She was not present consistently enough to offer guidance or to prevent boys from sniffing around. Or she may have been trying to make life easier for Dad regarding my hair-care regimen. Betty Norris was a mother looking out for her daughter’s best interest. It
took me years before I figured out as much, and years before I made peace with it.

Though I am loath to admit it, Mom may have been right about my hair, as she was about more important matters: for instance, that the shooting incident at the Pythian Temple and Dad’s secrecy about it went a long way toward explaining many a curiosity in our family, including the simmering tension between Uncle Simpson and Dad. While my father remained close to his brothers in Chicago, a mild conflict would flare up between Belvin and Simpson at unexpected moments. I never understood why until I dug into my father’s story. Simpson had planned to use his military stipend and back pay to buy property in Chicago or start his own business. But after Dad was arrested, my grandparents insisted that he use his nest egg to bail his brothers out of the Birmingham jail, pay for a lawyer, and dole out payola as needed to hasten his brothers’ departure from a legal system that was byzantine at best when blacks were involved. The idea was to make the whole thing go away.

Simpson’s son Butch said his dad quietly seethed every time he told the story about the squelching of his dream. Simpson often ribbed Dad about an outstanding loan. Though he appeared to speak in jest, there was always a caustic undertone to his remarks that even a kid could detect. My father would look more pained than amused. The squabble between the two loving brothers would surface when they spent too much time together. It reached a head once during a summer trip to Itasca State Park. Simpson and his wife, Ernestine, drove to Minneapolis to join my parents and me for a long trip north to Itasca, in the northern part of the state. I was about ten; my older sisters had long outgrown mandatory summer vacation
with the parents, as had Simpson’s two sons. So the two Norris couples and I embarked on our excellent adventure in Dad’s white Galaxie 500 sedan.

Once at Itasca, I spent most of my time with my nose in a book, while the adults drank Scotch and sodas and played bid whist. After one singular late night of card playing and rambunctious laughter, Mom and Aunt Ernestine slept in, while Dad, Uncle Simpson, and I headed to the big dining hall in the Old Rustic Lodge to have an early breakfast. At some point that morning, the ribbing between the brothers intensified. Simpson relentlessly put salt in whatever wound there was until my dad stormed off, muttering under his breath, leaving behind a little black skillet filled with grilled trout and scrambled eggs. I’d rarely seen my father lose his temper. It unsettled me, but it tickled my uncle. Uncle Simpson invited me for a walk to the water, so that my father would have some time to shake off whatever was bothering him.

Itasca is a gorgeous spot. There, the mighty Mississippi begins its meandering twenty-five-hundred-mile journey toward the Gulf of Mexico. Massive pine trees hug the shoreline, and the sun lingers at the close of the day, long golden rays piercing the lacework of branches. But the dark side of sunrise is so chilly—even in summer—that thick mist rises from the water. That morning, I skipped my way across the Mississippi in the time it takes to spell the word. The river there is only about twenty feet wide. The Twin Cities, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, are separated by a yawn of roiling muck flowing beneath the massive bridges joining one town to the other. Up in Itasca State Park, you can walk back and forth, across big jagged rocks, from one shore of the Mississippi to the other. Uncle Simpson held my hand as we did this, he in his dress shoes, trying his best to keep up with me in my Keds.

Simpson used to call his sons “Rusty-butt boys” and held them in line by barking orders and taking no guff. He was, however,
different around his nieces, slipping us peppermints and breaking out in applause when we sang silly songs or twirled until we fell. That morning, after we traversed the Mississippi, he leaned down to me and whispered, “You just crossed a river on your own two feet—now you can do anything.”