The Grace of Silence (9 page)

Though Dad never told me or Mom or my sisters about the episode, some of his brothers had apparently talked to their children about it. My first cousin Butch had known for years. He’d heard about it from his father during a cautionary “never look a cop in the eye” conversation, the kind black men often have with their teenage sons. Butch irrefutably dismissed the story about the white woman: “If a white woman was involved, your father would have been dead.”

For months, I could not find anybody willing to talk at length about the incident. At some point he or she would shut down, sometimes with pleasantries or stern warnings not to bring the matter up again. My father’s cousin Edgar Carr suggested that amnesia was a coping skill. “If they told you to forget it, you forgot about it. In fact, you forgot about it before they were finished talking.” When I called my eighty-nine-year-old aunt Blanche, in Ohio, the music drained out of her voice as soon as I brought the subject up. “So now you know,” she said. I could picture her holding the phone, shaking her head, and looking down at her slippers. “A man can’t talk about a thing like that. I think it took his life in the end. He never got over it. I think that is what killed him. He never got over it. He lived his whole life with fear in his heart.” Her advice to me before hanging up the phone was “Don’t let this make you bitter. You have so much in life.”

Two weeks later a letter came in the mail. “Despite all I said, I want you to [know] your father was very happy in his life and he was very proud of you,” Aunt Blanche had written. “We do our best to do right by our children. Try to understand.”

I’D BEEN IN
BIRMINGHAM
only a few times after high school, mostly to chase down stories as a professional reporter. Truly to understand my father’s experience, I had to travel back to Alabama. I had little to go on. No date of the shooting; no location; no names other than Woody’s and my father’s. I didn’t know whether Dad had been alone or with others, or whether the police or sheriff’s department had been involved. So it’s easy to understand why Jim Baggett was polite but guarded when I called to tell him I desperately needed his help. Jim heads the Department of Archives and Manuscripts at the Birmingham Public Library, and while he listened patiently to my ramblings on the phone, he must have thought I was just this side of crazy.

Patient and kind, with a slightly caustic wit, Jim was careful not to douse my hopes. He explained that it would be “pert near” impossible to find a record of so obscure an occurrence. He added that incidents like my father’s shooting had been “fairly common.”

“The Birmingham police shot a lot of people,” he said. “The city was like a shooting gallery back then.” Birmingham police records from the era are scarce, and Jim warned me repeatedly that arrest records, especially those from the post–World War II era, were unavailable, consigned to oblivion. Birmingham police archives are notoriously hard to track down. The few files that survive have been pored over by lawyers and countless civil rights researchers. Or they’ve been pillaged by those seeking to profit from or plunder souvenirs. I
learned, for instance, that most mug shots of the young demonstrators arrested at the children’s marches during the peak of the civil rights standoff, in the spring of 1963, are missing. So, too, are the rosters of the police officers on duty on those days. Documents so important to this country’s modern history have simply vanished.

This meant that tracking down the precise details of my father’s case would be difficult, maybe even impossible. “The only way you’re likely to find anything,” Jim told me, “is if it made the papers, and it would have to be the black papers because the white newspapers would never ever print a story like this. They just didn’t care.” On the phone seven hundred miles away, Baggett, I knew, could tell I’d been stung by his statement. “Let me see what I can do,” he offered, cautioning once again that unearthing even a scintilla of information about my father’s shooting would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. “But every so often,” he said, “someone sits down and lands right smack on top of it, so let’s see what we find.” It was all I could ask for. I felt in my bones that there was something out there waiting to be found.

In the meantime, I swam in a sea of what-ifs. What if my father had tried in his own way to tell me about the shooting but, with the callowness of youth, I had signaled that I couldn’t be bothered? What if the officer who had shot him was still alive? What exactly was I going to say when I showed up at his doorstep or, more likely, confronted him in his bathrobe in a nursing home? What if he didn’t remember the incident after all these years? What if he told me, “Yeah, I did it—your father was a real jackass”? What if I got arrested myself for smacking an old white man upside the head? I was losing it. What if the bullet had not grazed my father’s leg but had caused far greater harm? What if he had bled to death? What if he had been crippled? One night, I looked around the kitchen at my husband and my kids and their crayon drawings all over the place and
thought: None of this would even exist if the trajectory of the bullet had been different. My fate had been a matter of serendipity.

On the evening of July 7, 2009, the fog of my imaginings began to clear. My husband, Broderick Johnson, was in California on business and I had just had dinner with my kids. As I’d watched them slurp long spaghetti strands and dissolve into fits of giggling, I’d resisted the urge to fuss. How could I when they looked so adorable? I watched over the brushing of their teeth, and we all climbed into my daughter’s twin bed to read a wonderful children’s classic,
The Hundred Dresses
, a book about the moral dilemma of childhood teasing. Are you just as guilty if you sit back and say nothing while a child mercilessly teases another? The object of the taunts in the book is a poor little Polish girl named Wanda Petronski, and given the book’s publication date of 1944, it’s clear that the parable about having the courage to stand up for what’s right alluded to the plight of persecuted Jews in Europe. During our reading, it could have been taken as the oppression of marginalized “Negroes” in the United States. The simple eloquence of children’s literature can sometimes shoot straight to the heart.

With my two young children drifting off, I headed back to the kitchen to load the dishwasher and scrub pots and pans. I heard a ping in my purse, my iPhone telling me, “You’ve got mail.” I rinsed my hands to have a look, thinking that Broderick had left me a voice mail while I was upstairs reading to the kids. It was, instead, an email from Birmingham; the subject line: “Your Father.” “Michele, … found that Belvin and Woodrow Norris were arrested February 7, 1946, for drunkenness, robbery and resisting arrest. They were convicted of drunkenness and resisting arrest the following day in recorders court.… found the info in jail and court dockets. There you go. Talk soon.”

Drunkenness, robbery, resisting arrest? The ugly charges
couldn’t be true, I thought. My dad had never been one to hit the sauce hard. Had he lived it up with some navy buddies that night only to suffer the consequences? As for robbery, that, too, had to be wrong. It just had to be. For weeks I had been tracking down information in the manner of a journalist, though I’d wondered whether the story had substance, whether it might be nothing but family legend. I’d been besieged by hearsay. No one I’d spoken to had actually been with my father when the shooting happened; no one could prove anything, even that it had happened. But the email message erased that doubt. My father’s name was in a jail docket and court records.

His story, or at least a police officer’s version of it, had been written down in pencil and ink. My knees buckled; I collapsed to the floor and stayed there for nearly two hours. Everything I’d thought I knew about my father had been turned inside out. I was in a bind. I had to go to Alabama. But first I had to throw up.

During my childhood and adolescence, Alabama had been a second home to me. I spent weeks there each summer visiting my grandparents, absorbing the city’s rhythms and social codes. I could slip in and out of the loose-voweled Alabama accent as easily as pulling a sock on. But when I returned to Birmingham in search of my father’s story, the familiar accent hit me like an odor as soon as I stepped off the plane.

Suspicion. That’s what it was. The newspaper vendor in the gift shop. The woman behind the rental-car counter. The police officer directing traffic. Questions raced through my mind. On which side had these white people stood in Alabama’s race war? Were they related somehow to strict enforcers of the Jim Crow laws of yore? Had their kinfolk spat on schoolchildren or turned dogs and water cannons on civil rights protesters? Were any related to the policeman who shot my father?

I knew the score in Alabama. I understood that the state had more than its share of people who wanted to keep black folks in their place, although I had been schooled to look past that. But now my blinders had fallen off: the man who had preached to me to look the other way may have purposefully kept from me a defining racial confrontation in his life.

By the time I arrived in Alabama I had compiled a few more facts about my father’s “incident.” I knew that the day he’d been arrested, February 7, 1946, had been a Thursday. And I had learned that meeting the man who shot my father would be far more difficult than I’d imagined. The story was not simple; more than one officer had been involved. Clues to what happened that night had long been locked away in the bowels of the Birmingham Public Library’s Linn-Henley Research Library, a beautiful neoclassical building with large windows and thick majestic columns. That building had been off-limits to me as a child. Although the library officially integrated in 1963, it would be years before my grandparents would allow us to set foot in it.

In Ensley, my grandparents had joined forces with cash-strapped neighbors to form their own library lending system. No two families ever purchased the same book, except for the trinity of books that graced every working-class home. Every family had at least one Bible and often a special one, with the family tree drawn on the back. Most families also had another book nearly as important: a little dog-eared paperback dream book offering guidance for playing the numbers. And among families with school-aged children, small dictionaries were common. Books were sold door-to-door to black families at special discounts, and inspirational messages stamped inside told about the fruits of hard work and the power of industry.

The Ensley neighbors devised a collective purchasing plan. If one family bought an atlas, that was checked off the master list. The same held true if another household purchased a
thesaurus, a large dictionary, or one of the volumes in the
Treasury of the Familiar
short-story collection. Even the encyclopedia was purchased on a neighborhood-wide installment plan. One family would spring for the first two
Britannica
volumes, another would buy the next two, and so on until the set was complete.

So it was that the 900 block of Avenue G had acquired its own reference library. The books were displayed on high shelves in living rooms or locked away until needed in a wooden chifforobe. Who had read what and when was carefully etched in each volume. Often the adults who purchased the books barely understood the words contained within. But they derived great joy from propping their feet on the porch railing and listening to their children read aloud from the encyclopedia or a dictionary in the cool of evening.

This is what I was thinking about when I walked through the turnstile of the Linn-Henley building, past the reading room, with its amazingly ornate Ezra Winter murals, and down to the basement archives, where Jim Baggett presides over the special collection of Alabama history.

Jim is a researcher’s dream, smart and thorough and slightly obsessed with the small details that give a story weight and drama. And what a storyteller! Libraries were fixed in my mind as places where conversation was kept to a minimum and, if necessary, was whispered apologetically. That’s mostly true at the Birmingham Public Library. But Jim oversees his own little fiefdom, tucked under a marble staircase and closed off by a glass door. It’s a space where stories are kept and told with brio, in painterly detail, and accompanied by laughter.

The laughter threw me for a loop at first. Jim knows Birmingham inside out. He’s proud of his city, and he makes no apologies for its “unfortunate chapters.” He also does not defend Alabama’s segregationists. When he told his stories, there was no shame or hyperbole, and he managed to find humor even
where, as I saw it, there was none. Imagine Burl Ives relating the most dramatic and painful chapters of Alabama’s history. You are entertained even when you want to look away. He is a steady and fair steward of the city’s troubled history. Jim directed me to two massive leather-bound dockets, one from the court and one from the city’s main jail. They were well worn and big enough to cover a library display table. I spent hours poring over dusty pages smelling of mold; as a result, I caught a nasty sinus infection.

Baggett first guided me to the warden’s docket for the Southside Prison. In it I found a rogue’s catalog of men arrested and charged with all manner of offenses, organized in neat columns, like the ledger my father had used to document household expenses. Each handwritten entry detailed the facts of an arrest: date, time, type of offense, names of the prisoner and of the arresting officers. There were handwriting styles galore, suggesting varying degrees of education and even pride in penmanship.

February 7, 1946, appears to have been a busy night at the jail. Fifteen men were arrested within a three-hour period, a few for robbery, one for assault with a weapon. Most, however, were charged with drunkenness or vagrancy. You snap to attention when you see your own name in writing, much as you do when you hear someone say it aloud. I was prepared to see Norris in the docket, yet still I grew tense when my eyes fell on it. Prisoner number 7562, a twenty-two-year-old black male, arrested at 9:50 p.m. by two officers named Lindsey and Espy. The name of the man arrested: Woodrow Norris.