* * *
I was eight years old going on nine and Uncle Ralston was bringing Cello’s father back from Ghana. Dad fed us catfish sandwiches, but Cello ate tuna from the can without a trace of mayonnaise or a crumb of saltine cracker anywhere. My father took the five of us with him to Holy Cross Hospital after he got the call from Mom. Dr. King and the protestors had been trapped by white mobs at certain points during the day. She’d gone on the march against Dad’s wishes.
We found Mom and her nuns. They had short hair instead of habits and they wore pants. They were sitting with a white boy, a high school student, who was shaking his head and saying that that was the last time he was going to use violence. We’d missed it. The hospital emergency room mixed the wrong kind of whites with blacks. “Take a bath while you’re here,” some white guy snarled at Mom, and Mom’s white boy raced over and slapped the guy’s face sideways. But we’d missed it. Dad was so put out he wouldn’t speak. I was planning to wish again for superpowers when I blew out the candles on my birthday cake in less than two weeks.
I got to ride in the back of the nuns’ station wagon with the distressed white boy from the North Side. He tried to smile at me, but his heart was heavy. He said at least three times that it would be fine to let him out at the corner. Solomon had white friends in his scout troop and at school. He said in sports you just did, if the other guy was good enough. Mom had white friends. Cello didn’t talk to anyone, but had I friends, they would have been everyone, too.
That summer Martin Luther King was trying to persuade white Realtors to open all-white neighborhoods like Chicago Lawn or Gage Park to black homeowners. Any time we heard Mom and Dad argue about Martin Luther King we got nervous. Mom and Dad explained things. Dad explained them again, taking back what Mom had said. I never understood, not until much later. One of the surprises of growing up was finding out what things had been about.
That night, Mom wanted to prove that it was not dangerous out there; she was willing to take just me along for the ride, a Friday-night treat. But it was dangerous. South Kedzie Avenue was blocked off behind the whipping lights of patrol cars. Mayor Daley’s most loyal whites were shocked by what they’d done, the smell of tires burning in the night heat. We left the hospital, looking back, Dad after us, pulling at Mom’s belt, confused, Mom and Dad hitting each other’s arms, nuns running alongside, ineffectual, everything noise, bright lights, and sirens as we left Dad behind.
There was what I thought happened and what Mom and Dad told me later. The nun driving knew how to take backstreets. She ran stop signs and some lights. Because they had a kid in the car, they hoped they wouldn’t look like protestors, Mom admitted. The year before, a white woman from Detroit, a mother, had been murdered in Alabama for driving blacks home after a march. Infamous Selma.
When we pulled up that night we could hear Cello at the piano. We were expected to go to bed. Dad was waiting at the front door with Soloman. Cello’s brother and sister were already upstairs. We’d missed Hogan’s Heroes on TV, so the day was over for them. They were used to plans falling through, those two. Cello shepherded Solomon and me toward the stairs, a sign of her new maturity. Adults needed to talk, especially the ones in their right minds. I’d not been afraid, not once that night.
Dad said that every friend he had on the university police force was looking for Mom. He said they were burning the clergy in their cars. But Mom and Dad didn’t have an argument. I remember that Mom thanked him. She reminded him that she’d let him go to Sam Cooke’s funeral and now they were even. She said that afternoon they had parked on Halsted and never got anywhere near the back of the march. They met up with waves of red-faced Americans running amok. Mom said they looked like they played pinochle, not bridge. Mom and Dad both laughed, in the middle of the emergency sounds still going in my head. Cello led me on.
The suburb of Cicero, Illinois, kicked Reverend King so hard it made Mahalia Jackson groan. Mom didn’t like her, but everybody knew that Reverend King adored her as the song of trial. Mom told me years later that she had, indeed, piled on top of the knocked-down nun with the other sisters to protect her that night in Marquette Park, but she hadn’t shouted prayers to anyone.
* * *
On the day of Harold Washington’s funeral, we met by the front door, dressed in a kind of mourning, for the mayor, for the black family-owned newspaper that would not have been able to cover the story of the fallen black hero. It had been a while since our house had been a gathering place at such a time. Something like church platters of carrots, celery, deviled eggs, and ham and cheese slices between miniature buns had been placed around the living room, dining room, and on top of the hall bookshelf. The church-platter fairies turned out to be two arthritic, trembling secretaries, the last of Shay Holdings, Inc.
They talked at the same time, but not about the same thing. They were right behind Mom as she retreated to the kitchen. One was telling Mom that she would never forget her winter as a returning graduate student in Detroit. The snowplows were out every morning. Wayne State was practically stranded behind the walls of snow the plows had built up. The other was asking over her, like a descant line, if Aunt Gloria, Ruthanne’s mother, had ever made that album of Christmas songs she was always talking about, because she could use gift ideas.
The doorbell rang, admitting former newspaper staff members. Word had got around. Before too long, the living room seemed full of old heads examining the trays in Dad’s and Mom’s hands. Maybe I didn’t comprehend or stop to consider what the end of the Eagle might mean to them, but these people did, elderly vendors, retired machinists.
The doorbell kept ringing, bringing in movement types, Unitarian church types, grandmothers who’d got off night shifts that morning, University of Chicago sociology contacts, more people who used to work at the Eagle, neighbors, black or white, though some of them, blacks included, wanted to call the square East Ogden again.
Of the many women over the years whom Mom had made phone calls to jails for or loaned money to, few stayed in touch or went back to school. This did not mean that they had not turned their lives around, wherever they were, Mom sometimes said. Dad let her believe what she wanted when it came to her crazies. He didn’t argue. Mom moved on to greet an old colleague from the National Welfare Rights Organization. Two former crazies in front of me didn’t look as though they were doing that great, but that was no reason for the old secretaries to pretend the crazies had not said hello and that it was a sad day. Shay Holdings, Inc.’s last servants walked out of the kitchen rather than be compromised socially by the formerly homeless.
“Good soldier, where is thy switchblade?” I heard Dad say to a priest from St. Thomas the Apostle up the street. Dad wore a black armband and a red bow tie. Mom had fixed to the back of her head a fractured fascinator of small artificial cream-colored roses.
The television in the living room, the only one in the house, had been going nonstop since Harold Washington’s heart failed him. He was a good man, ahead of his time, the television repeated, the professional mourner among us. I heard Shay Holdings, Inc., say that she couldn’t hack the cold November rain or the downtown crowds, and that she was glad to pay her respects without having to mess with a service, while the other secretary topped her with her gratitude that she had found all of her recipes in a big Christmas box, when for the longest time she just assumed she’d lost them with her other things that time her basement flooded.