The Grace of Silence (12 page)

Much later Braden would reveal that the courtly gentleman was her father. And while she was convinced that he would never have joined a lynch mob, she nonetheless concluded that he had already “committed murder in his heart and mind” by voicing a sentiment that had “sprung out of the unconscious places of his soul.”

In film and literature and elsewhere in popular culture, segregationists are often portrayed as grotesque caricatures warped by hate and aggression. But in reality the Jim Crow system was held firmly in place by fear on both sides of the color line; fear of diminished social status, lessened earning potential, or cheap, exploitable labor was as keenly felt as fear of white retaliation or loss of dignity. Both whites and blacks had to live according to a strict racial hierarchy.

Consider the tight vise of Birmingham’s racial system when my father returned from the war. Imagine downtown, not as it is now, with its smattering of hotels and sandwich shops, but as it was in the mid-1940s. Because of wartime production, Alabama’s urban population had grown by 57 percent, as tens of thousands left rural towns for industrial centers like Mobile, Montgomery, and Anniston.
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As the state’s largest city, Birmingham saw the biggest influx. After the Depression, Birmingham had turned into a boomtown, the downtown area reflecting the city’s changing fortunes. It had a domed train station, neoclassical skyscrapers, and swank department stores like Porter’s and Pizitz. The business district was abuzz day and night, with its early morning farmers’ markets, midday retail rush, and crowded nightclubs and church revivals in the evening.

Though downtown brought blacks and whites together and they walked the same streets, everyone observed racial demarcations. Blacks knew which restaurants offered service through a side window and which buildings had colored restrooms or drinking fountains. Only certain stores allowed colored customers to try on hats, gloves, or clothing before buying them, though the courtesy was never advertised. Birmingham’s strict segregation had facilitated the emergence of a thriving black business corridor, just beyond downtown’s main retail center. Originally settled by Jewish families, Fourth Avenue evolved into the lifeline of the black merchant class. It was the main artery of a network of juke joints, dance halls, beauty shops, real estate agencies, and restaurants. You could pose for a picture at Brown’s studio, as my father and his brothers often did, or you could stop by to see Bishop B. G. Shaw, an entrepreneurial clergyman who could fix you up from head to toe—he owned Shaw’s Beauty Salon and Shaw’s Shoe Store. At the Little Savoy Cafe, ten cents would get you a strong cup of coffee, and for twenty-five cents you could have a fried chicken dinner with a choice of three sides. The food in the Fourth Avenue district was legendary and its gravitational pull so strong that prestigious white families who would never set foot in a Negro restaurant quietly dispatched emissaries with wooden boxes or straw baskets to sneak in and out for large orders to go.

Lawyers, doctors, dentists, and other professionals were clustered in one of two tall buildings, the black community’s pillars of self-respect: the seven-story Beaux Arts limestone Masonic Temple at 1630 Fourth Avenue and the six-story brick Pythian Temple. Their names suggest ornateness, but, save for the arched windows or Corinthian columns, the two looked like most office buildings constructed around the turn of the twentieth century. While modest by today’s standards, they were considered skyscrapers at the time. Both had been designed by a black architect and built by a black-owned construction company.
For a time, the Pythian Temple housed one of the first black-owned financial institutions in the United States, the Alabama Penny Savings Bank, later sold to the Grand Lodge of the Knights of Pythias, a service organization.

Both buildings had spaces for social gatherings, entertainment, and civic organizing. The Masonic Temple housed the first lending library open to blacks; the NAACP had offices on its sixth floor; and the Southern Negro Youth Congress was headquartered on the fourth. In addition to its professional offices, the Pythian Temple boasted a private waiters’ club, where its meticulously groomed manager, Johnnie Perkins, looked down his nose over his pencil-thin mustache and decided who got in and who didn’t.

The Pythian Temple is at the corner of Eighteenth Street and Third Avenue, across from the rear entrance of the Alabama Theatre and a few blocks from the Tutwiler hotel and the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. As a child, I frequently passed the building on the way to the train station or a downtown department store, whizzing by, my forehead pressed against the car window. And though, from the front seat, my relatives would offer running commentary about city landmarks and who did what on this or that corner, no one ever once referred to the melee involving my father at the Pythian Temple on the night of February 7, 1946. Had I been older or more perceptive, I might have caught some discomfiture in my relatives’ speech or demeanor, as we rushed along the building’s sidewalk on our way to fetch new church gloves to replace the ones I was forever misplacing or soiling beyond repair. The Pythian Temple had no special place in the narrative of our lives, even though it was where my father, Belvin, and his brother Woody had been arrested.

When I first started asking questions about the shooting and arrest, I discovered that my mother had learned about the incident—much as I did and at around the same time—to her
great surprise, from a cousin who had blabbed about it at a family funeral. While the revelation had made me want to scream with frustration, my mother initially dismissed the story as “crazy talk.” She shrugged her shoulders, no doubt adding the tale to her catalog of possible explanations for the failure of her marriage to Belvin. She didn’t know anything about it, and saw no reason to bother herself with knowing more. “You believe what you need to believe about your parents,” she told me. “It’s what we all do, and that belief has served you well in your life, so please don’t go looking for old ghosts.”

I wondered if Mom, too, had had her own epiphanies and how she had coped with the fact that Dad had walled off a part of his life. How could she not have known? How could she have traveled to Alabama repeatedly and never heard anything about this from her husband or his parents? Grandpa Belvin treated Mom like a queen. He called her “Daughter” as if that were her first name, and for a man who had six sons, it was a term of endearment. Yet in all those long talks on the front porch in Birmingham, it never came up? How could it be that, in their intimacy, the husband and wife on Oakland Avenue had never spoken of this? And had she known, would it have made a difference? I suppose I should have known better than to expect a simple yes or no to that question from Mom. Instead she said, “It would have explained a lot.”

Untangling what had happened at the Pythian proved extremely difficult. My grandparents and four of my father’s five brothers had passed away. Only Joe, the youngest, remained to give sketchy recollections of what he’d heard. He had been away in the military when the shooting happened. He wasn’t at the house when Dad and Woody ventured out for the evening and returned home from jail twenty-four hours or so later.

When my father and his brother left Ensley for downtown Birmingham that fateful evening, they were with their fellow classmate John Beaton, as the police docket suggested. Beaton’s
parents, Abe and Jesse, lived two doors down from my grandparents; the two women, Jesse and Fannie, were particularly close. If I could track John Beaton down, I thought, he might be able to tell me exactly what had happened in the Pythian elevator. But I soon discovered that John Beaton had died years ago. My next idea was to find one of his siblings, who might have lived on Avenue G back in February of ’46, in the hope that they remembered the hubbub the shooting most certainly would have caused.

John Beaton had two brothers: Morris, known as Mott, and Abe, named for his father. Like my father and uncles, the Beaton men had moved north—in their case, to Chicago—in search of better opportunities. I reached Abe on a Thursday morning and immediately regretted placing the call so early. It’s hard to get information from anyone jolted from sleep by a ringing phone. And since Abe Beaton was eighty-five years old, I imagined a heavy, old-fashioned rotary phone whose ring could be heard throughout his building. Groggy as he was, he softened when I mentioned the name Norris, but his familiarity with the incident didn’t yield much. His speech was slow and somewhat slurred; in response to my appeals he couldn’t offer any firsthand information. He seemed to believe it was still 1946 and he was in the army. The more we talked, the more he appeared eager to get back to bed. I thanked him and said good-bye.

I tried to reach his brother Morris repeatedly, with no success. Just when I was ready to give up, Uncle Joe remembered another Beaton relative—Julia, much younger than her brothers. When I got her on the phone, I had no idea what I was in for.

Julia Beaton had been five years old in 1946, and while she could not remember the specifics of the incident involving my dad, she recalled a chaotic evening that winter that had left her parents wary of police cars cruising through the neighborhood.
She suggested that I try her brother Morris and gave me his cell phone number, noting that it was a much better way to reach him than his house phone. I was grateful for the tip, but before I let her go, I asked, “What do you remember about life in Birmingham?”

There was a long pause, then sniffles. She said she needed a moment; I heard her set the phone down. Soon she returned to the line and asked me if I had time to hear her out. “Let me tell you one of my strongest memories,” she said. “I remember your grandparents walking home, all in white. They were coming home from church. Probably a revival, because they had white on head to toe. And I remember some kids. Some white kids came zoomin’ down the street hanging out of car windows and they pelted them with rotten tomatoes. They threw tomatoes at churchgoing folks and they laughed and they called them names I am not going to say out loud. Their clothes were ruined and they were so upset. Those kids in that car were just evil. What happens to make young people feel that kind of evil so early in life? I have never forgotten that. People do what they can get away with, and in Birmingham they could get away with anything. My feelings toward Birmingham, toward white people, are wrapped up in what happened that day when those boys threw those tomatoes at folks coming home from Sunday prayer.”

I was startled by her raw candor. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to Julia Beaton, and my question about life in the South had burst open a dam. “I don’t talk about this, and I barely know why I am talking about this now,” she said. “I am not a prejudiced person, but I do not trust American white people. When you have seen people treated that way and hurt and the shooting and the bombings and the constant disrespect, it bothers me. It really bothers me to this day. The theaters had an upstairs part for black folks, and you needed to go up front and pay and then go outside again and up the back stairs to get to
your seats. All so they could just remind you what they really thought of you. On the buses they sometimes had boards to keep people from sitting certain places even if seats were available. I am sixty-eight, and I remember it just like it was yesterday. I can’t look at these civil rights documentaries, because it is not entertainment and it sure as hell ain’t ancient history.”

I had planned on this being a quick phone call, but Julia didn’t give me a chance to interject. She was gathering steam, a freight train of rage: “I have no white American friends. I just don’t care for them. I just don’t trust them. I have always told my sons and my grandsons not to bring a woman in this house who does not look like me. That is a point of respect. I have a problem with the entertainers and the athletes. Sidney Poitier and Quincy Jones. They can do what they want, but it was a sign of disrespect to black women everywhere.”

I heard Julia Beaton exhale loudly, and I could almost imagine her slumping in exhaustion on the other end of the line. “Listen,” she said, commanding my attention. “I am not a mean person, but I am very firm in what I believe in. Birmingham was a very scarring place. Nothing per se happened to me. It was just the things you heard about that happened to other people. Everything for you was less than it was for other people, and though it is better today, my grandsons hate … and I say
hate
white people.”

Julia went on to explain that her grandsons’ anger had resulted from their encounters with the police. They are car enthusiasts, she said, and they like to spend hours tricking out their automobiles with spoilers and flashy chrome grilles. This leads police in their hometown to mistakenly assume they’re members of a street gang. It never occurs to the police, she said, that they’re young men who work full-time, go to church every Sunday, and spend their free hours tinkering with cars in the garage.

I asked her if she was bothered that her grandsons are consumed
by hatred for whites. I suggested to her that hatred is hardly admirable, especially on the part of worshipful churchgoers. She agreed, though only to a point, saying, “I know that hatred can do more harm to you than to the other person, but frankly, I understand what they feel.”

After twenty-five minutes on the phone with Julia, I was reeling. I felt honored by her frankness. But despite our shared history on Avenue G, she was far more distraught and full of rage about Birmingham than anyone in my immediate family has ever been—anyone related by blood to the churchgoing couple pelted with rotten tomatoes by young white hoodlums or to the serviceman shot by a Birmingham policeman.

This anger and mistrust, the absolute disdain for members of another race, the hatred: these were the very sentiments that civil rights marchers in 1963 had tried to overcome. But if there is one thing I have learned while listening closely to hidden conversations about race in America, it is how complex that objective really was. Many people of color wanted to move the country forward, wanted to convince white people, by moral suasion, no longer to hate and subjugate black America, while they themselves secretly clung to festering, old grudges, the better to foster communal solidarity.