The Grace of Silence (3 page)

In any case, the Fuller family said yes when so many others had said no. On February 1, 1961, Belvin and Betty Norris signed the deed to the largest house on the 4800 block of Oakland Avenue. My mother’s sister advised her against buying so big a house. “It will just make it harder,” Aunt Doris said. “Why give them another reason to judge you? They’re going to say you think too highly of yourself. You know how they are.” Mom wasn’t having it. “I do think highly of myself, and I don’t care if they know that. In fact, I prefer if they know that.”

My parents moved in within a week, and the white families whose property line touched ours soon put their homes up for sale. Three who owned houses across from my parents’ also
decided to decamp. As my parents celebrated their new home with a picnic supper, amid boxes in the living room, their neighbors furiously burned the dial, calling each other, calling my folks’ mortgage lender to complain, and eventually calling real estate agents to put their homes up for sale pronto. Mom says she watched the white flight with a mixture of anger and amusement. The desperation of her new neighbors to sell gave her an opportunity for a little mischief.

Every time a real estate agent pulled up with a prospective buyer, she would send my older sisters, Marguerite and Cindy, out to play in the yard. Or she would saunter out herself, holding her back or stretching her arms so anyone could plainly see that another child was on the way. That child was me. My sisters and I never knew any of this until recently, but now Mom loves telling the story. “I’d wait until they got inside the house and had time to check out the bedrooms and look inside the closets, and right about the moment I thought they were in the kitchen giving it a real good look-see, I’d say to myself: ‘Showtime!’

“No matter what your older sisters were doing I’d tell ’em, time to get some fresh air. Go on. Go! Out in the yard. If the kids were at school I’d go outside myself and make sure they saw that I had a child on the way.” She adds, “You couldn’t count to ten before those people would be scurrying out the front door, back to their cars.”

The family that lived next door had the hardest time unloading their property, even though their For Sale sign went up the very day my parents moved in. Three generations lived in the home, a grandmother, her son and daughter-in-law, and their children. They were “displaced persons” from Eastern Europe, and my mother told my older sisters never, ever to refer to them as DPs. Our next-door neighbors, however, saw no need for courtesy. The wife was a homemaker, a woman who
nowadays might be referred to as a member of the sandwich generation because she was taking care of her elderly mother-in-law as well as her children. She had a heavy Eastern European accent and only one arm, and she used to usher her kids inside anytime my sisters stepped into the yard. My mother shakes her head in disbelief as she recalls how the woman would stand on her stoop, clutching her shoulder, as my parents carried groceries from the car. She would stare down my mother when she left for work. My mother would stare back and wave. I can see Mom gliding down the front steps with her smart black handbag and one of her classic “get with the program” smiles. Great day, isn’t it?

The forlorn For Sale sign sat in front of the house for weeks. At one point, someone attached a flyer that read
BEWARE. NEGRO NEIGHBORS
, and the woman wailed so loudly that her cries ricocheted through our kitchen window. Sometimes I wonder: Shouldn’t my mother have been the one moved to tears? But that was not her style.

My sisters were told to keep their distance from our neighbors. And usually they did. But an unfortunate incident occurred. The neighbors had a hardy little apple tree, and some of the branches reached into our yard. When my sisters plucked a few apples from the tree, the woman sent her husband over to ask them to cut it out. He seemed somewhat ashamed to have to carry out his wife’s order. He and my father had achieved a measure of civility; they would exchange curt greetings while shoveling snow or cutting grass. Despite his discomfort, the husband’s message was firm. For everyone’s sake, leave the damn apples alone.

My sisters complied for a few days. But soon temptation was too strong. The moment Marguerite and Cindy plucked a few more apples, they were caught red-handed by the woman. Within minutes she stormed angrily out of her back door, chattering
away in her native tongue. My sisters couldn’t understand what she was saying, but they knew to get back inside the house, fast! The next day a landscaping crew chopped the tree down, creating a void in the nicely designed yard. When they finished the job, a smattering of red apples lay in our yard. “I told the kids, don’t you dare touch those apples,” my mother said. She finally went out and scooped the fruit up. She thought how nice it would be to put them in a basket lined with fresh gingham, or perhaps to bake them in a cobbler or a lattice-top pie, and deliver a gift at the doorstep of the furious woman next door. She thought about it. But instead she threw the apples away.

My mother’s tough. Rock of Gibraltar tough. John Wayne tough. Minnesota-winter tough. She lives life on her own terms; she’s an original. She has no patience for “woe is me.” Once, years later, when we were vacationing on a cruise to Alaska, Mom struck up a friendship with a fellow passenger, who told her how she keeps things in perspective. “Everybody is somebody’s pain in the ass,” the woman said. “Today someone is getting on my nerves but tomorrow I am certain to bug the hell out of somebody else. That’s just the way life works.” Mom loved that. It explained so much. She adopted that phrase and added her own coda: “Life would be pretty boring if we all got along all of the time.”

In retrospect, I can see how Mom’s tough-as-nails exterior might keep people at bay, but she also has a wicked sense of humor and a laugh that commands you to join in the fun. Sometimes I think she has the heart of a cleric. People seek her wisdom and track her down for comfort. Social graces are of extreme importance to her. She raised “please and thank you” daughters in a “Hey, how ya doing?” culture. Now, as adults, we share her small obsessions with thank-you notes, table linens, guest books, and carefully planned menus. Social conventions shaped her views about decorum and the management of her
home, but in almost every other way she’s a woman who colors outside the lines.

Mom wasn’t quite like all the other women in the neighborhood. She always seemed larger—not physically, though she’s what you might call stately because her erect posture seems to add inches to her tall, lean frame. She turned gray early and refused to dye her hair. There was something about her that always seemed epic, like the larger-than-life characters we used to read about at night when she sat at the edge of my twin bed.

She reminded me of those prairie women who pushed the plows on the plains. In reality she, like my father, was a postal worker; she sallied out of the house each morning bearing her thermos as if it were a scepter. Our neighborhood was full of women who took no guff from their children, but Mother was a cut above the rest. She could turn you into Jell-O with one of her looks, which she used to great effect in and outside our home. She’d give the clerk at Kramarczuk’s market a glance that would somehow compel him to pick out the best Warsaw ham from the refrigerator case. She’d narrow her eyes a bit when she spoke to my teachers, ensuring that my slight childhood speech impediment would not keep me from joining accelerated classes. And if my friends stepped out of line on her watch, she would fuss at them as if they were her own kids.

Never tell her that she can’t do something. She is a two-time breast cancer survivor who has probably outlived the gray-haired doctor who crouched down in a hospital corridor thirty-some years ago to tell me that my mother might not see me graduate from high school. She proved the doctor wrong that day and beat the odds twenty-five years later, when cancer struck again. She showed him. She showed us all. She danced at my wedding, gave my daughter her first bath at the hospital, and wiped away joyful tears at both of my children’s first communions.

One spring afternoon, she and I returned home after softball practice and froze when we heard hurried footsteps on the second floor. My older sisters had moved out by then. Dad was at work. Someone was in our house who did not belong there. My instinct was to flee and call the police from safety. Mom instead braced herself for a confrontation. She grew red with anger.

Weeks before, a burglar had broken in and had stolen my father’s video equipment and a few pieces of Mom’s costume jewelry. My mother and father were devastated by the violation—not just by the loss of property but by the notion that someone had been pawing through their things with abandon while they were off earning a living. They were unusually quiet at dinner after the break-in. They’d wait until I headed upstairs for bed; only then would I hear them pacing and fretting, wondering aloud who would have done such a thing. The theft ate away at my parents for weeks. Just when they’d started to relax and once again keep the bedroom windows open all night for fresh, cool air, another intruder was on the premises, wandering around in our private spaces.

Mom wasn’t having it. She threw down the grocery bag, tossed her purse in my direction, and stormed toward the stairs. Before she got to the landing, a long-haired teenager came whooshing down, zoomed through the living room, and zipped right out the front door. The scene was almost comical. I never saw the look on his face, but all the blond hair flying this way and that reminded me of Saturday morning cartoons. Mom roared at the guy like a mama bear chasing a skunk from her den. Without blinking, she took off after him down the street, screaming at the burglar while punching the air with her fist. I wonder what that kid thought when he looked over his shoulder and saw a middle-aged black woman hoofing it in pursuit. She tired halfway down the block and put her hands to her knees as she tried to catch her breath. The long-haired kid
hopped into the passenger side of a car waiting for him and sped off.

It was late afternoon, and the setting sun made Oakland Avenue look like a movie set. Shards of light bounced off windshields and the chrome handlebars of banana-seat bicycles. A group of kids halfway down the block, straddling their Sting-Ray bikes, watched the scene with utter amazement. Mom motioned to the uncomprehending kids to chase after the car to confirm the license plate number; she was so winded she couldn’t yell anymore. I spied the whole thing from the safety of our front steps and knew that this would be the talk of the playground for weeks. Not that I minded. This was the mid-seventies, when blaxploitation films featured baaadass women, when
Get Christie Love
lit up our TV screens and we cheered in our beanbag chairs as Teresa Graves shouted, “You’re under arrest, sugah!” every time she nabbed one of the bad guys.

Once Mom had huffed and puffed her way back into the house and started fixing our dinner, I overheard her on the phone talking to Aunt Doris, who by now lived a few blocks down Oakland Avenue. One of the first things she said was “Thank God he wasn’t black; I’d have hunted him down and wrung his neck.” I could very well imagine Aunt Doris, in her fashionable clothes, nodding her head while uttering her “you know it’s” and “yes honey’s.” The exchange was memorable because at the time I wondered, Would our white neighbors, upon seeing the teenage hoodlum with his dirty-blond hair and carpenter pants, fleeing our house, ever say: “Christ, why did he have to be white?” Even then I knew the answer. Blacks often feel the dispiriting burden of being perceived willy-nilly as representing an entire race. The idea made my head hurt, and it still does if I dwell on it too much. To this day I have to tamp down anxiety when I step on a stage or into a studio. The notion that I can lift up others through stellar work or stall their
progress by falling short has been drummed into me since childhood.

Whether the responsibility is an honor or a burden, I accept it as a fact of life. Whenever I feel the anxiety, I hear my parents: my father telling me, “Wake up and smell the opportunity,” and my mother saying, “Snap out of it.”

MOM LIKES TO PLAY
a little game when people ask her where she’s from. I’m a Minnesotan, she says, and if she is feeling really frisky she will stretch the
o
in
Minn-eh-sooooo-tan
to stress her bona fides. Then she waits for the inevitable next question: “But where did your people come from before they arrived here in Minnesota?” “Let me see,” she says, stroking her chin. “I’d have to go back four generations.” She sits back as their eyes grow wide with astonishment, which negates the inquiry.

Mom is proud to be fourth-generation Minnesotan. Hers was the only black family in the northern town of Alexandria. Her great-grandfather Austin Hopson and his son Fred were the town barbers. Though there were three other barbershops in Alexandria, theirs was favored by the town’s professional class. When doctors, lawyers, and merchants came by for their daily straight-razor shave, the Hopson men would reach into a glass cabinet on the wall for the personalized shaving mug and brush of each patron.

Fred’s daughter Ione was the only black child in her class throughout elementary and high school. She was a doe-eyed beauty with a lilting voice and a laugh that sounded like church bells. She used to tell us grandkids, “I decided to be happy.” A darker choice would have been understandable. Ione Hopson led a lonely life. Her mother left home when Ione was a baby; it was chiefly her grandparents who raised her. And while she had close friends in school and in town, her social life became
stunted as she got older, for everything began to revolve around dances and courtship. For Ione, there were no suitors. No dates. Even if she did have a girlhood crush on one of the farm boys or a young man who visited her father’s shop for a buzz cut, she dared not talk about it to anyone.

Her luck changed, though, when a handsome black baseball player named Jinx rolled through town looking for steady work. Instead he found love. Jinx’s birth name was Vernon, but no one ever called him that. At some point in his youth a friend had taken to calling him Bad News Brown because he always knew the latest gossip. Bad News Brown became Jinx. He was seventeen years older than Ione, but that didn’t matter. Soon Jinx and Ione moved to St. Paul and, eventually, to Minneapolis, where they raised four children.