A Reason to Believe (2 page)

My earliest impressions of my parents were of a stern father who always seemed to be observing us critically, and from a distance, and a brooding mother who would lie in bed for hours, smoking silently and staring off in dark, deep thought. They seemed to have negotiated their way into their marriage. In an exchange of letters within days in 1954, they communicated both a hunger for and skepticism about each other and their future. He wrote: “If your choice matches mine, we match. I can show you but don’t intend to make you see it if you don’t want to. On the other hand, if you do agree, you’ve got a mate.”

She replied, “I have a great affection for you, and feel we could make it together. I hope and will do the best I can not to be selfish as far as this is concerned. I want to give as much to you as you have given to me.”

My father, Pat, was a jazz musician, and as this letter suggests, he seemed to have a take-it-or-leave-it attitude about their relationship. It would be on his terms, period. His greatest and first love was music. My mother, Emily, appears to have felt chronically misunderstood and responded favorably to his insights about her. An ardent romance it wasn’t.

But they tied the knot, and soon afterward, in August 1955, my sister, Rhonda, was born. I followed a short
eleven months later, in July 1956. When I was born, the four of us lived in a basement apartment at 79th and Calumet, and there’s a favorite family photograph of me sitting on my father’s shoulders outside that apartment when I was two or three years old. I have vague recollections of living there, of being bounced around by my father in that apartment. I have a vivid memory of him pouring milk on my sister’s head at the kitchen table one night when he got upset with her. I thought it funny at the time.

Any sense I had of contented family life came to a jarring end when my father decided to leave and move to New York when I was four. I knew nothing of the tensions. My mother, who had dropped out of high school to pursue him, hoped he would return, a hope she nourished by sending him letters regularly. “We all love you very much, and are trying to understand you,” she wrote. “Try and do the same for us.” When Chubby Checker became a sensation, she wrote, “The kids have gotten so they twist on everything; every kind of beat.” She would include little notes from us in her letters. Rhonda’s penmanship was remarkably clear at age five or six. Mine was horrible.

My father sent some money once or twice a year, and the landlord was kind about waiving the rent for months at a time. But our finances went from tenuous to desperate, and we had to move. We were offered an apartment in the new Robert Taylor Homes, but my mother could not bring herself to live there, still hoping, I think, for her husband’s return.

There would be no reconciliation. My mother tried to make it on her own for a few years, mostly with the help of welfare, but feeling lonesome and needing help, she moved us into her parents’ apartment on Wabash Avenue. Since we spent so much time there anyway and I adored my Gram and Poppy, I thought this was a great idea. Little did I know that for my mother it was a sign of defeat, and that my grandmother made her feel like it was for many years.

The tenement that we lived in with my grandparents consisted of four apartments on two levels with two separate entrances. The apartments were identical, long and narrow. Ours was on the first floor. The door from the small, tiled vestibule opened on a dark, narrow hall. To the right, with a window on Wabash Avenue, was the living room with a gold upholstered sofa with clear plastic slipcovers, a dark green leatherette recliner, and a light brown stuffed chair, also covered in plastic, facing the television. That television, with its oversized cabinet and small screen, seems to have always been on and at full volume, whether for Gram’s soaps (her “stories”) during the day or the network news in the evening. It took a long time to warm up, so we had to plan ahead if there was something we didn’t want to miss. The firehouse across the street had two trucks with an uncanny ability to roar off, sirens wailing, just at the punch line of a favorite sitcom.

Next down the hall was my grandparents’ room, small and orderly, with twin beds, a matching dresser and chest
in walnut veneer, and a large radiator painted white with a tin pan or kettle on top to generate a little humidity in winter. I was born in this room, in my grandmother’s bed. She and my uncle Sonny assisted. There was no doctor; labor was brief. According to family legend, after Uncle Sonny cut and tied off the umbilical cord, Grandma wrapped me in a blanket and placed me in the warm oven with the door open until the doctor arrived. Grandma told this story every Thanksgiving when she was dressing the holiday turkey in the very same roasting pan that once held me.

My mother and sister and I occupied a smaller bedroom across from the one bathroom. It was furnished with bunk beds that took up most of the space. For a time we could double up, but eventually we had to rotate so that one of us would sleep on the floor. Whoever’s turn it was for “floor night” followed a ritual: you would lay down newspapers, then a thin blanket, then a sheet, then a threadbare cover. Part of the morning ritual was to disassemble all of this and stack it neatly under the bed. The room’s one window opened onto an air shaft and the neighbors’ window fifteen feet across.

At the end of the hall was a dining room, off of which was a small, rude kitchen with one bare lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling on a frayed cord. At the end of the cord, just above the bulb, was the kitchen’s one socket, where Grandma plugged her electric mixer or iron, depending
on the chore at hand. It could make running in from the back door hazardous.

We didn’t know to complain. It was home. The notion of having more than one bathroom or multiple sockets in the kitchen or a window with a view was not something I thought much about. We were better off than many. What we had was always orderly, even if our lives were not, as if making hospital corners on the beds each morning would keep the economic chaos at bay.

If we had been tempted by pity, my grandparents would not have allowed it. They came to Chicago from Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s, driven by ordinary middle-class aspirations for themselves and the family they hoped for. Their vision was simple and clear, and it helped shape my own. But, though they shared a vision for their lives, God could not have matched two more different personalities.

Sally Embers Wintersmith both embodied and defied the stereotypical grandmother. Grandma—or “Gram,” as we called her—baked cakes every Saturday morning, saving the beaters and bowls to be licked by the grandkids, and made every holiday and birthday an occasion. She could jump rope with Rhonda and her friends and read to me in ways that would make stories come to life. She also cursed so stridently and with such creativity that she would have felt at home in any barracks or locker room. The daughter of an Irish landowner and his black
“charwoman,” she had bright red hair and hazel eyes and was light-skinned enough to “pass,” as the old folks used to say. When she and my grandfather would drive through the Jim Crow South, she would go into the diner first, get a table, order for herself and the family, and then call everyone in once the food was served. The proprietor was less likely to refuse them at that point, but the ploy didn’t always work. One time, a waitress said she would have to serve my grandmother and her family in the kitchen. Gram drew herself up, looked her square in the eye, and said, “We don’t eat in the kitchen in our own home.” She walked out with her family in tow, leaving the food untouched on the table.

Grandma helped manage our tenement for the nonresident owner, which defrayed the cost of the apartment. She would, among other things, collect the rent, arrange for repairs, and keep track of coal deliveries for the basement furnace. She collected the gossip as well, a job that occupied a good deal of her time.

As talkative as Grandma was, my grandfather was nearly as taciturn. Reynolds Brown Wintersmith, whom we called “Poppy,” was strong, slightly bent, and balding, not quite six feet tall. My grandmother adoringly said that in his youth, he was “built like a Roman soldier.” He wore a faint perpetual smile and had a twinkle in his warm brown eyes, but he rarely spoke directly to me or other family members beyond simple pleasantries. He had a delightful
way of humming, though—indistinct tunes of his own composition, which seemed to keep trouble at bay.

Poppy’s work ethic kept us more stable than most. He was a janitor at the South Shore Bank at 71st and Jeffrey for more than fifty years. When he wasn’t sweeping the floors, he drove the executives. When he wasn’t driving the executives, he did odd jobs for their families or cleaned the nearby Laundromat. He was always pleasant, respectful, and dignified. At the bank, he was beloved by everyone from the tellers to the chief executive. At his memorial service, the bank president said that had my grandfather lived in a different time, he would have retired as the bank’s CEO.

Poppy put others at ease and was a good example of how to get along in the world. But in my youth, he remained somewhat impenetrable. When I helped him shovel coal and scrape out the clinkers from the coal furnace at home, he would say nothing save the barest instructions. I helped mop the floors of the Laundromats, but all he told me was what to do and what not to do. On the drives to and from those jobs, only his humming would break the silence.

Only on rare occasions would emotion break through his stoicism. After President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, when the Chicago schools closed out of respect, I watched the black-and-white broadcast of the national grieving and absorbed those powerful images: the flag-draped
coffin on the caisson, the young widow in a black veil with her two small children, the riderless horse with the boots facing backward in the stirrups. The procession seemed to move in slow motion. All was quiet save the
clippity-clop
of the hoofs against the pavement. In our living room, no one spoke. When I looked back from my seat on the floor, I saw my grandfather riveted by the images and crying silently. I realized then that being a strong man does not preclude showing emotion. I was seven years old.

Gram and Poppy wanted us to see more than the South Side. They took us on road trips to Michigan, where we picked apples and brought them home in big baskets for pies, applesauce, and fried apples at Sunday breakfast. One weekend each month, while my great-grandparents were still alive, we made the long drive to Louisville to visit my family. My grandmother would pack a lunch of fried chicken or juicy hamburgers, cooked rare early in the morning, then wrapped tightly in aluminum foil to finish cooking until lunchtime. We would set off just before sunrise in Poppy’s Buick, the smell of lunch so intoxicating that we would beg for it until we were fed around eleven.

While I thought those trips were exposing me to a much wider world, I now realize how blissfully unaware I was. We would attend the Kentucky Derby every year and watch from the infield. I had no idea that black folks weren’t allowed in the stands; I just assumed Gram and Poppy thought the infield was better. I never really
thought about why we stopped to pee at the side of the road instead of at a restaurant or motel or why there was so much anxiety over where we’d stop to eat or why we filled coolers or shoeboxes with food for the trip. Only later did I recognize that my grandparents wanted to avoid exposing us to the harsh realities of Jim Crow, to travel safely, and to broaden our horizon. They did not want me trapped by bitterness but liberated to believe that the wider world could be a special place.

My expectations—my sense of the possible—also expanded while visiting my father in New York. One summer in the early 1960s, I took my first train ride with my mother and Rhonda to see him. He had a tiny studio apartment in Lower Manhattan, and we all crowded in with him. We toured the sights, including a Circle Line boat trip and a memorable visit to the top of the Empire State Building, soured only when my father lifted me to see the view and accidentally speared my head on the sharp railing. On the train ride home, my mother had enough money for only one breakfast in the dining car, so the three of us shared a plate of pancakes. I thought it was elegant. In 1964, Rhonda and I flew alone to visit our father during the New York World’s Fair, where he performed with the Babatunde Olatunji band at the African Pavilion. We met the people, listened to the music, watched the dances, and ate food from all around Africa. We also spent a good deal of time wandering through the rest of the Fair, imagining ourselves in other parts of the world. I wanted it.

Those experiences often made my home life feel claustrophobic. In addition to my immediate family, my grandparents also accommodated Uncle Sonny and his daughter, Renae, as well as other short-term boarders. The environment was perpetually tense, with Uncle Sonny often serving as the flashpoint. He was older than my mother, a handsome, charming, but irresponsible character addicted to heroin who careened between drug binges, jail, and his parents’ apartment. Renae’s mother was also an addict.

Uncle Sonny was also Gram’s favorite, which embittered my mother even more. When I was about nine, Grandma and Poppy were away on a trip, and I walked in on Uncle Sonny shooting up in the living room. I went back to the kitchen and asked my mother what he was doing, and she flew into a rage. She put him out, double-locking the door, which produced a long night of his pounding on the door and shouting to be let back in while we huddled silently and sleeplessly in our room. For that understandable act of motherly protection, my mother caught unholy hell from Gram when she returned. “This is
his
home,” she screamed.