Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (13 page)

Emmett was always so confident about his ability to talk his way through things that you could forget that he still had a problem talking. After he had recovered from polio as quickly as he had done, at such an early age, the doctors figured he could lick this problem, too. And we did everything we were supposed to do. The speech therapy classes helped some, but the stutter was still apparent at eleven and then at twelve, in normal conversation, but especially when he got excited. If he was going to outgrow it, then when was that supposed to happen? He was growing pretty big, pretty fast.

Sometimes I would watch him through the window as he played with friends and talked. He didn’t seem to have a problem communicating with them or relating to them. I saw that he held everybody’s attention. Even when he was in a new group of children in Chicago, rather than the more familiar group of friends from Argo, people seemed to accept him. There was always a group of boys congregating on my porch talking to Bo.

I knew how cruel kids could be. And early on I had worried about that. But then I saw that I didn’t have anything to worry about when it came to my son’s acceptance. Everybody liked Bobo, and they never poked fun at him. I don’t know of a single fight he ever had. Over anything. He had such good friends, who would just wait patiently until he could get himself together and go and say what he wanted to say. Of course, there were times when he might get impatient with himself, and hold on to a friend’s arm, pulling or pushing when he was really getting stuck.

Even though the stutter obviously wasn’t holding him back, I agonized over it so much. Still, I hadn’t come up with a solution and figured it was just something he and all the rest of us would have to live with. Instead of Bo growing out of it, it was growing on all of us.

Then it happened, quite by accident. One day, I walked in and heard the voice of a television salesman. At least I thought that’s what I was hearing. But it was only the familiar tag line of a television salesman. “Lynn Burton, for certain.” The speaker was Emmett and he wasn’t stuttering.

“Bo,” I said, “what are you doing?”

Then the stutter came back as he tried to explain. I had startled him. But I had already seen him in action. He had been racing through that monologue like mad, imitating the commercial. Oh, it was a silly little thing, that commercial, but Emmett seemed to be drawn to silly little things. Twelve-year-old boys can be like that. Still, I was taking this seriously. I realized something after I watched Bo go through the routine without missing a beat, keeping pace with that crazy TV car salesman. When he knew ahead of time where he was going, when he knew what he was going to say, Bo could get through it. That was such a revelation to me. He could improve his speech by practicing, by memorizing and reciting. That would be my solution.

So that’s when the pileup began. Poor kid, I had him memorizing everything from the preamble to the Constitution to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address to poetry, everything I knew he was going to encounter. That way, when he’d come across all of this material again, he would already be ahead of everybody else. I felt so sorry for him, because my list of stuff never ran out. I mean, by the time he had half learned one, I was on him with another one. And I had him doing all the gestures, all the expressions. He was good, too.

I was working him so hard, he had to take a time-out. “Mama, you’re gonna have to let me come up and breathe,” he would say.

He was very pleased with himself, though. And it seemed to help. It proved to him that, once he was certain of something, he could go ahead and execute. But there was something else. I noticed that in pacing himself for the recitation, he would have to control his breathing. That’s when it occurred to me to give him a bit of advice.

“If you find yourself stuck on a word,” I said, “take in a breath, whistle, and then go ahead and speak.” He tried it, and it seemed that when he whistled, it was almost a hypnotic cue that would calm him, steady his breathing, and allow him to finish saying what he had started to say. I guess I was ready to offer anything that might help him through this difficulty.

I only wish he had been as open to my help with his schoolwork. Emmett was always a bright child and he seemed to enjoy school, but mostly for the social aspects of it. He was a student at McCosh Elementary in Chicago. He liked science, but he needed help with math sometimes.
And, even though he was very expressive, he needed help with his writing. Especially the spelling and grammar. Whenever he saw that I felt something was important, then he would take it seriously, especially if avoiding it meant he was not going outside. I let him know that until that homework was done, he was not leaving the house. Still, he would only ask a question when he absolutely had to ask, when he was really stuck on something and couldn’t move forward. Even then he didn’t want to stick around very long. He caught on pretty fast and would stop me cold: “Okay, okay. I got it. I got it.” And then he would just walk off and leave me. He didn’t want me to tell him too much, because he wanted to figure out as much as he could on his own. I would never see him work the problem through. But, once he said “Okay, I got it,” I knew that’s what he meant. And I knew he wanted to do it himself, by himself. He was very independent. Sometimes he was impatient with all the questions I would ask about his homework, what he was doing, how he was doing. “I could be through while you’re asking me all these questions,” he would say playfully.

I had always taken help myself. As a youngster, I would come home from school ready to interrupt my mother or whoever was there to listen. I would show them everything we did in school that day. Mama would talk to me until she got the job done, and I would sit there still listening. But I came to understand my son and the fact that we wanted different things. I wanted to be there watching every letter he put down, checking every number he subtracted, helping him improve. I wanted to help him solve his problems. He wanted to be left alone to work it out on his own. It was difficult for me to accept, but I did accept it. There would be times when I’d feel that I was not as involved as I should have been with Emmett’s schoolwork. But I could see that he was able to handle it. And I thought I was giving him what he needed most. Space. I was giving him the freedom to find his own way. And I had great confidence in his ability to make a way for himself.

Even so, I had to lay down the law from time to time. One day, Bo told me he wasn’t feeling well and asked if he could stay home from school. Of course, I told him, if he wasn’t feeling well, he should stay home and get some rest. When I got home that evening, I found he had been up, messing around in the kitchen and had made a cake, a Lazy Dazy pound cake. He was so proud, and he was waiting for my reaction.

“Oh, that’s great,” I said, as I watched his eyes light up. “Guess that means you’re well enough to go to school tomorrow.”

It was moments like those that probably confused him a little. Way back at Mama’s house in Argo, we had established our unique relationship. It
sometimes felt more like we were brother and sister. Except, of course, that we got along better than a lot of brothers and sisters, and we were very open with each other. Emmett loved music. I was so excited that he could dance. He tried to teach me the Bunny Hop once. I loved to dance, but had never quite got the swing of it. After all, I’d never danced at home. I was on my knees praying. Finally, Emmett looked at my pitiful coordination and just shook his head. “Give it up,” he said. “You will never dance.” Then he thought for a moment. “And you’ll never ride a bike, either.”

We talked a lot and sometimes we even argued. I thought it was important for him to have the freedom to express himself in all situations. So, what better place to start than with me? Oh, he would certainly let me know when there was something he didn’t like. I have to admit that he could be very persuasive, as he had been in the situation with Thelma and Loretha. It was hard not to consider the points he made, and even follow his advice. So, I guess it might have caught him off guard at those times when I acted more like his mother than his sister. He wasn’t always sure just how to react. Once he got so frustrated with me that he threatened to run away. “Okay,” I said, “well then, as soon as you get outside, you go left. Then at the corner, you turn right, and about seven blocks down …” After I gave him those directions to the train station, it never came up again. Other times, though, he would tell on me. He’d just pick up the phone and call his grandmother. Sometimes, I’d jump on the phone to tell on him, you know, the way brothers and sisters might do with each other. Whatever it was, she could settle it down. Unlike me, Mama never got confused about what role she played. She was always “Mama.”

Things seemed to work out with us, one way or another. I learned from Emmett, a boy setting out to become a man. I learned from this well-nurtured, self-assured son of mine that every problem has a solution. He and I might have had different ways of handling things, but our goal was the same. I was proud of his independence, I was proud of his positive attitude and the way he took on his most difficult challenges with confidence. And I settled into the assurance of a parent who knew her son would look at life the same way he had once looked at that linoleum on a dining room floor: “We can do it.”

 S
omething happens when a child is afflicted so early, as Emmett had been with the complications at birth, and then later with polio. Something happens to a child like that under circumstances like those. He develops a new sense. It is a sense of urgency about life. Emmett had such a sense. No doubt about that. It was clear in the way he lived his life. He might not have known why, and we never talked about it. Maybe it was planted in him somehow. In that deep-down place where you know things about life even when you don’t know why you know what you know. Maybe it was that he could feel my anxiety, the way I always felt about him, how protective I was. How protective we all were. How fragile we all knew a young life could be after seeing how fragile his had been. Maybe he could feel all that. But, whatever the reason, Emmett definitely had such a sense of urgency. He was two hundred percent boy. It was as if he was trying to squeeze twice as much life into only a fraction of the time. It was as if he somehow felt he had to live that way.

Emmett was always into something. Among so many other things, he still was committed to helping me, and Lord knows I needed help back then. I can only imagine where he got all that energy. I was worn out at the end of my day, but he seemed only to be getting started on his.

I was facing new challenges. I had changed jobs. At the Social Security Administration, I couldn’t get a promotion. When I had come to the agency a couple of years earlier, it was integrated, all right, but no blacks were being promoted. So, you could get in, but you couldn’t move up. On top of that, I was selected for a very special assignment. I was the one who trained new managers. We were recording everything on cylinders, using something called an “Ediphone.” I have to tell you I was dangerous on that
Ediphone. I mean, that thing was talking to me and my foot was dancing all over that control, starting, stopping, and starting the tape all over again. I had a nice rhythm going and never missed a beat. Not only was I fast, but I was efficient. They wound up calling me Mamie “Never-Make-a-Mistake” Bradley. That might have been flattering, but it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. The people from the Determination Section would send all their cylinders to me, flagged with my name. That meant that I was working when other people were sitting down doing nothing. Now, that would have been bad enough. But every time somebody new came in, somebody the top people wanted to make into a top person, a manager or a boss, well, every time that happened, I had to train him. Yet I couldn’t get a promotion. Well, then, what about a raise? Wages were frozen, I was told. That was it. I couldn’t get a promotion, couldn’t get a raise, but there was one thing I could get, something I could take for myself: a half-day leave.

Don’t tell me wages are frozen, and then expect me to just sit around, hibernating, waiting for a spring thaw. I came back at the end of my half-day leave and I handed in my resignation. I was moving up, two or three floors up, actually, to the offices of the U.S. Air Force, where I’d found a new opportunity, or created one, much the same way Emmett might have done with the iceman back in Argo. When word spread about what I had done, a number of the black girls at the Social Security Administration wound up following me out of that agency and into others where they could get better rewards for their work.

Anyway, as soon as I started working for the U.S. Air Force, I was put through the paces. I mean, those people really tested my skills. And to their credit, they rewarded me when they found out I could handle the job. Not long after I started, they gave me an important assignment: I would work with the Secret and Confidential files. Oh, I was so pleased with the respect they were showing me there. And I knew that it was all because of the quality of my work. It didn’t seem to matter at all that I was black. As a matter of fact, I was the only black girl in this office.

Being in charge of those sensitive documents was a lot of responsibility, and I took it seriously. We weren’t supposed to talk about the things we’d see in those files and I never did. Of course, I don’t even know what I would have said about it all if I had talked about it. So much of it was coded, anyway.

With all that responsibility, though, there were many nights when I would still be at work while all the other people were headed off to their own private lives. Sometimes the only other people left behind were the officer in charge and the head of my department. Just the three of us in that big building. And my days often went late into the night.

That meant I had to lean on Bo even more. Most of the time, when I got home, I was exhausted. And he just fell right in with the routine. He saw things that needed to be done and he took them on. On his own. There were so many things he did that really impressed me. Not only would he make dinner for us, but he would make sure I was not disturbed when I’d come home tired after work. He was so good about taking messages from people and just letting them know that I’d have to call them back later. He really started looking out for me like that, taking care of me. He was quick to assume responsibility and, of course, I was quick to let him.