The Song and the Silence Page 5

  The doctors, nurses, and psychiatrist they assigned to me would often strike up conversations about mundane things, but it felt more like they were trying to remind me about beauty and all of life’s possibilities or maybe it was my own mind going to those topics no matter what was being discussed.

  Either way, I found myself thinking more and more about how everyone needs something to tether them, something with roots planted deep underground, so they don’t just drift through life. For most people, the thing that tethers them is family. Even if they don’t speak for decades, many people will stand by their family when it counts. Family is a place to land when we fall, a touchstone. Family explains our place in history, in geography, connecting us to all that came before and all that comes after. Even if the relationships are fraught with tension and bickering when families do gather together, there’s still a sense of home, something familiar in this unsympathetic world.

  I spent the next several months pondering this idea before coming up with my own solution. I realized that I’d spent my entire life wishing for a different story, so in the end I just made one up. In my new story, I didn’t care about my race or my family. I tamed my hair, learned how to apply makeup, and got a corporate job. I willed myself to stop thinking about my sadness and to just be. When the smothering fog of loneliness did roll in, I told anyone who might ask that I was busy with work and then I holed up alone someplace until I had the strength to put my façade back on. In time, I even began to believe my fake story. I threw my past off like it was a worn-out coat. I began to live as if I’d come from no place at all.

  Get Off This Place

  Rosie gave birth to Mack “Booker” Wright on October 17, 1926. The two of them lived in Grenada, a farming town whose western edge meets up with the Delta’s eastern border. She was able to raise her child while working as a maid for a young, White couple named the Russells. When Booker was still fairly young, possibly two or three years of age, the Russells decided they needed to move over 250 miles south to a town called Gulfport so Mr. Russell could pursue a new career. Fortunately, the Russells invited Rosie to join them, so she wasn’t in danger of losing her job.

  Aside from working in the homes of White folks, Black women living in the South in the 1920s and ’30s had only a few ways to support themselves. Most farms only allowed a woman to work as a sharecropper if she had a man living with her. A single mother in the Delta was like an endangered species. Women like Rosie lived on the edge of life with no one to catch them if they fell.

  It’s unclear whether or not the Russells asked Rosie to leave Booker behind for the initial move so she could help them get settled, or if Rosie herself felt that she needed to move first, find housing, and then return for Booker. What is clear is that Rosie shared her concerns with a Black, older, married couple who lived near her: Willie and Annie Wright. The Wrights didn’t have any children of their own and, after considering Rosie’s predicament, offered to keep Booker for her while she moved to Gulfport.

  Taking the Wrights up on their offer, Rosie went ahead and made the move with her employers. While she was still in the process of getting settled she received alarming news from someone back in Grenada. The Wrights had moved away. Rosie found out that Willie and Annie had moved to a plantation in Baird, Mississippi, sixty miles west of Grenada, and they’d taken Booker with them. She wrote a letter to the Wrights and sent it to the Baird Plantation. In it, she explained that she was coming to pick up Booker. Rosie waited for a reply from the Wrights but never received one. The young mother decided to make the trip anyway.

  Rosie took a train from Gulfport to a station in Moorhead, Mississippi. Moorhead’s train station was made famous in a 1914 blues song, “The Yellow Dog Rag,” by W.C. Handy, as the place where the “Southern crosses the Dog.” “Southern” referred to the Southern Railroad and “Dog” referred to the Yazoo Delta Railroad, which many called the “Yellow Dog.” It was at this station where Blacks—fleeing the poverty, violence, and degradation they regularly faced while living in the South—caught the train that would take them to Chicago and the hope of better living.

  When Rosie arrived in Moorhead, the train station was likely packed with hopeful travelers who were all leaving behind the only way of life they’d ever known, but possibly also by angry Whites determined not see their workers flee. “Greenwood whites had an especially bad reputation for mistreating blacks at the train station . . . They were roughed up and threatened by law enforcement officials [and] train porters were harassed as well.”

  After disembarking from the train, Rosie stood in the station looking around. She had no idea how to get to Baird. In the hubbub of people, she began approaching strangers to ask them if they knew how she could reach her destination. What happened next felt lucky, but in the years to come it would seem like part of a deceptive plan.

  Rosie ended up in a conversation with a Black man who lived and worked as a runner, or a driver, on the Baird Plantation. He ran various errands, including carting White men back and forth between the train station and Baird. Rosie explained her predicament to him and he offered to give her a ride.

  When they got to Baird, the runner introduced Rosie to someone who could help her, one of the White men who worked on the plantation. Rosie explained the situation. She’d left her son with the Wrights for a brief time while she got settled in Gulfport. The Wrights were never supposed to move away with Rosie’s child. She’d always intended to get him back.

  He listened to her story, but apparently he was unmoved by it, because instead of helping Rosie, he placed her in an even more dire predicament. He explained that if she wanted to remove her son from the plantation she would have to pay for him.

  It was the late 1920s. Rosie was a young, single Black woman talking to a White man who, simply because of the color of his skin, had more power and influence than she could ever dream of having. She did not argue with him, nor did Rosie reiterate that her arrangement with the Wrights never included money. Instead, the young mother assumed defeat and complied passively, obediently. The only thing she said was, “Alright,” and then she let the runner take her back to the station.

  Rosie returned home empty-handed. Whether it was from utter shock at the immensity of her despair or just basic human compassion, when Rosie told the Russells what had transpired, they offered to give her the money she needed to buy back her son. There were just two problems: Rosie didn’t know how much she needed, and she also didn’t know how she’d ever pay the Russells back.

  Her employers were undeterred. They gave Rosie a sizable amount of cash and told her they’d just start withholding a little here and there from her regular pay. The Russells seemed to grasp that Rosie simply would not be able to make it without her beloved child.

  With renewed hope, Rosie wrote another letter to Willie and Annie Wright. Again she waited for a response. Again, none came.

  Rosie went back to the train station and traveled to Moorhead. When she arrived, something interesting happened. The same runner just happened to be there. She explained to him that she’d brought money with her because this time she didn’t want to leave without her son. The runner heard her out and took her back to the plantation.

  Just like before, the runner took her to one of the White employees. She explained the situation, but this time she made sure they understood that she’d brought money with her. The man climbed into the vehicle with Rosie and instructed the runner to drop him off at the main house on the plantation. When they pulled up in front of the house, the White man got out, explaining that he was going to find out the price Rosie would have to pay for her son. He left Rosie with the runner, who drove her to his own home on the plantation.

  The runner took her inside and, without offering an explanation, he left. She wasn’t alone for long, though. After several minutes the runner returned in a state of urgency. He told Rosie that she’d been lied to. The White man had actually gone into the main house not to find out how much Rosie needed to pay to
get Mack back but to look for someone who would come out and whip her. They had no intention of giving Rosie back her son. The only thing they’d give her was a reason to never come back.

  “Get off this place!” the runner implored her. “Come on, let’s go, ’cause he’s gone to get that White man to come ’round here and whip you.”

  Rosie quickly gathered her things, rushed out of the little house, and climbed back into the truck with the runner. He dropped her off at the station at Moorhead without an explanation or advice about what Rosie could try next. Somehow it was all settled. The young mother boarded a train that took her home.

  Years later, Rosie married a man named Erby Butler and moved to Chicago, where she had five more children. One died as a young girl, but the rest would live into adulthood. For years, she wrote to the Wrights to find out if there was any way she could be reconciled with her firstborn son. They never wrote back.

  Rosie was living a parent’s worst nightmare. Many young mothers have laid in bed at night wondering what they would do if someone ever tried to take their child. It’s probably safe to assume that few envisioned themselves reacting the way Rosie did. Her response was a nonresponse. When threatened with violence if she continued to ask for her son’s return, she seemed to believe there was no hope and she simply left. Yes, she wrote more letters, but she did not storm the plantation to get back her firstborn son. She did not, as far as anyone can tell, go to the authorities.

  For Rosie, the odds were slim that anyone would have believed her version of the story over a White man’s anyway. Blacks throughout the Southern states had been lynched for far less than accusing a White person of kidnapping. And Rosie wasn’t living in just any Southern state; she was in Mississippi, where tensions between Whites and Blacks had grown exponentially more combustible after what transpired during the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927.

  What would come to be known as one of the worst natural disasters in US history was also a catastrophic disaster between the races. When the Mississippi River flooded the Delta, she left twenty-three thousand square miles of land underwater, more than half a million homeless, and at least 250 people dead.

  But the flood itself was a culminating event in a region that was already pulsating with fear and tension.

  It began quite simply. Heavier-than-expected rains fell from the sky in the summer of 1926 when Rosie was still pregnant with Mack. The rains caused the Mississippi River to rise, and whenever she rose, a sense of foreboding in the surrounding communities rose along with her. Historian John Barry once noted:

  “There is no sight like the rising Mississippi. One cannot look at it without awe, or watch it rise and press against the levees without fear. It grows darker angrier, dirtier; eddies and whirlpools erupt on its surface; it thickens with trees, rooftops, the occasional body of a mule. . . . When a section of riverbank caves into the river, acres of land at a time collapse, snapping trees with the great cracking sounds of heavy artillery. On the water the sound carries for miles.”

  As the waters rose, so did the fear of local residents.

  Small river systems throughout the Midwest and the South were failing. The Yazoo in Greenwood overflowed, causing hundreds to lose their homes. At the time, the smaller floods seemed unfortunate but unlikely to have an effect on the Delta. In retrospect, it’s clear they were an omen of what was to come. “It was as if the Mississippi was . . . sending out small floods as skirmishes to test man’s strength. Those who knew the river always felt that it seemed a thing alive, with a will and a personality. In 1927, its will seemed intent on sweeping its valley clean of man.”

  The residents were assured the levees would hold. But, as a precaution, the Army Corps of Engineers gave instructions for them to be inspected for weak spots and to be raised at certain points.

  The work of raising and inspecting the levees was dangerous because, if they did fail, anyone standing on top of them or nearby would surely be swept away. “In towns on both sides of the river, every morning the police ran patrols through the Black neighborhoods and grabbed men off the streets and sent them to the levee. If a Black man refused, he was beaten or jailed or both; more than one was shot.” Many Blacks were forced to relocate, to live in the makeshift tents that were set up along the river and on barges on top of the water.

  The work Blacks were required to perform was brutal and exhausting. They had to fill sandbags with wet dirt. Once filled, these bags often weighed more than a thousand pounds. All day and into the night, they had to fill, cart, and pass the sandbags, which were then stacked higher and higher. Someone standing on top of one of the levees to lay sandbags in place noticed that “a black man beside him slipped and fell; he fell the wrong way, into the river, and disappeared, his body never recovered, never even looked for. Work went on without interruption.”

  Accidents weren’t the only way Blacks lost their lives while rebuilding the levee.

  Finally, on April 21, in a violent show of her power, the river pushed the levees, literally moving them along the ground, before rolling over the tops of them. When she breached the levees, the Mississippi River was a wall of water thirty feet high, almost a mile wide, and for three weeks she moved across the land, stopping just before reaching Greenwood.

  As the waters came rushing in, “One planter put his black sharecroppers in his cotton gin and nailed it shut . . . They broke out.” The planter may have figured that if some died, the ones who lived could stay and work, but if he let them all go they might never return.

  He was not alone in his concern. While their lands were being swallowed by waters, many Whites expressed fears about what would happen if too many Blacks fled the Delta. There wouldn’t be enough people in the labor class to clean up the mess left from the flood. Furthermore, there wouldn’t be enough people left to tend the fields once life returned to normal.

  These fears were so prevalent that in Greenville, about an hour from Greenwood, a law was passed forcing all Blacks to work at the levees or be arrested as vagrants, but most towns didn’t need a law to force Blacks to work. The National Guard was employed to patrol “the perimeter of the levee camp with rifles and fixed bayonets. To enter or leave, one needed a pass. They were imprisoned, and fed barely enough to stay alive. Blacks were kicked or hit with guns for not moving fast enough, talking back, or trying to leave.”

  It wasn’t until late July 1927—almost a full year after the rains that started the flood began to fall—that the Mississippi collected herself and eased her waters into the Gulf of Mexico.

  It’s not surprising that it was in the aftermath of the flood that the manager of the farm where Mack was living felt entitled to keep him. It was becoming clear that, at least where Blacks were concerned, freedom and equality were ever-changing equations in which the value they were assigned depended upon who was doing the assigning. At a time when Blacks in other parts of the United States were getting college degrees and having their votes courted by political candidates, Delta Blacks were being forced to live and work in demoralizing and dangerous conditions.

  Historian James C. Cobb wrote that “by the end of the 1920s, most Delta blacks lived in severe economic deprivation, politically and legally powerless to improve their material circumstances or even protect themselves from violence, coercion, or unlawful incarceration bordering on slavery.”

  Cobb also details the story of a man named Dave Ross, an elderly sharecropper whose furniture was confiscated by a local planter who’d advanced Ross money. Since Ross was unable to pay the money back with cash or labor because of his “broken health,” his family slept on the floor while Ross went to jail. He was imprisoned even though all of his furniture had already been confiscated.

  A Black Coast Guardsman named Sam Edwards didn’t fare much better. While visiting his mother in the Delta he was arrested for

  “trespassing without money,” and hauled into a grocery store “courtroom” where, when it was discovered that he did indeed have money, the charge w
as changed to vagrancy. For this offense he was sentenced to thirty days at hard labor and a twenty-dollar fine. The judge, incredulous that a Mississippi black actually did not know how to pick cotton, promised to send Edwards to a place where he “could learn.”

  It may have been a Black man determined to flee the Delta who explained conditions the most accurately and succinctly when he spoke of “this cursed South land down here a Negro man is not good as a white man’s dog.”

  What Blacks experienced in the Delta was something words could never capture. Their daily reality was one of such pain and humiliation that it could smother a human soul. That season gave birth to a raw, mournful, contemplative sound that moved and unnerved anyone who heard it.

  It was called “The Blues.”

  Part Three

  Surface of the Deep

  There are victims of the Holocaust who haven’t been born yet.

  Reed Farrel Coleman

  Empty Ever After

  Colorless

  After leaving the hospital, I entered a very strange season of life, one in which I felt completely untethered from the world. While I was pretending what mattered most to me really didn’t matter at all, a series of events transpired that managed to completely reshape how I viewed my mother and the way I felt about being Black.

  I was about twenty years old, working at a design firm, when I realized I had a problem I didn’t know how to solve. The phone system was set up so that if someone called a person’s direct line and got voice mail, the caller had the option of dialing “0” for the receptionist, who would then page the employee. I had lots of meetings with outside vendors and also with other employees, so I needed to be paged multiple times a day. Each time the receptionist had to call my name her voice grew more and more shrill, irritated. She sounded as though she thought they were personal calls, but I never heard her do this when she paged anyone else. There were employees in other departments who were paged much more often than I was.