The Song and the Silence Read online

  At the time, I was looking for a summer class I could take to fill a requirement and I noticed that Arizona State University offered a course called Family History Writing. I enrolled. I figured that if I was going to be spending time on this research, I may as well get college credit for it, plus I was hoping to get some help with how to find out more about my grandfather. The first assignment was to do an interview with someone over the age of sixty who was not a parent. I was irritated, because I really wanted to focus on Booker. Then I realized that I did know someone who fit the parameters of the assignment.

  When I was a little girl, my aunt Vera had lived with us for a while. Over the course of several weeks, during a particularly hot summer, she’d spent countless afternoon hours sitting on our brown leather couch in the rec room reading novels out loud to me and my sister. No one had ever done that for me before. I always credited her with my love for reading, but what I remembered the most about her, what came through clearly from the past, was that at Vera’s core was pure kindness. She was one of the most genuine and thoughtful people I’d ever met, and I knew she’d help me. After living in California for several years, Vera moved back to Mississippi, to a town called Greenville, a one-hour drive from Greenwood.

  I called her on the phone, explained the assignment, and she agreed to tell me about her life. We made plans to chat in detail the following week. When we spoke, Vera talked about the work she and her siblings had to do every day to keep the family going. They had an extensive garden that provided the majority of their food. “We took care of that garden and it took care of us,” she said.

  During the majority of our conversation she was the Vera of my memories—sweet, thoughtful, and generous in her recollections of others. All that changed when we began to talk about Greenwood. When I asked her what it was like to grow up there, Vera paused, took in a deep breath, and then, in a voice filled with such disgust it sounded as if she was on the verge of spitting on the floor, she said slowly, “Greenwood was a racist, racist town.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, wondering more about the sudden change in her tone than about what she’d actually said.

  “It was a racist town. One night, Vette,” she continued in a tense whisper, “I was driving my car and I pulled up to a red light. Some White men pulled up next to me. They started saying, ‘Do you smell something? I smell something. It smells like nigger.’ I was too afraid to even turn my head. I just sat there waiting for the light to change. It was only me and them on the road, and I was so afraid. I can still remember how I felt sitting there in my car. I just knew they were going to kill me. I really believed I was going to die that night.”

  When she finished talking, I sat there trying to work out in my head how I should respond. I wanted to say something to comfort her, but I couldn’t think of anything to say besides, “That’s awful.” I felt inept. I’d initiated this conversation, and it was clear I was unprepared for what I was hearing. I didn’t know what to do with the answers to my own questions.

  The silence between us was making me feel uncomfortable. I quickly scanned my list of questions and decided to ask Vera about some of the major assassinations that took place in the ’60s. Every time I’d hear people talk about the day John F. Kennedy died they’d begin by explaining where they were when they heard the news, how they waited to hear what would happen next, and so on. That’s not how Vera responded.

  “When they killed JFK and then Martin Luther King Jr., we thought they’d kill anyone who tried to help Black people. We thought it was all over. If they could kill the president, then no one was safe.” Nothing Vera was saying was all that different from the types of things I’d heard about the civil rights movement when I was a kid in school. What was different was that it was my aunt Vera—not Rosa Parks, not a legend or an icon—it was my sweet-hearted aunt Vera who’d believed her life was about to meet a terrifying end simply because she’d been Black and driving her car one night in Greenwood. It was my aunt Vera who believed, for a time at least, that all hope was lost for Blacks and that anyone, from the most powerful man in the free world on down, would pay with their very life if they tried to help someone who shared her skin color.

  Whether or not she sensed my discomfort I didn’t know. But I was thankful when she began talking again. This time, she recalled her college years and her start in teaching. At one point she explained, “All my life I had been told never to look a White person in the eye, because then they’d say I was an insolent nigga. But then when I got a job, I had to work right next to them. That was one of the strangest and hardest things I’ve ever been through, learning how to look a White person in the face.”

  Each time she made a comment like that, racially centered, infused with hurt, not anger, I found myself wanting to say something meaningful, but nothing came to mind. Discomfort swelled in me as I tried to think of a way to move out of the emotionally charged territory we’d veered into. “Wait a minute,” I said, surprising myself with how excited I sounded. There was at least one date I knew from school about civil rights. I did some quick math in my head. “The schools were integrated in the mid-1950s when you were in first or second grade. Didn’t you go to school with any White kids?”

  In a voice that sounded like she was explaining to a grown man the truth about Santa Claus, Vera said, “Vette, they didn’t really integrate the schools. Just because they passed a law doesn’t mean thangs changed. I graduated high school without ever being in a class with a White person. When they passed the law to integrate the public schools, the White people just put their kids in private schools.”

  I felt my insides begin to shrink. I’d assumed that when legislation changed, people changed, customs changed. The moment Vera said the schools didn’t really integrate, I knew without a doubt that my belief had not only been false but grossly naïve.

  As she spoke, I was not confronted with how little I knew about Black history, because I was already aware of that. Rather, listening to Vera made me realize how little I knew about what living that history actually felt like. It seemed that, just a handful of decades ago, living as a Black person in the South was to live in terror.

  There was something in her voice that made me sense it was time to wrap up the call. I was preparing to express my thanks when I realized I hadn’t even asked her about her father, the main reason I’d chosen to interview her in the first place. I felt reluctant. Just speaking to Vera had made it quite clear to me that there was no way I could understand anyone’s life without understanding the world they’d lived in. But I was also resistant because she was already worked up from talking about the movement and I didn’t want to upset her any further. I figured her father must be the source of some shame, otherwise she probably would have mentioned him.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. When Vera began to talk about her father, something in her shifted. She became calm and certain, focused, self-possessed. I sensed that, instead of avoiding the story, she’d been waiting to take me there until she was confident I was ready to make the journey.

  When Vera presented me with her father’s story, she did it with care, unwrapping it for me as if it were a delicate treasure wrapped in fine, century-old paper.

  Willie and Annie Wright never told Booker about his mother, Rosie. Instead, they said they’d found him one day on their doorstep when he was just a toddler. Whoever placed him there hadn’t even left a note. According to the Wrights, no one ever came back for him or checked to make sure he was okay. Since they didn’t know what to do with him, Willie and Annie let Booker stay and raised him more out of pity than out of love.

  Booker played that story over and over again in his head. There was one aspect about it that stuck with him, one he just couldn’t resolve. How could someone have abandoned him? Why didn’t his parents ever return to make sure he was okay? When he spoke about how he’d been left on a doorstep, Booker would always tell his children, “That’s why I’m going to see after you all, I’m not giving you to
nobody, nobody’s going to take you, you’re mine, you’re mine.”

  The Wrights raised Booker with a sterilized, arms-length-away style of parenting. They never had any kids of their own and made little effort to make the boy they’d “found” feel like family. Booker wasn’t allowed to go to school, so he reached adulthood without ever learning to read and write. He worked for years as a waiter at a restaurant called Lusco’s, where he served White folks. Vera explained that since it was difficult for Blacks to get home loans at the time, Booker saved up his tips for more than twenty years until he had enough to open his own restaurant.

  I could hear the smile in her voice as Vera said, “When he opened Booker’s Place, he felt like he was his own man.” Almost sixty years later, and her father’s joy was vivid to her.

  She also cleared up questions I had about the family tree. When Booker was still in his twenties, he fell in love with my grandmother, Doris Cooley. Doris came from a desperately poor family that lived in Baptist Town, a Greenwood neighborhood known for its poverty and violence.

  Her parents ruled their house with a heavy dose of religious fervor. Since Booker wasn’t the churchgoing type, they had deep reservations about his involvement with their daughter. They believed she could do better if she’d only wait. In spite of their reservations, Doris and Booker got married. They had two children in under two years—my aunt Vera and my mother, Katherine.

  Not long after my mother was born, Doris crumbled under her parents’ criticisms and filed for divorce. She went on to have more children, five in all. She married again, but her second husband was murdered one night when he was on his way home. He was robbed and set on fire while he was still alive.

  Doris and her children continued to live in her parents’ house, but during the summers, Vera and Katherine went to stay with Booker, who worked hard to be an intricate part of their lives. He could always make Vera laugh, taught her valuable lessons, and never seemed to feel sorry for himself even though he’d grown up in a home where he knew he was unwanted.

  In time, Booker fell in love with a woman named Mildred, who everyone called Honey. With skin that matched her name and soft curly hair, Honey was one of the most beautiful girls in town.

  I didn’t know how to feel. My grandfather was responsible, joyful, funny, attentive, determined, and accomplished. I could hear in Vera’s voice that she was swelling with pride for him, but there was something else there as well. Saddled with her affection for her father was an unmistakable sense of loss that was so deep it humbled and silenced me.

  Vera told me that her father’s death was somewhat random. Booker was shot by a Black kid everyone knew from the neighborhood who went by the nickname “Blackie.” After the shooting, Booker survived for three days in the hospital before passing away.

  Vera and I stayed on the phone for a few more minutes, expressing gratitude for one another before saying good-bye. After our conversation, I couldn’t stop thinking about Booker, mainly because of how Vera had come to life when she spoke about him. The more she talked about her father, the more her voice changed—hope, love, and immense loss were all bound together and riding on her words. I wanted to bottle up her sound, her emotional resonance, and share her Booker Wright with the world.

  I had one more question that I doubted Vera would be able to answer: Why hadn’t my mother shared this beautiful man’s story with me?

  * * *

  IN THE DAYS THAT followed, I wanted to know more about my grandfather, but in some corner of my consciousness, I decided not to act on my curiosity, opting instead to settle for the glow rising up inside of me. So much of my life and my parents’ lives were lived on the surface—the football star who couldn’t read, the beautiful mother who rarely spoke, and me, so hopeless with my feelings about race and family that I’d resorted to pretending they didn’t exist at all. I wondered if Booker’s story was the same way, ideal on the surface but less so underneath. My knowledge of him probably would’ve remained shallow if it hadn’t been for what happened next.

  The second assignment for my Family History Writing class was to reconstruct a place from the past. Each student had to have their place approved before completing the assignment. During a telephone conversation with my instructor about the locations I was considering, she recommended that I write about Booker’s Place. I chuckled and explained that since Greenwood was such a small town, there probably wasn’t any information available about his restaurant.

  She responded by telling me to check my inbox.

  I found an email from her with a link to an article written by an oral historian named Amy Evans. Evans was at the University of Mississippi at Oxford, and she’d conducted an interview with the owners of a restaurant called Lusco’s. I remembered Vera saying that Lusco’s was where Booker had worked for more than two decades.

  The interview was from the 1990s when a woman named Karen Pinkston was running the restaurant with her husband, Andy, the great-grandson of the people who’d first opened Lusco’s. It was seventy pages long. I quickly scanned the document for my grandfather’s name. Booker wasn’t mentioned much, but Karen did say that he’d been the restaurant’s most famous waiter.

  Then I searched online for information about the woman who’d written the piece, Amy Evans. I was curious to find out whether or not she knew more about Booker. I found her on the university website, where a phone number was listed for her department. Without really thinking about what I was going to say, I picked up my telephone and dialed the number.

  “Hi, my name is Yvette Johnson, and my grandfather was a man named Booker Wright. I was just looking through an article you wrote about—”

  “Booker Wright? Did you say your grandfather’s name was Booker Wright?”

  “Yes. I was reading an interview you did with Karen Pinkston. I just wanted to know if you knew anything more about him,” I asked, climbing out of the chair and pacing back and forth through my office, living room, and kitchen.

  “Well, yes, of course—well, wait, wait; you should talk to John T. He knows more about your grandfather than I do; he’s been studying Greenwood and Lusco’s and, well, let me just get him for you.” Then she was gone, and I was on hold.

  As I waited for her to come back, I walked over to my kitchen table and moved my fingers along the lines in its black wood. I was going over her tone of voice in my mind. Was it just in my head, or did Amy Evans sound excited?

  “This is John T. Edge,” a voice said. “Now, Amy said that you’re Booker Wright’s granddaughter, is that right?” He sounded quintessentially Southern. His voice was nasal, unhurried, and he overstated his vowels, slowly drawing them out as if there was no such thing as time.

  “Yes,” I said, as I now considered both he and Amy might be referring to a different Booker Wright. “My grandfather was from a small town called Greenwood, he owned a little café—”

  “Booker’s Place. It was called Booker’s Place. I had no idea that he even had any children,” John T. said, sounding as though he was talking more to himself than to me. Then, “Wow, where do I start? Well, your grandfather was really just an amazing man. When he was on the news back in, oh, what year was it . . .”

  “What do you mean he was in the news?” I asked.

  “You don’t know about him being on the news?” He sounded incredulous, as if getting oneself on the news was a monumental feat.

  “No,” I said.

  “Okay, have you heard of Lusco’s?”

  “Yes, yes, that’s where he worked.”

  “Yeah, well, Lusco’s was one of the most, if not the most, popular restaurant in Greenwood, and your grandfather was the favorite waiter there. Everyone knew him. One day, some news people went down to Greenwood—this was back in the sixties—and they were interviewing people to find out about the civil rights movement there. Well, they asked your grandfather what it was like to be black in Greenwood, and everyone thought he’d say things were fine, but he didn’t. I haven’t seen the footage, b
ut he told them how bad it was. He let ’em have it. He didn’t hold back. What he said shook up that whole town. He lost his job after it aired. It was a big deal what your grandfather did. I tried years ago to find the footage but never had any luck.” He paused for a moment and then said slowly, “Hey, well, you’re the family. You have a right to that footage. You have a right to see it for yourself.”

  I put the phone down. I felt like a gust of wind had just rushed into my house and inside my body. As silly as it sounded, I felt like Booker’s spirit was seeking me out. Through the quagmire of time and death, he was reaching out for me, and, like a deft surgeon, his story was going to heal the wounds of my shame-filled existence, leaving only the most minute scar.

  I couldn’t believe this was happening

  As great as my excitement was, as alive as I felt in that moment, my joy was tempered by a small amount of fear. How had I never heard this story before? Was there a chance it wasn’t true? Was this really my grandfather? Next to the strong, intricate hold Booker’s story had on me, there lay a tiny seed of doubt.

  Did my aunt Vera know about this? If she did, I was certain she didn’t know how important other people thought it was, because she surely would’ve mentioned it to me. I pulled out her number and dialed it. I stumbled over my words and asked her if she knew about Booker appearing on the news. She didn’t. I told her about my call with John T. Edge and his excitement about finding a descendant of Booker’s.

  After a long pause she said slowly and carefully, “Vette, did you tell them it was Booker Wright?”