Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (12 page)

Well, everything just sort of froze right then and there. I didn’t know what to do. Apparently, neither did Pink.

Finally, Bo broke the ice, very calmly, very smoothly, very slowly, taking his time to get it all out without faltering. “Pink, Mama wants you to go and I think you should go.” And his next words sounded like he had been saving
them up for a very long time. In fact, the whole time I had been married to Pink. “And if you put your hands on her,” he said, “I
will
cut you.”

Pink measured him up and down for a minute. Bo was only eleven, but he was the one holding the knife, a pretty long knife at that. I knew I had to step in, get Pink out. He was kind of stubborn about leaving, and struggled some. I knew he felt challenged, and might do something stupid just to make a point. I had no idea what that might be, and I was caught there in the middle, but it didn’t matter. All I knew was that I had to break this up. In a way, I was helping Pink save face. Finally, I got him out the door and locked it. I think that’s about when I started breathing again.

My God, that frightened me so. I didn’t want my baby to wind up hurt by this man, or in jail over something that had started out as a stupid disagreement. Pink wasn’t worth the trouble. Things were still unsettled for a moment after Pink left, and I went over to feel Bo’s little heart. It was racing a mile a minute. He was very upset, even though he had seemed so calm. Really, I think I was even more worked up about it. I don’t know what I would have done if something had happened to Bo. I hugged him, held him close, held him tight, but it was as much a comfort to me as it was to him. I knew at that precious moment that I would never let Pink into our home again.

Later, Emmett and I talked about it all and I told him that he should never, ever, get between me and somebody else when we were arguing. I warned him that he might get hurt, that just because he was a kid, there was no guarantee that someone wouldn’t knock him down. Or worse. I told him that if he ever thought a situation was getting too serious, that he shouldn’t try to step in to fight. He should call the police. That’s what they’re for, to take care of things like this. He insisted that he could defend himself and he could defend me, too. He said he could duck if he had to, and I had to fight back a little chuckle. Emmett was like that. He never seemed to be aware of his limitations. Maybe it was because he had struggled so hard to get beyond so many difficulties so early on. Time would tell whether that was a good thing. But, at that moment, all he could think of was that he wanted to protect me, and from then on, he wasn’t ever going to let anybody hurt me. I told him I felt the same way about him, and that’s pretty much where we left it. But I thought about it from time to time, that whole thing, how Emmett and I had put each other in danger, and how each of us could think of nothing else but how to protect the other.

For Bo and me, this was a turning point. We formed a new and stronger bond. It was almost like a partnership. He started taking on more responsibility. Like cooking. He loved pork chops and would go shopping some
afternoons and bring home two packages, one for him, one for me. He’d cook them in separate skillets. Heaven forbid that
I
might get one of
his
pork chops. And then there was the corn, another one of his favorites. But, oh, my goodness, he would just empty the pepper can into that corn. At least that’s the way it seemed to me. I mean, the corn was yellow
and
black. He thought it was delicious. And I would eat it. I
had
to eat it. I was his mother. And I was hungry. Eventually, I had to plead with him, “Honey, please. Let up on the pepper.” So that was a typical dinner he made, pork chops and “pepper” corn, and he served it the same way each time. His pork chops went by his plate, mine went by my plate, and the skillet of corn sat in the middle of the table. That was our community dish.

Over time, Emmett got accustomed to doing most of the cooking. He even expanded the menu. I appreciated that. He figured out how to boil potatoes, even though he would add too much salt. And he’d cook green peas, pork and beans, hot dogs, and soup. It was simple, but I was grateful, as a mother would be. Besides, I was too tired to worry about cooking myself when I got home from my Social Security Administration job.

Emmett wanted to take on even more. With Pink out of the picture, it was clear that he wanted to be the man of the house. One evening I came home and I was bone tired. Emmett had been down the street playing and he ran to meet me at the steps of our building. He looked at me and he could tell that I was exhausted. That’s when he set out the plan, telling me then that if I had to go to work every day to make the money, then the least he could do would be to take care of the house. And I just handed it over to him. At that moment, I was in no mood to debate. I felt as if a huge load had been lifted off me. By him. It was just beautiful the way he took on that responsibility without being asked. It did take him a while, though, to tell me he would do the washing.

Emmett was very industrious. He could take care of the house. It had started in Detroit, when he was just nine, and felt some great need to clean up the Harrises’ place. He always wanted everything to be a certain way. But now he was reaching new levels. He would see that something needed to be done and he would do it. Just like that, no questions asked. If we needed to lay a rug, Bo would tell me, “We can do it.” Which usually meant
he
could do it. Sweep, mop, wash walls, paint—“We can do it,” he’d say. When I saw he could handle it all, I really loaded him up. He kept a good attitude about it, a sense of humor. Emmett could find humor in anything he was doing. He and I saw a cartoon once where two of the characters had swept some dirt into a little pile under a rug. Now, I thought it was cute, but Emmett just thought it was the funniest thing. And I could see the wheels turning in his mind and I knew him well
enough to know where this might lead. I knew I needed to keep that boy in check. I warned him in a playful kind of way that if I ever found out that he was sweeping dirt under my rug, I was the one who would have the last laugh. I think he got the message. He didn’t really say anything. He just looked at me, smiling, with that mischievous gleam in his eye.

Soon, he would show me skills I never knew he had. I had bought a piece of linoleum to install in the dining room. As it turns out, we got a big snowfall on the day I was supposed to get help laying the linoleum. Mama was even planning to come over to supervise the whole thing. Of course. But that snow just kept coming and I knew my help was not. Everyone was snowed in. So I sat there, wondering how I was going to get that linoleum laid, wondering
when
it was going to be laid, for that matter. The roll had already been sitting in my apartment for the last twenty-four hours, getting up to room temperature as we were supposed to let it do. Oh, I was so upset. That big roll would have to sit there in the way, blocking everything, for another week while we waited.

Emmett walked up. He looked over the situation for a minute. He started nodding his head. “We can do it ourselves. We can lay that linoleum,” he said.

I didn’t take him seriously. “Oh, honey,” I said, “I can’t let you mess up Mama’s linoleum trying to learn how to lay it.”

He insisted, “Mama, we can do it. I know we can.” He wouldn’t let it go. “Look,” he said, “all we have to do is move all the stuff from the front to the back and when we get back there, we move all the stuff back to the front.”

Oh, was
that
all we had to do? He kept working on me, telling me new pieces of his plan, and walking me through it all, and, I don’t know, it was still snowing, and what else were we going to do that day? He talked me into it. But that doesn’t mean I ever relaxed about it.

Right from the start, we were facing obstacles. We had cleared the first section of the room at the front. But there was a built-in china cabinet that couldn’t be moved. We would have to go around that. It had a shape that kind of reflected the bay window along the dining room wall, as if it had been a puzzle piece pulled from that section of the wall. It came out from the corner at an angle, then it ran straight across, then back at an angle to the wall on the other side. That was going to be one tough corner. To make matters worse, right next to the cabinet was a radiator. How on earth were we going to get that linoleum under there?

“Don’t worry about it.” Bo smiled. He looked so confident, like he had already figured out how to do it. “Just let me handle that,” he said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Well, you can imagine how nervous I was. The piece had to be cut just right to work around the china cabinet and all the way to the wall under the radiator. If it was off even a fraction of an inch, I knew that would be the only fraction of an inch I would ever see in that room from then on: every family dinner, every time I walked to the hutch, every day for the rest of my life. Okay. All right. He said we could do it, and if ever I was going to trust my son, I guess this would have to be the time. Besides, we already had moved everything from one end to the other.

Bo measured out that section of space around the cabinet and the radiator. Then he measured the entire piece of linoleum and decided how far we would have to cut into it. Next, he took off all the molding around the room—
all
of it.

I was in shock. “What are you doing with the molding? You’re tearing up my floor.” Waiting another week was starting to look better and better to me.

He simply made a calming sign with his hands and explained that he would put it all back once the job was done. He got a tape measure, drew lines, then somehow drew circles for the feet of the radiator and the pipe from the floor. He made all his marks precisely, and took a lot of care to set the linoleum out perfectly, at the proper distance between the radiator and the wall. Then my heart stopped. He was about to cut. His back was to me, but he must have felt me eyeing him like a hawk on a chicken, ready to swoop. Didn’t seem to faze him. He was so calm.

I was so worked up that his voice startled me when I finally heard it. “Don’t bite your fingernails off,” he said, teasing me, disarming me. But just for a heartbeat.

He started cutting out the space for the china cabinet, then he moved to the radiator legs, then along the wall, around the bay window, and the rest. My mouth was open, but I wasn’t speaking a word. We took a cutting break to move everything back to the other end. And by the time he got to the front wall, it was all so easy. The door? No problem. He worked it all out to perfection.

He stood up, and looked around the room at our new flooring, then over at me with that little sparkle in his eyes. “How do you like it?”

My eyes must have been as wide around as dinner plates and I know I was beaming. “Perfect,” I said. “Just wait until Mama sees this. She is not going to believe it.” He knew that was the highest compliment I could pay. After all, we both thrived on Mama’s approval, and we knew that she did not expect us to do any of the work unless she was available to engineer, to supervise the job.

Well, when Mama came and saw what her children had done, she had nothing but admiration and accolades. For Bo. We had a great time, celebrating the moment, walking back and forth across our new floor, singing Emmett’s praises. When Mama got through talking to him and telling him what a smart guy he was, and how talented he was, and all that, he puffed up like a frog. There was nothing more I could say.

Except to share my next brilliant idea. “So, Mama, tell us, how do you go about tiling a floor?”

After we all finished laughing, Mama actually did explain it. And Bo and I wound up laying tile in every available space—the kitchen, the bathroom, even a section of the hallway. Emmett did a beautiful job on that project, too. And I came to expect that of him. I knew there was nothing I couldn’t ask him to do for me. There was no chore too difficult, no problem he couldn’t solve. “We can do it” was all he would say. And I was confident that everything I asked of him would be done with the same kind of loving care he used on the linoleum project, when he made my heart skip a beat.

Emmett was meticulous. Always. For one thing, that boy loved his clothes and he wanted to make sure they looked good. In between taking care of more and more things for me, he made sure he took care of his own things. I had taught him how to crease his brown dungarees on the ironing board. But then he showed me the shortcut he had developed. He’d take great care to fold his pants, creasing them with his fingertips, then placing them on the radiator, where they would wind up getting steamed. He would hang shirts on the line, press them with his hands, and when they dried, they would look like they had been professionally laundered.

He never shied away from hard work, even though he teased his cousins about it. Thelma Wright came to live with us again in 1953, joined by her sister Loretha. Thelma was attending Northern Illinois University and Loretha was working. As he was helping them move into the room the girls would share, he made a wink of a remark. “You better act like you’re lazy. Otherwise, Mama will work you to death.” They all laughed. But I was serious about housework. So much so that eventually, the girls and I had a falling-out about it. I don’t know if anybody can recall exactly what it was all about. What I do remember is that one thing led to another, and Thelma and Loretha wound up leaving to stay with other relatives.

Well, that really bugged Emmett. He could never stand that kind of tension. Not anywhere, really, but especially not in the family. And these girls were close to him. After all, he had grown up thinking of Thelma, I mean,
Thel-moo, as his big sister. It hurt him. He could not accept the fact that there was some sort of problem between us.

He was not going to let it go and he kept working on me. “Look at yourself,” he’d say to me. “Don’t you feel silly about this?”

Oh, he just kept on with it, pushing me to make up with the girls. Finally, I gave in. It was a Saturday night, and Bo and I just showed up where the girls were staying. We made up and everybody was so happy about it. Especially Bo. We wound up staying there very late that night and had so much fun, laughing and talking and playing music, like nothing had ever happened. Mama knew about the tension, but had no idea that Bo had talked me into making up with Thelma and Loretha. She was so relieved, and, of course, she gave Bo all the credit. I agreed, figuring he should have won a Nobel Peace Prize for those negotiations.