Death of Innocence : The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America (9781588363244) (15 page)

Now, this was right up Bo’s alley. He had never lost that drive to get out and hustle, hadn’t let up much at all from the time he was six years old and hawking ice and coal back in Argo. More recently, he had been going up to the Jewel food store and helping people carry grocery bags to their cars in the parking lot, or around the corner to their homes. It seemed like everybody lived on the second floor, too. But he would carry those bags all the way up to wherever they lived, and then would even help them put the groceries away before running back to the store for more business. This had all started when he was about ten and had gone up to the store for a couple on our block. Of course, he took forever to get back. And when he finally did, he told us he had stopped to help some people at the store, just stopped to help them carry their groceries to their car, and they had given him a few nickels. So he decided to keep helping people at the store and wound up coming home with a pocket full of change.

It wasn’t long before he asked me to buy him a Radio Flyer. His little business was growing. He told me people had gotten accustomed to seeing
him and they kind of gravitated to him. They knew they could trust him to get their stuff home and even put it away for them. But his two little arms weren’t quite enough. He figured he could make more trips and carry more bags and get more nickels if he had that wagon. Now, a Radio Flyer wasn’t cheap, but he promised that he would pay me back. And I guess he did, one way or another. That’s how it always was with Bo. If he wanted something, he would go out and work. And he would come back to me with his money in his little hand.

Now, with Gene, Bo was getting more than a few nickels. Gene was giving him a few dollars to run errands for him. My goodness, that was a heap of money back then. First it was the hats from the cleaner’s. Then other cleaning, and after that, he wanted Bo to take his shoes out to be shined. Now, they had a shoe-shine stand right there in the barbershop, but he would let Bo take his shoes somewhere to get them shined.

Obviously, Gene saw that whenever Bo was happy, Mamie was happy. So he set out to make Bo happy. And that’s when Gene and I started seeing each other. Even so, I do believe Bo was seeing more of him: whenever he needed a haircut, or whenever he needed to earn some money. Gene would take him to baseball games, too, sometimes with his closest brother, Wealthy Mobley. And, of course, there was the shopping.

I came home one night and found a note on my dresser. It was from Bo. “GeGe and I have gone to Sixty-third and Halsted.”

By the time they came home, they were loaded down. Bo had a baseball bat, a ball, a glove, some shoes with cleats on the bottom. He was all dressed up.

I was a little upset as I turned to Gene. “Why did you spend that kind of money on him?”

Gene smiled. “He’s a good boy,” he said. “He deserves it.”

They just seemed to really hit it off, building a very strong relationship. And, as a result, my relationship with Gene grew stronger, too. We hadn’t been seeing each other long, but Gene was already becoming a father figure to Bo, as if it was supposed to be that way. Funny how at first I didn’t think Gene was my type. I guess I just hadn’t given him much of a chance to show me what my type really was. Some things happen the way they happen because that’s just the way they’re supposed to be. I didn’t go into Polk’s Barbershop that day looking for a man. I went in looking to get my nails done. To look like a Chicago girl. To think I had stopped looking for that perfect man in my life and almost missed him when he finally looked me in the eye. In the end, Gene showed me something very important, something it can take so many years to discover on your own: Sometimes the best way to find what you’re looking for is simply to stop looking.

 I
f you look at Emmett’s century, you see that the men who lived important lives, significant lives, were truly gifted. They were blessed with good mothers, mothers who gave them exactly what they needed—unconditional love. That, and the freedom to express themselves, to fulfill their promise. In that way, these mothers helped their sons come to believe that there was nothing they couldn’t achieve. This was a gift I gave my own son—a boy of great potential.

Early on, I had a feeling about what Emmett might make of his life. I wanted him to go to college, a dream my mother always had for me. I had a great-uncle, Wade Gordon. Mama had talked once of having me stay with him because he was a minister and a professor at Fisk. When Emmett was still an infant, I wanted this for him, to go to Nashville, to attend Fisk University, maybe even to become a minister.

We had a lot of ministers on my father’s side of the family, and two or three on my mother’s side. I always thought Emmett would make a wonderful preacher. I thought he might at least become a deacon or a trustee in somebody’s church. He liked going to church and he was under the influence of his grandmother, a deeply religious woman. He talked about helping her build a church one day. He attended the one she had helped to build, the Argo Temple Church of God in Christ.

So a minister, maybe, or a deacon, at least, or a trustee. There are so many possibilities when you look at a child’s skills, his abilities, his natural tendencies. Emmett was a problem solver. If other people saw problems as locked doors, Emmett always seemed to hold a ring of keys, and an eagerness to see what was on the other side. He looked forward to a life of opened doors. That was Emmett. A solution locked in every problem.
A promise in every solution. Even his stutter. Just as One-Eyed Rogers, the minister and dinner guest from my childhood, never let his life’s vision be limited by the loss of an eye, Emmett’s stutter was something he always tried to talk, or whistle, his way through. He made us believe that he
would
get through it, too. To know Emmett was to believe in him. That was his way: “We can do it.”

He made his analytical and persuasive abilities work for him. He loved working things out with people, to negotiate, to resolve things, as he had done with Thelma, Loretha, and me, and as he did all the time with all his friends. If a problem arose and two guys were ready to go at it, Bo would be the one who stepped right between them and said no. That would be the end of it. No one can recall Emmett ever getting into a fight. And he had an uncanny ability to keep others out of fights. I mean, nobody would buck him. Nobody would talk back to him. That was something that we marveled at. These things helped to make Bo a natural leader among his friends. They loved him. He had so much self-esteem and pride, especially in his appearance. He definitely got that at home. He was a secure boy, very confident in the way he carried himself. He might have stuttered at times, but he knew how to get his point across.

With his natural interest in working things out, he might have made a good lawyer or a politician. Aunt Rose Taliafero, the family “to-mah-to,” would have loved that, with her commitment to public service. Who knows? Emmett did have a deep sense of justice. He actually told me once that he wanted to be a motorcycle cop. We thought an awful lot of policemen back then. We saw them as good people doing good works. And we’d hear about the exploits, the dramatic stories. When I was coming up, there was a man everybody talked about named Two-Gun Pete, and by the time Bo came along, the tales of Pete had become legend in our community.

Two-Gun Pete was a man who didn’t play. His name made him sound like an outlaw, and he was every bit as tough as one. But Pete was a cop, a local black hero, who worked the trendy Bronzeville section of Chicago’s black South Side, mostly in the areas where the nightclubs were located. When he told you to put those hands up, oh, boy, he meant it. He took no stuff, and often took no prisoners. He was known for sometimes shooting first and asking questions later. And, yes, he did carry two guns. He was a two-fisted crime stopper. Street hustlers would clear out just on the rumor that he was headed in. Even if people didn’t love him, they sure respected him.

So Emmett wanted to be a motorcycle cop. He liked the work that he saw cops doing. He enjoyed being the peacemaker. And he just loved the uniform. Boys like to look up to heroes. They like to look at themselves as
heroes in the making. Emmett was young and probably would have dreamed many things before settling on what he was to become. I was patient, content to let him take his time to make the right choice—whatever that would mean to him. And, with all the uncertainties in life, all the ways that young lives can turn, well, a motorcycle cop would have been just fine with me.

Gene once said that Emmett told him he wanted to be a professional baseball player. That was probably Bo’s heart talking. It wasn’t his head. It couldn’t have been the rest of his body. He might have loved the game; he might have had all the best equipment, thanks to Gene; he might have been able to go to many White Sox games, thanks again to Gene; but Bo was no ballplayer. I know, because so many times I was the umpire when he played with his Chicago friends in Washington Park. Bo tried pitching and catching and he was not very good at either. Now, I really can’t talk. As an umpire, I didn’t know the strike zone from the ozone, but, like Bo, I was out there trying. What I
did
know was how to get the kids in our neighborhood organized and piled into my car with the soft drinks and other refreshments to head off to their games. Of course, Bo loved that part, since it placed him right at the center of attention. And the center of attention was the place where he felt most comfortable.

Things were no better for him on the baseball field on his weekend trips out to Argo. There was a game one Saturday, the school championship game. Bo had gone out to the park, but he no longer was a student in Argo. He lived in Chicago, so he was going to have to sit and watch all his Argo buddies play. Well, Emmett was never content to sit on any sidelines. He had much too much energy running through him for that. So, he convinced the PE teacher to let him in the game, even though there was no way he could have qualified. The game came down to one out left for Emmett’s team, and Emmett came up to bat. He wound up catching a good piece of that ball and he sent it way into right field. Now, by this time Emmett was in seventh grade, and he was getting bigger. Because of his size, he was a slow runner, but he had put enough on that ball to get him all the way to third base. He should have stayed right there, just held up. He didn’t. He came around third base, and he got tagged. It wasn’t even close. Bo wasn’t used to losing. If the game had been marbles, he would have walked away with his pockets full. But this wasn’t marbles. This was a championship game. His team lost. His friends lost. But they took it pretty much the way they took most things back then: They grumbled for a moment, then they shrugged it off. They still had half the weekend left. And this would be just another funny story they’d tell over and over again.

Emmett loved those weekends he spent in Argo. The trip might take a
good hour on the streetcar from our place in Chicago. But that never seemed to matter, from the time he started making the journey when he was about ten years old. And I never worried about him when he was there. I knew he was in good hands. I knew the entire community was looking out for him. It had always been that way. Kids in Argo couldn’t walk to the corner without speaking to every adult they saw, by name. They’d have to do the same thing on the way back. Argo was a good fit for Emmett. Which is why he was drawn back there, again and again. He would hang out with his friends all day on Saturdays and spend a good part of Sundays in church, where, of course, he’d find his friends again. He lived for the fellowship. He lived for the fun. That most of all.

Bo had quite a group of friends out there in Argo, his band of merry young men. There were his cousins Wheeler, William, and Milton Parker; his other cousins Crosby “Sonny” Smith, Sam Lynch, and Tyrone Modiest; along with friends like Donny Lee Taylor and later Lindsey Hill. And when those boys got together, I mean it was nonstop laughter. Many of his Argo friends didn’t have televisions yet, so Bo would be all too happy to provide the entertainment, sharing skits and sketches he had seen on his set. Comedy, of course. His favorite was George Gobel. But he also loved Abbott and Costello, and Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. This was such a novelty to his friends. They hadn’t even seen these performers. But they would sure hear about them, getting whole routines from Bo. He had learned a lot about memorizing.

Bo would let his friends get in the act, though. In fact, he would insist on it. He was so hungry for laughter, he would pay for jokes just as he might pay for snacks at Miss Haynes’s store in Argo. He would come to town loaded from all those errands he ran for Gene, so he could afford to stand around paying quarters and half dollars and even dollars for jokes. His favorite jokester was Donny Lee, who had a Mississippi knack for storytelling, and had some long rhyming tales Bo would hang around for hours listening to him weave.

“Tell me another one,” Bo would say to Donny Lee, or “T. Jones,” as he called his friend, referring to a character in one of his stories.

Those two would even stand out for long spells in the cold swapping dollars for jokes and jokes for dollars. It was quite a thing, too, for Donny Lee to tell such long funny stories, since, like Bo, he stuttered. In fact, some of the funniest moments they had together came when they laughed at each other’s stuttering. Once it happened while they both got stuck placing orders in Miss Haynes’s store around the corner. She asked what the boys wanted to buy.

“I want a p-p-p-pop,” Donny Lee said.

“And I want a M-M-M-Moon Pie,” Bo added.

They just laughed and laughed over that one. I mean, it was “p-p-p-pop” and “M-M-M-Moon Pie” for the rest of the day. On purpose. That was the way Emmett wanted it. Nonstop laughter. And pranks. On the way back from a beach outing in nearby Michigan, the boys decided to wear their swim trunks and carry everything else home. Donny Lee made the mistake of falling asleep in the car with Bo. He woke up to find that he was wearing his underwear after all. On his head. Another time, when Wheeler and Sonny visited Bo in Chicago, the three boys crossed paths with some tough-looking kids up on busy Sixty-third Street. As they walked by, Bo turned to his cousins and spoke, loud enough for the other boys to hear, “You say you could beat their
what?”