The night-club audiences were a little more respectful when I came back from Birmingham. After Greenwood there had been hecklers who accused me of demonstrating for publicity. After Birmingham people came backstage to shake my hand and God Bless me and tell me to keep up the good work. White and black. I was surprised. I had thought that being in jail and getting beaten up would cool me off in show business.
I began taking more and more time off, flying to fund-raising benefits, to rallies, to meetings. In May I opened at the hungry i in San Francisco and I wasn’t there long before the demonstrations began in Jackson, Mississippi. Medgar Evers was the key man down there, and I called him to ask if I could help. In many ways, Medgar was the man responsible for my being in the civil rights fight. If he hadn’t invited me down to Jackson in 1962 I would never have met the old man who lost his wife, and I would never have heard of Clyde Kennard. Medgar asked me to come.
I went to Enrico Banducci, the owner of the hungry i, and I told him I wanted to leave, that my people needed me. A white man, and he had waited all year for my engagement, but he never batted an eye.
“I admire you, Greg. Good luck.”
It was that last night in San Francisco, a Saturday night, that I first felt death. Just a funny little feeling in my stomach, a sixth sense that said someone was going to die. I called my lawyer to make sure my will was in order. Then I flew to Chicago to talk to Lil. If I was killed in Jackson, I didn’t want my children raised with hate.
She sat on the couch, her eyes wide and tearful, and I told her what I wanted my children to hear. Just tell them that Daddy was doing right, Lil, tell them it takes a strong soldier to fight when he’s outnumbered and the other side has all the dogs, all the fire hoses, all the prods. Don’t let them come up with hate, Lil; just show them the beauty in what their Daddy was doing.
I went into the bedroom and I kissed Michele and Lynne, and I kissed Richard Claxton Gregory Junior. He was two and a half months old, and I hadn’t had time to know him.
Jim Sanders was waiting for me downstairs, and when I got there I discovered a little switchblade knife in my pocket I had used in my act. I went back upstairs to leave it, and Lil was in the bathroom. Richard Junior had soiled his diaper and he was crying. I picked him up and he stopped crying and smiled. Lil came in and smiled, too.
“That’s the first time you ever played with him, Greg.”
“There’ll be time, honey, time’ll come we’ll sit and talk father to son.”
I kissed him again and promised Lil I’d call as soon as I got to Jackson.
I didn’t. The demonstrators put Jim and me up at a Negro minister’s house Sunday morning. I figured I’d call later from a pay booth. Jim and I had just gone to sleep when the phone rang. It was Medgar Evers.
“Greg, you better call home.”
I got chills. His voice sounded just like Doc Lingle’s when the coach came to the movie theater the night Momma died.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. Just call home. Your son’s sick.”
“No, Medgar, he’s not sick. I just held him last night.”
“Call home, Greg.”
“Why?”
“Just call home, Greg.”
“Medgar?”
“I’m sorry, Greg. Your son is dead.”
I was numb and I was sick but there was still hope. Until Lil answered the phone, hysterical.
“I’ll be right home, honey, I love you very much.”
I called Medgar back and told him I was sorry, that I knew what he was doing in Jackson was more important to America than my son dying, but I was leaving. He said he understood. Jim and I left our clothes in Jackson, and flew back to Chicago. It was a very short flight because I didn’t know how I was going to face Lil, a woman who had to be mother and father to her children because her husband was a stranger in the house. And I couldn’t understand how I had been so sure that I was going to be killed in the heat of battle, only to find out that someone safe and protected had died.
Lil was sitting on the couch when I came in the door. Bob Johnson, editor of Jet magazine, was with her. Her eyes came alive for a second when I walked in, then they went dead again. I started toward her and the phone rang. It was a long-distance call from Alabama, collect. I accepted the charges. It was a white woman.
“Mister Gregory?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I just heard on the radio your son died, and let me tell you it serves you right, I’m real glad that happened, you coming down here where you don’t belong and stirring up all . . .”
“I’m glad, too. I had five million dollars’ worth of insurance on him.”
There was a long silence, and then she said: “I’m sorry, please forgive me.”
It was a very long night. Sometimes I got through to Lil for a few minutes, but mostly she just sat still, her hands in her lap, staring at the wall. When she talked her voice was chilly and far away. It was always the same story. She had gone to bed at midnight the night before, soon after I left. At 4 A.M. she woke up to give Richard a feeding. He was the healthiest of all the babies, the best eater. She went back to sleep, knowing that he would wake her at 8 A.M. with his crying, like he always did. But he didn’t and she woke up with a start at 9, ran in and picked him up. He was warm, but dead. She ran into the hallway, screaming, and the neighbors called the fire department. They brought an inhalator. One of the doctors at the hospital said he thought it was a kind of overnight pneumonia, a common thing with babies. Later, we found out he was right. Thousands of babies die every year that way.
There were a lot of phone calls that night. All kinds. Most were sympathetic. Some were cruel, and asked for Richard Junior. Some were from ministers because it was suddenly open season on Dick Gregory. It would be a big prestige move to get his son’s funeral. One minister taped his five-minute radio show and came by the house just in time to turn the radio on and sit in my living room and listen to himself talk about Dick Gregory’s heavy moments. I asked Bob Johnson to get a minister who wouldn’t turn the funeral into a carnival, who wouldn’t try to take Richard Junior to heaven right in the funeral parlor. He called the Reverend Mack.
The phone rang again. Greenwood. He had a Southern dialect, and for a moment I thought he was a Negro.
“Mister Gregory?”
“Yeah.”
“When you coming back down here?”
“First chance I get.”
“How come you ain’t in Jackson now?”
I heard someone whisper on the other end of the line: “Ask him about his son, ask him about his son.” I knew they were white.
“How’s your son, Mister Gregory?”
“Just fine, just fine.”
“How come you ain’t in Jackson now?”
“Didn’t feel like going down, you know us niggers are lazy.”
“Thought you were in Jackson this morning.”
“Oh, man, how can you be so dumb? How could I be in Jackson this morning and talk to you from Chicago tonight? You know, white boy, niggers is scared of airplanes.”
“Mister Gregory, tell me some jokes.”
“Listen, white boy, us niggers up North are more sophisticated than you white folks down there. We never work after 11:30 at night. You’ll have to call me back during my working hours.”
For some reason, when they didn’t hear the cry for pity or sympathy or tolerance in my voice, they became ashamed. In their own little way they said they were sorry.
“Good night, Mister Gregory,” the voice said softly, and the line went dead.
I went back to Lil. I told her about the phone calls. It upset her, she started to sob.
“Now you understand when I say this thing is bigger than you or me or the kids. When a grown man will call and ask to talk to Richard Junior, you know this thing is bigger than all of us.”
She said she understood. Then her mind wandered away again. Michele and Lynne were very quiet, taking care of each other in another room. Lil hadn’t told them yet, and I took Michele into the bathroom.
“Michele, honey, where’s Richard?”
“Richard’s gone, Daddy.”
“Gone where?”
“To the hospital.”
“When will he be back?”
“He’s not coming back, Daddy. You’ll have to get another Richard.”
“How do you know?”
“I looked at Mommy’s face.”
It was midnight then, just twenty-four hours since I held him in my arms. I wanted to get back to Jackson, back to the demonstrations, but I had a woman here who was losing her mind. I talked to the minister and told him to go ahead and make the arrangements. I said good night to Bob Johnson, and I put the girls to bed. Now I’ve got to take care of Lil. And I have to do it fast so I can get back to Jackson with a clear mind.
I walked into our room, and she was lying across the bed, looking at the ceiling. Richard’s blanket was clenched to her breast. I decided to take a chance on pulling her out of her shock fast or pushing her deeper in. I knelt next to the bed.
“Lil, can I talk to you?” I touched her and she jerked away.
“Lil, he was my son, too. Can I share it with you, just a little?”
She looked at me and held the look for the first time since I had gotten into town. She grabbed my hand.
“You remember how I thought I was going to be killed in Jackson?”
“Yeah.”
“Remember how I came the long way through Chicago to explain not to bring the kids up with hate, and how for the first time I picked Richard Junior up and hugged him and kissed him and played with him?”
“Yes, yes . . .”
“I kissed him and said that Daddy’s going to make it a better world for you, not knowing that his world would be over in a few hours. Right?”
“Yes . . .”
“Honey, I left here and went to Mississippi last night knowing it was very easy for me to get killed, thinking I was going to get killed. You know, Lil, if you had been sick, if Richard had been sick and they called me to come out of the South, I never would have come. Right?”
“Yes . . .”
“Remember last year when you had the miscarriage and there was trouble in New Orleans, I just put a blank check in your hand as they were wheeling you out of the house because I had a plane to catch? You know that nothing short of death would have pulled me out of the South today?”
“Yes, Greg, I know that.”
“Good, honey, because I wonder if it ever dawned on you that maybe if I hadn’t come out of the South today I would have been killed.”
“No, it didn’t.”
“Well, does it make sense to you?”
“Yes.”
“You know, Lil, maybe this is the work of God. Maybe to spare my life He took our son’s life. Do you believe God could do something like that?”
“Yes.”
And then I grabbed her hand hard because I was ready to do the most awful thing I had ever done in my life. I held her hand and looked into her eyes.
“Forget about God. I want you to make the choice.”
“What do you mean, Greg?”
“You have the decision now, Lil. Forget about God. If you had the decision to make this morning that I was to be killed in Mississippi, and the only way you could spare my life was to take Richard’s, which one of us would you have taken?”
I knelt there and I looked at a woman’s face that was so distorted it wasn’t even human, a face with two holes for eyes that were filled with hate for me. She jerked and twisted and I jumped up and pinned her down on the bed and I screamed at her.
“Forget about God. It’s your decision, you make the decision, me or Richard Junior, me or Richard Junior. . . .”
And she twisted and rolled and tried to get free and screamed and kicked, and then suddenly she went limp. For the first time her eyes were clear, and her body relaxed and the tears rolled freely down her cheeks.
“Richard Junior . . .” she said.
After the funeral, Jim Sanders and I went back to Jackson. All the way down I wondered if I had a right to shock a woman out of crying, out of a grief a mother has to feel when her only son dies in the same room. And because Lil had pulled out of it so strongly, and because I was now away from it all, I think I went into shock myself, realizing for the first time what had happened. Over and over again I thought about that feeling of death I had, and how it was a little baby, safe and sound, not a soldier on the battle line, who had died. Then we were in Mississippi again.
We didn’t stay long this time. There was a strangeness in the air, the demonstrations weren’t going well. Kids were coming to demonstrate and they were being sent back to get notes from their parents. I saw two young Negroes, one a soldier, walking on the streets and I asked them why they weren’t demonstrating. The soldier said because he was in the Army. Sure, I told him, the same Army that will send you all over the world to guarantee a foreigner his rights. His friend said he wasn’t demonstrating because he was too violent. That’s right, I told him, and when the doors of segregation get kicked down and they’re ready to hire their first Negro detective are you going to refuse the job because you’re too violent? They both said they’d demonstrate.
Lena Horne came down to speak, and that did a lot of good for the people, to hear someone they idolized say: “I’m with you.” This is especially important in an area where the church is afraid to wake up and carry the ball.
I talked to Medgar Evers, told him that something bad was going to happen in Jackson, things seemed so wrong. But I didn’t know what it was, and somehow there didn’t seem to be anything I could do here. I remember Medgar cried—I guess he felt it, too. I told him I was sorry to be leaving again, but he knew that anytime he called me I would come back. Anytime. He said he knew.
We went back to San Francisco, started working again at the hungry i. I apologized to Enrico Banducci for having left in the middle of an engagement, but I told him that as long as I stayed hot as a comic I’d work for him every year.
I don’t know if my mind was really on my work those first two days at the hungry i, thinking about Lil, about Medgar, about Richard Junior. Somehow I still couldn’t understand that feeling I had a week before in San Francisco about death, about someone being killed. I was so sure it would be me, and then it turned out to be a little baby born in one of the world’s best baby hospitals, born into money and love and care. It didn’t make sense.
And, of course, it didn’t. The second night back at the hungry i, Billy Daniels drove over from a singing engagement in Berkeley to tell me that Medgar Evers had been murdered.