Luther woke up that Sunday morning, his knees and ankles so stiff he couldn’t move them. His face had erupted overnight into a raw rash, his skin flaking like scales off a fish. When I tried to move his legs toward the edge of the bed, he moaned. “Stop. You’re killing me.”
Tylenol and the heating pad didn’t help, so the doctor said to meet him at the hospital. Luther got into his loosest clothes and house slippers, us both straining in the already ridiculous heat. He hobbled to the car, leaning on me as I held him up by the back of his pants. We didn’t shower, but once in the car I regretted it as the smell of my ripe sweat filled the space.
The doctor examined Luther, signed admission papers, and ordered tests before leaving. Luther lay on a gurney in a dingy hall, waiting for his room. After a long while, I had to squat to rest my legs. When way too much time had passed, I went to the desk.
“Excuse me,” I said, “Luther Johnson hasn’t been transferred to his room yet. Do you know what we’re waiting for?”
The attendant didn’t look up from her papers. But she did sniff loudly. “There’s no room for a black man now,” she said flatly. As if it was obvious that Luther should continue to lay there without treatment just so a white man didn’t have to be in the same room with him. Humiliated and angry, I chose to bite my Yankee tongue and feign submissiveness like other blacks waiting in the emergency room. Arguing with her could sabotage his care further. Once in his room, Luther fell asleep, moaning when he tried to move. He stayed like that as the days dragged by in a medical mire of misdiagnoses, from malaria to a spinal disorder, and back to a barrage of tests that turned up nothing. Then one morning Luther lay catatonic, suspended in a coma-like state, with only his steady breath to show he was alive. And there he lay in that netherland without me, for so many more days than I can now measure.
My only respite from the hell my life had become was clearing the weeds from our front flower beds. In that humid heat, they grew thick and deep, yielding only when I avenged my demons on them. On a late afternoon while wrangling a batch out, I hardly registered a motorcycle’s vrooming up the street. Suddenly something exploded in my face, it’s singeing heat too near my eyes. Clusters of firecrackers pop-pop-popped with their smoke plumes rising, long after the perpetrator rode away.
I ran inside and closed the drapes, thinking they could have blinded me. I lay on my bed crying, afraid and exhausted from the constant dread of what else might happen. Depression overtook me as I unbuttoned my shorts to loosen the waistband that cut deep welts into my middle. I’d probably gained thirty pounds since the trouble started, looking for comfort in bakeries and fried chicken joints. But just as eating hadn’t saved me, Luther couldn’t save me, the police wouldn’t save me, and I wouldn’t let the builder save me. I drifted into a fitful sleep, not knowing what would save me.
Luther was awake the next morning, frantically straining against gauze restraints that tied his wrists and ankles to the bed. He begged me, incoherently, to get him loose while the staff insisted the restraints kept him from getting hurt. The doctor came in with no explanation for Luther’s swollen joints, rash, catatonia, misdiagnoses, or state of mind. What he recommended was best for my husband was to transfer him upstate to the Louisiana State psychiatric hospital. He handed me the already prepared committal papers to sign, apparently expecting compliance. Luther wasn’t mentally ill, he was sick. Yet this white man was ready to leave him indefinitely in some waste pile of Negro neglect and probable abuse. I said we needed a cure, not a warehouse, and would look for other options. At the hallway payphone, I called the builder for an opinion.
“Naw, no ma’am,” he said. “Don’t even think about signing that mess. Black people who go in there never come out.”
I called Luther’s pop in Harlem.
“Sounds like that there lupus he had back in his twenties,” Pop said, “when he was so sick for all those months. Physical and mental.”
How could that be? When we’d gotten engaged, Luther told me he’d had a blood disease called lupus, but that it was behind him. So I never investigated lupus before we stood under the flowered arch in my family church and said our vows. Now Pop gave me the number of the New York lupus specialist who had treated Luther a decade before.
That doctor told me lupus was never “behind” you. It is an incurable disease often found in blacks that destroys vital organs and can be fatal. Pop got on the next flight to Baton Rouge, then escorted Luther on the transfer up to New York to be treated by that specialist.
I had to stay behind in that house by myself to keep my job’s medical insurance, the only one we had. A frightening pile of medical bills on the dining table had already reached well into six figures, and now there was just my one salary coming in instead of two. I could afford to visit Luther in New York only one weekend a month. In those few days I’d see Luther, discuss his case with doctors, and try to figure out a future with his family’s support.
Back at work in Baton Rouge, I did my best to keep managing a team that sold new technology to local businesses. That focus was the one sane part of my day. We strategized on prospective sales, and I took turns accompanying each of my team members on calls, assessing opportunities and debriefing afterward. When it was the big fifty-something man’s turn, the one whose resentment for my black young female Yankee self was obvious, he glared over his glasses and said, “I don’t need you to go.”
Because I was twenty-six and stupidly wanted to assert my authority, I said we would go. He drove us in the company car out of town to a small business with a basic system we could upgrade. Once there, he and the older white owner did a lot of back slapping and coffee drinking but negligible business. Back in the car, I explained what products he could have proposed and what he might have done differently. Red faced, he refused to engage.
He started the engine and drove down a sparsely populated road for ten minutes, ignoring me. Bulging blood vessels pulsed in his neck before he turned for what I expected to be the next customer call. Instead it was a small dirt road bordered by tall tangled weeds that dead-ended out of sight. He killed the engine and turned to me, his eyes boring into mine. And I saw it in him, the bone-deep hate that could kill me. Like Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner whom the Klan buried in a dam wall in Mississippi, nobody would be able to find me. With my thighs frying on the scorching upholstery, I forced myself to glare back, even as I prayed to be forgiven my sins.
I don’t know how long we tried to stare down each other’s souls on that day in the Louisiana backwoods where my father warned me not to go. I tried to break his threat by turning away and looking out the front window. The pull of his eyes burned into my cheeks, but I would not look back. Alert to any move that big man might make, my every muscle was ready to jump out. We sat there, silent and seething, before he finally turned the engine on and headed back to the city.
On the way, we drove past the state capitol, where all too fittingly a Confederate flag flew prominently. Its message was the same as the salesman’s: white people could get away with hurting blacks in Louisiana. Maybe that salesman had been the one who already tried, burning that cross on our lawn.
That night, several helmeted men raced up on my front lawn on roaring motorcycles. They leaned side to side until the smooth carpet of our mowed and edged grass was ripped up. I called the police to come right then, to catch them in the act.
“We can’t make it over there,” the officer said. “There’s a football game at LSU. Every thang in town and ever’body is tied up.”
I walked in circles in the living room, peeping out from behind the drapes at the vandals nobody would stop. They must have known I was alone in the house. Luther’s car hadn’t moved from the carport the whole time he was hospitalized. What was I going to do when the evildoers came back? Next time they might do their worst. Beat me. Rape me. Kill me. I could call Mama and Daddy again, fifteen-hundred miles away up in Buffalo, and give them another sanitized version of what was going on. All Daddy would say is to run, like he and Grandma did when they escaped from Georgia in the 1930s. But I had to stay to keep our medical insurance, so why tell them anything?
With nobody to help me, I had to do something to take care of myself. I had Larry take me shopping for a gun.
The one-story building stood alone on a nearly deserted street with a large GUNS sign across the front. Inside, we were the only customers. A hefty white clerk smiled; the glasses set on top of his head glinting in the very bright lights. Larry said we needed some protection for the lady.
“Why sure,” the clerk said, sweeping his arm across a mind-boggling array of weaponry. Behind him, long rifles and shotguns were mounted on the wall in rows. Farther down were more elaborate automatics that I associated with soldiers and criminals. And in front of me were locked glass display cases, the type you’d find in a jewelry store. There, black handguns lay on their sides, with barrel lengths ranging from snub nosed to arm’s length. Their handles were black, with a few fancier ones in brown wood or what looked like mother-of-pearl. Was I supposed to pick one I liked, like a piece of jewelry?
“Let’s see a lady’s handgun,” Larry said. “It’s her first.”
The clerk put a few guns on top of the case. “Ma’am, let’s find you one that fits your hand so you can handle it. See, the right fit gives less recoil and a more enjoyable shoot.”
Enjoyable? Here I was scared to death I’d have to shoot somebody to keep from getting shot myself, and he thought this was fun? We found a couple I could wrap my hand around easily. Larry steered me to those with long barrels because the longer the bullet rode in the barrel, the more accurate hit I’d make.
“But those are not so good for a concealed carry,” the salesmen offered, “’less you got a big handbag or a holster.”
I saw how to pull back the hammer, then press the trigger fast with the same hand. In fifteen minutes, I had a right-sized six-shooter I could aim at a spot on the wall and use to blow a Baton Rouge bigot to kingdom come.
I learned to use my gun in an open country field set up for target practice. Out there, I bumbled through the first steps—getting the feel of the unloaded weapon, picking it up and pointing in one fast move, until I got comfortable. Next, I aimed at empty beer and soda cans set on a chopped-off tree stump. When I first used ammunition, my bullets went wide, into the woods and the ground. But one sunlit evening out in that field, I planted my feet, held still, and let the bullet clear the barrel for a straight shot and sent those cans jumping. When I had enough skill to hit a good spot on the circular target mounted on a tripod, I was miserable. I could make anybody sorry who attacked me, with a gun I wanted no part of.
The revolver stayed on my nightstand. It was fully loaded and cocked, with the handle positioned for a fast grab. And there it stayed until the night a noise in the kitchen woke me up. I sat up in bed and listened. Was that something creaking? Somebody was inside the house, moving toward the bedrooms. I pushed the covers back and put my bare feet on the floor. I was not about to let them kill me in my own bed. Adrenaline poured through me as I reached for the gun. It felt good in my hand as I threaded my finger onto the trigger. At the bedroom doorway, I stopped to listen.
CLACK. Somebody had cocked their trigger.
I inched down the dark hallway toward the living room, squinting in every corner since I’d forgotten to put on my glasses. Pretty sure nobody was in the living room, I set my feet wide apart to steady me, and lifted the revolver to my good eye. Aiming through the dining room and into the open kitchen behind it, I stroked the trigger with my finger, searching for the intruder.
CLACK.
Suddenly, I recognized the clack was my refrigerator’s thermostat adjusting. There was nobody in my house after all. They weren’t coming after all this time. Luther had been right the night the cross was burned. If they wanted to kill us, we’d have already been dead.
I wiped sweat off my brow with the loaded gun still in my hand. In that moment, I saw myself—a crazed black person ready to shoot a white man in a state where I could never be acquitted.
I fixed a two-finger Jack and ginger with plenty of ice and sat in the dark on Luther’s living room recliner. When I calmed down, another time somebody’s pride in homeownership was trampled on came to mind . . . my parents, when they bought their first and only house in 1958.
I was ten then. As the pile of cardboard boxes in the living room grew higher, Mama hummed on. “Que Sera, Sera” came from the back hall by the coal bin.
We were moving from our backlot apartment with its potbelly stove and the amped voices of choirs and preachers at the church next door. Daddy and Mama had saved for fifteen years so we could move into our own house across town, in the beautiful Cold Spring neighborhood. There we would own, not rent, and live in it all by ourselves.
That place on Florida Street cost my parents $8,000, financed with a thirty-year mortgage and monthly payments of $89. An NAACP man from church had talked to Daddy about moving to Cold Spring. He said not to worry about moving out there because when his family had integrated that part of Buffalo, they had no trouble at all buying, or when they moved in. In fact, our house on Florida Street was surrounded by white families like the Siegrists and Gagliones, neighbors on either side of us.
The night we moved in, Daddy poured champagne from the gift bottle the sellers left, even giving a little to each of us three kids.
“Here’s to our American dream come true,” he said, raising his cup.
I didn’t like the sour wine that fizzed all over my nose but understood what a big deal that house was. My parents clicked pink plastic cups and linked arms to drink. When they kissed, Daddy’s eyes were wet as he smiled down at Mama. He had more pride in his eyes at that moment than any other time I can remember. And I was as proud of him as I can ever remember being—the black man at the head of our family, the breadwinner who got us a house, the father who loved my mama.
What Mama loved most about the new neighborhood was Humboldt Parkway. That green space, just two blocks from the house, was where she would stroll among the sprawling canopies of maples and elms planted in lines down the mall. Humboldt joined a string of other public landscaped parks meandering through Buffalo, forming another of Olmstead’s curated Emerald Necklaces through American cities. We had been to those green spaces many times, when Mama had driven miles to enjoy them when we were younger.
“Some people want to live by the lake,” Mama said. “But the parkway is my oasis, with its grass and trees, where we can breathe.” Once the house was set up, we started walking over there. The boys ran free while the two of us, neither with an athletic bone in our bodies, walked in the fresh air of the grounds.
Unbeknownst to us, the realtors were blockbusting. They scared white owners who feared losing value by living near Negroes into selling while selling those houses to more blacks. The white exodus flipped our predominantly white neighborhood to black within a couple years after we moved in. Realtors got paid plenty, sacrificing our black dreams to earn commissions on sales to us, as well as from the new suburban homes purchased by the fleeing whites. If I’d internalized that lesson and not been so sure access to housing in white neighborhoods was open to me in Baton Rouge, that cocked gun wouldn’t have been in my lap right then.
My parents watched the evening news one night, noting a traffic jam with streams of red taillights barely inching along. Some official said the traffic on local roads had built to untenable messes every morning and night from the new suburban commuters trying to get back and forth to downtown jobs. The congestion had to be relieved, and the solution was to build a new expressway.
Daddy sat on the living room couch, talking back to the TV. “Those white commuters just left Cold Spring and moved to those suburbs. That’s why. Report that.”
“There’s no place to put a highway,” Mama said. “All the land between the suburbs and downtown is residential. It’s talk, that’s all.”
“No, babe,” Daddy said. “Those politicians downtown will put it right through Cold Spring.” He said downtown didn’t care about us. Our neighborhood had become a pain in the ass for the white people who had to waste time crossing it on the way to work.
“Since none of them live here anymore,” he said, “we’ll be targeted for that road. Watch and see.”
The expressway route ran straight down Humboldt Parkway.
When construction started, twelve-year-old David and I walked up to Humboldt to see what was going on, even though we’d been told not to because it was too dangerous. We heard the deafening boom from bulldozers driven straight into those statuesque elms before we got there. We saw a tree pushed up and out of the serene grove, its enormous root system thundering onto the dirt.
Boom! Another tree thudded to the ground. Boom! Then another and another toppled over. An army of men in safety glasses with power tools sawed off branches from felled trees. The high-pitched squeal of woodchippers ground the smaller limbs into sawdust as bulky trucks grunted into a start and hauled away the trunks.
“What are they doing?” I yelled over the noise.
“Destroying it, just like Daddy said they would.”
“They can’t do that!”
“Wake up, my sister,” David said. “White people never run out of ways to mess us up.”
Weeks later I went back to see what the project looked like. Thick mud caked over my shoes and socks up in front of St. Francis de Sales church. Men in hard hats operated a battlefield of earthmovers, digging deep underneath where the parkway had been, hauling away dirt and boulders in loud, chugging trucks spewing black soot. Down at the corner of Delavan Avenue, the hole they were making seemed big enough to drop in the entire Peace Bridge from Buffalo over the Niagara River to Canada.
A fork was taking shape in the road. One branch turned right about where Humboldt ended and the other swung a little left. The design saved all of Delaware Park, the next link in the Emerald Necklace, over in the neighborhood where white people lived. But on our black side there was that mammoth hole and dirt floating thickly in the air, covering the houses and church. And making me feel filthy.
I reached down and plucked a wood chip the size of an apple wedge from the dirt and put it my pocket, a souvenir of how helpless we were to stop the destruction. It sat on the little wooden desk Daddy had made for my room, a daily reminder of ruination.
When the work was done, Daddy drove us on the new expressway. Giant walls banked the sunken road, holding back the gutted earth behind them, topped with ugly chain-link fencing. Litter had already collected at their bottoms. Not one living green thing remained. Not anywhere. And the city had divided us from friends on the other side. Only three cross streets were left above, meaning we had to walk many blocks out of the way to get over there.
“Our community was raped,” Daddy said, driving on. “You see, it’s every bit as prejudiced up here in the North as it is down South. They’re just slicker about it. You don’t realize they’re going to dig your grave ’til the mayor signs off on the shovels.”
“But we have our own home and garden,” Mama said. “They can’t take that away from us. We’re going to be happy with what we do have.” She kept on making flower beds in the backyard from bushes and bulbs and bags of manure, working in bone meal and ground eggshells to feed them. Mama would have her green space, even if it was small. She got on her knees in that dirt for the next thirty years, wearing the girdle she would not be seen without, planting roses and peonies, snap dragons, poppies, and gladiolas outside our back door. The luscious fragrance from her purple lilac bushes was so powerful I could smell them coming up the driveway.
My drink finished, I got up from my Baton Rouge recliner and went into the bedroom closet to fish out a shoebox of old souvenirs. Pushing aside ticket stubs and expired student ID cards, I felt the rough edges of that wood chip from Humboldt Parkway at the bottom. I pulled it out and rolled it around the palms of my hands.
No way would Luther and I stay in our first house the way my parents did theirs. No, I was through—too through with black life in the South. We had to get out of Baton Rouge. I laid the wood chip beside the cocked revolver on the nightstand and kept it there. It symbolized my mission, to make a new life for us while Luther got well.
Of the several jobs on the East Coast I’d applied for, a great marketing position in New Jersey was offered. We’d be an hour from Luther’s family and the lupus specialist in New York, whose continual care was essential. “Mr. Johnson,” he’d said, “if only you had come to us sooner, we could have prevented some of the irreversible damage done to your vital organs.”
We sold the Baton Rouge house and moved to a bigger one in a tiny central Jersey town in 1978. Luther came home after ten months in the hospital and landed the government engineering job he held for the rest of his short life.
As we got in bed one night, he said, “C’mon, baby. Give me that wing and spoon me.” For the first time in a year we lay there happily snuggling as a soft breeze floated through the sheers at our bedroom window.
It had taken that long for us to reconcile to America’s truth, that racism is embedded in the country’s fabric, down in the marrow of the malicious, the unaware, and the disinterested. It was true in Louisiana or New York, that despite the changed national narrative and law, white people, including the neighborhood children chanting “Nigger, nigger, nigger,” behind our new hedges, could not be trusted to do right by us.
At least, we hoped New Jersey was a better chance to live safely.