chapter three “COPY THE RIGHT PEOPLE, AND THE REST FALLS IN PLACE”
Opal Jewel and Pearl Welmont both described their relationship as closer in early childhood. As the siblings matured, their outlooks on life diverged, and each sought to form meaningful connections outside the home.
PEARL WELMONT:
We went back to Birmingham two more summers after that first one, but after the bombing, Mama said “Never again.”I And it was like a big hole was blown in my heart. Over the news, yes, but also because I missed Lawrence, and I missed my connection to the church.
OPAL JEWEL:
Every week Sister Pearl turned it up a notch. Driving us up the wall. Mama didn’t mess with religion—who knows what abominations she’d seen holy people do, growing up down there—and by that summer I was old enough to have my own mind and my own interests. My patience with Pearl quoting verses and looking cross-eyed at me on Sundays had worn entirely out. I would’ve understood it more if all that passion she supposedly felt for Jesus didn’t wax and wane, depending on whether she’d heard from that man. If she’d mustered some real gumption, maybe she could’ve become a preacher herself, instead of a preacher’s wife.
PEARL WELMONT:
After a while my yearning got to be too great. And a few months before I turned sixteen I took it upon myself to find a church in Detroit that would welcome me. Got on the bus and rode to a different one every Sunday, until I sat inside Emanuel Cross and my spirit just soared. The pastor welcomed visitors to testify that day, and I drifted up to the microphone and felt moved to sing. The church was packed but they encouraged me—“Take your time, honey!” [Laughs]—and the next Sunday I was wearing the choir robes….
PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:
You were the featured soloist before too long, weren’t you? Don’t forget to mention that.
PEARL WELMONT:
And all these years later, of course, I’m the first lady of that church. Won’t He do it?
PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:
By and by!
PEARL WELMONT:
This is all I have ever wanted to do with my life: spread the Good Word any way I knew how. And we have a blessed marriage, equally yoked, because we do that together. The pastor is a shepherd, and I am his rib.
Now, people today have turned evangelical into a dirty word, something political, but at the root of it is a deeper love than a lot of folks will ever know. I get that my sister likes to joke about me preaching to her—at her, she likes to say—but what I’ve really been trying to do all these years is save her life. We’re sinners, each and every one of us, but we can be forgiven. And when she seeks the Lord’s forgiveness, she’ll have the peace I’ve always wanted for her. An unshakable rock.
OPAL JEWEL:
Let me stop you before you ask the inevitable question. Because even with you, I know it’s close—it’s right there dancing a damn polka on the tip of your tongue—so I might as well answer it now. You journalists would say this to me all the time: “Opal Jewel, what gave you such extra-ordinary confidence?” Listen, I may not be as witty as the great Nev Charles, but for sure I’m not an idiot. I understand that what people are really trying to ask me is this: “How in the world did a woman so black and so ugly manage to believe she could be somebody?”
No, no, baby, it’s true. I’m not such a phony as to ignore what most people thought when they looked at me before 1971, before I became [using air quotes] “unique” or “special” or “striking.” I was dark-skinned, and I was bald-headed, and I caught pure-D hell at Eastern High School. “Pickaninny, Pickaninny, Pickaninny.” That was the name they yelled at me in the cafeteria, and the name they whispered behind the teachers’ backs in class, and the name on that heifer [name redacted for privacy]’s lips before I finally got up the nerve to sock her a good one dead in her mouth.
So. Let’s get to the root of this question. Looking the way I did, and as poor as we were, how did I not just let life run me over? I’m sorry, I don’t usually use this word, but it’s because fuck that.
I believe in myself above all. [Pointing to her heart] I believe I have always had a song, right here, to perform. I had an inner voice, and for a good portion of my life that voice was a lot smarter than me. It was more mature, and it was patient, and it was brave enough to tell me that despite what anybody else was saying, there was more for me out in the world and I deserved every single drop of it. I was just fine knowing that there existed, at some unknown time and in some unknown place, a pretty, dangling ring. And one day I was gonna reach up to grab hold of that ring, and I’d be lifted away.
Survival skills. Some of us have them; some of us don’t. Now hold on, wait a minute—don’t go taking me out of context like the rest of these fools in your business used to! I’m not talking about blaming victims. I’m just saying that some of us are naturally stronger, better equipped to deal with the bullshit than others, and that’s the same as saying that some people are taller than others. Just fact, no judgment. And for those who are going through the tough times and don’t have that kind of strength inside them already? Well, that’s all right, because trust me: It can be learned. You just have to copy the right people, and the rest falls in place.
EARL CALVERT, ENGLISH TEACHER, EASTERN HIGH SCHOOL, 1962–73:
Eastern High didn’t have an official drama program, but because I was a young teacher and the students liked me I got paid a little extra for helping coordinate a production every year. We didn’t have a lot of money to stage it, but the school would make some cash selling tickets, and beforehand there’d be popcorn and peanuts you could buy and bring into the auditorium. We’d let the student council vote on what each year’s show would be, and it would always be a musical so that the kids who were interested in acting could participate but so could the chorus and the band. It’s funny looking back on it now, but we weren’t working with material that made logical sense at Eastern. The students said no to Carmen Jones and Cabin in the Sky—they looked sideways at some of those roles, you know, and this was in the years before The Wiz and Dreamgirls. What we ended up with was a school full of inner-city Black kids doing South Pacific, singing ’bout “Bali Ha’i.” [Laughs]
A group of us faculty, including the principal and the choir and band directors—and the football coach too, I don’t know why—we would hold auditions and decide who got what parts. Now, Opal’s sister, Pearl, she was a star in the chorus, and she would blow us away on the singing. It was just a shame that she couldn’t act. We couldn’t count on her to carry the whole show, but we’d usually try to find a big number for her to do somewhere in the middle, so she could have a minute to do her thing.
Then Opal would come out for her audition, and we’d get to arguing. Technically the singing was not as excellent, but to me she was a shining star on that stage. I believed every word out of her mouth. The best time I remember, and I think this was after Pearl had graduated and Opal was a senior and it was her last shot to get cast, she told us she had prepared her own reading. The principal said that wasn’t allowed, said she had to audition using the material that was given to everybody, but for some reason I felt of a mind to speak up for her. So I said, “Go on ahead, Miss Robinson,” and she handed me some lines to read along with her. She pulled a plastic cup out of this knapsack she was carrying—she had clearly swiped it from the school cafeteria—and she snatched the scarf off her head and ruffled up whatever little hair she had, and she stumbled around on the stage like a drunk. And then, I swear to my Lord in heaven, she launched into one of the wild Liz Taylor parts from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I mean, can you imagine? “So anyway, I married the SOB….” That’s exactly how she started; I’ll never forget it as long as I live! [Laughing] I could hear Constance Davis, the chorus director, take this giant gasp next to me.
Although she declined to walk in her class’s commencement ceremony, Opal Robinson graduated from Eastern High in June 1967. A little more than a month later, Detroit exploded in five days of violence following a police raid on a party at an unlicensed bar. The eighty-two revelers arrested in the raid had gathered at the Twelfth Street speakeasy to celebrate two young soldiers home from Vietnam. Anger over the arrests translated into looting, arson, and worse after the National Guard arrived: Forty-three people, most of them Black men, were killed in street skirmishes.
OPAL JEWEL:
I wasn’t throwing rocks in the Twelfth Street riot, but I could have been. Just like I could have been one of those four little girls blown up in Birmingham a few years before. Being a nigger in this country during the 1960s meant that you constantly lived with the possibility of violence. When you look back on how the ’67 riot got started, it almost seems silly—the pigs busted up another party, so what? But many of us young people, we were just filled with anger. Justifiable rage. We were over-policed and underemployed. Our young men were being shipped across oceans, the first time most of them had ever been outside of Detroit, and because they didn’t have any other viable options they were fighting on the front lines of a war nobody could explain. I wouldn’t wish that fate on my worst enemies—and that includes several of those tacky, tacky hoodlums from Eastern who went on to be Uncle Sam’s henchmen soon as the diplomas hit their hands. So when those kids saw the powers that be stomping all over our joy, on our happiness for the sparing of two Black boys back from Vietnam, boys who had served their country even though it had never served them… Well, that becomes the moment when the first pebble strikes the cop car, right? And that’s all it takes for everything to bust loose.
That summer I was biding time. I was just a month out of high school, still living at home and dreaming about the miracle that I knew was gonna come my way. Pearl was working some shifts at GM, some secretarial work she was proud of for some reason, and both she and Mama were breathing down my neck about getting a job of my own. But during those days of the riot we were all cooped up in the apartment together glued to the news, the same way we had been years earlier when the Freedom Rides were happening. Pearl was praying constantly—“Lord Jesus” this and “Lord Jesus” that. Mama was making noise about transferring to a new plant in the suburbs, and maybe buying a nice house nearby. Then Pearl would start up about marrying that man and moving down to Alabama, where she could get a Cadillac and have a safe place to park it. I looked at both of them like they were crazy, because they didn’t get it. There was no escape to be had, anywhere, by being so damn regular.
That’s when I decided it was time for me to start cooking up some luck—meeting that miracle halfway. But in order to do that I needed to figure out what direction to go, and in order to do that I needed some scratch.
PEARL WELMONT:
You know, my sister has never worked a real job, with structure and hours. And I think that’s what makes her so… so… I don’t know…
PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:
Obstinate.
PEARL WELMONT:
Yes, that too, but I mean more like… impatient, when it comes to looking at me and my life and my choices. She can’t relate to normal things, like a marriage and a family, and the sacrifices we make every day out of love.
PASTOR LAWRENCE WELMONT:
Didn’t she work at the phone company, though?
PEARL WELMONT:
Well, right, she spent about five minutes at Michigan Bell. But she complained every second, so I’m not counting it.
OPAL JEWEL:
I was one of the girls they paid to bug folks about their bills. The ones who call you during dinner and get cussed the hell out. Seemed like half the people I had to call I knew from around the East Side, and I didn’t give a good goddamn whether they mailed in a check. All I cared about was getting my check every payday. Because Michigan Bell owned my ass Monday to Friday, but the weekends were mine. Yeah, I sang with Pearl sometimes, I’d set up gigs for us here and there, but singing was just one of the things I could do. I could cook for you, dance you dizzy, whatever you like. Anything I could see, I tried to know at least a little something about it. They call that a dilettante, and that’s supposed to be a bad thing—but in my mind, I was versatile! Multitalented! Twice as good at everything, as we aspirational Negroes had to be back then. So, you know, I watched Miss Julia Child come on TV, and after that I was going to the white folks’ markets to find things like fresh parsley and thyme, and on Sundays, when Pearl was back from whatever marathon church session she was wailing at that day, I’d serve up the prettiest roast chicken you ever saw. Kitchen would be a mess, but the dinner would be delicious. So maybe I was going to be a chef; maybe I was gonna open my own restaurant. Or sometimes I would study the sewing patterns in women’s magazines—I’d spend my check at the fabric store and make pretty skirts in all kinds of prints. Yeah, I could have been a fashion designer too. But you already know that.
I’m just saying I was interested in anything that would let me express myself, and get me out of being stuck. I was gonna find a way, honey.
I. On September 15, 1963, white supremacists set dynamite outside the basement of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. That Sunday morning it detonated, murdering four Black girls—three of them the same age as Opal that year.