“Mama exhorted her children at every opportunity to ‘jump at de sun.’ We might not land on the sun, but at least we would get off the ground.”
—Zora Neale Hurston
“Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier! Hey, hey, U.S.A.…”
It was the 1970s, and my sisters and I walked in a purposeful circle with a handful of other protesters with hand-written placards in front of the Dade County federal building in Miami, chanting loudly in opposition to U.S.–backed Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. I was about eleven, my sister Johnita was nine, and Lydia might have been seven. All of us wore our hair in neatly combed pigtails, and we pumped our placards in rhythm as we walked. “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier!”
It was just another day in the Due family. Our parents gave us ballet lessons, drama lessons, piano lessons, etiquette lessons—and life lessons. From a very young age, we were taught that there were injustices in the world and that we could have a role in rectifying them. During the forty-five-minute drive to that protest from our home in Southwest Dade, our parents explained to us that Haiti was a very poor country, that most of its inhabitants were black, and that the United States government discriminated against Haitian refugees who tried to come here for a better life while refugees from Cuba were welcomed. Worse, we were told, the United States was supporting a terrible Haitian dictator named Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was corrupt and violent.
That was all we needed to hear. We joined the adults in the small picket line in front of the federal building, proudly brandishing our signs, chanting with youthful abandon. Passersby stared at us, but we did not feel shy or self-conscious. We had a message to spread, and we wanted people to hear it. “Hey, hey, U.S.A.—Stop supporting Duvalier!”
Roughly two years separate Johnita and me, and two years separate Johnita and Lydia, so often we recall different childhood occurrences because of our age gap. While I remember a fairly regular barrage of racial epithets from white children after we first moved into Point Royal, Lydia, who is four years younger than I am, was bracing for that but got none. For Johnita and Lydia, most of their torment was from the mouths of other black children who called them “Oreo” and tried to pick fights, believing my sisters’ careful diction and dedication to school must be proof that they considered themselves superior.
My sisters and I share slightly different memories of our family experiences. But the day we marched for Haitians’ rights has been seared into all of our memories.
I felt strong, and free, and right. I felt like my parents’ child.
For me and my sisters, childhood was about learning where we belonged in the world. We never questioned our parents’ activism. We took for granted that this was something they did because it needed doing. We knew other kids’ parents didn’t have their names in the newspaper, or have people calling from all over the state because they needed help. Other kids’ parents didn’t march for Haitian rights, and hadn’t been to jail. Perhaps, I thought, other kids’ parents weren’t quite so busy all the time, either, but that was all right, too. It needed doing, that was all. From time to time, when we weren’t in school, my sisters and I would do it with them.
At meetings, my sisters and I usually sat in the back of the room. Our main job was to keep quiet. Once, my mother took us to a meeting in Opa-locka, a North Dade city (this was far, far away from our house, farther than downtown), with Mrs. Eufaula Frazier, an activist we knew very well, and we got a little too giggly during the opening prayer. That was one of the rare times my mother had to raise her voice at us in public. Another time, my father was hosting a meeting at the house. The only time people ever came over to our house was for meetings, and they came often and stayed late. My sisters and I amused ourselves by hiding just out of sight behind a big easy chair, giggling as we surveyed the visitors. That was one of the rare times we actually made our father angry, and he took us to the back of the house with swats on our behinds and a stern and firm good-night.
In 1976, when I was ten, my mother asked me and my sisters if we’d like to take the morning off from school. This usually only happened on Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday, when we set out early in the morning for a quiet observance downtown that culminated with the singing of “We Shall Overcome,” followed by breakfast at Howard Johnson. The singing and the eating were my favorite parts.
But this wasn’t Dr. King’s birthday. “You know who Jimmy Carter is, don’t you?” my father said.
“He’s running for president,” I said, because I’d seen him on TV. “The peanut farmer.”
“We’re going to meet Jimmy Carter. He wants to see prominent blacks in Miami, so we’re going to visit him at a hotel downtown.”
Of course! Why wouldn’t a man running for president of the United States want to meet my parents? I considered this a perfectly natural turn of events. If anything, I probably wondered why we had to go to him instead of him coming to us. John Due and Patricia Stephens Due were very busy people, after all. My only regret was that I wasn’t already sitting in my classroom at R. R. Moton Elementary, where I could remark loudly to my classmates, “Oh, excuse me, I have to go. My family is going to go meet the man who might be the next president.”
“Do we have to?” Lydia whined. At six and a half, apparently, a trip to a hotel to meet a peanut farmer did not sound exciting enough to miss school. Johnita and I shushed her loudly.
Mom dressed the three of us in matching denim suits, and we set out for our appointment at the Konover Hotel on Miami Beach. I expected to find a zealous crowd of supporters waving red-white-and-blue streamers, but the setting was actually a very sedate hotel suite with only about a dozen people in sight. Lydia was the first in our family to spot him. “There he is!” she said, and we followed her pointing finger. People parted as Carter walked into the room. He was so soft-spoken as he talked to the people flanking him that I could barely hear the singsong of his Georgia accent until we were standing beside him. Since my sisters and I were too awestruck to speak, Mom asked him to sign autographs for us.
To me, it was all a bit anticlimactic. Jimmy Carter was not a large man, towering over everyone in the room the way I had imagined a presidential candidate might. He had a slight build, and he wasn’t nearly as tall as Dad. We got a good look at his trademark smile, though. Carter posed for a picture with our family and Florida Representative Gwendolyn S. Cherry, my godmother and a close family friend. His hand rested gently on Lydia’s shoulder as we all grinned for the camera.
“Hey, know what?” I said, making a sudden realization during the drive home. “If Jimmy Carter wins the election, we’ll have a picture with the president!”
The three of us shrieked in delight, and a few months later, my prophecy came true. Johnita would meet President Carter again at a Democratic rally in Miami four years later, when his hair had gone white and the strain of his four years in office was obvious in the deep lines on his face. She showed him the picture he’d taken with us and asked him to sign it. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. The Secret Service won’t let me sign it now,” he said sadly, sincerely. “Mail it to me at the White House.” By then, they both knew that he might not be in the White House much longer. True to his word, shortly before the end of his term, President Carter signed our photo: With Best Wishes to the Due Family—Jimmy Carter.
My parents’ lives were not separate from ours, and by taking us with them to so many places they went, my parents gave us a consciousness many children our age did not have. I remember, when I was about eleven, my mother gave us T-shirts printed with a giant “X” across the image of an electric chair when we were about to drive to a state NAACP meeting. END DEATH PENALTY NOW, the shirt said.
“I can’t wear that,” I said.
My mother paused, surprised. She wasn’t used to hearing objections.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m not against the death penalty. If someone kills you, they should die, too.”
My parents patiently explained to me and my sisters that the NAACP was against the death penalty because it unfairly targeted blacks and other minorities. A disproportionately higher percentage of blacks who committed murder were sentenced to the death penalty than were whites, they told me. And blacks were more likely to be poor, so they couldn’t afford proper attorneys. They also told us the story of Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, who had spent twelve years in a Florida prison, nine of them on death row, only to be proven innocent of the crime. The NAACP was also trying to help Pitts and Lee win reparations from the state, they said. In addition to being carried out in a discriminatory way, the death penalty sometimes sentenced innocent people to die, especially if they were black or poor.
“So you see?” my mother said. “I understand how you feel, but this is just another area where the system discriminates. And as long as that’s true, we’re against the death penalty.”
As usual, my parents knew how to move me in a way that made their position crystal clear. There was justice, which is what my parents believed in, and there was injustice, which they were fighting against. It was as easy to understand as Superman and Wonder Woman outsmarting villains with the League of Justice on Saturday morning cartoons.
My opinion on the death penalty was formed at that moment, and hasn’t wavered since.
In May of 1978, when I was twelve, I saw government at work. I was selected to serve as a page in the Florida House of Representatives under Rep. Gwendolyn Sawyer Cherry, one of the state’s few black legislators. Rep. Cherry had received her law degree at the age of forty-four and was a forceful proponent of equal rights and reform on issues like the death penalty.
Most of my days as a page were spent scurrying back and forth between the snack bar and the House floor for the representatives’ coffee, sugar, and nicotine fixes. During the brief moments between filling food orders, I heard snippets of the laws the legislators were debating. Most interesting of all was the question of whether or not to give former death row prisoners Pitts and Lee $75,000 apiece for their twelve-year ordeal. Mom and I attended an impassioned rally in their favor before the day of the vote, and I was later on the House floor to hear the cascade of loud nays that dashed their hopes in the Florida House, at least for that session.
I think that’s downright disgusting, but they’re trying again next year, and they’re going to keep trying until they get it, I wrote in my diary. Twelve years is as long as I’ve been alive. Pitts and Lee are asking for $75,000 mere dollars for all of those years of agony. I just can’t imagine a government that would be so unfeeling to deny these two men not only their freedom … but justice.
I didn’t know it then, but I would be a grown woman—with a newspaper career behind me, and two novels published—and it would be on the eve of my wedding day before Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee would finally receive $500,000 apiece from the Florida legislature in 1998, after the tireless urging of Florida’s black legislators. Pitts and Lee had been pardoned by Gov. Reuben Askew in 1975 after spending twelve years in prison, but they battled for decades to win compensation for those stolen years. After the police beat a confession out of them in 1963, Pitts and Lee originally were convicted by an all-white jury. Another man confessed to the murder they were charged with only a year after their sentencing, yet they sat on death row.1 How can anyone calculate a price for such an invasion of one’s life? And why did the state take so excruciatingly long to provide even that meager compensation?
Johnita was selected to serve as a page a couple of years after I did. She served a state representative from Jacksonville, Dr. Arnett E. Girardeau, a dentist who was a former NAACP vice president in Jacksonville. He later became one of the first black state senators in Florida since Reconstruction. (Lydia also later served as a page under State Rep. Humberto J. Cortina.)
Johnita’s page experience had an ironic twist: Because Mom was working, she could not stay in Tallahassee with Johnita the way she had with me. So Johnita was hosted by Rep. Bill Flynn, a white Democrat from Miami, and his wife, Elizabeth. Between the Flynns, Dr. Girardeau, and especially Rep. Carrie Meek, Johnita was very well taken care of. But the decision to let Johnita live with the Flynns turned out to be controversial for my parents. Bill Flynn had been a strict segregationist in the 1960s, and my parents had two activist friends, William Miles and Odell Johns, who remembered Flynn threatening them with a shotgun in his South Dade barbecue restaurant because they wanted to be served. But Rep. Flynn begged my parents to entrust their daughter to him, saying he’d had a change of heart, and once Mom was certain it was all right with his wife, she agreed. “I just felt that this was what we were working for—change—so we could say, ‘All right, you’ve changed,’ ” Mom said, explaining the decision. But when the news spread in the black community that the Flynns had offered Johnita a room and a bed in Tallahassee, my parents got a couple of nasty phone calls, and some of their civil rights friends didn’t speak to them for some time. One of the activists, Clarence Edwards, brought it up again years later at a civil rights reunion my parents hosted in their home in 1997, “The Gathering.” He said, “I forgive, but I don’t forget.” Johnita had no clue she was in the thick of a controversy. She only remembers that the Flynns treated her with kindness.
Despite my disappointment with the treatment of Pitts and Lee in Tallahassee—or perhaps because of it—my experiences at the state’s capital helped inspire me to run for office myself.
My first elective endeavor was to run for president of the student body at Cutler Ridge Junior High School. I decided to run at the last minute, mostly because I saw an opportunity to make a speech, and I loved making speeches. I’d been winning oratorical contests for years, even though I found out later that my junior high school had refused to display my first-place countywide Kwanzaa Oratorical Contest trophy in the school trophy case, when the mostly black junior high schools across town did so proudly. My mother had kept this from me, so I had no reason to believe I could not be voted student-body president at my school. As I wrote my speech, I gave myself instructions to “gaze out at the audience awhile before speaking.” The way I remember it, my speech was a huge hit; it left the auditorium roaring as my topics veered between humor and fire while I impressed upon my classmates how much I cared. What a great feeling! My slate and I swept the vote after my speech. It never occurred to me back then to wonder about it, but I was the first black student-body president at Cutler Ridge.
I learned that I enjoyed winning elections. Soon after that, I ran for president of the Greater Miami NAACP Youth Council. Now that we were older, my sisters and I had meetings of our own to attend, and not just the Girl Scouts. I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade when my mother first began taking me to monthly meetings of the Greater Miami NAACP Youth Council, which met in the NAACP office in Liberty City. The group was never very large, but the same steady number of people attended each time. Some were very young, like me—brought, too, by their parents—and others were teenagers in high school, or perhaps just beginning college. They were young, but they were focused. They acted a lot like grown-ups, planning voter registration drives and other community activities. (As a sixth-grader, Johnita was crowned Miss NAACP for the Greater Miami Branch because she raised $3,000 for the organization.)
Honestly, I don’t know why I ran for president. I pushed myself to try it, just to see how it felt. Maybe I believed my parents expected it of me, or maybe I really felt inspired to help make a change through public service. I won that election, too. It probably didn’t hurt that my sisters could vote for me, and I might have been running unchallenged. In any case, I had become an NAACP officer. With guidance from the adult membership, and strictly adhering to Robert’s Rules of Order at our meetings (“Yes, the floor recognizes Johnita Due.”), the Youth Council set its sights on voter registration in the black community. The 1980 election was approaching, and Jimmy Carter was facing a formidable challenger in Ronald Reagan.
One sunny afternoon, I set out to make a speech with zeal, summoning my best suburbanized preaching voice as I held a megaphone to my lips: “You know, friends, there are some people out there in this day and age who don’t understand the importance of—”
“Tananarive, what are you doing?”
I was riding in a car with Dr. William Perry, the president of the Greater Miami NAACP branch, and he’d given me the megaphone to shout out messages about voting while we drove slowly down Seventh Avenue in Liberty City, one of the centers of Miami’s black life. I liked Dr. Perry’s wit and commitment, but I didn’t like being cut off in mid-sentence.
“Telling people to go vote,” I said, annoyed.
“When were you going to tell them?”
“I was about to tell them, Dr. Perry.”
Dr. Perry laughed at me. “Girl, if you go on like that, we’ll be at the next block before you finish what you’re trying to say. Give me that thing. Let me show you.” With that, the more seasoned activist began making choppy proclamations, with emphasis on all the key words. “The election is Tuesday. Please don’t forget to vote.” Then, he handed the megaphone back to me. “Do you understand now?”
I sighed. Where was the creativity in that? When could I mention the marches of the 1960s? Or the suffering of generations of slaves who had never been permitted to vote? Still, despite my dissatisfaction, I imitated Dr. Perry’s choppy, to-the-point phrases, keeping all my far-flung thoughts to myself. “The election is Tuesday.…”
I remained an NAACP Youth Council president for a while when I began high school. Then we started a new branch in South Dade. My father was the president of the adult branch, and my mother was the South Dade Youth Council advisor. Janet Reno, who was then Dade County’s state attorney, occasionally came to his branch banquets and other events. Johnita and Lydia served as South Dade Youth Council presidents after me, focusing on voter registration in the area. Lydia even enlisted the help of her high school social studies teacher, Barbara Brown, in organizing her phone-bank campaign. Students from Ms. Brown’s social studies class worked the telephones for Lydia during the campaign.
But I had already begun to lose my enthusiasm for leadership.
One day, my mother spotted a mural that outraged her, and she suggested that we needed to make a complaint as a youth council—which, as far as I remember, consisted of mostly me and my sisters, and perhaps a few others. A car detailing company with a prominent building on South Dixie Highway had a mural on its wall depicting a black man and a Hispanic man in a playful exchange, with stereotypical dialogue attributed to them. Something like “Yo, man, ya’ll got the good deals? Qué pasa, homey? You got that right!” The black man had a big, gleaming gold tooth. No question: The mural was cartoonish, maybe even offensive. Mom wanted us to set up a meeting with the management to complain, but I was feeling slightly squeamish, though I had the cause of justice on my side! This would be my first experience with an actual one-on-one confrontation.
The meeting was set up, and one day Mom and I marched over there to talk to the owner. I steeled myself and voiced our youth council’s concern as articulately as I could. The unshaven owner listened quietly, impassively, occasionally fidgeting with irritation as I spoke. I knew that the NAACP’s name carried weight. If the NAACP was angry about something, it made the nightly news. At annual NAACP conventions, all the presidential candidates came to speak because they wanted to curry that organization’s favor. No one wanted the NAACP on his tail, so I figured this man was irritated because he knew he was going to have to repaint his wall. I could understand that. That would take time and money.
When I was finished, the man shrugged and stubbed out his cigar in his ashtray. “Yeah … well … listen … we’ve been in this neighborhood for years, and nobody’s complained. It’s just supposed to represent the people who live around here, that’s all. It’s no big deal.”
“But it’s offensive.” Suddenly, my voice sounded very tiny in my ears.
“To you, maybe. Sorry. Lighten up.” He shrugged, having nothing more to say.
So much for my first confrontation. My mother was muttering about writing letters to the newspaper, but my insides had shriveled. First, I’d felt bad about bothering the guy, but then I was angry that he was planning to so thoroughly ignore me. No, not me—he was going to ignore the nation’s oldest civil rights organization! There wasn’t a single part of that conversation that had felt good to me, even airing my concern, because what if, after all, the mural wasn’t offensive? What if it was just offensive to Mom, and she’d passed her indignation on to me?
I never pursued any further action on the mural, although the adult branch did. Eventually, some time later, it came down, but that experience remained with me.
I haven’t run for office since.
“Come on, girls, put on your scarves,” my mother said on February 23, 1980, after a flurry of telephone calls. “We’re going to the Dade County jail.”
My sisters and I were watching Family Feud when the news came that Dr. Johnny L. Jones, the first black schools superintendent in the county’s history, had been indicted for grand theft and was ordered to surrender himself at the jailhouse. To my parents, Dr. Jones’s indictment was just another attempt to discredit a black man in power, something that happens with curious frequency in Miami. Dr. Jones had been charged with misusing school funds to buy gold-plated plumbing for his home. When Mom had first seen the newspapers implicating Dr. Jones in what became known in the media as “The Gold-Plated Plumbing Caper,” she’d been very upset. Something else? It could not have come at a worse time.
Based on a series of bad events, Miami’s black community was already in a slow, churning boil. A black insurance executive named Arthur McDuffie was in the news. He’d died after a police chase in December, and police had claimed he’d died from injuries sustained when his motorcycle crashed. The Miami Herald had recently disclosed that the whole thing had been a cover-up. He’d actually been beaten to death. In another debacle, police had charged into a black schoolteacher’s home and beaten everyone present, only to discover later that they had raided the wrong house. The Miami Herald also reported that a white Florida Highway Patrol officer had molested an eleven-year-old black girl and received virtually no punishment for his crime, not even a notation in his personnel record.2 Was it open season on black people in Miami?
In 1979, in the midst of all this turmoil, Mom had been named coordinator for the 1980 NAACP national convention to be held in Miami Beach that summer, at the behest of Charles Cherry, the president of the Florida State Conference of NAACP branches. It was an immense event for which the city was ill-prepared. Mom had been working very long hours away from home, her stress level was high, and her mood was snappish. The tension in our home then was already thick, and now the most powerful black man in the county, in my mother’s mind, was being lynched by the media. It was time for action.
Mom worked the telephone, calling Dr. Jones at home to ask when he was going to the jailhouse, then rallying volunteers to provide a human shield for him so he would not be mobbed by the waiting media. Johnita, Lydia, and I were going to be part of that shield. Dad was at a meeting, so he could not go with us.
I had a headache that night, but I didn’t complain. We were part of a regiment, like the National Guard. When duty called, the Due family responded.
Dr. Jones and my parents were not friends. In fact, my mother had butted heads with Dr. Jones over parental involvement in the schools in her role as chair of the Dade County Title I Parent Advisory Council, when he asked her to buck proper procedure by signing off on a document without reviewing it first with her board. When she refused, he’d found a way to remove her from office. Personal feelings aside, my parents applauded Dr. Jones’s efforts to improve education for children in general, being especially sensitive to the needs of poor and black children. My parents also considered the treatment he was receiving an outrage, and they were convinced the situation would have been handled very differently if Dr. Jones had been white. The Dade County School Board had made an unprecedented move, meeting on a Sunday to remove him from his position as soon as the allegation surfaced. Dr. Jones had not yet been tried, but his peers had found him guilty.
The one question that nagged at me as my mother drove me and my sisters toward the jail was What if Dr. Jones was guilty? I’d asked my parents that question when the news first broke, and they said absolutely not, but I still wrestled with that question. (Dr. Jones was convicted later that year, but in 1986 the Florida Supreme Court threw out the conviction because there had been no blacks on the jury. There was not enough evidence for a second trial. Dr. Jones died in 1993, never having fully recovered from the ordeal.)3
Once we arrived at the jailhouse, I hesitated briefly again as we passed the cluster of reporters waiting outside with their news cameras and notepads readied, waiting for Dr. Jones to appear. I was in the ninth grade at the time and was beginning to think I might want to be a reporter myself someday. Could that have been me standing out there, waiting to cover a story? Whose side was I on? Johnita, surveying about fifty supporters waiting for Dr. Jones to appear, had a different reaction, as she described in a school English essay: I could feel the support in the air, and it made me feel self-satisfied.
I chose my side. I decided there was a conspiracy against prominent blacks in Dade County, and the media was part of it, even if the individual reporters were not to blame. Dr. Jones deserved the privacy and dignity of being able to walk to his car without harassment after meeting with police.
We went inside the jail building and marshaled protectively around Dr. Jones with the other supporters, all adults except for me and my sisters. I gazed at this man I did not know except from watching televised school board meetings, noticing how red and glassy his eyes looked, how he strained to smile at his supporters. His smile looked tight; he was too tired and dazed to try to look like a composed politician that night. Introductions were made, and I shook his hand, holding tight to let him know I felt badly about everything that was happening to him. His attorney made a couple of dry jokes to ease the tension, and then it was time to go back outside to the waiting reporters.
“Okay, let’s do it,” someone said, and we were on our way en masse toward the exit.
At first, the reporters were caught off guard because they didn’t see Dr. Jones in our midst. I was standing directly behind him, telling myself I would keep my eyes on his brown coat so he would always be in sight. We went outside to whatever was waiting for us.
I wouldn’t remember any details about that night if I hadn’t written an essay about Dr. Jones later that same year. Even then, I could recall so few details—to the point where I wondered if I’d gone at all, or if only Johnita and Lydia were there—and today I can’t help wondering if I was slightly traumatized by that evening. Perhaps my experience was buried by the horror of the events in Miami that soon followed, making a February trip to a jailhouse seem trivial. Whatever the reason, my essay preserves details from my memory, at fourteen, that would otherwise be lost by now:
There was one urgent shout, and suddenly the reporters were upon us. That’s when I first saw the ugliness. It seemed like everyone was talking at once amidst the bright lights and confusion. The pushing … the shoving … I was confused by all of it as I struggled to stay in back of Dr. Jones and keep my balance. It sounded like there was a fight going on, and I had a vision of us all being thrown in jail, but there was no fight. The reporters were standing in front of us, blocking our way as they tried to get good film, but we still walked forward, the ones in front shouting repeatedly for them to get out of the way. One of the cameramen, a large black man, kept saying over and over, “Come on, man … gimme a break … gimme a break.…”
I felt so disgusted with him, I wanted to tell him how ashamed he should be and that he had no business here bothering us, but I didn’t say anything. They tried to get pictures of Dr. Jones as he got into his car, but all of us held up our arms to block their view. The car drove off, his attorney driving.
For once, we had won. Perhaps it was a small victory … but we had won.
It’s not a coincidence that Johnita and I both wrote essays about that night. She concluded by writing My family went to our car and my sisters and I had relieved smiles on our faces. Johnita’s was for a class, and mine was longer, a researched essay detailing Dr. Jones’s life, the conspiracy against black officials, Dr. Jones’s trial, and how that night my family went out to shield him from the cameras and lights. Our emotions were raw, and writing the essays helped us order and settle them.
Because I could always find refuge in writing, nothing ever happened to me in vain. There was no such thing as utter uselessness or hopelessness. No matter what it was, or how bad it felt, I could write about it. And if I could put what I was feeling into words, I could at least give it all some kind of meaning.
By then, I really understood better what my place in life would be. I was not the bold firebrand who could confront anyone with ease, like my mother. I also did not live in the realm of philosophy, sociology, and law, like my father. I was a writer. I could escape through writing. I could teach through writing. I could air shared emotions through writing. I could tell people what had happened—exactly how it had happened—through writing.
As long as I could write it, people would know.