I swear to the Lord,
I still can’t see
Why Democracy means
Everybody but me.
—Langston Hughes
By August 1964, I had not seen my husband for a full month. This was nothing new to me. Soon after he’d passed the bar in November 1963, even before he began monitoring voter registration, John had actually moved to Miami for a while to find work, accepting a job at the state’s first integrated law firm, Heiken & Marger, on Miami Beach. We both thought his career was on its way, but the experience had been very disappointing. John could not attract Negro clients because Negroes were not welcome on Miami Beach. John was tailed by Miami Beach police wherever he went. Because he had trouble building a client base, John couldn’t produce an income and was forced to live with Mother during that time. As you can imagine, John felt very uncomfortable being forced to live with his mother-in-law. Our only earnings were the meager $70 a week I made as the voting project director, and John did not like being supported by his wife.
John’s circumstances really worked against him as a Negro. Even people who professed to be “liberal” did not want to hire him. When he sought a new job at the American Civil Liberties Union in Miami, he was told he wasn’t a good candidate because the ACLU was not a civil rights organization—then they hired a white civil rights activist, one who didn’t even have a law degree! Both white and Negro students took the same bar examination, and although John had passed it, his degree from FAMU was considered inferior because it was from a Negro school that received inferior state support. In fact, in 1963, ACLU attorney Tobias Simon—who had been subjected to a malicious campaign to disbar him because of his activism—recruited one of our civil rights allies, Dr. John O. Brown, to file a lawsuit to close FAMU’s law school by arguing that a low percentage of FAMU’s graduates passed the Florida bar. John challenged the suit in a letter to the St. Petersburg Times, arguing that admissions tests for the University of Florida’s law school were culturally biased and had excluded Negroes who later successfully practiced law, and that FAMU’s law school should instead be opened to students of all races. Simon’s case was dismissed, but within a few years, state funding for FAMU’s law school stopped and Florida State University was awarded a law school. (Fights to reinstate FAMU’s law school continued for years; a law school for FAMU finally reopened in Orlando in 2002, a hard-fought compromise that still leaves the law school isolated from the Tallahassee campus and community.)
In early 1964, we had been very relieved when John won his position as an Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow, but the separations were difficult for us. The only bright side was that we were always so happy to see each other when we had been apart for a long time.
When John finally came to see me in August of 1964, I was so excited! After weeks of tension, some intimate time with my husband was exactly what I craved. But when John and I were alone, making love, I felt the sharpest pain I’ve ever experienced in my life. I cried out. For thirty minutes, I was paralyzed with pain.
“What’s wrong, Patricia?” John kept asking me, concerned. I had to tell him I didn’t know. Maybe I thought the pain in my insides had been brought on by stress. I have always had a very strong pain threshold, so I hoped the wave would soon pass. I told John I just wanted to lie still. After a half hour, I very carefully made my way toward the bathroom.
That’s the last thing I remember. On my way to the bathroom, I fainted.
My regular doctor was out of town, so John and I visited another doctor. He examined me and told me I had lost a lot of blood, so he ordered a blood transfusion for me, but he did not speculate why or how I might be bleeding internally. Sure enough, after the transfusion, I felt much better, so I decided to carry on with my life. Since everything seemed fine, John left to go back to his work and I went back to my old pace. It may seem silly now, but I didn’t follow up on that doctor’s visit to find out why I had been bleeding internally, even though Judy begged me to. “I feel fine, I feel fine,” I kept telling her. “I have too much to do, and it has to get done.”
One day, I finally had no choice. I found my panties covered in blood. Alarmed when I told her, Judy insisted that I see my doctor this time. Grudgingly, I agreed.
I visited my regular doctor, a Negro doctor named Alexander Brickler II who had been very supportive during my forty-nine days in jail in 1960, visiting me often with his wife. I got a thorough exam at his office. “Mrs. Due, you’re pregnant,” he told me. Before I could rejoice or react in any way, he said in a very grave tone, while staring me in the eye, “But I’m afraid it’s not a normal pregnancy. You have an ectopic pregnancy, which means that the embryo was growing outside of your womb, in the fallopian tube. Now that fallopian tube has burst inside your body. I’m not trying to alarm you unnecessarily, but you are literally dying. You need to have surgery right away. I have to admit you to the hospital now.”
I cut him off right there. His words had not completely sunk in, but I felt an immediate reaction to his last instructions. “I can’t go to a hospital now.”
Dr. Brickler gave me a questioning look, then he added patiently, “If you don’t have the surgery right away, you’ll hemorrhage, and the bleeding will be much more severe. You will bleed to death, Mrs. Due.”
Looking back on it now, I must not have been completely in my right mind during this time. I listened to everything the doctor said, and I understood it all. I had a serious problem. I needed surgery. I was dying. Perhaps I thought he was only exaggerating, since his language was so dramatic. All I could think about was a voter registration campaign and the endless details I felt I needed to supervise. I was the project director, and Judy and I couldn’t simply disappear for the rest of the day. We had to talk to the workers in various counties who might call the Freedom House, whose lives might be in jeopardy. On August 7, seven more workers had been arrested in Mount Pleasant, a small town in Gadsden County: Betty Green, Cleola Goodson, Jesse McMillan, and Miles McCray, who were all minors; and Stu Wechsler, Scott McVoy, and Barbara Preston.1 The workers needed us. Our staff was small, so our absence would be marked.
“I can’t go to a hospital now,” I said again.
Imagine the look he gave me. The poor man was exasperated! Thank goodness he told me I needed to stay somewhere close to a hospital. If I stayed in Quincy, which was more remote, he said I would be dead before I could get help. (Dr. Brickler, incidentally, later became the first Negro doctor admitted to practice at formerly segregated Tallahassee Memorial Hospital.)2
After the visit, Judy begged me to admit myself to the hospital as Dr. Brickler had advised. Again, I refused. But Judy won one concession from me, and it no doubt saved my life: Instead of staying in Quincy that night, we would bring our work with us, tell people where to reach us, and get a room in a Tallahassee hotel. The Public Accommodations Act had just passed, so legally I was now permitted to stay wherever I chose. In Tallahassee, a Holiday Inn gave us a room, and we took a room together. Perhaps registering at the hotel that had recently been integrated should have felt like a victorious moment, but to me it was an inconvenience. My mind was still on the CORE workers.
I barely made it to the hotel room. As I climbed the stairs, I felt weaker and weaker. Something really was terribly wrong, I realized. As my doctor’s words came back to me, I began to feel concerned. All I remember is that I wanted to get to the bathroom.
There I discovered yet more blood. Much more. Again, I fainted. Medically, I was in a state of shock. Judy called for an ambulance. I drifted in and out of consciousness, but I was lucid enough to try to keep my dress positioned modestly over me while they brought me down the stairs. After that, I lost consciousness again.
Since John was away and I was unconscious, I really believe Judy forged my name on the medical papers to authorize the surgery that saved my life. The next thing I realized, it was all over, and John was standing over my hospital bed with a worried look on his face.
“How did you …” I mumbled. “What happened?”
“I got brought in by the Florida Highway Patrol,” John said.
Sure enough, when word of my dire illness had reached the police radios, the Highway Patrol had sent troopers to find John after being told he was on his way to Gadsden County, and they escorted him all the way to FAMU’s hospital. The police had given us nothing but grief all summer, but they brought my husband to me when it really mattered. Usually civil rights workers and the police felt as if they were on opposing sides, and some police officers, particularly in St. Augustine, were Klan sympathizers who would have cheered to see a troublemaker like me die. Yet sometimes life’s circumstances can bring both sides together. Sometimes we are just people after all. I am grateful to those officers.
Because I had lost my left fallopian tube, Dr. Brickler told me he didn’t think I would be able to conceive a child without great difficulty, if at all. That made me sad. What made me sadder was when he told me I would need to rest for several weeks, and that it would be out of the question for me to return to the voter registration project I had been shepherding for months.
While I was recovering, I remembered a conversation John had had with our lawyer, Howard Dixon, soon after John and I decided to get married. He worried that once we were married and started our family, we would no longer be of use to the Movement. “Let all children be your children,” he said. At the time, I thought his concern was unfounded. I never could have imagined that a pregnancy would sideline me from the civil rights movement. My commitment was far too strong. Now, without warning, a pregnancy had sidelined me. Yet there would be no child, and if my doctor’s fears were right, there might never be any children. For all I knew, I had just lost my present and a part of my future. I felt useless. That was a terrible time for me.
Judy left the project soon after I did to become more involved in Gainesville, and CORE put a field secretary named Spiver Gordon in charge of the North Florida Citizen Education Project. He did a fine job. I moved into John’s apartment in Atlanta. After years with virtually no breaks, I had no choice but to take some time off to care for myself. Only nearly dying could have kept me away.
I am so proud of Gadsden County!
Although I was in Atlanta with John for the rest of the summer, I moved on to Jacksonville in the fall after I received good news: I was permitted to re-enroll for classes at FAMU! I was finally able to complete the student teaching that had been interrupted by my suspension. I continued to get regular updates from the others still involved with the voting project.
It’s important to remember that our project in Gadsden County was never limited to voter education and registration. Area churches, like Arnett Chapel AME and Mount Moriah, hosted meetings and workshops on community involvement and direct action protests. We also started Freedom Schools to teach young people new skills, such as typing. Many years later, I met a young woman who said she’d attended a Freedom School I taught in Quincy, and she credited the experience with eventually setting her on a path toward law school. With only a little initial leadership, the people of Gadsden County really came together to devise solutions to their own problems—unlike some Southern communities, whose grass-roots coalitions fell apart as soon as the civil rights organizers left town. Led by Rev. James Crutcher and others, Gadsden County developed a civic organization, C.I.G. (Citizens Interest Group), which remained quite active in community improvement projects.
Of course, segregation in northern Florida didn’t end with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and civil rights workers met continued harassment throughout the year. The Florida Free Press, a weekly newsletter, kept workers and the community informed of troubling incidents, such as the time four Negroes—Johnny Watson, Charlie Hall, Steve Hendley, and Vencille Gibson—were threatened with a shotgun when they tried to eat at the Havana Terminal diner in a small town right outside Quincy. A white CORE observer, Arlene Bock, was thrown to the pavement as she watched, her camera yanked roughly from around her neck. A crowd grew, chanting “Kill them! Kill them!” Another white CORE volunteer, Richard Williams, was arrested as he tried to drive the group that had been attacked to the FBI office to complain. Williams was charged with driving without a license, even though his license was perfectly valid. He was taken to jail, where he was beaten and released after two days.
That same week, six fires were set in the North Florida Citizen Education Project’s office in downtown Quincy, damaging half the rooms in the six-room suite. Luckily, no one was there at the time, and many of the papers destroyed had duplicates stored elsewhere. As he viewed the damage from kerosene-soaked rags, Spiver Gordon told a reporter, “Florida at one time had the reputation of being one of the better Southern states, but this proves that the haters in Florida have come out of the same rotten barrel as those in Mississippi and Alabama.… He did not scare us, and he did not inconvenience us.”3
There were many other incidents, probably too numerous to name, but none of that could diminish the sense of accomplishment the entire community felt on election day, November 3, when a record number of more than 3,500 Negroes in Gadsden County went to the polls to vote. In the previous presidential election, only 300 Gadsden County Negroes had been registered to vote; now 4,300 were reportedly registered, and about 90 percent of them voted. In fact, according to The Pain and the Promise, North Florida had registered more Negroes than any other region of the South.4
On election day, CORE workers amassed a fleet of eighty-five cars to help transport voters to the polls, and the ferry service ran all day. Those who couldn’t get rides walked. People who could barely see struggled to choose the right lines on the ballots as CORE workers gave last-minute instructions on how to mark their candidates. When a CORE worker pointed out to five women he had brought that they should mark the ballot’s second line if they wanted to vote for Barry Goldwater, the women all “whooped with laughter,” a St. Petersburg Times reporter noted.5
It was a celebration. Everyone knew what a momentous occasion it was. Among the voters was Mrs. Pearlie Williams, the 109-year-old woman we had registered that summer. She turned up to have her say, too, although she admitted to a reporter that she had trouble seeing which candidate she had voted for. “I hope it was for Johnson,” she said.6
The day did not go entirely smoothly. One Negro woman was physically removed from a polling place and her ballot destroyed because she was wearing a button that said “I Am Registered.” (Polling places ban political literature, but it’s ridiculous that a button proclaiming one’s registration status would be considered “political” at election time.) Several other ballots were also impounded because the voters were carrying matchbooks with their candidates’ names printed on them.
In the end, President Johnson won the state of Florida, but he did not win Gadsden County. Whites in the fairly affluent tobacco county gave the election to Barry Goldwater by a slim 190 votes.7 If only a few more registered Negroes had turned up to vote, the county’s election undoubtedly would have gone to Johnson, very much the same story that Floridians faced in the 2000 presidential election. I have always known that every vote counts!
Jewel Jerome Dixie, a Negro man who had written himself in as a candidate for Gadsden County sheriff, got more than 1,500 votes,8 which was unheard of in that area, although he did not get nearly enough votes to win. Negroes’ preferred candidates did not win the Gadsden County election in pure numbers, but we had all won something far, far greater.
Pride. Courage. Belief in our future as full American citizens.
I am so very proud of Gadsden County.
In the fall of 1964, I still had to contend with visits to New York based on my arrest at the World’s Fair. During one of my absences, I had to leave Scout and Freedom, our two dogs, with John in his Atlanta apartment. That might have worked out fine, except that John was sent to Mississippi to help evaluate the results of the Freedom Summer voter education campaign. With no one to look after Scout and Freedom, John had to take them with him.
What happened next is one of those stories from the Movement that is both funny and sad.
John and I had a blue Volkswagen Beetle, and John drove the dogs to Mississippi in the backseat, as we often did. John stopped at the national SNCC office in Atlanta because he’d been asked to pick up Bob Moses. “Why are those dogs back there?” Moses said when John arrived, eyeing the two German shepherds suspiciously.
“Sorry, man, my wife’s in court in New York,” John had to explain.
The two men drove to Mississippi with the dogs in tow. John dropped Bob Moses off at the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) office in Jackson, then drove to his final destination of Greenwood, Mississippi, where Stokely Carmichael and an activist named Art Cobb had an office under the auspices of SNCC. John met with the activists, and at about 2:00 A.M., he realized he needed to let the dogs out. He didn’t have leashes for them—and he wouldn’t have been eager to walk around Greenwood at night anyway—so he opened the door to the office to let the dogs run out.
“Scout didn’t go very far, but Freedom took off,” John recalls. She ran out of sight.
So John ran outside bellowing, “Freedom! Freeeeee-dom!”
I can only imagine how far his voice must have carried. The windows to the office were open, so John’s fellow activists heard the fuss he was making outside as he cried for Freedom. By the time he came back inside with the dog, Art Cobb and some others gave him an earful. “What’s the matter with you? Are you trying to get us shot?”
Somehow, John survived his trip to Greenwood, Mississippi.
During the 1964–65 school year, I threw myself into my studies. I had decided that nothing was going to come between me and my degree. I had been attending Florida A&M University, on and off, since 1957—for seven years!—and I was ready to move to the next phase of my life.
During my student teaching in Jacksonville, I taught five civics classes a day, and I was asked to conduct the program for what was then called “Negro History Week.” I taught the students about Florida’s most recent civil rights history, discussing the sit-ins and our subsequent projects. I already felt a need to begin passing on the story. I knew how short people’s memories are. After I completed my student teaching and returned to FAMU’s campus in early 1965, John joined me in Tallahassee because he’d been hired as Southern Regional Counsel for CORE.
I was finally doing what I wanted to do for myself, and John was doing what he wanted to do. As I wrote to Mother on February 8, I am just happy to be together again.
But happiness always seemed fleeting in the 1960s. Two weeks after my letter to Mother, on February 21, 1965, yet another horrible event took place: Malcolm X was assassinated. In many ways, the death of Malcolm X was more upsetting to me than the death of President Kennedy. Although I had never been a follower of the Nation of Islam, I always realized Malcolm X was a very necessary component of the struggle. He was the only one really talking about economic development, which I thought was crucial to the survival of our people, and because the black nationalist was perceived as so militant, more people in power were willing to listen to those of us who followed a philosophy perceived to be more moderate, like Dr. King. With Malcolm X gone, it seemed that the struggle was in the midst of a nightmare that would never end. Who would be next?
A month after Malcolm X’s death, Priscilla, who was teaching in Ghana by then, wrote us with some news: She had gotten married! During her ship’s passage, she’d met a Dutch radio operator named Muncko Derk Kruize, whom she called “Mun” for short. They married in Sekondi, Ghana. Like me, Priscilla had a civil ceremony, but unlike me, she had a honeymoon, in Israel, courtesy of some of her friends. I was happy for Priscilla, but I had never met the man she married, so now my sister’s life was even further removed from mine. Since she had married a foreigner, it seemed less likely that she would return to the States anytime soon. Mother, for one, was very upset not to be included in the wedding, but it would have been too expensive. Mother couldn’t afford to fly to Africa, and Priscilla and Mun couldn’t yet afford to bring her.
Still, this was an exciting time for the Stephens sisters. Soon after Priscilla got married, despite my doctor’s pessimistic prediction, I discovered that John and I had conceived a child. We were thrilled! This time, there was no confusion about whether I was pregnant because I suffered from terrible morning sickness. I felt sick all the time, to the point where sometimes I could hardly move. Everyone told me my morning sickness would pass after three months, and I looked forward to that milestone, but unfortunately it lingered. I was sick all nine months. We had to hire a housekeeper because all I could do was lie on the sofa, or on the floor. The floor was my favorite resting spot, really.
By then, John and I had a house on the other side of town, on Fourth Avenue, so I had to drive myself to classes each day. I still remember how I would drive a little, then pull over to vomit. Start, stop. Start, stop. But I always made it to my classes. Once I arrived on the campus, my professors were understanding, allowing me to eat crackers in class to soothe my nausea. I also signed up for a golf class during my pregnancy because it entailed a lot of walking, and walking was what I craved. I haven’t played golf since.
I honestly don’t know how I passed my classes during my last term at FAMU. When I was in class, it took virtually all of my concentration not to feel sick. I took notes, but I could tell I was not absorbing the information. I often panicked, thinking, “Oh my goodness, I’m going to have to actually recall this information!” I had no idea how I would manage, but somehow I did. By way of a miracle, right before exam time, I had one good day—and I mean one day—when I did not feel sick at all. Relieved, I gathered my notes and textbooks and studied as hard as I could, forcing myself to retain as much as I could. That was the only way I was able to make it.
I wrote Mother that I wanted to leave a trophy to FAMU that meant a lot to me. During our summer tour after the jail-in, I had received a trophy “for convictions above and beyond the call of duty” at a Freedom Jubilee at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, soon before receiving the Gandhi Award from CORE. By the time I was finally about to graduate, I really wanted to begin mending the bad feelings that had brewed over the years between activists and Dr. Gore. What has happened in Tallahassee should become a part of the history of the city and school, and as I see it, the only way for this to happen is for me to practice what I preach—nonviolence—forgiving and trying to bring all sides together.
As I was approaching my own milestone in August, John had reached his earlier that year: He opened his own law office in Tallahassee. We have a photograph of John wearing a suit and bow tie while polishing the smoky glass on the door of his office—JOHN D. DUE, JR., ATTORNEY AT LAW, the sign reads. The dean of FAMU’s law school, Thomas Miller Jenkins, who had just been selected president of Albany State College in Georgia, stands proudly beside John, watching his former student set out on his own. That photo ran in the Indianapolis Recorder, a Negro newspaper. Graduation day was one of the proudest days of my life. There I was, twenty-five years old, finally graduating from a four-year college after so many setbacks! The only painful aspect of the day was that John and my brother, Walter, were the only family members who attended the ceremony. Priscilla was out of the country, and Mother had finally received a ticket to Ghana from Priscilla, so she had left for a trip we all knew she would remember the rest of her life. Priscilla sent me a letter of congratulations instead: I am extremely grateful, proud, and overwhelmed that you have finished the beginning of a long educational journey, she said.
It was good to see Walter, though, so the absence of Mother and Priscilla did not dampen my spirits. In fact, the night of my graduation party was one of the few nights I wasn’t sick from the pregnancy. John and I invited all of our friends from the Movement to the house, and we had the party to end all parties. I danced myself nearly to exhaustion! People kept asking me, “Pat, how can you keep dancing like that when you’ve been so sick?” But it was as if I’d tapped into a source of energy I’d forgotten about, because I felt more happy and free than I had in a long time. Losing myself in the music reminded me of my days as a freshman on FAMU’s campus, absorbed in my own world in those rehearsal rooms, not realizing how quickly my life would no longer be my own. I can’t remember the last time I’d had a chance to dance before graduation night! That party is one of my happiest memories from the 1960s.
I had done it. I had been involved in civil rights and I had gotten my degree. That night, as I danced, nothing else in the world mattered.
Our first child was born at FAMU’s hospital a month prematurely, on January 5, 1966, the same day as our wedding anniversary. Maybe I’m wired differently than other people, but I didn’t experience the kind of immediate joy and bonding most mothers describe when I first looked at my new baby girl. Her little face was the spitting image of John’s, but I have to admit that I thought the baby looked strange, with all those folds of wrinkled skin. Since I’d had an emergency cesarean section, however, I was probably in a daze. It took me some time to gather my thoughts and feelings.
Priscilla and I had vowed to name our daughters after each other whenever we had children, but I decided to use “Priscilla” as the middle name. I’d picked out a first name already. A couple of years earlier, while I’d studied contemporary Africa in a course taught by FAMU professor Dr. William Howard, I learned about the nation of Madagascar and its capital city, Tananarive. (Madagascar is the island near the southeast coast of mainland Africa.) The name sounded like music to me, and I’d vowed I would name my firstborn daughter after the city. The only problem was, by the time I finally had a child, I had forgotten how to spell the name. I took a guess on the birth certificate, spelling it T-A-N-N-A-R-I-V-E, but since I wasn’t certain, I called Professor Howard to check. “No, no,” he said, hearing how I’d spelled it. “You’ve left out an A. It has ten letters.” Somewhere, there is an original copy of Tananarive’s birth certificate with the original misspelling crossed out and a correction hurriedly added above it, thanks to Dr. Howard. We chuckled over that for many years.
I’d coordinated demonstrations and registration drives, but I was at a loss when it came to caring for a baby. I hadn’t been around many people with young children, so having a baby in my life was a very new experience for me. Whereas most of my relatives in Quincy had kept their distance while I was there with the North Florida Citizenship Education Project, I found that they were eager to assist me with my new baby. It’s not that they had ever stopped caring about me; they had only been afraid before. I have never been one to expect people to do more than they feel comfortable doing, in most cases, so I did not hold a grudge. Believe me, I was grateful for their help. Mother also came to spend a week with me. For the first few weeks, while I recuperated from my surgery, my new baby and I were waited on hand and foot.
When John and I needed a babysitter, Mrs. Augustine Hudson, the wife of FAMU chaplain Dr. James Hudson, was happy to look after her. There were so many people who were important to me that I named several godparents for Tananarive, all of them from the Movement—Judy Benninger, James and Lillian Shaw, and Mrs. Dorothy Jones. Later, I would name a Miami lawmaker, Rep. Gwendolyn Cherry, as another godmother. Tananarive was dedicated at the Unitarian Church in Tallahassee. Dr. Irene Johnson, a geography professor from FAMU, came to Tananarive’s dedication, as did other friends and family. Walter, my brother, who lived five hours away in Atlanta, also attended the dedication, and he frequently visited us for holidays, including Tananarive’s first Christmas. Our families were very close. (When Tananarive was a little older than two, she was the flower girl in Walter’s wedding to educator Rita Willis.)
John and I did not slow down after becoming new parents. Although a rift would grow between us in later years regarding the demands of family versus the demands of activism, in 1966 we were still very much of the same mind. When Tananarive was only three months old, we took her to Miami to live with Mother for a while because John and I were busy on the campaign trail for state and local elections. We were supporting candidates we believed were sensitive to the needs of Negroes and the poor. With record numbers of Negroes in Florida registered to vote, we wanted to start capitalizing on the community’s newfound voting power.
The previous year, we’d seen the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which President Johnson had supported, in large part in response to the travails of those of us who had worked in voter registration drives in 1964, and especially in response to the violence in Selma in 1965, where marchers supporting voting rights had been subjected to arrests and brutal beatings at the hands of police and racists. Again, it had taken suffering and bloodshed to prick the nation’s conscience. It was so ridiculous that we needed new, special laws to guarantee rights Negroes should have been able to take for granted just like any other U.S. citizens.
John decided he would run for the state senate in Florida’s Sixth District. At that time, there had been no Negro state legislators since the days of Reconstruction. John felt very strongly that all of Florida’s citizens were not being properly represented. We were very hopeful that political empowerment could lead to rapid, sweeping changes. John thought he might actually have a chance to win.
John had an official campaign manager, but believe me, I had to do most of the work. And it was work! We knew it was going to be a very tough race, and not just because John was Negro. The Sixth District was drawn so that it included twenty-four counties, including Leon and Gadsden Counties. Our first challenge would be to reach all of the voters; the next challenge was the racist Democratic machinery, which saw John as an outsider. Armed with eye-catching campaign cards with green print reading “DO IT WITH DUE,” we got a convertible and began the difficult task of driving from county to county to introduce ourselves to the voters. We brought Tananarive with us as much as we could, but for the longer trips we left her with babysitters like Augustine Hudson, the wife of Dr. James Hudson, FAMU’s chaplain, who was so supportive of civil rights.
My skin was burned to a crisp and peeling as we traveled through those hot Florida counties in our convertible. We arrived, uninvited, at every official Democratic party function we heard about. Most of the events were picnics, and we would stroll in and look for John’s rightful place among the candidates. You should have seen the looks we got! If John appeared to be approaching the vicinity of a white woman, the white men gathered around her as if John were some kind of beast who would attack her. Some candidates actually got up and left the table when John sat down. You could almost read their minds: Look at the audacity of this nigger coming here into our territory.
Though we were encountering hostility from racist whites, the Negro voters we met were overjoyed to see a Negro running for the Florida senate. When we had the baby with us, they cooed over her. I’m sure people were very pleased to see a family working together to make changes. When it was time for the election, John got enough votes to carry both Leon and Gadsden Counties, which even President Johnson had not done in 1964. Unfortunately, the other counties voted for his opponent, so John lost the election by a wide margin.
But the race had been a family affair, and even baby Tananarive had been in on the act.
After being a CORE activist for so many years, the philosophy of nonviolence was deeply ingrained in me. I never owned a gun, even during the worst times in Gadsden County, but when Tananarive was nearly nine months old, I realized how much motherhood had changed my perspective in some vital areas in my life. In the summer of 1966, I lost my belief in nonviolence, at least for a day. I was not launching a protest or looking for trouble, but somehow trouble found me, as my family tells me often seems to be the case.
Priscilla had told me in her letters that she planned to wait a few years before starting her family, but she got pregnant right before I gave birth to Tananarive. I know she agonized over her pregnancy, because her true desire was to have the baby in Ghana, but she considered the medical system there too unreliable at that time. Her baby was due August 25, so she had written to tell me she would be coming home for the first time since her departure. I begged her to come back to live in the States, where we could see each other more often and our children could grow up near each other. This was my dream, of course, but Priscilla’s attitude had not changed, as reflected in a letter she’d sent me in February: As for me coming to live in America again, Never! she wrote emphatically. She also noted that since I had my own baby, it was less likely that I would travel to visit her in Africa. We seemed to be in a no-win situation.
When Priscilla returned to the States that summer, I wanted to show her that things had changed since she’d left. After all, we had the Public Accommodations Act and the Voting Rights Act. Although Tallahassee’s municipal pools were still closed since Priscilla’s kick from a police officer at the 1963 “wade-in” and a subsequent protest in the summer of 1964—sadly, the city fathers preferred to have no swimming pools rather than integrate—great progress had been made in other areas in a very short time. If we could only have a pleasant visit, I thought, Priscilla would change her mind about living in Ghana.
It was so good to see my sister again! She came home bubbling with stories about her travels, her admiration for Ghanaian reform president Kwame Nkrumah, and the University College of Science Education in Cape Coast in Ghana, where she worked. It really seemed that Priscilla had managed to cram several lifetimes worth of travel into only two short years, and I could live vicariously through her stories. As she liked to tell me, I shouldn’t just think of the fact that she had left. I should think of all the places I might see through her, as Mother had done. To this day, Priscilla is the most well-traveled person I know.
I left Quincy for Priscilla’s visit, bringing Tananarive with me to live with Mother in Miami for a month, until Priscilla’s baby was born. By that time, Mother had left Leo Sears, the man she’d married after her divorce from Daddy Marion. Their relationship had been rocky from the beginning, and it simply never worked out. Mother had a job at Gulf American Land Corporation on Biscayne Boulevard in northeast Miami, so she left Priscilla and me at home with a list of chores each day when she went to work. I tell you, Priscilla and I behaved like we were children again. From the time Mother left the house each morning, we sat in the living room eating snacks, watching movies on television, and laughing as we talked about our days as young people. I purposely avoided some of the more painful subjects of the civil rights movement, not wanting to remind Priscilla of all the reasons she had left. Each day, as we realized it was almost time for Mother to get home from work, we’d scramble to do the chores she had asked of us. Those were carefree days, and we spent a lot of time laughing.
When Priscilla was nine months pregnant and as big as a house—actually, I believe she may have been overdue by then—she decided she wanted to drive up to Belle Glade to see some of our childhood friends. Belle Glade was about a ninety-minute drive from Miami, and we packed up baby Tananarive and left in the morning, planning to return home by late afternoon.
Priscilla and I had a good day visiting people we’d known in Belle Glade, but as the afternoon wore on and the summer sun grew hotter during the drive home, Priscilla began to feel sick. I knew that feeling well, and since she was pregnant we both understood what it meant: She needed to eat something right away to overcome the nausea. We had only made it to the town of South Bay about five miles outside of Belle Glade on Highway 27. We saw a sign for Roy’s Pit Barbeque, so we stopped to get Priscilla a sandwich to keep her from being sick.
Imagine us as we were: Priscilla was very, very pregnant, and I walked in carrying a nine-month-old child. There were plenty of empty seats in the restaurant, so we took the first table we saw. Like any other customers, we sat and waited to be served. Yes, we got some stares from whites in the restaurant. Maybe I was being naive again, but since two years had passed since the federal law outlawing racial discrimination at public facilities, I did not expect to have a problem that day. If I had, I never would have exposed my baby and pregnant sister.
The waitress was very excitable, and when she saw us there, she flew to our table, her face red with anger. “You can’t sit there!” she said. “Go on, git. I said you can’t sit there.”
Instead of pointing out that the law was on my side, I tried to explain what the problem was. “Miss, we just want to get a sandwich. As you can see, my sister is pregnant, and she isn’t feeling well. We just need a sandwich and a drink, and we’ll be on our way home.”
“You get up from there!” the waitress said, as if I hadn’t spoken.
“If you would just listen to—”
I never finished my last sentence, because I saw something I could barely believe even though it was happening before my own eyes: That waitress picked up a steel chair and began raising it as high as she could, heaving it over her head, as if she were going to hit us with it. Priscilla and I were shocked. We were a pregnant woman and a mother with a baby, and this woman was about to throw a chair at us.
“You listen to me,” I said in a deep, solemn voice that I barely recognized, because my voice was filled with something that had never been awakened in me until that moment. “If you make one more move, I will wipe up this floor with you.”
I saw the waitress freeze. She knew I meant it. She had no doubt that if she hurt my pregnant sister or my child, she would be lucky if I didn’t kill her.
Priscilla had such a bewildered, pained look in her eyes. To think that another woman could behave with such poison, with such mindless hatred! Priscilla glanced at me, and I knew what she was thinking: How could you say things have changed? Pat, things are worse than before! There was nothing else I could say to her about moving back to the States. As soon as she could leave after the September 6 birth of her son, Muncko Derk Kruize II, Priscilla went back to Ghana to live, and I couldn’t blame her. Maybe, deep down, I wondered if John and I were the crazy ones for staying here to raise our own child.
That incident wouldn’t still be so painful in my memory if it had somehow been resolved, if authorities had reprimanded the owner, who was responsible for the behavior of the employees. I called John to let him know what had happened, and he called the FBI to report the incident as a violation of federal law, but Priscilla and I were treated as if the whole thing was our fault. While we were researching this book, Tananarive and I put in a request for my FBI file under the Freedom of Information Act, and my file includes extensive interviews from the incident at Roy’s Pit Barbeque. All of the witnesses interviewed by the FBI contended that Priscilla and I were the ones who had been belligerent, that I had threatened the waitress first! I don’t think a single person told the truth, the way it had really happened.
I’m so puzzled when I read those varying accounts in the FBI report, which is riddled with inaccuracies. Were those the real witnesses the FBI spoke to? Did those people invent different accounts because they were trying to protect the restaurant? Did someone else tell them what to say? Or did they somehow see an event that looked wholly different in their eyes simply because Priscilla and I had darker skin?
“The owner was sick that day, you know,” an FBI agent in Miami told me in a scolding tone. “Why would you go in there bothering the owner with a protest? They had to pull the owner out of bed.” He completely missed the point. Priscilla was feeling sick, too, and I never asked anyone to call the owner, I said.
When Priscilla and I walked into that diner, we never expected to become part of a controversy. No one could understand that we had only wanted to order a sandwich.