“One does not fight to influence change and then leave the change to someone else to bring about.”
—Stokely Carmichael
George Calvin Bess’s family could not make it to The Gathering, and neither could he. His father was too sick from kidney problems to travel. His sister had a prior obligation with neighborhood schoolchildren. George Calvin Bess himself had been dead for thirty years.
His name had come up many times over the years as one that stuck particularly in my mother’s memory, and she had been afraid his family members might react coldly if she called to interview his family for our book. Mom has always felt that his family blamed her for his death, and deep down, I think she always blamed herself, too.
But when we tracked down his family in Tallahassee and Mom was brave enough to make the call, the family was happy to hear from her. “Patricia Due?” his father kept exclaiming with happy recognition. They were eager to take part in interviews about the impact of the civil rights movement on their family.
Calvin’s mother was in a nursing home and could not speak to us. Nor would she have agreed to it, her husband said; she’d never recovered from the loss of her only son. But we did speak to Calvin’s father and his sister, Cherrye, who’d been only six in the summer of 1967, when the older brother she’d simply called Brother never came home. (Mrs. Cherrye Bess, Calvin’s mother, died in 1997, the year after we interviewed her family; and Calvin’s father, also named George Calvin Bess, died in 2000.)
Most people know about Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman, the three civil rights workers who died during Freedom Summer in 1964. I remember seeing Mickey Schwerner’s mother years ago on Donahue and thinking that, no matter how painful it was to lose her son, she might have won some small consolation in the fact that her loss, and his sacrifice, were known. Hollywood fictionalized it and made the movie Mississippi Burning about it. But Calvin Bess had died, too, and almost no one knew. He did not make national newspaper headlines. His name does not appear in history books. His family has not been on Donahue, nor on Oprah, nor have they had to watch the horror of their son’s final days Hollywoodized for the careful consumption of the general public. Hollywoodized, perhaps, but at least remembered.
Mom’s spark was able to light a durable flame in Calvin for a variety of reasons, not the least of which, we know now, was the influence of his father, also named George Calvin Bess. Mr. Bess and Mom hugged upon meeting each other. George Bess was tall, at least six-foot-two, with thick arms and a handsome face, despite his seventy-one years. Mom and I were both struck by how attractive he was. His nature matched.
At the beginning of the interview, he chuckled good-heartedly over stories of his exploits as a young man, like getting into a brawl with a Tallahassee store clerk who called him “nigger,” and not getting arrested because someone intervened and argued that he didn’t know local customs since he was from New York. He also took part in an on-base riot at an Army camp in Florida, when the black soldiers weren’t permitted to watch a Noble Sissle concert with the white soldiers. “We broke into the main post warehouse and we took all the guns we could find, and all the ammo, and we shot the place up. And we burnt the post headquarters down,” he said. “This was in 1942. Shortly thereafter, they shipped us out of there. They shipped us overseas.”1
Mom and I could instantly see where Calvin got his determination.
Calvin’s mother, predictably, was worried about his involvement in the civil rights movement, especially once he was arrested, but she gradually had to accept it. There was no convincing a Bess man not to do something he wanted to do.
There were no classes at Harvard that Calvin was interested in that summer term in 1967, nor at FAMU, so he decided to do some voter registration work in Selma. Before he left, his father took him to a nearby auto shop to buy a blue Triumph convertible. After he’d packed up his car, his father noticed he had a taillight out, so he warned him and fixed it for him.
At the time Calvin died, his kid sister, Cherrye, who rode with him everywhere he went, was six years old. Cherrye called him “Brother,” and he called her “Q” (“Because he said I was cute,” Cherrye said). Cherrye told us that she remembered riding in the convertible with her brother to civil rights meetings when she was very young, and how much she’d loved singing the freedom songs even though she hadn’t understood what they meant. Cherrye remembers him studying and writing a great deal before he left.
Neither of his parents had really wanted him to make the trip because of the danger. But at least it was Selma, his father told him. Selma wasn’t so bad. Cherrye wondered why she couldn’t go on this trip with her brother—she went to all of his other meetings with him, she sang freedom songs with him. But he was very insistent, she says. She could not go. She would have to wait. And wait she did. She waited by the front door’s jalousie window for her brother to come home.
Soon after he left, Calvin called home and said he wasn’t in Selma, after all. There wasn’t anything for him to do there. He’d gone on to Mississippi. His father recalls how, when his son called him and told him he’d decided to move his voter registration work that summer from Selma to Mississippi, he’d told his son, “Well, you’re in no-man’s land now.” But Calvin always told his parents he was all right. He was safe. He talked to them a few days before he died.
The other call came the first Sunday in August. The sheriff’s office in Mississippi and one of Calvin’s civil rights coworkers, a man Calvin had nicknamed “Tex,” had tried to call the Bess family several times that day. George Bess remembers getting the call after church. Cherrye Bess remembers she answered the phone first, that they’d come back from getting groceries. Her mother took the phone from her, then shrieked and sank to her knees, sobbing. “And then Daddy ran to the phone,” Cherrye recalls, “so I knew it had to be something pretty bad. Nobody was speaking to me, though.” Even after she was told what had happened, she did not fully comprehend it. She still waited for her brother by the window, she remembers. “I told Mama, ‘God gon’ put a Band-Aid on him and send him back,’ ” Cherrye recalls.2
People who visited the house, like Stokely Carmichael and others, kept telling Cherrye about the Movement. “They asked, ‘Do you understand the Move-ment and Civil Rights and why they were fighting for my rights? They made it very personal,” she said. She did not understand until much later, but she remembers that when she was a child, people thought it was very important that she should know.
No one ever fully believed the police account of what happened to Calvin. Calvin died of a blow to his head that made a large gash at his temple. Mississippi locals always thought the car had been hauled to that creek by racist murderers, that they had not really driven into the creek. But Calvin’s parents were too distraught, and too frightened, to go to Mississippi to investigate, even when the NAACP offered assistance. They did not think they would find the truth, and they were afraid the same fate might befall them.
Calvin’s father had the water-damaged car towed back to Florida. For six months, it sat in front of their house. Every time Calvin’s mother saw it, she was overcome with grief. He put it in storage eventually, but it was eating away at him, too, so he finally got rid of it.
Along the way, though, the family experienced tiny miracles. The biggest was that soon after Calvin died, they discovered he’d fathered a child they didn’t know about. The mother lived in Ocala, and the boy was about a year old. They intervened just as he was about to be adopted by a family in Daytona, proved they were related from the similarity of photographs, took the boy home, and named him Calvin. Everyone, even little Cherrye, felt the baby was solace. Now there was a Calvin, Cherrye says, and she could stop waiting. Calvin had come back.
The day we spent with Calvin’s father and sister was very moving. Listening to Calvin’s father tell his story, recalling the awful day the telephone call shattered their lives, my mother began to choke and had to excuse herself from the room. Later, I took pictures of Calvin’s father hugging my mother, and I hoped that the book we wanted to write would give him and his family a sense that his son has been properly honored.
The tragic footnote is that George Calvin Bess IV became one of a long line of Bess men who fathered children shortly before being separated because of traumatic events—George Calvin II was overseas during World War II, with no expectation of returning, and didn’t see his child until he was two; George Calvin III died in Mississippi, never seeing his child at all; and George Calvin IV was incarcerated, leaving a young daughter outside. At nearly the same age his father had been when he died, Calvin’s son was sent to prison on drug charges, sentenced to thirteen years for his first offense, a nonviolent crime. He is almost thirty at this writing, and he has spent most of his adult life in jail. Truly, the criminal justice system in this country is the next great frontier in the civil rights struggle.
How did we leapfrog from the painful gains of the civil rights movement to seeing so many of our young men end up in jail? It’s a question of economics, in part. For so many misguided young people, even the brightest ones, drugs are a trade, an attainable means of support. Too many of us are still outside the system, haven’t learned to thrive within the law. And the “War on Drugs,” which is really a war on drug addicts and the poor, a war on inner cities, has filled our prisons with obscene numbers of nonviolent offenders.
Calvin Bess always told his father that he was dedicating himself to civil rights work for Cherrye, so she could go to school anywhere she wanted. She chose Bethune-Cookman College and FAMU, historically black schools, but she chose them. Today, Cherrye says she cherishes the memory of singing with Calvin when she was young, her first memories of singing. Today, she is active in Tallahassee’s black community, giving of herself to make the city better for everyone, often through song, gracing audiences with her lovely singing voice every chance she gets. Her brother would be proud.
I’ve had many occasions to reflect upon that young man’s sacrifice. One election day more than a year after the interview, my telephone rang early, waking me. “Good morning, darling. I hope you weren’t asleep, but I wanted to catch you before you left for work. It’s election day. Don’t forget.” It was my mother’s voice.
“Election day? For what?” I mumbled.
“Don’t you read your own paper? For one thing, the mayor is trying to change the name of the county. There are a couple of other items, too.”
Still only half awake, my mind was on anything but an election. By then, I’d returned to my job as a newspaper reporter because I needed an income, and I had a deadline that day. “Mom, I don’t have time to vote today. I have an assignment this morning, and then—”
I didn’t finish, but I didn’t have to. “I don’t believe you,” my mother said. She couldn’t have sounded more hurt and angry if I’d slapped her.
“I don’t have an opinion about that name-change thing. And I don’t even know what else is on the ballot.”
“That’s why you read,” my mother said, then she was silent. She is not an inarticulate woman, but it seemed she had to search for words because she was shocked by my response. To her, the question Why should I vote? was like Why should I breathe? On that day, though, I was pretty sure my sisters in Dallas and New York weren’t headed for the polls, either. We all vote religiously in presidential or mayoral elections, but the occasional local election goes unnoticed because of busy schedules.
“Of course you vote,” my mother said. “I really can’t believe this, from you of all people. I thought you understood by now how important this is.”
I was waking up. I sighed. “Mom, of course I understand how important my choice to vote is. That choice is sacred to me.” Choice? I could almost read my mother’s mind, her silence was so loud. “And I understand that people sacrificed their lives so I could voice my opinion. In this case, I don’t have one. This is just a little local thing. Most people haven’t even heard about it.”
“Yes, the newspaper is expecting a five percent turnout, and that’s all the more reason for you to vote. That’s all I have to say about this. I have to go.”
We both hung up the phone feeling frustrated, at an impasse. I knew my mother was profoundly disappointed to hear her daughter sound like some insensitive person who didn’t understand where she had come from. I hated to prick my mother’s pain, but I’d longed to be honest about my feelings, too. I wasn’t a deadbeat. I voted and I voted often. Was it really shirking the responsibility of my race to miss one election?
Regardless, I got up earlier than planned, dug through my wallet for my voter registration card, and drove to the nearly deserted polling place about two miles from my home. It was a ghost town. The staff members were so glad to see me, they smiled as if I’d just brought them breakfast. At that moment, I was glad I was there.
I hadn’t gone just to avoid another argument with my mother. I hadn’t gone even because I had any opinion whatsoever on whether Dade County changed its name to Miami-Dade County.
In the end, maybe I’d gone because of the interview with Calvin Bess’s father. I thought about that visit, when he was forced to recall the death of a bright young man who never had the opportunity to grow up, meet his own son, finish his promising college education, or live the life his parents had dreamed for him.
Calvin’s father had told us how he felt on election days when neighbors who had known his child since he was a boy, and knew how he had died, still refused to walk the simple distance to a nearby church to cast their votes, even when it was time to choose a president. He said he had one neighbor who was barely literate and yet voted every single time, but unfortunately he was the exception: There’s other guys sitting around there saying, “Ain’t gon’ do no good.” It makes me feel bad, angry. I say, “Hey, I had a son who gave his life just for this purpose, to get people like you involved in voting.” It goes in one ear and out the other. I hate to call them ignorant, but what more can you say?
I couldn’t remember Calvin Bess and neglect to vote that day.
In November 1996, two weeks after our interview with Calvin Bess’s family, an unforgettable opportunity came to Mom and me: a chance to interview Stokely Carmichael, the influential black nationalist and former Black Panther who popularized the phrase “Black Power.” Since Calvin Bess had been working for Stokely Carmichael’s SNCC at the time of his death, the well-known activist had visited Calvin’s family often at their modest Tallahassee home in the following years. We’d hoped to have the chance to talk to him about Calvin, and now we did. He was in Miami to visit his mother, Mabel Carmichael, and to take part in a public tribute, and he was gracious enough to agree to an interview when my mother called.
It was November 5. Election day. I drove to South Dade to interview Kwame Turé, a.k.a. Stokely Carmichael.
Mom had heard that he was ill. His sickness, we learned, was prostate cancer. He walked and sat very gingerly, and I couldn’t help noticing how swollen his bare ankles and feet were. Yet he had a beautiful smile that enlivened his entire face, showcasing a row of bright teeth against his clay-brown skin. He spoke very properly, in a careful West Indian manner, and he was not nearly as intimidating as I had expected from a revolutionary. He seemed, in fact, like a man who could sit and listen very patiently to the arguments of someone with whom he disagreed vehemently.
On that day, even more than other days, I felt the very strong sense of recording a fleeting bit of history. I didn’t know how much longer Kwame Turé had left to live, but I did know how serious prostate cancer is, I knew it was undetected for some time, and I knew his feet were swollen. I did not believe he would live to see this book published.
I was every bit the journalist that day, helping Mom set up the video cameras, testing the microphone on our tape recorder, interviewing him in very much the same way I’ve interviewed countless other people. I listened with interest, not sorrow or mortification, as he described being in a Montgomery, Alabama, hotel on the day of an SNCC march in Montgomery in 1965, when he could see the horse-mounted police with their batons waiting for marchers. The marchers could not see the police, but Turé could see them from his fifth-floor vantage point. When he tried to run downstairs to warn the marchers, he found he’d been locked inside the hotel.
He told the story best in his own words: “Julian Bond was then our communicating secretary in Atlanta, so I had to call him, and I was giving Julian a blow-by-blow description of the brutality I was seeing before my very eyes. I mean, they were brutal. I’ve seen a lot of brutality in my life, but they trampled kids on horses, they had bullwhips, they had batons, they rode into the crowd and smashed them down. I mean, the horses were coming fast, at galloping speeds. So I was giving a blow-by-blow description. They sent a man from the telephone company, directly opposite me, and he began to climb the telephone pole. I told Julian, ‘OK, I’d better give it to you fast, because they’re getting ready to disconnect the phone, you know.’ And of course, the man did disconnect the phone. Since I couldn’t get out because they had locked the door, I had to stay by the window and see all this brutality, and there’s nothing worse than witnessing it when you yourself cannot participate in it.… That evening, I went off and they had to send me out of Montgomery. I went off. I went off.”3
After Turé described this scene, Mom began to cough and ended up needing a glass of water and excusing herself to go to the bathroom. When Mom returned, she said she’d been more caught up in his story of brutality than she thought. “The flashbacks,” she said. There were tears in her eyes, and it was only then that I understood that her emotions had provoked the coughing bout, not simply her allergies or her asthma. She had been drawn in. She told me later she felt as though she’d been in that hotel room with him, seeing everything he was seeing through his eyes.
We asked Turé why he visited the Bess family for so many years after Calvin died. He explained that SNCC, which Calvin was working for at the time he died (and which Turé headed), was a poor organization. There were many others who died like Calvin, he said, and the visits were the least he could do. “There were many. We lost many people, so it wasn’t unusual at all,” he said with his gentle, plainspoken eloquence. “He was a comrade who had died, so we had a responsibility. Of course, we were poor, and we were so poor we couldn’t even feed the families of our dead comrades, you know. So, we couldn’t do anything for them, but at least we had a responsibility to visit them to let them know that, if nobody else knew, we knew the death was not in vain. We were aware of the sacrifices made, and grateful for those sacrifices made. And thankful to the family for having produced him.”
Simply put, he was a man who believed in doing what should be done. That, I think, was the quiet mark of his life. After the interview, I presented Turé with a copy of my first novel, The Between. Exactly two years later, to the month, he was dead.
“Keep writing that history,” he said to me that day.
I will, I told him. Oh yes, I will.