Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family

chapter seven

My mother and father plunged into parenthood with a vengeance. Early on they sought to build a good learning environment for me, reading stories to me every night until I was able to read myself. My mother was as determined to raise a musician as my father was to cultivate a sports fan. She bought my first piano when I was three months old, and I learned later that we would “play” songs together, Mother moving my fingers along the little keyboard.

Before I was one my mother returned to teaching. There weren’t any debates in my community about the relative merits of rearing children while working. Almost all of the women in my community worked, most as teachers. Teaching was such a prized profession that most who could teach did. There weren’t many other options except perhaps nursing. Most men did the same, though occasionally they went to law or medical school.

Extended families provided a good child care alternative for these working parents. It was convenient that the length of the school day as well as vacations were roughly the same for parents who worked in the schools and for their children. But often grandparents filled in with kids who weren’t yet school-age. I was dropped off by my parents at my maternal grandparents’ house in the morning and picked up after school. There was no safer or more nurturing environment than the one provided by Grandmother and Granddaddy Ray.

When I was almost four, my father persuaded the church to build a proper manse so that we could move out of Westminster. I have only a few memories of living in the back of the church, but I remember very well the whole process of building the small gray house on a corner lot at 929 Center Way Southwest. The manse was located about five minutes from the church in Birmingham’s black middle-class neighborhood of Titusville.

My parents tried to involve me in family decision making from a very young age, and the impending family move was a perfect opportunity. There were so many decisions to make about paint colors and the functions that would be assigned to various rooms. I personally picked the pale green for the bathroom, the yellow for the kitchen, and a rich blue for my playroom. Mother decided on “Chinese red” for the living room. Since I was an only child and had no competition from siblings for space, I had a pink bedroom in addition to the playroom. But I was afraid to sleep in it alone, having shared the bedroom in the church with my parents. My bedroom was soon turned into a small den and a second bed was put in my parents’ room. This was the arrangement for a few years until at about eight I declared the need for my own space and reclaimed my bedroom.

But then there was the question of what to do for a den. Again here was an opportunity to involve me in decision making. By now I was president of the family. We held an election every year. My father insisted on a secret ballot, but since my mother always voted for me I was assured of victory. There were no term limits. My responsibilities included calling family meetings to decide matters such as departure times for trips, plans for decorating the house at Christmas, and other issues related to daily life. So I called a meeting, and after some discussion we all agreed that the playroom should become the den.

The move to 929 Center Way had been one of the most exciting times in our lives and included the family’s first TV purchase, a little thirteen-inch Zenith black-and-white set. We watched a lot of TV. I have many intellectual friends who either don’t watch TV or pretend that they don’t. Some go so far as to refuse to own one. And I know that parents today restrict television watching for their kids.

My parents didn’t set limits on how much TV I watched. To be fair, television was a lot more wholesome in the late 1950s. But there was more to it than that. I have always thought that it’s harder to be the parent of an only child than to be an only child. Someone has to entertain the little one when night falls and playmates go home. In that regard, television was one of my parents’ best friends. We watched TV together just about every night, and I often watched alone too.

The only black people regularly on TV were the characters on Amos ’n’ Andy, and while we watched their antics, my parents went out of their way to point out and correct their butchered English. Mostly I watched cartoons such as Popeye and situation comedies such as I Love Lucy. The Popeye Show took place in a studio with Cousin Cliff, a big white man in a sailor suit, hosting an audience of schoolkids. Sometimes kids would bring their friends and celebrate a birthday on TV. The studio audience was all white, of course, until about 1962, when the show started devoting a few days each year to “Negro day.” I actually got to go when I was about seven years old and one of my friends had her birthday party there. I remember finding the whole highly anticipated event rather disappointing. We drove up to Red Mountain, where Channel 13 was located, sat on bleachers in a studio, and went home. I never again held Cousin Cliff in high esteem.

My mother also made sure that I watched Mighty Mouse, in which the heroic mouse sang, “Here I come to save the day!” Mother explained that this was a form of opera in which dialogue is sung, not spoken. She seemed to find high culture in just about everything.

But my favorite show was The Mickey Mouse Club, which we watched as a family every day after school. All three of us would put on our mouse ears and sing, “M-I-C (See you real soon) … K-E-Y (Why? Because we like you) … M-O-U-S-E.” It was a real family ritual, not to be interrupted by anything. One day Mr. Binham the insurance agent was in the living room pitching my parents on some new policy. He was the only white man I can ever remember coming into our house in Titusville. In any case, it was about time to sing the Mickey Mouse song, and I was becoming agitated that my parents were otherwise occupied. Daddy politely told Mr. Binham that he’d have to wait. We put on our mouse ears and engaged in our family ritual. I felt very proud that my parents had put our time above whatever business it was they had with Mr. Binham. This small gesture was simply one of the many that communicated they always had time for me.

After The Mickey Mouse Club we would take a break from television for reading time and, as I became older, doing homework together. We would then tune into the nationally televised news program The Huntley-Brinkley Report. My father would comment on each story, explaining the historical significance of big events. I remember watching John Glenn’s historic mission to space, which preempted all other programming for the entire mission. For a while I wanted to be an astronaut, as did most of my friends. We’d load up our “space capsule” out in the backyard, with some lucky kid getting to be the astronaut and others being confined to earth as ground controllers.

But one of my most vivid childhood memories is the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, in which the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in a tense standoff over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. We were glued to the set every evening during those thirteen days. It was a very scary time. We’d never bothered with a bomb shelter in the house, even at the height of the Cold War. But some of our friends did have them, fully stocked with provisions to survive a nuclear exchange. In school, we went through duck-and-cover drills. When the alarm sounded all the children fell to the floor, huddling under their desks. My friends and I even played bomb shelter, crawling into the little space just beneath the house in response to a “nuclear attack.”

But the crisis in Cuba was no drill. Because the missiles would have been deployed just ninety miles from the Florida coast, the newscasters reported, probably incorrectly, that Birmingham was in range. They showed big arrows pointing right at us. I could tell that my father was worried, and I realized that this was something my parents couldn’t save me from. It was the first time that I remember feeling truly vulnerable.

Daddy explained that our country had never lost a war, and he was sure we weren’t going to lose this one. He was nevertheless visibly relieved when the Soviet ships turned around, ending the crisis. The whole episode had a surprisingly strong impact on me. I once told an audience of Cuban Americans that Fidel Castro had put the United States at risk in allowing those missiles to be deployed. “He should pay for it until he dies,” I said. Even I was surprised by the rawness of that comment.