five• In the Driver’s Seat

As dawn broke on my wedding day, I sat up in bed and tried to convince myself I was experiencing normal bridal jitters. In only a few hours, the fairy tale I had planned would unfold. McGee Avenue Baptist Church would be scented with bouquets of carnations; my four bridesmaids would be in place; and admirers in the pews would be glancing over their shoulders as I floated down the aisle to become Mrs. Frank Davis Jr.—for better or for worse, til death do us part.

If I were to back out now, what else could I do with my life?

So I got married.

Afterward we held the reception at Frank’s house, given that it was fancier than ours. His house was filled with our friends—all teenagers barely out of high school. We girls stood around in our gowns as we nibbled hors d’oeuvres; we were striving to appear as sophisticated as those in the wedding parties depicted in bridal magazines. Frank and his groomsmen clustered around the black-and-white television, watching Illinois cream Stanford in the first nationally televised Rose Bowl game.

The next day, the air force dispatched Frank to Texas for training, and I took another apartment in Berkeley with my mother and her children. But it wasn’t for long. Later that year Frank was reassigned to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C., and sent for me to join him. My mother put her Southern Pacific connections to good use, alerting all the porters on the California Zephyr to keep an eye on me, feed me well, and make sure I changed trains correctly in Chicago, as I made the three-day trek across country. She also schooled me on survival in segregated territory, warning me to use only the colored bathroom, to drink out of only the colored water fountain, and to make sure I didn’t wander by mistake into a whites-only waiting room. When I got off the train in Washington and plunged into the frenzy of Union Station, I couldn’t find the “coloreds” bathroom or Frank. By the time I spotted my new husband’s face in the crowd, I was a nervous wreck.

Washington, D.C., was in transition in 1952, as it began to look in the mirror and confront its racism. Just a few years earlier, the Truman Committee on Civil Rights had released the first comprehensive survey of its kind, which was damning. The committee singled out the capital as “a graphic illustration of a failure of democracy.

“For Negro Americans, Washington is not just the nation’s capital. It is the point at which all public transportation into the South becomes ‘Jim Crow.’ If he stops in Washington, a Negro may dine like other men in Union Station, but as soon as he steps out into the capital, he leaves such democratic practices behind. With very few exceptions, he is refused service at downtown restaurants, he may not attend a downtown movie or play, and he has to go into the poorer section of the city to find a night’s lodging.... In addition, he must endure the countless daily humiliations that the system of segregation imposes upon the one-third of Washington that is Negro.” The inconsistencies were ludicrous: Constitution Hall seated whites and blacks with no distinction but refused to allow black performers on stage. Other theaters cast black actors but refused to allow blacks in the audience. And foreign officials with dark skin were typically mistaken for “American Negroes” and refused service until they established they were not Americans.

The exception to all this senseless segregation was the federal government. As an experienced GS-2 clerk typist, I landed a job with the Wage and Salary Stabilization Board. Every day in Washington was an education for me. It was the first time I had worked with so many black professionals: lawyers, economists, and managers. Our office set wages for most major industries. One day the thunderous and fiery labor leader John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers Union—the man who infuriated the nation when he took his miners out on strike in 1943 during World War II—stormed into our office during the Korean War, threatening to do the same thing again unless the agency would approve wage increases for his miners. He was a man to be feared; and there I was, a recent high school graduate at the front desk, asking if he had an appointment.

My coworkers and I even made a trip up to Capitol Hill as spectators for one of Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist witch-hunting hearings.

Within a year, I gave birth to my son, whom I named Steven Eugene. Yes, I kept Eugene in the family tradition.

But no sooner did Steven arrive than he was whisked away from me. I was diagnosed with hypertension, and the hospital ordered us separated so I could rest and receive treatment. For the crucial first week of Steven’s life, I couldn’t hold him or care for him the way other mothers did.

When we returned home, Frank and I continually clashed over how to raise our son. We were merely kids ourselves, neither of us knowing the first thing about caring for infants. Given my upbringing, the maternal instinct was a mystery I had to discover on my own. Nonetheless, I believed you could never hold a baby too much; he disagreed. One evening when Steven was about a month old, fussy and inconsolable, Frank put him on the bed and locked me out of the room, determined to let little Steven cry himself dry. As his wailing grew more shrill and frantic by the minute, I pleaded with Frank, pulling at his arm and begging him to unlock the door and let me get to my baby. He refused.

I would never truly forgive him.

Washington, D.C., desegregated city parks and facilities in 1954, and that same year the Supreme Court jettisoned the “separate but equal” doctrine for public education. I watched the burgeoning civil rights movement from afar—by that time, I had joined Frank at his new posting in Hawaii, near Pearl Harbor. News from the mainland reached us a day late, after newspapers and filmed TV news segments had been flown over the Pacific.

By the time we returned to Oakland in 1956 for Frank’s discharge, Rosa Parks had been arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger; and the resulting bus boycott, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, was shaking the foundation of segregation throughout the South and beyond.

Frank began work as an electronic technician at the Hunters Point shipyard in San Francisco. I secured an after-school babysitter for Steven, and I landed a post handling top secret weapons manuals for the navy, working out of a huge warehouse on Treasure Island in the middle of the bay. Soon our small unit was melded into a much larger one at the Naval Supply Center. Then it became a tedious eight-to-four job—and when the clock approached 3:59 p.m., most of my coworkers had their handbags at their sides while they waited to punch out and head home. In that environment I was a veritable workaholic, even winning a few employee awards for my dedication. Before long I could recite the naval names and numbers of larger vessels, the newest types of missiles and rockets, and assorted minutia about a host of weapons of war in the Pacific Fleet.

Needless to say, this expertise limited my conversation within my circle of friends. I certainly couldn’t chat about my work.

To keep some spark in my life, I joined several black women’s organizations. Soon I was volunteering to write about their activities for local small black weekly publications, most of which would print anything that was fairly well written and that landed in their lap free of charge. Admittedly, I was an amateur—one of the first outlets to publish my reports was the San Francisco Shopping News. Eventually I teamed up with popular photographer Chuck Willis; I wrote small stories that accompanied his pictures of community and social events.

I never expected Chuck to pay me a dime—I considered it sufficient reward that I was meeting interesting people, and he had valuable contacts. Among his clients was Jet, a magazine that was becoming indispensable to tens of thousands of black readers across the nation.

The creative force behind Jet was John H. Johnson, a young Chicago entrepreneur who sensed that a magazine aimed at the emerging Negro middle class would be, in his words, “a black gold mine.” He used his mother’s furniture as collateral for a five-hundred-dollar loan and catapulted into the magazine business, first with a Reader’s Digest style Negro Digest and the romance confessional Tan. In 1951 he introduced Jet, and a few years later, he debuted the glossier Ebony.

Jet was a mix of human-interest features, celebrity profiles, and political news, as well as practical guides, such as how to apply for scholarships and register to vote.

Its formula for success: covering the stories that white publications downplayed or completely ignored—stories of crucial interest to African American readers. As Johnson later observed, “If you had relied on the white press of that day, you would have assumed that blacks were not born.”

So when fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was lynched, beaten, shot, and his body dumped in Tallahatchie River for the “crime” of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi, Jet ran the story on its cover. Emmett’s mother, after threatening to bust his sealed casket open with a hammer to see her son, was sickened to see that the boy’s tongue was choked out; his right eye hung from its socket; his nose had been broken in several places as though someone had taken a meat cleaver to it; and his body had been held underwater for three days by a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire. The Chicago funeral director asked if she wanted him to “touch the body up.”

“No,” she replied with vehemence. “Let the people see what I have seen. I think everybody needs to know what happened to Emmett Till.”

The only national publication to feature the photo of Emmett’s corpse was Jet, but the photo made it impossible for decent people to ignore the results of racist hate. And when an all-white-male jury in Mississippi took less than an hour to find the accused white men “not guilty”—and boasted that the verdict would have been even speedier if they hadn’t taken a soda break—the case of Emmett Till became a major turning point for civil rights.

I was an avid reader of Jet and was pleased when Chuck asked me to write captions and fact sheets for the freelance photos he was sending off to the company’s headquarters in Chicago. One day Jet editor Bob Johnson phoned with a question:

“How would you like to be a stringer for the magazine? We can’t pay you much—five dollars an item if we use it.” I would not get a byline: Anything useful I submitted would probably end up in Gerri Majors’s popular “Society World” column.

I couldn’t have cared less about the low pay or the lack of credit. In fact, I was elated.

I began submitting community news items, blurbs about the most fascinating black people in the Bay Area, rundowns of charity events. As it turned out, Johnson (no relation to the publisher) was a talented and patient editor, from a distinguished family—his grandfather had been the first African American to serve as a U.S senator. Each week after the magazine was “put to bed,” he would call me and go over my copy, ripping it apart. “How do I know it was a great party—what did you tell me about it, except for that flat line?” he would ask. “Girl, you have got to take me there!” From him I learned to meticulously record the details that bring a story to life.

I was interning with a mentor two thousand miles away, working for the most popular black magazine in the world.

At the same time, I was more or less trying to be the submissive, traditional wife that Frank clearly desired. I cooked, I cleaned, I attended church, I played hostess, I cared for our son. But I also was moody, distant in the bedroom, and not inclined to invite him into the world of my imagination.

He was jealous, kept close tabs on my whereabouts, didn’t want me to drive, objected to my dancing with other men, detested it if I wore short skirts and low necklines, and saw “this writing stuff” as a complete waste of time.

I defied him and continued reporting for any publication that would take my copy. For Ebony, I prepared short profiles about Bay Area notables for consideration in its “Bachelors of the Year” and “Bachelorettes of the Year” features; and I relished the opportunity to spend time in the company of fascinating people. One of my successful bachelor submissions was George Wiley, a brilliant UC Berkeley professor who would later be regarded as the father of the welfare rights movement.

Eventually I received my own bylined column, “Society Swirl,” in the Bay Area Independent, a small weekly, based in San Francisco. I wrote about the progress black people were making—local civil rights leaders; budding politicians; and everyday people, such as the first local black man hired as an automobile showroom salesman and the first black woman to work at a cosmetics counter.

I was juggling a lot: working a full-time job with the navy, freelancing for Jet and Ebony, writing my column, and of course, my family. And on that front, things were continuing to crumble.

Steven was not a happy child. My husband’s rules were strict, and the repercussions for violating them were harsh—he expected young Steven to “be a man.” He showed no sympathy for the fact that Steven was frightened of the big dog in the backyard and terrified to walk the nine blocks down MacArthur Boulevard to kindergarten all by himself. My son had few friends, and a mother who was changing every day. I think his childhood must have been as lonely as mine. He began stuttering. We both were out of step with the head of the household.

And then I found out I was pregnant again.

The arguments between Frank and me only escalated—about Steven, my work, and particularly my perpetual deadlines. In my final trimester, I began to rely on a new friend, the warm, easygoing photographer who worked in Chuck’s darkroom. Bill Moore was a godsend. Many times when I was banging into a deadline, he bailed me out by driving to my home to retrieve my newspaper copy and delivering it where it needed to be.

The final showdown with my husband came three nights before Christmas 1959. I had been rushing to finish my column, decorate our Christmas tree, wrap presents, and keep my life from unraveling. I can’t even recall what ignited this particular explosion, but soon Frank and I were toe-to-toe screaming at one another in the bathroom; and I was doing my fair share of the screaming. I told him I wanted a divorce.

“Get over it—divorce is not acceptable in this family,” he hissed. And then another, more chilling declaration: “I’d rather see you dead than go through a divorce.”

What happened next would forever remain a matter of dispute—with me believing Frank struck me, and him contending it was only a shove—but the impact sent me toppling backward into the bathtub. My water broke, and my daughter, Darolyn, began her journey into this world.

Now I had a son and a daughter. The world around us was awakening, stirring, changing. In the face of snubs, jeers, fire hoses, attack dogs, and big-ots backed by the power of the state, black men and women in the South and throughout the country were risking everything for equality, freedom, and the dream of limitless possibilities—the enticing “what if?” In that milieu, I allowed myself to dream along with them. And I feared that if I waited much longer to leave my marriage, I’d get too worn down to take a risk, and my dreams would wither and die.

I had to get out of there.

For three months, I schemed with the precision of plotting in a detective novel. First I informed the navy that I would not be returning from maternity leave and requested my full retirement disbursement: three thousand dollars. I paid cash for a used car—a huge blue and white Plymouth sedan—that I bought only on the condition that I could store it on the sales lot until I needed it. I spent hours hovering over the counter at the AAA office, perusing cheap motel listings and maps as I plotted our route along desolate country roads that meandered south toward Los Angeles. And I hired a moving van, which was to appear at our house at 9:30 a.m., about an hour and a half after Frank left for work; to load up the furniture, toys, and clothing the children and I would later need and deposit them in a rented storage space. To avoid confrontation, the timing had to be perfect.

I left Frank some food, our bed, and a letter informing him that he could keep the house we had jointly purchased on Seneca Street. I hoped that might create at least a sliver of good will.

As the moving van arrived, neighbors were peeking out from their curtains along Seneca, one of two streets in the East Oakland hills that accommodated black homeowners. Owning our first home there had been a symbol of progress and pride, but I knew I could never live there again.

As I loaded the children into a waiting taxi, Rose Evans made a beeline across the street. She was the sort of woman who tracked the comings and goings of the neighborhood, and she’d clearly concluded that she needed to launch her own inquiry.

“What’s up with the moving van? I just saw Frank, and he didn’t say anything about you guys moving,” she said, scanning my face for clues.

“Good,” I replied. “And the less you know about this the better. Wish me luck!”

With that, I bade good-bye to my old life and moved into the great unknown. I had confided only in my mother, who thought this impulse was terrible and feared we would surely be caught or hurt or both. But in the words of the old Negro spiritual, we had “crossed over” now, and there would be no turning back.

An opaque fog enveloped us as we sped through the night, our own headlights reflecting back to cast a luminous halo around our lumbering Plymouth. Tule fog is notorious in California’s Central Valley—it causes more weather-related deaths than any other force of nature in the state. Every few years, the highway linking Northern California to the Los Angeles Basin experiences a massive pileup in which up to a hundred cars and tractortrailers plow into one another in fog-induced oblivion. For the most part I avoided venturing onto any easily traceable highways. Our greatest danger was that if we would need help, no other living soul was around for miles.

For the sake of my children, I feigned calmness. But I was inexperienced behind the wheel—an awful driver who kept hitting the brakes at the slightest cause. The bassinet on the backseat, with baby Darolyn tucked inside, would tumble forward; and six-year-old Steven would grab it and slide it back into place. He asked where we were going. I told him only that we couldn’t live with his father anymore and needed to find someplace else to be for a while. Mostly he was quiet.

We changed motels every night, and at each we propped a chair against the door. None of us slept soundly.

In Los Angeles, I checked us into a flashy Hollywood motel with a shimmering blue swimming pool on Sunset Strip. We stayed three nights, giving Steven a chance to swim, relax, and pretend to be on vacation.

A phone conversation with my mother shattered our fantasy refuge: Frank’s mother had put a private eye on our trail. Mrs. Davis was a strongwilled woman who was devoted to her grandchildren, and I knew she would never give up. For a few frantic hours, I considered driving us into Mexico. Then the rational part of my brain kicked in, and I realized I couldn’t speak a phrase of Spanish and we would have no one to help us. Besides, I was running out of money.

I could only hope that Frank’s temper was similar to my father’s, and that with the passage of time, he had simmered down. For all my masterminding of this elaborate escape, I really had no plan for what would come next.