The Sound of Silence

My mother, Joan Southgate, was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929. Her father, Falstaff Harris, was a locally prominent artist who won the Leavenworth Prize in Art as a student at Syracuse University, a fine-art painter who also did commercial work for local businesses. She grew up in a house full of books and paints, a grand piano in the living room. He was the only African American doing such work locally, but according to my mother, his distance from the glorious ferment of the Harlem Renaissance always gnawed at him. Here’s a description of them together from her memoir ’Bout Time, published in Ohio by Eagle Creek Press:

When I was four or five my father showed me how an artist sees. Just lie back and gaze up at the ceiling without remembering that the room is a cube. Just look at the corners on the ceiling and see how they are shaped, examine the angles as obtuse rather than right.

From the same memoir:

It was not exactly a secret that my father drank and beat my mother, my brother Shurley and me. I always knew, without talking about it much at the time or later. It was not lost, just not remembered often. . . . If you are punched in the face hard enough you can really see sparks that flash in a spray. I remember, I watched, so this is what it means, hit so hard you see stars. There is also a sound.

Another memory, describing a moment in my childhood home in Cleveland, Ohio, the place where she lived with my late father and raised four children.

I am standing in my kitchen. I love warm evenings here. I have this beautiful room that is mine because I thought it up. I built the open pine shelves, stripped and stained the washstands and woodwork. I rubbed the one hundred fifty-year-old table’s patina smooth. I am holding a floral thin china cup of herbal Red Zinger and the real view of my own backyard through the oversized, deep-set garden window. Suddenly I discover an amnesia so specific that no one noticed it was there while it was happening. And I begin to know what is inside.

What was inside was this: She never forgot, though didn’t share with her children, stories of the violence in her family. What she had forgotten—no, completely repressed—was the fact that her father also sexually assaulted her, many times. In the book, she reveals the emergence of the memories in excruciating detail: the days of flashbacks so intense that she vomited, how she stopped being able to sleep at all. And she recounts the way she ultimately saved herself by calling Cleveland’s rape crisis center and there finding crisis counseling (they treated her memories as the emergency they were) and group support. A few months after her amnesia lifted, her sister, my Aunt Letitia, came to stay with her; my mother’s desperate phone call confirmed the terrible thing my aunt had long suspected and even asked about occasionally, always to be met with denial, a reality forgotten. Tish reminded my mother of a night when her brother Shurley beat their father savagely, screaming, “Don’t you ever touch Joan again.” Another fragment of memory: a time when she tried to tell her mother. So it wasn’t a total secret after all. But what was a family to do in Syracuse, New York, in the mid 1930s—especially a Black family, for whom there was an extra layer of race pride to carry and an artist’s reputation to protect? When I worked at Essence magazine in the 1980s, I heard a colleague say “We [Black people] don’t do that” (meaning incest). Although this was long before my mother’s revelation, I had sense enough to respond, forcefully, that incest isn’t confined to one culture or race. But that remark gives you a hint of the imperviousness of the wall of denial, the degree of taboo, the degree to which there was no help to be had. Horror and love. All in one place. My mother writes: “My mother defined my world by filling it with sound: poem, song, plans for adventure, and significant silence: of questions unanswered.” There was a silence buried beyond knowing, a survival silence. They say the truth will set you free. Not always. It depends. At the right time. Maybe.

*

Though her psyche was informed by a profound silence, I’ll say here that, publicly, my mother is a proud rebel and an unconventional soul who has loudly fought injustice all her adult life. From the her involvement in the civil rights movement, to counseling clients at Preterm, Cleveland’s first abortion clinic to co-leading the rabble-rousing Saul Alinsky–style organization that was her last full-time job, to march after march and rally after rally, she’s been out here in these streets as long as there have been streets. Her most unconventional act was one of honoring Black history and strength. At 73, she decided to retrace what might have been the path of the Underground Railroad through Ohio and on to Canada on foot; she recounts the journey in another memoir, In Their Path: A Grandmother’s 519-Mile Underground Railroad Walk. After she finished the walk, more work; this time to create an Underground Railroad education center called Restore Cleveland Hope. Her name is carved into the sidewalk out front, a legacy set in stone.

I’ll say here too that I would describe her in much the same way that she describes her mother. Poem, song, plans for adventure: check. Significant silence and questions unanswered: check.

*

I’ve got a lot of silence in my head too. I have very few specific memories—scenes or incidents I can recall, good or bad—from either my childhood or my adult life. I was reassured to learn recently that there are variations in autobiographical memory and it’s not necessarily a sign of something gravely awry. Particularly after my mother’s revelation, I worried that I too would have to live through the emergence of a long-buried horror (remember when Satanic-cult memories were a thing?) But I’ve seen many therapists over many years—I wrote this essay shortly before my 64th birthday. I figure if something was gonna stick its head out, it would have done so by now.

I say this to explain (in part) why I’m unable to recount my reactions to learning of my mother’s recovered memories. She sent a letter to me and my siblings telling us what was happening. I can’t remember what it said. I didn’t keep it. When ’Bout Time was first published, I read it as though through a scrim. In rereading it as I worked on this essay, I was genuinely astonished to find that I’d written the laudatory, loving afterword.

Unlike some of the other gaps in my memory, forgetting that I wrote this does carry some meaning. Presented with a horror that I wasn’t ready to hear and asked to be supportive as it unfolded, I pushed the whole thing away. Silenced it, as it were. My primary recollections now are of anger that it happened but also of anger toward her for telling me about it. In retrospect, a child’s anger, though I was in my 30s. Perhaps that accounted for its fierceness.

She and I did grapple with it some. I must have said something to her. How could I not have? I remember crying in my husband’s arms. I have a vague memory of going to a therapist with her once, her sobbing on the street after. I don’t remember what I did or said. I had feelings of course. But I was silent. That’s how it was.

*

My childhood home sits on a quiet street in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood. On the front lawn there’s a sycamore tree whose roots are pulling the lawn into a tentlike shape. The house is more than 100 years old, the tree probably the same. I spent so much time sitting or lying on the bed my mother had built, foam rubber on top of an old door, legs made of two-by-fours hammered into it, looking out my window at that tree, its thin yellow bark, its wide gray circumference, a sturdy, familiar shape, a comfort.

Historically, humans have regarded sycamores as symbols of protection, a relationship that dates back at least to ancient Egypt. They are often depicted in tomb drawings. Sarcophagi were also made out of their wood. The Web site Historicaleve.com sums up the general consensus: These sacred trees, notably the sycamore, played a pivotal role, providing sustenance, protection, and facilitating the transition to the afterlife. On 9/11 as the World Trade Center towers collapsed, the sycamore in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Chapel was knocked over in such a manner that it fell, branches spread like sheltering arms, saving the church from complete destruction. Only one window was cracked, the chandeliers untouched. Much like that tree, our sycamore was a shelter for me, a place of sustenance. For my mother, shelter was the view out the back window. There was no tree there but at the right time, the view offered the light of revelation.

*

My siblings and I were brought to civil rights marches before we could walk. Practically every book in the house—and there were many—had the word Negro or Afro-American or Black in the title. We had Black history comic books, the Golden Legacy series, which contained vividly illustrated comic book–style tales of figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman (I still remember the drawing of her being hit in the head with the brick that induced her narcolepsy). I remember being told that my grandmother, born in Auburn, New York, where Tubman lived until the end of her life, met her she was a little girl and Tubman was very old.

But there’s a startling gap in what we were told about that history too. There’s a brief interview online with my late aunt for a project capturing the history of Black Syracuse in which she shares childhood memories of the folks who dropped by their house on their way through town: Paul Robeson, Cab Calloway, W.E.B. DuBois, among others. Names most of us know only from history books. Most likely they dined there because they knew of my grandfather’s artistry—and because they weren’t welcome to dine elsewhere.

Despite my mother and father’s activism, the vital sense of Black history that they imbued us all with, I have no memory of being told about these visits. It’s a gap that’s hard to understand. Or maybe not. Glory and pain woven together is one of the hardest braids to undo.

*

My father, Robert Southgate, died in 1988. At that time, my parents had been separated for 9 years. The way I remember finding out about their separation was through a phone call in my dorm at Smith. She said something like “I’m not staying married anymore.” She sounded so firm. Once again, I don’t remember what I said. I’m not even 100% sure this memory is accurate—there were no phones in dorm rooms at Smith in 1979. Was I in a friend’s room? Did it even happen this way?

My mother describes her moment of decision this way in ’Bout Time:

All of our children were in their teens when I said, Robert, you have to leave. . . . Robert was home every day after work. He was there on weekends. He was in the house but he was just vaguely part of the household.

My father moved into an apartment about 10 minutes away from our house. Life went on. And gradually, without my knowledge (I was away at school, and then moved to New York City when I was 25) my parents started seeing each other again, tentatively. A movie. A dinner. And one day, a doctor’s appointment, at which my father was told that he had such severe heart disease that he didn’t dare go home, that he needed a bypass immediately. He had that bypass, but there was a cascading series of crises after that, and he died 8 days later. Despite their separation, my mother was at his side every minute through the whole ordeal. At his side but they weren’t talking. They were never talking. She writes:

We drew a dead silence around us, with me keeping what I could-should say all tucked tight inside my head. That is the way it had usually been, vague contact between us. Once in awhile, in the thirty-two years that we knew each other, we would try, and fail, to speak what there was to say. We could say aloud that we loved each other, beyond that, not much.

Dead silence again. And love again. And beyond the silence between the two of them, there was the one that enveloped all six of us. My father drank. Quietly and regularly and too much for years. While there was no physical or sexual savagery, my father’s drinking was a constant stealthy presence in our house. I remember a refrigerator full of Stroh’s six-packs, a black label with gold edging and pseudo-German typeface. I remember him sitting in a wingback chair in the small room where the TV was, staring at it, unmoving, an occasional belch. It takes me back to the smell of beer, to an angry quiet. How is anger quiet? Muttering, threats to leave, swearing to himself, a dark cloud surrounding him. Sometimes there was light. When I was little, he would magically pull quarters out of my ears, to my joy and astonishment. I still don’t know how he did it. I know he loved me and was proud of me, how smart I was, what I achieved. He told me so sometimes. But negativity bias rears its head here. I remember the darkness more clearly.

*

When I was about 8, I was in the TV room with my mother, watching The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, a wildly popular show of the time. Bill Bixby (white father) and Brandon Cruz (white son) ran lovingly through a field and splashed together in an unimaginably blue pool, father wholeheartedly embracing son in every scene. My mother was quiet—was sewing something? And I said, “I wish Daddy was more like Eddie’s father.” She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “That’s not a very nice thing to say about your father.” The show continued. The conversation did not.

*

Sometime during my adolescence, we briefly went to Alateen—the 12-step meetings for children of alcoholics who are still children, but I always felt like I was in the wrong place. The fathers of the other kids there, because it was mostly fathers, were passed out drunk on lawns, running cars into signs, loud and roistering and impossible and sometimes violent. But my dad wasn’t like that. He was a public school elementary teacher who got his MLS when I was 9 and then became a middle school librarian and an adjunct professor at two local colleges. He wrote several books, among them a textbook about Black literature, titled Black Plots and Black Characters: A Handbook for Afro-American Literature. It’s just that: concise summaries of almost every work of note by a Black writer during the 1970s and before. I remember the index cards all over the dining room table, the typewriter, the intensity and determination of his effort. He wrote other books after that. And while he wasn’t known nationwide, he was successful. One of his proudest possessions, one I still have, is an encouraging letter from a young scholar named Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “Your resume is very impressive indeed. I am, of course, familiar with your work, especially your Black Plots and Black Characters. Keep up the superb work.”

*

My father, born in Cincinnati in 1921, was more or less on his own from the age of 10, in and out of foster care, parents and two siblings largely lost in a murk he never talked to us about. His sister came around occasionally when I was a baby, my mother has told me. And I met his brother once or twice. They’re both dead now too. That’s it. Except for us, he was all alone in the world.

In In Their Path, my mother wrote that he remembered being chased by police officers as a child, banned from stores and restaurants, more anecdotes I was never told, anecdotes he barely told her. He was saved in large part from the marginal, perhaps even criminal, life he might have lived by books he found in the library and his voracious appetite for them. He made his way to a better life, a life with a family he loved but, my mother has observed, never quite knew how to be a part of.

The pain of his childhood went inside, into the beer cans, into the muttering. But it was also a soil: for his civil rights advocacy, the books he wrote, the pride he took in me and my brothers and sisters and the way he saved himself by reading. Would those things have grown in kinder soil? No way to know—but like so many Black men, he grew from where he was planted.

*

What is striking about my childhood, as a Black woman raised in a Black neighborhood in the 1960s and 1970s, is that my parents didn’t use corporal punishment. There is an aspect of Black culture, grown out of years and years of pain and intergenerational torment that has historically (and still sometimes in the present) turned that pain toward children and called it correction. It was commonplace for me and my siblings to hear about friends at school and neighborhood kids going to cut a switch off a tree or fetch a parent’s belt to get a beating over some misbehavior. Given how both my parents grew up, violence and a lack of care could have been their M.O. as easily as not. There were things that were difficult in my home, but my body was never violated, I was never called a name or insulted. None of us were—we were loved, and we loved in return. For that, I am still and always grateful.

From ’Bout Time:

To us, redemption seemed a perfect possibility. We were both witness to the times that our father was gentle and loving. Why would anyone choose being drunk? We huddled on the toy chairs at the toy table inside the playhouse in the corner of the attic composing a storybook plea on lined paper, changing a poor word to a better one, sounding out phonetically correct spelling, printing neatly, using up one sheet, two sheets and another sheet of paper as rubber erasing smudged too gray for this important missive. What did it say? I can’t really remember: Daddy, please don’t get drunk anymore? Stop hitting Mommy? Don’t make me go call the police ever again? I do remember how we worked steady, heads together all afternoon. There were hugs and kisses, oooo, xxxx, because that is what Tish could draw/write all by herself. Then we folded it neatly, printed DADDY uppercase, propped it in full view, on top of the pile of books on the floor beside our father’s side of their bed.

We checked the next morning and the note was gone. My father and mother never mentioned it. We waited. And nothing changed. If at least he had said, I read your letter, then walked away. Said, Don’t you girls ever do that again! Said, Daddy was only a little bit drunk. Said anything.

*

Now my mother is 95, still living in the house where it all came back to her, the house where I grew up. It’s a beautiful home in a neighborhood that has gradually become impoverished, scarred by year upon year of Cleveland’s government and businesses turning away from the Black neighborhoods at its heart. There are still some well-tended homes and not too many vacant lots. There are brokers coming in to buy some of the houses and restore them. It’s not hopeless. But in 2024, the neighborhood I remember, full of middle-class people, their kids on racing around on bikes, their shouts echoing into summer nights, and folks washing their driveways with hoses in the daytime is a memory; the grocery store nearby with fresh vegetables and the Dippy Whip to bike to for ice cream cones in the summer long gone. My mother’s step is a little unsteady now, as is that of her 15-year-old shepherd mastiff mix. They both waver a bit but can still make it up and down the stairs. Her short-term memory isn’t great, but her functioning—her activities of daily living, or ADLs, as gerontologists say—are solid. She still does the dishes, the laundry, the smaller chores and has a cleaner who comes in to help with the rest. She manages. We see what people go through—the incontinence, the memory gone, the agonizing slide to the grave, accompanied by every physical insult and failure. We all know how blessed we are.

She’s also blessed by having learned how to forgive. In the afterword I wrote to ’Bout Time, the afterword I forgot writing, she asked me to include these words from her: “I hope the book makes it clear that the amnesia (about the abuse) allowed me to have a very good life.” She speaks of her father fondly now. She’s never talked—at least to me—about how she arrived at this place. I imagine that remembering, and then the hard work she did to claim those memories and then, to use that overused word, process them, has invited that peace. She’ll die without rage and she hasn’t passed that rage on. Another thing I’m grateful for.

*

For all that my mother lost, her childhood did have something my father didn’t—she was abused but she was also greatly, openly loved by her mother, her siblings, her friends and community. When I imagine the little girl she described looking up at right angles, learning from her father, I can even see him offering a kind of love; an ability to look at things two ways, to encompass things, feelings, actions that contradict each other. I think of a quote from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: “Love, thick and dark as Alaga syrup, eased up into that cracked window.” Love in the face of ugliness. I’m not making an excuse for the horror; I’m making a small allowance—one my mother has made—for that not being the whole story.

The silences my parents lived within complemented each other, built on each other, helped each other, hurt each other, seeped into the cracks of the house among us all. They grew a tree—a sycamore— of both silence and sound, of good and bad, joy and sorrow. It both protected and buried so much in our house. It helped make me an artist.

*

From Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: “Silence: 1) forbearance from speech or noise; 2) absence of sound or noise; 3) absence of mention.” I’ve used the word silence so much in this essay. I wish I could think of other words, but this is all I got.

*

Our culture doesn’t countenance gray areas, even though they are the stuff of life. My mother learned silence and violence hand in hand with joy and affection and skill. Yes, the things that are hidden hurt. The things that are hidden can drive the most damaging behavior. I know that. And I know that declaring that silence and secrets not only have their uses but are sometimes vital and protective runs counter to everything every one of you has been taught; runs counter to your deepest beliefs and every scrap of your training.

So perhaps we’ll have to agree to disagree. I can’t prove that my mother’s life was better because these memories weren’t conscious. But I’ll take her word for it. To live with the constant torment of those memories and the lack of support she would have faced to navigate them might well have eaten her alive. And perhaps at a level none of us can tease out, it contributed to her resilience, her strength.

How might it have been different had she remembered? I don’t know. But the fact is, no one does. So I’ll stop here, with a call for living in and living with the gray areas. Sometimes colors stand out better that way.