The Grace of Silence Read Free Page B

was time to live someplace nice. We worked hard and we worked with white people at the post office who could live wherever they wanted. We wanted to do the same thing and we wanted to show them that we could do the same thing. We wanted to show them that we were just as good as they were.”
    The Twin Cities, especially Minneapolis, were known for tolerance. Even so, blacks, Latinos, American Indians, and, later, Hmong and Vietnamese refugees would cluster in a few ethnic fiefdoms. My parents wanted to be on the far South Side, where the best schools were located, and they wanted to be close to water. Finding a house wasn’t going to be easy for a brown-skinned couple. Realtors would “forget” appointments or make hasty exits when my parents walked into their offices. So my parents decided to sidestep real estate agents and focus on other ways to buy a house, like reading newspaper obituaries. After all, a family in mourning might feel pressured to entertain a strong offer, regardless of the race of the bidder, as long as the money on the table was green. Ghoulish, but Belvin and Betty did what they had to do, and eventually things worked out for them.
    In January 1961, they found a three-bedroom, two-story, Tudor Revival on a corner lot with a large yard, an open kitchen, a large limestone fireplace, and a finished basementwith knotty pine paneling. After her first marriage, Mom, with two daughters, had been a little gun-shy about relationships when she’d met the handsome man from Alabama. As she watched Dad cut the real estate deal, she said she was reminded why she’d married him. When my parents showed up to make their offer, they saw discomfort on the white sellers’ faces. Mom and Dad explained that they had been preapproved for a loan and could make a decent down payment. And just when they sensed that the sellers and their agent were about to bolt, Dad stood up and said, “Do you really want to lose a sure thing for only a possibility?” The sellers were close in age to my parents. I have since discovered that the husband came from a small town in southwest Minnesota. He was the son of an insurance salesman and had enlisted in World War II two months after my father joined the navy. The two men were discharged from the armed forces around the same time. I can imagine that Cecil Fuller may have looked at Belvin Norris and seen more than just a “Negro.” Perhaps he also identified with a fellow veteran eager to use the G.I. Bill to pull himself and his family up.
    In any case, the Fuller family said yes when so many others had said no. On February 1, 1961, Belvin and Betty Norris signed the deed to the largest house on the 4800 block of Oakland Avenue. My mother’s sister advised her against buying so big a house. “It will just make it harder,” Aunt Doris said. “Why give them another reason to judge you? They’re going to say you think too highly of yourself. You know how they are.” Mom wasn’t having it. “I do think highly of myself, and I don’t care if they know that. In fact, I prefer if they know that.”
    My parents moved in within a week, and the white families whose property line touched ours soon put their homes up for sale. Three who owned houses across from my parents’ alsodecided to decamp. As my parents celebrated their new home with a picnic supper, amid boxes in the living room, their neighbors furiously burned the dial, calling each other, calling my folks’ mortgage lender to complain, and eventually calling real estate agents to put their homes up for sale pronto. Mom says she watched the white flight with a mixture of anger and amusement. The desperation of her new neighbors to sell gave her an opportunity for a little mischief.
    Every time a real estate agent pulled up with a prospective buyer, she would send my older sisters, Marguerite and Cindy, out to play in the yard. Or she would saunter out herself, holding her back or stretching her arms so anyone could plainly