Common Ground (14 page)

After all those years of wrangling, Quinnie—then fifty-eight—was at a loss without his wife. He moved across the street to a smaller house, where he was desperately lonely. When he asked some of his children if he could move in with them, they put him off. On February 5, 1963, he was standing on the platform of the Northampton Street El station during the evening rush hour. As a train roared in, Quinnie stuck his head directly in its path and suffered a fractured skull. He underwent delicate brain surgery, but died the next day. Although police called it an accident, some of Quinnie’s children—Rachel among them—believed it was suicide.

Long before her father’s death, Rachel had been having troubles of her own. In her third year at Brandeis Vocational High School, she’d grown bored with the dreary courses in sewing, typing, and office practice, so she hadn’t put up much resistance when her father insisted that she quit school to help support the family. She took a job at Mack’s Variety Store, where the owners trusted her so completely that they often went South and left the store in her teenage hands.

At nineteen Rachel left home for good, taking a room with a family friend and keeping time with Eddie Jones, a burly trucker who drove giant rigs on interstate runs to California and Arizona. In quick succession, she bore two of his children—Richard in 1954 and George in 1955. For a time, Eddie helped support his sons, but he never lived with Rachel and gradually they drifted apart.

Soon she met another man, a charming Alabamian with a Nike missile unit in suburban Squantum, and in July 1957, Rachel and Sergeant Haywood Twymon were married. When Haywood overstayed his leave, he was bumped to corporal, an ominous start to a marriage that soon went awry. For Rachel had largely recapitulated her mother’s mismatch. Like Helen, she was proud of her roots in Boston, of her associations with whites. She cherished childhood memories of Lower Roxbury’s ethnic hodgepodge—of Catholic holidays when Italian neighbors would invite her in for homemade wine and butter cake. She was nostalgic for that golden era of racial harmony when “people were people, whether they were black or white or whatever.” Soon after her marriage, she sought out a six-room apartment on Dewey Street, two-thirds of the way from Intown toward the Hill, in a neighborhood still largely white.

Haywood, on the other hand, was not unlike Quinnie, a product of the Cotton Belt who felt ill at ease with the gentility of old Bostonians. At first, he was regarded as a prime catch—an Army sergeant with a technical skill and prospects for promotion. Jovial and friendly, he was good company—except when drinking. But as the years went by, he drank with increasing ferocity; as soon as he got his paycheck, off he would go on a binge, hitting all the bars along Massachusetts and Columbus avenues. One Christmas, he was found wandering the streets in his underwear.

In the meantime, he was saddling himself with family responsibilities. Four children came quickly: Frederick in 1958, Wayne in 1959, Cassandra in 1960, and young Rachel in 1961.

With little money coming in from Haywood, Rachel went back to work, joining her mother for a time at Goddess Bra, later working as a packer at Schrafft’s candy factory in Charlestown, then as a maid for white families in the suburbs. With a child coming nearly every year—and often laid up with mysterious illnesses—Rachel couldn’t take a steady job with a family. Instead, she did “day work,” shuttling back and forth by bus and subway to the comfortable Yankee-Jewish suburb of Newton. This meant rising before dawn to reach the state employment office by 9:00 a.m., when the jobs were parceled out. The families Rachel worked for lived in big Victorian houses along Walnut Street. The brisk young housewives gave her the work they didn’t want to do themselves—scrubbing bathtubs, cleaning toilets, scraping the grease out of ovens. Unlike her mother, who never regarded herself as a maid, Rachel knew just what she was and resented it bitterly.

In June 1960, three months after Cassandra was born, Haywood stunned the family by announcing that he was leaving the Army after eight years. Rachel, Helen, and other relatives urged him to reconsider; his military allotments had kept the children fed even when he drank up the rest of his pay. But Haywood wanted out.

Cousin Moses Baker chose that moment for one of his periodic visits to Boston. Retired from the Navy on a disability pension after the Charlestown beating, “Cuz” was a highly respected member of New Haven’s black community, for years president of its NAACP chapter, a former butler to Yale professors. Some of the family found him pompous and self-important, but he was Rachel’s favorite cousin, personifying the respectability she so badly craved. On his visits to Boston he invariably stayed with her because only she would put up with his demands—that his plate and cup be warmed before each meal, and his coffee served just so. For days before his arrival, Rachel scrubbed the house and prepared his favorite dishes. Haywood bitterly resented “the Great Cuz,” grumbling, “He ain’t nothing but a man, is he?” Cuz, in turn, openly disdained Haywood. The continuing debate over Haywood’s decision to quit the Army made this visit from Cuz an especially tense one.

Haywood behaved well all week, but others could see he was building up a head of steam. The morning after Cuz had left, Haywood told Rachel that some friends were coming by to play cards and he needed ten dollars to buy whiskey and beer. Rachel, who could get very deaf when she didn’t want to hear someone, simply ignored him. Pulling on his pants, Haywood warned, “When I get dressed you better have that ten dollars.” Rachel didn’t respond. Exasperated, Haywood grabbed his wife and dragged her down the hallway, bellowing new threats at her while she shouted her defiance. But Rachel wrenched free, grabbed a pot of boiling water off the stove, and as Haywood bolted down the stairs, emptied it on his head. Howling in pain, he lurched
back upstairs, pulling the soaked undershirt over his head. With it came great swatches of skin from his chest, shoulders, and face.

Treated at the hospital for third-degree burns, Haywood came home, but Rachel wouldn’t have him. “I’m sick,” he appealed. “I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t want you dying here. Get out and stay out.”

After a month Rachel relented, but the relationship continued to deteriorate. In March 1961, Haywood walked out. Dependent on his $68 a week from Colonial Coal, out of work herself, with five young children to support, Rachel sought public assistance for the first time. The Welfare Department awarded her an “emergency grant” of $20. At the social worker’s suggestion, she then swore out a non-support complaint against Haywood and the court ordered him to give her his full salary every week, which he did until mid-May, when he was laid off.

After a hospital stay in June, Rachel moved to her parents’ house on Ball Street, taking her children with her. In July, she again went to the welfare office, “sobbing and somewhat hysterical,” saying that her youngest child, Cassandra, was ill. She had no money except for the few dollars her parents could spare and feared that if she returned to Dewey Street Haywood would beat her. The social worker authorized “general relief” payments of $38.80 per week. Ten days later, a warrant was issued for Haywood’s arrest for non-support. That August, Rachel obtained an uncontested separation from her husband, who was ordered to pay $40 a week in support of his family. Meanwhile, Rachel qualified for permanent Aid to Families with Dependent Children, with payments beginning at $257 a month. In September, she and the children moved back to Dewey Street, changing the lock to keep Haywood out.

For a time, Haywood met his obligations, but in July 1962 he was laid off again. Late in August he blew most of his $64-a-week unemployment check on a drinking binge. With no money to feed her children, Rachel swore out another complaint against him and this time the court sentenced Haywood to six months at the Deer Island Correctional Facility. The year before, Eddie Jones—father of Rachel’s first two children—had spent several months at Deer Island for failing to support them and several children by another woman. Rachel insisted she never wanted to send either man to jail. All she wanted them to do was support the children they’d given her.

But this is just what Haywood couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do. On his release from prison in February 1963, he told Rachel he’d learned his lesson and wanted to come home. She refused, saying she didn’t want him in the house until he proved he had stopped drinking and could support the family. Getting a job at the Tillotson Rubber Company, he resumed support payments. Late at night he would show up at Rachel’s door, often with a bottle in his hand. To avoid trouble, she often let him in, then watched him fall asleep on the couch. But soon the support payments stopped again. In November 1963, Haywood was sent back to Deer Island, this time for a year.

By then, Rachel was utterly dependent on her welfare checks. For in late 1962, doctors at Boston City Hospital had finally diagnosed her frequent illnesses as manifestations of systemic lupus erythematosus, a disease which alters the body’s immune system, giving rise to a legion of odd, seemingly unrelated symptoms: severe arthritic pains in the joints; inflammation of the lungs; red, patchy lesions of the skin; malfunctions of the heart, kidney, liver, or central nervous system. Characteristically, her lupus would go into remission for several months or even a year, only to be followed by a relapse. She was in and out of the hospital dozens of times over the next decade. For four days in 1964, she was completely blind, only to mysteriously regain her sight. Several years later, she required a total hysterectomy. Still later, she had to have all her teeth removed. At times she was profoundly depressed, preoccupied with fears of death or of life as a permanent invalid.

She was hospitalized so often that she was unable to provide a home for her family, and late in 1962, her children were placed in black foster homes. Richard and George, then eight and seven, went to stay with a Miss Bernice Cook on Braddock Park in the South End; Frederick and Wayne, four and three, went to the Sneeds in Maiden; Cassandra, two, and Rachel, not yet a year old, went to the Freemans, also in Malden. They remained in these homes off and on for nearly three years until in late 1964 they returned for good, joining their mother at her new apartment on Fenelon Street.

Even when the worst of her hospital bouts were behind her, Rachel often found it difficult to care for her children. Occasionally, she suffered slight paralysis in her arms and legs; once she had a seizure while feeding two-year-old Cassandra and dropped her onto the floor. At such times, her mother or her sister Alva would look after the children, but most members of the family were reluctant to help out. One female relative told the Welfare Department she would take Cassandra and young Rachel if she got twenty dollars a week for each girl—four times the statutory figure. The social worker admonished her, saying that she should be willing to accept the responsibility “without demanding a profit.”

Even Helen Walker didn’t want to be saddled with her grandchildren for very long. As Helen was leaving Quinnie, Rachel implored her to move in with her so the children wouldn’t have to go into foster homes. When her mother flatly refused, Rachel was deeply wounded.

Rachel never even considered asking for help from the aunts on her father’s side—loud, coarse women from Burke County, stereotypical Homies. Sarah was a hopeless drunk; Fanny eventually went mad and was committed to Boston State Hospital for the Insane. The only one of Quinnie’s relatives whom Rachel saw regularly was cousin Magnolia Williams, a late arrival from Burke County who settled in Boston in 1951. Although she was considerably older than Rachel, the two women managed a cordial, if ambivalent, relationship.

One day in April 1964, Magnolia paid a call on Rachel. That spring, many Massachusetts whites were heading South to protest racial segregation, often getting arrested to dramatize their cause. Over coffee and doughnuts in Rachel’s
kitchen that day, the two women discussed the movement’s latest
cause célèbre
—the arrest of Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, mother of Massachusetts’ governor, Endicott “Chub” Peabody. Known for her proper Bostonian zeal for good works, the white-haired Mrs. Peabody had gone to St. Augustine, Florida, late in March to demonstrate against segregated hotels and restaurants. When Mrs. John Burgess, wife of the first Negro suffragan bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, was arrested in the lounge of the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge, Mrs. Peabody and several other demonstrators courted arrest too. After two days and a night in jail, she proclaimed, “I will go to jail again if necessary to fight for civil rights.” Martin Luther King sent a telegram lauding her as “an inspiration to generations yet unborn.” When she and Mrs. Burgess returned to Boston, demonstrators met them at the airport carrying a banner which read: “Godspeed to the Gallant Ladies.”

Rachel thought that Mrs. Peabody was a wonderful woman, a modern exemplar of the abolitionist tradition. Magnolia wasn’t so certain. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “that’s fine, going down to Florida to integrate some motel. But what’s that lady and her son, the governor, doing about things up here?”

“We don’t have that kind of discrimination up here, Mag,” said Rachel.

“You think you don’t?”

“No,” said Rachel, “or at least we never used to.”

“You had it all along, honey, but you hid it under half a bushel.”

“Mag, I’m telling you, we never used to have any of that sort of thing up here, and if we have it now, it’s only because all you Southerners came up here and brought it with you.”

“That’s a damn lie,” said Magnolia, slamming her coffee cup down on the table. “They don’t want you up here any more than they wanted us down there. One of these days, you’ll see how you been foolin’ yourself.”

Magnolia stormed out and the two women didn’t speak again for weeks.

T
oward the close of the eighteenth century, the North of Ireland writhed in sectarian combat. Protestants and Catholics raided each other’s settlements, burning, pillaging, and slaughtering. The Protestant banner was raised by the Peep o’ Day Boys, so known because they appeared outside their victims’ cabins just as dawn lit up the glens, while the Catholic Defenders matched their foes lash for lash, bludgeon for bludgeon. County Armagh was particularly vulnerable to these “outrages,” as Protestants sought systematically to rid the county of Catholics. In 1791–92 alone, some 7,000 Armagh Catholics were forced to flee south into counties Louth and Monaghan.