The Lost Daughter: A Memoir
Read The Lost Daughter: A Memoir Online
Authors: Mary Williams
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs
ALSO BY MARY WILLIAMS
Brothers in Hope: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan
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Copyright © 2013 by Mary Williams
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Williams, Mary, date.
The lost daughter / Mary Williams.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-61106-7
1. Williams, Mary, 1967—Childwood and youth. 2. African Americans—California—Oakland—Biography. 3. African Americans—California—Oakland—Social conditions—20th century. 4. Adoptees—California—Biography. 5. Black Panther Party—History. 6. Mothers and daughters—California—Biography. 7. Fonda, Jane, 1937– 8. Oakland (Calif.)—Social conditions—20th century. 9. Oakland (Calif.)—Biography. I. Title.
F869.O2W55 2013 2013001245
979.4'053092—dc23
[B]
Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.
FOR MY MOM
AND
FOR MY MAMA
All of us have moments in our childhood where we come alive for the first time. And we go back to those moments and think, This is when I became myself.
—
RITA DOVE
I AM ABOUT TO ATTEMPT
time travel. Once I pass through airport security and board US Airways flight 2748 to Oakland, California, I will be transported to a place I fled nearly thirty years ago. Although I have taken on physical challenges, like a cross-country bicycle ride and a five-month stint on a research base in Antarctica, I have generally shied away from emotional ones.
Six years ago I quit my well-paid job, left my fiancé and sold my three-bedroom home in Atlanta, abandoning a life of materialism and attachment to pursue one that included solitude, travel and adventure.
Now in my mid-forties, I spend half the year working all over the country for federal parks and nonprofits, doing odd jobs like manning a visitor center, clearing trails or assisting researchers. So I often live in constrained quarters with an assorted lot of scientists, dreamers and vagabonds. The rest of the time I enjoy self-imposed exile in my tiny Arizona condo, happiest when left alone to hike, read or watch YouTube. I’m especially drawn to makeup application and hairstyling videos, even though I seldom wear cosmetics and my hair is two inches long; I like the girl talk without the hassle of actual girlfriends. I was hesitant to try Facebook, but after a colleague at an Alaskan wildlife refuge introduced me to the site, insisting that with my reclusive lifestyle it would be the ideal way to stay in touch, I decided to give it a shot.
That’s how I found Neome Banks, someone I haven’t seen since childhood. And that’s why I’m headed back to Oakland. I want to see the place that formed me, find the people I left behind. Rediscover family.
I once heard that families are like fudge: mostly sweet with a few nuts. But a family can also be like a country. It can thrive in times of prosperity in one moment and in the next be embroiled in senseless conflict. Its once well-loved leaders corrupted and its citizens numbed, beaten, violated, murdered. Some left displaced and in search of refuge. I know because I once had a family like this. It has taken me decades to weave together the moments of peace, despair and resurrection into a makeshift treaty that will finally allow me to lick my wounds and go home to see what I can salvage.
The word “home” feels strange on my tongue, like a bitter aftertaste that lingers long after a meal. Though I have lived in many places, home has always been Oakland. As I prepare for the journey, I stare at my face in the mirror a lot because soon I’ll be with people whose faces and voices are slight variations of my own. But mostly I think about what life was like before everything disintegrated as if in the wake of an atomic bomb.
I WAS BORN
at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, California. It was 1967 and there was much more going on than my painful, bloody struggle to free myself from the womb. The world was caught up in a swirling storm of violence, revolutionary zeal, sexual freedom and creative expression. The Vietnam War was in high gear, with the number of American troops serving reaching nearly half a million. Stateside, anti-war protesters were out in full force too. One of them was Muhammad Ali, who in this year was stripped of his boxing world championship for refusing to serve. Israel was feeling especially scrappy and was at war with Syria, Egypt
and
Jordan. Cities throughout America exploded in race riots and looting. Pot was groovy. Sex was free. The Beatles were the number one band in the world. Microminiskirts and go-go boots were in vogue, as was (for a brief time) paper clothing.
Despite the violence, sex, drugs, rock and roll and bad fashion, my mother managed to carry me safely through the long, hot Summer of Love and deliver me on a Friday the 13th in October. No baby pictures exist to mark my birth. I don’t think this was out of indifference. I just happened to be number five in a growing brood of girls. I imagine my arrival was like seeing your favorite movie for the fifth time. Enjoyable but lacking the excitement and anticipation of the first couple of viewings. I was named Mary Lawanna, though because my mother’s name is Mary, I was called by my middle name. I would be followed a year later by a little brother who would garner a great deal of excitement because he was the long-awaited boy. I’d come to view him as the wee-wee-packing changeling who displaced my coveted role as the baby of the family.
My mother was a cook. In my earliest memories she is bent over a steaming pot of gumbo, waiting to feed whatever group of Panthers had gathered at the local community center to discuss the latest news regarding conflicts with the police or strategies on how to improve education at the Panther-run elementary school. She would also hit the streets to sell the Party newspaper,
The Black Panther
, for twenty-five cents a copy.
My father quit his job as an apprentice welder to join the Panthers. He was a captain in the Panthers’ militaristic hierarchy. He participated in one of the most controversial programs, the armed citizens’ patrol. Working in rotating twelve-hour shifts, he and other Panthers would spend long days and nights tailing police cars and doing foot patrols, ready to defend any blacks they saw being threatened by police.
Oakland, California, was at the heart of the social upheaval that gave rise to the Black Power movement. My parents were members of the Black Panther Party—an organization founded in Oakland during the mid-1960s to stop police brutality toward African Americans and to help those who lacked employment, education and healthcare. Some of the many accomplishments of the Party would include the Free Breakfast for Children Program that would be replicated by public school systems across the country. Other free Panther services to underserved communities included clothing distribution, classes on politics, economics, self-defense and first aid. They also opened free medical clinics and offered transportation to upstate prisons for family members of Panther inmates.
Revolution was a day-to-day reality of my early childhood, resulting in bloody shoot-outs and confrontations between the police and, well, us. From shortly after I was born in 1967 through 1969 nationwide, police–Panther clashes would result in nine police officers killed and fifty-six wounded. Ten Panthers would be killed and there were no statistics for the wounded; hundreds more would be arrested.
These hostilities ignited soon after J. Edgar Hoover, then the director of the FBI, issued his notorious statement against the Panthers as “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country.” This proclamation was followed by U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell creating his “Panther Squad,” which would begin carrying out a series of pre-dawn, shoot-first-ask-questions-later police raids, like the one in Chicago that killed Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark.
When I was about three years old, I remember hiding out in the basement of a house during a Panther confrontation with the police. From above, I heard glass breaking, heavy footfalls and shouting muffled by distance and floorboards. I was held tightly by some woman (not my mother), and all around me were other little kids whimpering and whining. The woman holding me was rocking me and stroking my hair and whispering “Shush, child” over and over. But the strange thing was that I have no memory of feeling scared. I actually liked the uncertainty, the presence of bodies in the damp darkness, the feeling of tenseness in the air. It’s a good memory.
As the FBI began to crack down more and more on Party members via intimidations, arrests and assassinations, some Panthers went into exile in other countries or went underground. When I overheard adults saying things like, “Well, you know Sister So-and-So went underground last week?” all kinds of crazy images would form in my head. I’d daydream of Panther members living in candlelit dirt tunnels, shivering in the dark, feeding on dangling root vegetables like a frightened Bugs Bunny hiding out from Elmer Fudd.
I wondered if my father, who seemed to be around the house less and less, was actually underground. So it came as a relief when I learned that my increasingly absentee father wasn’t underground at all. He was serving time at a place called Soledad State Prison.
In 1970, my father, Louis Randolph Williams, had risen to the rank of captain within the Panthers. He was twenty-nine, and for years he had been working odd jobs by day and participating in the armed citizens’ patrols at night. In April of that year, he and two fellow Panthers had been on patrol when they saw a paddy wagon and several police officers arresting four black marijuana suspects. They ambushed the officers, wounding three. Backup police units were called and the Panthers fled the scene, leading thirty patrol cars on a high-speed chase into downtown Oakland and discouraging their pursuit with Molotov cocktails. My father was captured, charged with assault with intent to murder and sentenced to seven years in prison.
At first, my mother took my five siblings and me on long bus rides to Soledad prison to visit him. Prison seemed like a fine place to me. Unlike for the first few years of my life, I knew exactly where my daddy was at all times. On our visits he was always smiling and we got to play in a large room filled with tables and benches, vending machines and lots of other families. Daddy would buy us candy bars and soda, and we’d all stand in front of a large, faded mural of a forest and take pictures. We took turns sitting in his lap while he and Mama talked. When I asked if I could stay the night with him, he’d laugh. I loved to make him laugh. He was so handsome. Caramel skin, shiny teeth, tall and lean-limbed. Perfection.
But after a few months, Mama stopped taking us to see Daddy; the long bus rides with six rambunctious kids were starting to take their toll, and it turned out their marriage was a lot shakier than I had imagined. Mama would get mad at me whenever I asked when we were going to see him again. When I told my oldest sister, Deborah, how great it would be if Daddy would come home, she said, “You don’t know nothing! I’m glad he ain’t living with us no more.” When I asked why, she told me I was too young to remember when Daddy lived with us—true enough. She told me how Daddy and Mama fought all the time because he was always seeing other women. They fought so badly one night, Daddy ripped Mama’s clothes off and beat her until she ran into the street naked to get away from him. “It’s better he stay where he is.”
Though my father was heavily involved in Panther activities, my mother limited her support to attending the many Free Huey rallies. But at this time any involvement in the Panthers attracted the attention of the FBI. It didn’t take long for them to home in on her. One afternoon, the FBI paid us a visit, surrounding our apartment building and threatening to subpoena my mama to appear in front of a federal grand jury investigating the Party. Sufficiently frightened by this encounter with the FBI, my mother called the Party leadership, which promptly got her a lawyer. Luckily the FBI’s secret grand jury investigation turned up nothing, and my mother emerged from the experience unscathed. Her involvement in the Party deepened, however. She quit her job at the post office and moved us into Party housing with several other Party members. People slept in shared rooms and in the basement and living room on pallets and mattresses. People were always coming and going.
As a fully fledged Panther, she took various jobs within the organization, including cooking at headquarters and in the free breakfast program. Though my mother would leave the Party in 1973, my father would remain and we children continued to attend the Party school. My mother went back on welfare for a time before taking a 28-week welding course at the East Bay Skills Center and soon after became the first woman welder at Ameron Pipe. She’d rise to the position of journeyman welder and win a spot on the grievance committee of Teamsters Local 70.
My mother’s position as a welder meant more money and a move away from government cheese. In its stead, we ate out at all-you-can-eat buffets once a week and got actual store-bought toys we wanted on Christmas: skateboards, pogo sticks and Big Wheels. She even got a steady boyfriend named Tracy. He was tall, dark, gentle-natured and doted on our mother. These were good times until they weren’t.
In my father’s absence, his younger brother stepped in as a father figure for us. He was also a Panther. Uncle Landon, who was a former U.S. Army Vietnam War paratrooper, was invaluable to the Party as its security chief and weapons expert. His job included training Party members in militaristic maneuvers. He had recently been released from prison for the suspected torture and murder of a police informant (the government would eventually drop the case against him) just as my father began his seven-year sentence. He did his best to provide us with a strong male presence in our father’s absence.
While my father was handsome and charismatic, his younger brother was the more stable and intellectual of the two despite his fearsome reputation as a Party enforcer. He was a young father supporting two children from a previous marriage and a child younger than one in his current marriage. Unlike other Party rank-and-file who lived in Panther housing, which meant bunklike quarters and often sleeping on pallets, my uncle chose to live in his own tidy little apartment in a good neighborhood with his new wife, Jan, and their baby, Ayaan. At the time, they were both pursuing bachelor’s degrees.
Jan was very fair-skinned, short and compact, with the waist-length, thick black tresses of an Indian princess. They never argued or raised their voices. At least twice a month they invited us (usually two at a time) to spend the weekend in their light-filled apartment that smelled of patchouli incense and was decorated with African textiles, art and potted plants. They also had bookshelves overflowing with books covering topics like political economy, radical theory, philosophy, social theory and history. I helped my aunt feed my baby cousin, whom my uncle called Apples because her cheeks were so full it looked as if she were holding one in each cheek. There was an atmosphere of unflappable calm in their home that sedated my usually rambunctious nature. In their home I was content to work on a puzzle or catch up on homework. I didn’t miss not being able to watch TV. Occasionally they’d take us on outings to the Exploratorium and Knott’s Berry Farm.
Very rarely did we misbehave with Uncle Landon. A stern glance from him was usually enough to get us to abort any acts of tomfoolery we were contemplating. Those glances gave us a rare glimpse into a side of his personality that he saved strictly for his enemies and that we wanted no part of. But there was a time when I did something so bad that my uncle had no choice but to discipline me. It happened one afternoon before dinner when my aunt was changing the baby and my uncle was studying for an exam. I left my sister Louise in the living room and went to read a book in my uncle’s big bed. As I propped up the pillows, I discovered a gun hidden underneath. I’d never seen or held a real gun before. I sat on the bed and took aim at a vase and then the doorknob, with my finger resting on the trigger. I blew air between my pursed lips emulating rapid fire. Then I turned the gun around and looked down the barrel just as my uncle walked in the room.
When he saw me with his gun, he froze in the doorway then grabbed onto the doorjamb as if he suddenly could not hold himself up. All the color left his face. I knew I was in trouble, and as if to erase it, I shoved the gun back under the pillow and jumped off the bed. My uncle, with the color slowly returning to his face, barked at me to go to the living room and stay there. That’s when the tears came. When I got to the living room, my sister Louise must have heard my uncle yell, and when she saw me crying she said, “Oooo! Whatchu do?” “Shut up!” I snapped, and flopped onto the couch and buried my face in the cushions. “What happened?” she asked with worry in her voice. I told her I found Uncle Landon’s gun. She stared at me with eyes so wide I thought they’d fall out of her head and roll across the floor. Then with the solemnity of a doctor informing her patient that the cancer has metastasized, she patted me on the back and said, “You gonna get it, but good.”
I already knew I was going to get a beating for what I’d done. I got whipped at home for things far less dire than playing with a loaded gun. Something as simple as giving my mother a dirty look could get you lashed with an extension cord, a wire hanger, a shoe, a pot. Anything close to hand when the offense occurred was fair game.
I’d never been disciplined by my uncle but I had no reason to suspect it wouldn’t be like what I’d get at home. Usually, punishment at home was swiftly meted out. But it seemed like a long time since Uncle Landon ordered me to the living room. When he came out of the bedroom, I instinctively wrapped my arms tightly around my sister’s waist as she frantically tried to extricate herself from my grasp. But instead of reaching for me, my uncle did not even glance our way. He calmly walked into my cousin’s room where my aunt was and closed the door. Louise and I crept over and put our ears to the door to hear what they were talking about but could not make sense of their whispered conversation. When we went back to the sofa, my sister punched me in the shoulder. “Because of you they probably talkin’ ’bout us not coming here no more!” I rubbed my bruised shoulder and let flow a whole new round of tears. A few minutes later my aunt and uncle emerged from the bedroom as if nothing had happened. They told us to get washed up for dinner. My sister and I washed up, all the while giving each other disbelieving looks. Had I really dodged a bullet—so to speak?