 |
(L-R) Rosa Parks and Mable Harris
|
All stories are true. This one is too serendipitous to be dismissed. Imagine living in your own little world, minding your business and perhaps assuming things -- no matter how stifling and oppressive -- will always be the way they are. There's comfort in sameness. But then things change. Abruptly. It's akin to being swept up in a natural disaster without any warning. One moment you're asleep, and the next you're running for your life because you've seen something that will forever change the world. Yes, the world. Mable Harris is one such person.The Living Is Easy?
"Montgomery was good," says Harris from her perch at K&T's Mini-Mart on Reading Road in Avondale. "We went to church. And what we did was, we were black and we lived in a black world. We were comfortable."
Above her head is a giant photograph of Kyria Anthony Graves, her only grandchild.
Harris is a spitfire, a hellcat. She wears diamond-encrusted rings on each finger and snazzy, stylish outfits even in her leisure time. She is bluntly honest when she speaks. She does not suffer fools.
But she tells a good joke and laughs a guttural laugh at herself more than she laughs at others. Beneath her leathery facade beats the heart of a wise and weathered Christian wife, mother, grandmother and devoted children's choir director at Southern Baptist Church.
Harris has worked in various capacities for nearly 28 years for Hamilton County and is now the information clerk at the County Administration Building downtown. She spends every evening at K&T's selling Doritos, soda pop, cigarettes and milk and carding fellas from the neighborhood who come in to purchase cheap cigars.
She financed and helps operate the store with Gwen, her sister-in-law. A large portrait of Gwen's grandson, Tyler, hangs beside Kyria's. Their names are the "K" and "T" in K&T's.
"If you think I'm about to lose my license so you can buy some Black & Milds, you got another thing coming," she tells a young man searching his wallet for a photo I.D.
Back when Harris was growing up in Montgomery, Ala., she was raised by her aunt Rachel and uncle Elbert McGee, went to a colored high school, sold candy and popcorn to the kids returning from the movies and worried mainly about what she would wear to school dances.
Around her, however, Montgomery was literally a powderkeg awaiting ignition. Black folks were tired of the lynchings, the beatings, of being excluded, overlooked and ignored.
"I never understood why it was alright for a white man to kill a black man but it wasn't alright for a black man to look at a white woman," she says of Emmit Till, a young black boy she knew who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
 |
Mable Harris graduated from high school in
Montgomery, Ala. in 1958,
|
Blacks wanted equal treatment under the law but didn't know how to unite to achieve it.
Then came a fateful bus ride.
Double-Edged Blade
On Dec. 1, 1955, Mrs. Rosa Parks, a 42-year-old Negro seamstress, was ordered by a Montgomery City Lines bus driver to get up and make way for some white passengers. She refused, was arrested and fined $10 under an Alabama law making it a misdemeanor for any person to disobey a bus driver's seating instruction. But that was not the last of the Rosa Parks case: It has since been used to prove that economic reprisal, as advocated against Negroes by the white Citizens' Council of the South, is a double-edged blade.
Within 48 hours after Rosa Parks had been arrested, mimeographed leaflets were being circulated in Montgomery's Negro sections, calling for a one-day boycott of the city buses. The strike was so successful that Negro leaders decided to continue it until their needs were met. The demands: that Negroes be seated on a first-come, first-served basis without having to vacate their places for white passengers; that white bus drivers show more courtesy toward Negro passengers; that Negro drivers be employed on buses traveling mostly through Negro districts. The bus company agreed only to instruct its drivers to treat Negroes more politely.
The boycott continued and last week, as it entered its second month, was still 95% effective. Rallies were held twice a week in Negro churches, where overflow crowds gathered to receive the latest information on car-pool instructions (the motorpool includes more than 200 cars operating from 40 regular pickup points).
The boycott's economic punch has been staggering, because the 25,000 Negroes who ordinarily ride Montgomery's buses make up some 75% of the company's patronage. Company officials refused to reveal the size of their losses, because "that's exactly what they want to know." The strike spirit showed no signs of flagging. A Negro minister, working for the car pool, stopped to pick up an old woman who had obviously walked a long way. "Sister," said he, "Aren't you getting tired?" Her reply: "My soul has been tired for a long time. Now my feet are tired and my soul is resting."
-- Time Magazine, Jan. 16, 1956.
Between sales at K&T, Harris returns to her girlhood in Montgomery. Rachel and Elbert McGee were middle-class business owners who embodied the dichotomous passivity and outspokenness of blacks surviving in the South in the 1950s.
"My aunt and uncle had a business and we didn't really want for a lot," Harris says of her life there with her younger cousin, Wilma, whom she considers a sister. "But my aunt was just so scared of them white folks and she was scared of the Klan."
Elbert, however, was not so afraid. While he was not a rebel-rouser, he protested Jim Crow and maintained his dignity. He taught Harris likewise. Especially in the face of hatred.
 |
Harris lived with her Aunt Rachel (pictured) and Uncle
Elbert.
|
"My uncle was a stronger man and he went along with what he believed in," she says. "He never went out to eat in their restaurants, and he never drank from their water fountains. I did have to drink from the colored fountain and you (sat) in the colored section to eat. All this stuff that's going on now -- been there, done that."
Harris says she never accepted the rules as being fair, but at the time "that's just a way of life. You accepted it. What I could never understand is, how could we take care of their babies and we couldn't sit at their tables and eat with them.
"This is 2000, and I can't understand why people don't realize God created us all equal. I don't know any black people that was born in the United States that's pure black."
Considering all she's seen, heard and been called, Harris' optimism is refreshing, yet startling.
Salad Days
While attending the segregated Carver High School in Montgomery, Harris worked as a salad girl at either Chicken in the Rough or Chicken in the Ruff -- her memory fails her now on the spelling.
A white patron in Harris' section became irate by the preparation of his salad, sending her back to the kitchen several times.
"He asked me, he said, 'Nigger, don't you know how to make a salad?' I dumped that salad in his lap, turned around, got my coat and went home. Twenty minutes later, they sent the police to my house," she says, laughing. "I went home and told my uncle it was an accident. He talked to the police. 'Sir, she was nervous. She got nervous when he called her a nigger. Haven't you ever gotten nervous and dropped something?'
"Later, he pulled me to the side and asked me if it was an accident. I said, 'No.' He said, 'You should've dumped it on his ass.' "
Ironically, a teen-ager's rash rebellion became a sort of training ground for fate. The rush and co-mingling of adrenaline and fear Harris felt after she dumped that salad would pale in comparison to what she'd feel after seeing perhaps the most seminal event in the fight for modern black civil rights.
On Dec. 1, 1955, the day Rosa Parks was arrested for not relinquishing her bus seat to a white man, Harris, a 10th-grader, was sitting in the back in the colored section holding a bag with the pink and black dress she'd skipped school to retrieve from lay-away at a downtown store.
 |
Mable Harris was reunited with Rosa Parks at a 1988
program in New York City.
|
"I'll never forget that day," Harris says. "I didn't even think about how I was going to get the dress in the house. I was probably going to leave it at my girlfriend's house. I know I needed the dress for the weekend, so I just thought I'd take that day. I knew I had the money, so I went and got the dress for the Christmas dance. It was a bad move."Sign of the Times
This is where revisionism rears its head.
While Parks was local branch secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) at the time of her arrest, Harris says the seamstress was merely obeying Jim Crow rules.
Harris uses a small stuffed animal from behind the store's counter to illustrate the incident preceding Parks' arrest.
"Mrs. Parks was sitting ... at the beginning of the colored section," she says, at the exact point of demarcation for the colored-only section. "Facing her was the white sign. When a (white) man couldn't find any place to sit, the bus driver came back and moved the (colored) sign behind Mrs. Parks so she was sitting in the wrong section. She refused to move, because she was within her rights. But she didn't get on that bus to cause trouble. She was meek and mild."
So Parks did not intentionally get on the Cleveland Avenue bus to start trouble as many rehashed accounts would have us believe. It's remarkably one of the ironies of racism that put her "in her place."
Further, it was her unknowing role as a major catalyst for change that kept her there.
While Harris bears no ill will against whites, the incident gives her cause to level searing criticisms against black men at the time.
"Big, cornbread-fed black men, when the bus stopped, they were sneaking off the back of the bus," Harris says, her voice rising in disgust. "No one came to Mrs. Parks' defense. They came and handcuffed her and took her away. They didn't let her make a phone call until 10 o'clock that night. I thought they were going to kill her, I really did."
When Harris speaks of what she saw 45 years ago, the anguish and confusion are palpable. "I said to myself, 'Why won't Mrs. Parks get up and come on back here? I'll even give her my seat.' In retrospect, I know I was crying."
 |
Every night Mable Harris helps manage K & T's
Mini-Mart.
|
When Harris finally got to her stop, she says she was so nervous she "almost peed in my shoes. I ran so fast and so far I ran past my house."
Once inside, she told her aunt and uncle what happened and she wanted to tell others. Fear gripped Rachel.
"I could've gotten killed on that bus," Harris says matter-of-factly. "I told on myself when I ran in the house, and the first thing (my aunt) said was, 'What the hell were you doing on that bus?' The second thing was, 'Well, you better keep your mouth shut or they'll kill us.' "
Some time later, her uncle took Harris to a clandestine meeting with leaders of the burgeoning civil rights movement, including Martin Luther King Jr. Harris says she told the men exactly what had happened on the bus that day.
Shortly afterwards, King and others helped Montgomery's blacks organize their boycott of the city's bus system. The boycott's success -- one of the first attempts in the South by blacks to get organized and to demonstrate their economic impact on their community -- thrust King into the national spotlight.
It also earned Parks the unofficial title of Mother of the Civil Rights Movement.
For everyone in Montgomery, black or white, the bus ride Harris shared with Parks was a defining moment. The city and the people could never go back to the way things were.
Harris' uncle was among the countless volunteers who picked up bus boycotters from designated points around the city and delivered them to their homes. The boycott would last 381 days.
"My aunt said, 'No! No! No! The white folks gonna tear our house down! They're gonna burn our house down!,' " Harris remembers. "But when my uncle said go (on the carpool), I went. He'd come home from work, eat, change his clothes and I'd hurry up and do my homework so I could ride with him."
Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Time, it seems, heals most things. But it does not blur a memory so vivid.
 |
Harris teaches Sunday School at Southern Baptist
Church.
|
Like many Southern blacks, Harris eventually left Montgomery for a better life in the North. She came to Cincinnati to live with another aunt.
Years later, in her Silverton home, Bob, Harris' husband of 34 years, was watching Eyes on the Prize, the celebrated PBS documentary chronicling the civil rights movement. He told her to come watch it with him. She couldn't. It was much too painful.
She then told her husband about being on that bus with Parks. She told her daughter Joan, now an attorney with Procter & Gamble, when she was 12.
Harris likens holding on to the memory to "being in a coffin. You're there, you're not dead but you can't get out. My aunt had instilled so much fear. Even though my uncle and me were doing our thing, she just kept saying, 'Don't talk about it, don't talk about it.' So the years just rolled by."
In 1985, Harris tried to get Parks to a Black History Month program at Southern Baptist Church. Parks, now 87 and living in Detroit, declined the invitation but the two women spoke by telephone. According to Harris, Parks told her she's been the only person from that bus trip to contact her and, from the details Harris recounted, she verified Harris' presence on the bus.
In 1988, together for the first time since Parks' historic arrest, Harris was a keynote speaker in New York City at a program honoring Parks before an audience of 3,000.
The morning of her speech, Harris was so nervous she broke her glasses. The pharmacist at the nearest drug store had only one screw left. It fit her glasses perfectly. Again, fate.
The Bitter and the Sweet
So why, you might ask yourself, are you reading a story normally told during the obligatory span of Black History Month? Editorial changes -- CityBeat's coverage of the stadium cost overruns -- bumped this story back a week, and it's a good thing. It should not have been ghettoized to the shortest month in the year in the first place.
A good story is a good story.
Harris is living proof that sheroes and heroes live among us in real time. They're not necessarily the icons and marionettes lazily trotted out before us year after year after year. Harris was there.
This could easily have been a story about two women -- one a "meek and mild" woman who remains so and the other a rambunctious and outspoken civil servant -- brought together, separated and reunited by time.
Really, it's about what history, racism and time have and have not done to Mable Harris.
She is a testament to what history is really about: ordinary people thrust into extraordinary circumstances. And although she remained silent for so long for fear of retribution, the fact that she tells the story at all speaks to her character.
More importantly, she's not hardened by history. And if anyone could or should be, it would be her.
"It's all good," Harris says. "It made me strong. Behind all of that, I'm not bitter. I'm hurt and disappointed that my father, being a black man, never stepped up to the plate (during the civil rights movement). But I have no problem with white people, because I have my own mind. I know that the people I'm dealing with now aren't the people I dealt with then. I don't judge them by what their forefathers did, and they don't judge me by what my forefathers did.
"Being on that bus was a lesson I could never have learned from books. It was an experience, and I'm not bitter." ©
