Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
MY MOTHER'S SON
When I think about the early part of my life and how it helped make me the man I have become, it is so clear to me how lucky I was to have been born and raised in a world of structures. There was the structure of my family, the structure of the St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the Gate City Day Nursery, my schools, the Butler Street Colored YMCA. But above all else, I had my family.
I know for certain that the world my parents created for me, as I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia, has made all the difference in my life. And when I say "created for me" (and I should include my brothers Warren and Windsor in this), I mean that literally. It was as if the world had been built for the three of us, and it was just our job to make the best of it.
The principal architect, general contractor, and bricklayer for the whole enterprise was my mother, Mary Belle Jordan, with strong assistance from my father, Vernon E. Jordan, Sr. Although my father was a constant and steady presence, there was no question who was in charge of my brothers and me. It was my mother's plan that mattered. Her strategy for getting her black sons through childhood in the segregated South grew out of her approach to life in general: Make the most of what you have at the moment, do the best you can when it counts, and hope and expect good outcomes from your efforts.
This sounds simple enough on its face. But like so many of the rules and guidelines we all try to apply as we go through life, my mother's approach was easier said than done. Think of our situation. We were in Georgia—unreconstructed, unrepentant Georgia. At the time of my birth on August 15, 1935, the state was seventy years (one biblical lifetime) away from the end of legalized slavery. That was just a blink of an eye in history's terms, and the fallout from that history was everywhere to be seen.
Although slavery was officially over, there was no way for those old times to be forgotten because they really had not gone too far away. Thousands of blacks, my grandparents among them, had been trapped in a system of debt peonage that was slavery in all but name, eking out a "living" on "Mr. So-and-So's" property. All that was missing was the auction block. Sometime after my mother moved to Atlanta, members of our family had to go in the dead of night and literally steal her sister, my aunt Jimmie Lee, from the home of the white man for whom she worked as a maid and cook. It was like being on the Underground Railroad, only it was the twentieth century. Jim Crow was operating at full throttle. Lynching was a part of life in the South. Most blacks could not vote. This was a hard time to be a dreamer.
And yet here was my mother. A black woman—unlettered, unlearned, but with a Ph.D. in life—who had come out of the Georgia countryside into the big city to make a better place for herself. It was a breathtaking act of courage for her to dream and to expect that her sons would find their way in a world that had not, despite what she may have felt about it, really been built for them.
Although she sometimes called me "Junior" or "Vernon Junior," my mother's main nickname for me was "Man." She started calling me that when I was still a little boy. While away at camp or later in college and law school, she sent me letters with the salutation "Dear Man." This was her positive way to counteract what she knew would be the outside world's—the white world's—view of me even after I had officially passed into manhood.
So from the very beginning, I felt the tug of my mother's hope. It could not have been missed. I moved forward, propelled by her deep ambition and love for me—two things I never had a moment's doubt about and that moved me to accept her guidance and to want to vindicate her faith in me. It is an almost irresistible challenge when you have someone who thinks you are special and who works to see to it that you get the chance to shine. A bargain is struck, sometimes silent, sometimes spoken: their faith and commitment for your effort and success. If success is at all possible, you do not want to fail. You do everything you can to not fail. If there are times when things don't work out as you plan (and that often happens), a hard and honest effort fulfills the bargain. No matter what, you never break faith with those who support you.
This is not to say that I did not have a will of my own, or my own preferences. It just happened (nature or nurture?) that my mother and I were of the same mind on the main point: that I was to go as far as I could as quickly as I could. All children rebel at some points, but for the most part, I believed my mother was right. If she had a plan for my advancement, then I was all for it. I was so confident in my knowledge that she wanted what was best for me that I followed her instructions about the important things in life. Until she died, I never made a major decision without consulting her. Sometimes, I didn't even get the chance to consult.
"Vernon, Jr., now wherever you go to college, you're going to join the ROTC."
"I don't want to be in the ROTC."
"It doesn't matter. Wherever you go to college, you're going to join the ROTC."
"Mama, what do you know about the ROTC?"
"I don't know anything about the ROTC."
"Well then, why are you so insistent that I should join it?"
"All I can tell you is that all the white women I work for are sending their boys to the ROTC. There must be something to it."
There must be something to it. That was how my mother thought about things. She hadn't figured out exactly why the ROTC was so important to the white women. I don't believe she knew it was the upper class's method of keeping their young men out of harm's way as they performed their military service. But considering how things were between whites and blacks, the details didn't matter much. It was a simple, straightforward calculation. Whether you were talking about the ROTC, schools, medical care, political power—all the basics of life—white people were hoarding the best of the world and had frozen black people out. It just made good sense to pay attention to where whites were going and how they were using the enormous amount of resources and opportunities they had rounded up for themselves. Whatever was going on that could be good for us, Mama wanted us to be a part of it, and her contacts with the white world gave her an idea what to look for.
My mother, born in 1907, came to Atlanta in the 1920s from Talbot County to "live on the lot." When you lived on the lot, you worked as a servant for a family and lived above the garage, in the basement, or in some other house on their property. My mother had no extensive formal education. What she did have going for her was natural intelligence and an almost superhuman drive—and the fact that she was a very good cook. This combination would one day make her the owner of one of the best-known catering businesses in Atlanta. But in the beginning, she was just one of many black women and men who escaped the sharecropper's life to try to do better in the world. She used every scrap of what she had to try to do that.
The family she worked for had daughters who were about her age and just about her size. This turned out to be something of an advantage for Mama because they gave her clothes that didn't fit them any more or that they had grown tired of. So sometimes she was able to go to church in dresses she could never have afforded on her salary. She was one of the best-dressed ladies at St. Paul Church, wearing clothes that the white girls had tossed away. They called this "making do"—making the most of what you had. In my mother's case, making do in this way helped enhance her stature in the community. She was an usher at Sunday services, and the fact that she was always well turned out made a big difference.
This is an aspect of the black church that often gets overlooked. Although religious doctrine was important, the church played another critical role in the psychological lives of black people of my mother's time. It was the one sure place where they could go to achieve dignity and status. No matter what positions they held in the outside world, no matter that they were spurned and rejected by society at large, in the church blacks had the chance to be in charge, to manage affairs, to feel that they were a part of something. The yardman who lived with condescension and contempt six days a week could put on his Sunday clothes and be a deacon. The maid or cook, hostage most of the time to other people's whims or cruelty, could be an usher and tell people where to sit so that the program could proceed as planned.
I have a favorite photograph that tells the story. It shows several latecomers to church peering into the sanctuary through the small windowed portions of two swinging doors. The doors are shut tight because the service has started. The worshipers are anxious to get in. You can see it in their faces. You can also tell they are in their finest clothes, that they have put a lot into getting ready to go to church. They just didn't make it on time. At the immediate inside of the door stands an usher, this time a man. He knows how badly they want to get in. His face is impassive, yet his will is clear. They are going to have to wait. Church has started. There is serious business going on. Order must be upheld. On Sundays, America's second-class citizens had somewhere to go to get spiritual nourishment and to feel like whole human beings.
My father's story was much the same as my mother's. Born in 1908, he also come out of rural Georgia—Monticello, in Jasper County—one of seventeen children. I am convinced, although I have no proof, that our name, "Jordan," came from the white family who owned a large furniture store in the county. I presume that the Jordans owned one or more of my ancestors, since some slaves took the last names of their owners. But I have never had any real interest in all that.
What is more interesting to me is that my father, for whom I am named, was born Vernon Ulysses Jordan, but he grew to hate his middle name and changed it to Eulion. Where he got Eulion from I have no idea. With this small bit of self-refashioning, my father carved a unique space for himself. As far as I know, we may be the only Eulions in the entire world.
When my father met my mother, he was a chauffeur for a prominent white family. He went to church regularly. He even sang in the choir. That is where my parents met and got to know one another: in the church. My father had Thursdays off. He'd pick her up, and they would go out on the town. That's how it all got started between them. By this time, my mother had already gotten the idea that she wanted to become a caterer, and true to form, she decided to prepare herself by going to night school at Booker T. Washington High School, taking a class in home economics.
From the standpoint of that time, theirs was an interesting match—interesting in ways that would in the end prove to be too much for their marriage. Put simply, my mother was ahead of her time, and my father was a man of his time. By any measure, my mother would be recognized today as a feminist—though I am not so sure she would have been comfortable with all the associations that word currently calls to mind. If being a feminist means that you stand your own ground, work to achieve your goals, and do not see yourself as just an appendage to a man, my mother fit the bill ten times over.
Although she kept our house in order and cooked for us, it was clear that her life was outside the home. She was a businesswoman, not a housewife. That would be less of a problem today than it was during the time when my parents were married. Of course, black women have always worked outside the home. Enslaved women worked in the fields. After the end of slavery, black women worked out of economic necessity—and their husbands had to accept working wives. We generally have not had Ozzie and Harriet-type expectations of family life, since for most of us, that type of life was out of reach—even if we had wanted it.
Still, with all the adaptations that blacks had to make to our family situations, the expectation remained that the husband was the head of the household. It was "the man of the family" who was supposed to direct the course of family life. He was in charge.
That might work if the man was better suited to that role. It might have worked if the husband and wife were evenly matched in this regard, and the wife just decided to leave it to her husband so she could do other things. In our family's case, it would not have made any sense at all because my mother was more suited to being the prime mover. Her business skills shaped the way things operated. She was much better at planning than my father. She was better at handling money. She had the energy to pull it all together. And so my father, quite wisely I think, left it to her to do that.
He paid a price for this. His buddies taunted him. They would say, "Mrs. Jordan wears the pants in that family!" That kind of talk might seem harmless today, but in the 1940s and 1950s, this would hurt any man who had conventional ideas about the proper relationship between husband and wife. Whatever my father may have understood about the practicalities of the situation—my mother did have a flair for management—it could not have been easy for him. But what was he to do? Make her sit down?
I knew it bothered him. I knew because he would sometimes say so. The outside teasing just put the fine point on a conflict that was already deep inside him. He was happy about my mother's success. It benefited all of us. At the same time, there is no question that another part of him wanted a more traditional family, and a more "normal" wife. He saw things through until my younger brother Windsor and I were out of school, and then my parents divorced after twenty-eight years of marriage.
At the root of it all was the difference in my mother's and father's personalities. Where my mother was entrepreneurial and driven—always thinking about "how you get there" and always sure that there was in fact some place else to get to—my father was less of a risk taker and much more easily satisfied. My mother aspired to great things in life. I guess you could say my father just wanted the good things of life. He was a plain, honest, hardworking man who had his own code of discipline and order, and I loved and admired him very much. He taught me how to sign my name, and I've copied my signature after his. He kept the hedges trimmed, the car washed, his shoes shined. He could tell you at a moment's notice where everything he owned was, because for him, everything had a place. His steadiness was the perfect complement to my mother's charging determination.
When he went off to the navy in 1943, he made me and my brother real heroes in the neighborhood. Most of the other fathers were going into the army. My father was in the navy! He was a steward and, at times, an assistant to a gunner. When he came home on furlough, I was king of the mountain. I felt so proud and happy to walk down the street with him, to go to church with him, to be seen anywhere with him when he was wearing that uniform.
The truth is, any rituals that took us out of the house with my father meant the world to me. Every Sunday morning my mother would cook a big breakfast for the family. She would stay behind to clear away the dishes while my father walked me and Windsor to Sunday school. This happened no matter what: rain, sleet, shine. This is what the Jordans did.
My father belonged to the T. J. Chambliss Bible Study Group. While we went to our Sunday classes, he would be off in his group arguing about the correct interpretation of one or another passage in the Bible. They also spent a good deal of time arguing about politics and the situation blacks were in at the time, which my father was always more than ready to do. Our morning classes finished, Daddy would gather Windsor and me up and walk us to a nearby café to have a soda. By this time my mother would have gotten the house in order, and she would drive to the church to meet us for the eleven o'clock service.
After church, we usually brought someone home for dinner. Most often it was Sister Fannie Green, another refugee from rural Georgia who had come to the city to "live on the lot," in her case on Peachtree Street. After a big Sunday dinner, we sat around talking, and then my mother or father would drive Sister Green to her home on the other side of town. It is hard to imagine in this era of 200 television channels, computers, video games, and almost endless sporting events that driving Sister Fannie Green home could be a major form of recreation for two little boys, but it was. To top things off, Sister Green would give me and my brother fifty cents.
The routine of walking to Sunday school with my father, of sharing a soda with him and listening to him talk at the dinners with Sister Green or other members of our church, gave me a strong sense of security. I never had to wonder about what we were going to do, whether he would be there or not. With that issue settled, I could concentrate on being a kid, learning all the things I needed to learn in order to become an adult.
As for his hopes for me, my father would have been perfectly happy if I had just finished high school, gotten a job in the post office, bought myself a little white house with green shutters, gotten a car, married a nice girl, had two kids, kept my car washed, my grass trimmed, read the newspapers, voted in every election, attended Sunday school and church. He would have thought that was a very good life. And he was not wrong about that. That does describe a good life. But it was not good enough for my mother, and it was not good enough for me.
There was another aspect of my father's personality that influenced the way he went through the world and what he wanted for his sons. Although he was a smart man, he just did not have as much confidence in himself as my mother had in herself. As a matter of fact, he did not have as much confidence in himself as my mother had in him. I remember how she pushed and pushed to make him take the examination to become a postal worker at the army base at Fort MacPherson. "This is something you can do," she would say over and over. "You can do this." After a while he followed her advice and took the test, and everything worked out. He got the job carrying mail. This was a tremendous aid to our family. It insured that whatever ups and downs there might be in my mother's business (as there are in every enterprise), there would always be a steady, and good, paycheck.
In the end, it may be true that what you think you want in life is a function of what you think you deserve, or what you think you can achieve. Maybe it was not so much that my mother and father actually wanted different things. It was just that the difference in their levels of confidence helped set the expectations they had for themselves, and for me. My mother wanted to have and do great things because she thought it was in her power to have and do great things. And so, why not? She felt the same about her children. When we were little boys, my mother would talk about the Lab High School, an experimental school affiliated with Atlanta University. She had heard it was a good program and that was all she needed to know. "If it's still open when you're old enough, I want you to go to the Lab school," she would say, making it sound like the best thing in the world. Her ambition for us was just enormous, and she never missed the opportunity to let us know that.
My father seemed to tailor his desires to what he may have thought was a more realistic judgment of what could be achieved. Perhaps he saw himself as just facing the facts. Facing facts is a tricky business. What are the facts? Who makes them "the facts"? Why should anyone be bound by facts that someone else has drawn up? Who knows why my mother did not see how "unrealistic" it was to think that she could go from being a cook in someone's house to running Mary Jordan's Catering Service and being admired and respected by blacks and whites alike? Why did she, living in the heart of segregated Dixie, think her black sons could go as far as they wanted in life?
I got to know something of the life my parents left behind when we went to the country to see relatives. For a city boy, these trips were like visits to a faraway exotic land, and they brought on the same intense feelings of excitement and anticipation mixed with a small sense of possible danger. We were going to see people we loved, in a place where we felt comfortable, but we had to pass through some very treacherous territory to get there. My mother packed lunches, because we would not be able to stop on the way; or if we did, we would have to go to the back of some restaurant not knowing whether the people would be hostile or just indifferent. Once we were in the car, pretty soon the aroma of my mother's fried chicken, and whatever else she'd prepared, filled the air. "Mama, we're hungry!" we'd say, almost before we'd gotten beyond the city limits.
Our trips were to visit three of my grandparents who were alive when I was a kid: Charlie and Annie Jordan, and Jim Griggs, my mother's father. My mother's mother, Julia, had died before I was born. Charlie Jordan was a carpenter who had retired by the time I was old enough to know him. He used to sit on his front porch drinking sweet water, which was literally that—water with a couple of teaspoons of sugar in it. What fascinated me about him was that he could tell time, with great precision, by where the sun was in the sky. We would ramble around his house and the surrounding land, have a big dinner that my grandmother had cooked, and then go to sleep at night on pallets on the floor, under quilts my grandmother had made.
We went more often to my mother's old home in Talbot County. This was, in part, because her father, "Pa" as we called him, would think he was dying about every three months. "Send for Belle," he'd say from his "deathbed." We would load up the car, going down there expecting the worst. We'd walk in and there he'd be, eyes low, lying under the cover. "Is that you, Belle?" he'd ask. After a few moments in her presence, which he missed so much, he'd say, "I feel better now," and he wouldn't die.
Pa was my favorite grandparent. He lived on the property of Mr. Robert Callier, for whom he had worked all his adult life. It was easy to talk to Pa about anything that came to mind. Once, while we were sitting on his front porch, I asked him, "Pa, sitting here today, if you could have anything in the world, what would it be?" He thought for a moment and said, "If I could have anything in the world, I'd want to be able to go to the bathroom indoors, in a warm place, one time before I die."
Excerpted from VERNON CAN READ! by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. with Annette Gordon-Reed. Copyright © 2001 by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., and Annette Gordon-Reed. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
