Free The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris

out front most likely would have read, GREAT FOOD. GOOD PEOPLE. NO DUMMIES .
    As I grew older I began to understand my dad’s joke about the seven dwarfs. Dopey aside, the personalities of these six black sons of Birmingham seemed to correspond to those of Snow White’s little friends. Sylvester, the oldest, would be Sneezy. He was the eccentric, always dabbing at his face with a white hanky as he sketched out music and poetry in a little notebook. Louis would be Sleepy, though all his brothers called him Nip, even though they knew it was a derogatory term, because the deep slant of his eyes made him look slightly Asian. Simpson was Grumpy because he often was grumpy. He was hot-tempered, hardworking, and tightly wound. When he laughed, only his eyes would smile. His chin remained tight—the sign of a man who never let his guard down; though he could be an absolute softie around kids. In contrast, Woodrow had an impish grin all his life, even when his skin wrinkled and his hair turned gray. The name Bashful suits him best. Doc? That would be Joe Nathan, the youngest and smartest of the bunch, who never let you forget it. My father, Belvin, would naturally be Happy, for his perennially upbeat disposition.
    Until the end of his life, Dad was an infernally cheerful man, always smiling, always trying to make others feel at ease. I am now ashamed to say that there were times when his demeanor made me uneasy, moments when he would smile at, and joke with, salespeople or waitresses who had shown disdain or disrespect. His manner may have suited him well for his job as awindow clerk at the post office, but to a kid raised in the sock-it-to-me seventies, his penchant to please struck me as submissive. Only here’s the thing: years later, I now see the same trait in myself, and it no longer makes me cringe in quite the same way, for I now understand that his aversion to conflict and his compulsive need for calm are what got us through the roughest patches in our lives. What I did not understand until recently is that it also got him through his own darkest days.

6
A Secret
    I HAVE COME TO THE CONCLUSION that when people start a sentence with “You know,” they’re trying to take the edge off unsettling news. Think about it. All those times you’ve heard “You know, I hate to tell you this” or “You know, this relationship has not been working out.” Or even “You know, I love you.” “You know” suggests a seed of doubt; maybe you don’t really know, after all. I was certainly in the dark when Uncle Joe surprised me over breakfast one morning a few years ago. Joe Nathan Norris is my father’s only surviving brother. He was supposed to be called Jonathan, but someone got it wrong on his birth certificate. These days he likes to call himself “the Last of the Mohicans” or “the Last Man Standing”—dignified titles that hint at the loneliness of a man who has too quickly run out of brothers to call when he needs advice or has news he wants to share.
    At breakfast that morning Uncle Joe blurted out a secret: “You know, your father was shot.” Six shattering words uttered in a matter-of-fact way before Joe shoved a spoonful of oatmeal into his mouth. “Shot in the leg,” he continued, churning the spoon in the bowl full of gruel, as if constant motion would enhance the flavor. I have always been close to Joe. When I was a kid, he rewarded my love of books with a steady stream of suggested reading, and now we have a special bond because I was the only one in our big, loud family who could huddle with him in a corner and talk about the jazz musician Jaco Pastorius or the Argentine dissident Jacobo Timerman.
    My work frequently takes me to Chicago, and whenever I blow through town, I swing by to see my uncle on the Far South Side, in Pill Hill, so named because many black doctors once lived there. On this particular trip, though, my schedule was tight, and so that Thursday morning Joe drove to meet me downtown at