Free The Grace of Silence by Michele Norris Page A

the West Egg Cafe, an all-day breakfast spot near the Lake Michigan waterfront that’s popular with yuppies. He had ordered his oatmeal and I some Tex-Mex egg concoction, even as Joe made a point of reminding me that for the price of a piece of toast we could have both enjoyed a whole spread at any one of a dozen joints on the South Side. No sense in arguing. He was right, though his protest was a bit hollow.
    In truth, Joe didn’t mind heading downtown to break his routine. He had become the primary caretaker for my aunt Odiev, whose kidney disease required frequent dialysis, and he also doted on a firstborn granddaughter with cerebral palsy. In other words, he spent his retirement earning his sainthood and he never complained. He also needed to stop downtown at the Obama campaign office to pick up some yard signs and flyers. Like so many older black Americans, Joe felt that the hope Obama offered was much more than just a four-letter word.
    Uncle Joe’s news about my dad’s shooting was tangential; he went on a rant about a completely different subject, grousing about black men and black leadership and why so many black people had given up hope, even though their lives were so much easier than their forebears’ had been. Joe had the heart of an activist. He’d left a comfortable teaching job in Hyde Park to start a pilot project working with juvenile inmates in the Cook County Jail, kids whose rap sheets were so treacherous that they were tried and remanded as adults. The assignment would be hell on earth for most people, but Joe saw an opportunity to reach a captive audience; his pupils couldn’t skip class or threaten the teacher without inviting a beat-down by prison guards. He introduced his students to works by PaulLaurence Dunbar, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ernest Gaines, Chester Himes, and even Chinua Achebe and Mark Mathabane. When he knew he had won their trust, he made them read Rudolph Fisher’s
The Walls of Jericho
, the better to understand an important life lesson: that a man is truly tough only when he can show his soft side. He turned criminals into readers, and in exchange he asked for only one thing: that they continue to read upon release from jail.
    His years with the Cook County cons had left Joe with some hard theories about young black men. “They have it too easy. They don’t know what struggle is. They always want to blame somebody else. They want a handout. They don’t take care of business.” If you didn’t interrupt him, he might go on for hours. Get an older black man riled up about today’s young folk and his vitriol might outdo that of even the most outrageous conservative commentator. At our Thursday breakfast, Joe was worked up. He’d asked the juvies which leaders they looked up to; they had rattled off the names of rappers and athletes. No surprise there. When he’d clarified that he was asking about elected officials, they’d cracked up and all but told him to go to hell. Politics, they’d said, is for white folks. So Joe was on a rant, upset at the juvies for throwing their lives away, upset at black leaders who couldn’t figure out how to inspire young people, upset that he had to work so hard as a precinct captain to get young black folk to vote. Even his own son was unregistered. “Don’t they know what people had to do to give them the right to vote?” he asked.
    Joe continued, on a roll, before dropping the bomb: “You know, your father was shot.” He must have seen the look on my face, the confusion in my eyes, the utter shock. In a world of my own, I heard the tap-tap of his spoon against the ceramic bowl. He pushed his breakfast aside and took a slow deep breath before puffing out his cheeks as if to suppress a belch, the kind of thing older men do all the time; but since I interview peoplefor a living, I know this can also be a stalling tactic to take the measure of things. Uncle Joe had never been one to pussyfoot through uncomfortable