Fall Rising: Exile to Odyssey

Praises for Ticket to Exile

"Lyrical at times, incisive at others, humorous, and moving, but never, ever sentimental or hyperbolic...We are accompanied in Ticket to Exile by an indomitable, always inquisitive, ever playful narrator, who, despite limits and obstacles, refuses to back down."

—Jane Anne Staw, author of Unstuck: A Supportive and Practical Guide to Working Through Writer’s Block."

"Ticket to Exile is both a tender and revealing biography and a sober social-historical document of a time and place that summoned some among us to quiet, but extraordinary dignity and courage."

—Peter Buttross, Jr., author of Natchez Cantos: Poems

"In a world where we are accustomed to sound bites uttered in nano-seconds, Ticket to Exile provides an opportunity to slow down, settle in, and share in the life of another person."

—Luisah Teish, author of Jump Up: Seasonal Celebrations from the World’s Deep Traditions.

Adam David Miller keeps his ear to the ground and a keen poet’s eye on the world around him in accounts of his life from birth to manhood. How he struggles to obtain a ticket out of those environs is like nothing you’ve ever heard.

––Mei Nakano, author of Japanese American Women: Three Generations, 1890-1990

In the course of Adam David Miller’s exploration of the meaning of his own past and of the subtleties of black-white relations, he illuminates historical trends essential in understanding his region and this country.

––Phyllis Bischof, co-author of Bibliographies for African Studies, 1987-1993

A coming of age tale with a singular bite.

––Gerald Haslam, author of Haslam’s Valley

"Ticket to Exile is a shining light. a glowing beam of human experience and inner truth cutting through the bitter fog of racism, the vein of fear and cruelty that has shrouded American history."

––Joyce Jenkins, editor of Poetry Flash

A. D. MILLER

FALL RISING

a memoir

Eshu House Publishing, Berkeley, CA

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2015 by A. D. Miller.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including information photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Eshu House Publishing.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

ISBN: 978-1-31192246-5

1. Miller, Adam David--young adult through adult. 2. Poets--20th century--Biography. 3. African Americans--

Cover Art by Robert MacChesney, courtesy of Mary Fuller and Phyllis Burt.

Cover and interior design by Elise Peeples

Hard copy books are available. Inquiries, and correspondence should be addressed to:

Eshu House Publishing

P.O. Box 162, Berkeley, CA 94701

http://www.ADMillerPoet.com

Dedication

When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.

—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

For all those who have stayed

out of the nets of either/or.

Keep sending love out.

For all who flap and struggle

without visible supports.

Keep sending love out.

For all who fly through friendly

and unfriendly fire.

Keep sending love out.

And for the point people

who, through the tumult of falling and rising,

rising and falling

bring us all closer to soaring

on the currents of love.

Keep sending love out.

Keep sending, sending, sending...

Table of Contents

Start of book

About A.D. Miller

Other books by A. D. Miller

Connect with A. D. Miller

Acknowledgements

Chapter One: Rockville Centre, 1942

Chapter Two: Recruitment

Chapter Three: Entering the Navy

Chapter Four: San Diego Section Base, 1943

Chapter Five: V-12 Officer Training and Education, 1944-45

Chapter Six: Last Home Leave, January, 1946

Chapter Seven: Starting Over, Post-WWII

Chapter Eight: First Marriage

Chapter Nine: Job Search

Photographs

Chapter Ten: Job, Job, Who’s Got the Job?

Chapter Eleven: Pilgrimage Home, 1963

Chapter Twelve: The March on Washington

Chapter Thirteen: My Tuskegee Summer, 1965

Chapter Fourteen: The Play’s the Thing, Summer, 1966

Chapter Fifteen: My Second Marriage

Chapter Sixteen: Teaching at Laney College

Epilogue

Afterword

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work has been a long time coming, and I am indebted to many people for their support from beginning to end.

Gratitude to Editors: Lucille Day and Elise Peeples who waded through very early drafts; Elizabeth Claman who tackled the manuscript in a still raw form; Jannie M. Dresser who followed that with insightful and sensitive comments and moral support (she returned a particular chapter with tears in her eyes saying, If I had been there, I’d have had your back--I’d have beat somebody up if I had to!) that were essential to the manuscript’s fruition and Pemba Pierini who read many versions and provided thoughtful and patient comments.

For their heroic efforts to eliminate copyediting errors: Pemba Pierini, Lucille Lang Day, Francesca Rothberg, Ron Baughn, Elaine Rueter, Chloe Peeples, Elise Peeples. (I take full responsibility for any errors that remain.)

Readers/listeners: Los Seis Writing Group; Peter Buttross, Jr.; Lucille Lang Day; Meg Wither’s class in the Merced Community College District; Al Young; various reading series coordinated by Judy Wells/Dale Jensen, Catherine Taylor, and Bruce Bagnell; Sharon Coleman and her classes at Berkeley City College. My extended family: Bruce Bagnell and Kathleen Evans, Amon Evans, Christine Evans, Ernest Jolly and special invited guests to the Sunday dinners who listened to versions of Fall Rising and were gracious and encouraging.

Thanks to Robert MacChesney for creating the art used on the cover (and in design elements in the hard copy book) and to Mary Fuller, his wife, for giving permission for its use and and to Phyllis Burt who brought that particular work to our attention.

Many thanks to my wife, Elise Peeples, who designed the outside and the inside of the book and without whom this book would still rest in a drawer somewhere.

Because we are, I am, I am because we are. --Ibo saying

CHAPTER ONE

ROCKVILLE CENTRE, 1942

As he disembarks from the train in Rockville Centre, A.D. enters this new society under a triple whammy: his ancestors had been snatched brutally from their ancestral homes, subjected to the unspeakable horrors of the Middle Passage, and forced into three hundred years of chattel slavery. Then, as if that was not enough, they faced one hundred years of peonage accompanied by terror. Add to this, his own sudden, inexplicable exile from South Carolina. Pray for our boy A.D. He will need your prayers and appreciates them. He knows that without them he is nothing.

Watch yer step, there, the conductor called out. I must have seemed shaky disembarking from the train.

On descent, I set down my suitcase and watched the train rattle off. I was there. I had reached the place I had set out for. There was no turning back. My tickets throughout the trip had been one-way only: Florence, SC to Richmond, VA; Richmond to DC; DC to NYC by bus, the Long Island train from The City to Rockville Centre.

When you get off the train, cross the Sunrise Highway. You’ll see Central. Walk on up that street to the end. You’ll see the house facing you when you get there. Number 23 Oxley. That’ll be the one. I folded my sister Edith’s letter and slipped it back into my jacket pocket. My cardboard suitcase was not heavy since my stock of clothing was not large.

Two people passed me on the steps down from the train platform, one staring at my suitcase. They both were black and walked briskly. They did not speak to me. Since both were neatly dressed, I was sure they were thinking: ‘Another one from the sticks.’ Remembering having been burnt by the black soldier in the Richmond Bus Station restroom when I attempted familiarity, I now resisted my temptation to speak to them, though I did note that they both went down the street where Edith had said I should go. I followed a short distance behind.

The afternoon, though sunny, had a slight haze of a kind I had noted more pronounced in some of the towns and cities I had passed through on my way up from the South. Years later I learned this was city smog, a byproduct of our industrial cities. I longed for the clear skies of Orangeburg, the clear skies of home.

In no hurry to get to the Wilsons’ house, where my sister was staying on her days off from her live-in service job, I ambled up the street taking in the sights. The train tracks and Sunrise Highway cut through the colored neighborhood, veering off to the south to separate it from the middle-class white people’s houses to the north. The black population was concentrated in a few square blocks in an older section of town, a pattern I was to find duplicated in every town I visited on Long Island. Destruction of established black neighborhoods by the placement of new freeways was a pattern I was later to find throughout the U.S.

Along one stretch of highway there were warehouses, light industries and a few small businesses. On Central, a barbershop, beauty salon, café restaurant, and an Elk’s Club that doubled as a meeting hall made up the black business district. No drug store, grocery store, dry cleaning, clothing or shoe stores or shoe repair shop. An African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was located nearest to the white business district. I learned later that there was a black dentist, who boasted that many of his patients were white. (I often found that black business or professional people needed white patronage for validation.)

Well, you just come right on in, said an ebullient high-brown woman in an afro-contralto voice after I identified myself as Edith’s brother, Mam. Edith told us to look out for her brother sometime this week. She at work, be off Sunday. You just come on in and make yourself at home.

Mrs. Wilson was a strikingly handsome woman, perhaps forty, still able to turn men’s heads after having given birth to three children now all in high school. She set aside her apron. She had been doing some afternoon house cleaning before the children returned from Rockville Centre High. Then, she showed me upstairs to an attic room.

Number 23 Oxley, constructed in late Victorian style, had a parlor, dining room and kitchen on the first floor; a master bedroom plus two rooms and bath on the second floor where the family slept, and above that, a converted attic where my sister and Edna, Mr. Wilson’s daughter from an earlier marriage, slept. I would sleep in the attic’s converted front dormer on a cot. In the basement there were workrooms and the furnace.

After a perfunctory sharing of Everybody Down Home Fine. And When you write your momma, tell her you got here fine and hello for me, Mrs. Wilson left me to settle myself and took up her cleaning where she had left off. Bone tired, yet relieved at having found the house and being welcomed so pleasantly, I lay on my cot fully clothed and slept. I woke up after dark to a babble of voices downstairs. Still not feeling rested I undressed myself, used the room’s chamber pot, then slipped between clean sheets for more sleep. I slept soundly until the next morning after the children had left for school.

When I came downstairs, I was greeted with, You sure must have been worn out, and We didn’t want to disturb you after your long trip. Then, I set out to look for work. Mr. Wilson had long left for his job as custodian of a building. Edith, with her live-in job as housekeeper for a well-off white family, would come home only on Sundays, her day of rest. Since my stay was open-ended, I was expected to work too. I also had to find a place to eat, as my room rent did not include food. Mrs. Wilson pointed the way down Central Avenue to Sunrise Highway where I was to turn left and keep walking. That’s where you find all the stores, businesses and such. Then she wished me luck and returned to the kitchen to resume her day.

As I reached the bottom of the front steps I heard her voice raised in song, Walking with my Jesus. Mrs. Wilson was a member of the Mount Pisgah AME Church choir, and her strong contralto filled the house as she washed the breakfast dishes, mopped the kitchen linoleum and made up the bed in the master bedroom. She did not work outside of her home. No wife uh mine’ll ever work in any white woman’s kitchen, her husband swore. That’s why I left the South. To my knowledge no wife of his ever did.

The sun was shining and I was feeling alert. Eager to see the town, I almost skipped along. The Central Café, the colored restaurant on Central was not open. Maybe there would be something open towards the center of town. There was. I hesitated before Nick’s Diner, a long narrow space filled with men intent on their breakfasts. A youngish black-haired woman behind the front counter raised her arm as I entered and waved me to a table along the left wall. I was barely seated when a man entered and sat down in the empty seat opposite me, took out his paper and opened it as he waited for service.

Scrambled eggs, sausage, rye toast and coffee, Mitzy, he told the young, blonde, frizzy-haired waitress who had taken an order of steaming food and coffee to the table next to ours nearer to the door.

I wanted eggs and grits but I did not see anyone eating grits.

Closest thing to it was hot oatmeal cereal.

Two scrambled, oats, Mitzy shouted to the cook, and milk.

The man opposite me bolted his food, lit a cigarette and left, leaving me poking slowly through my meal. I was glad he waited until the end of his meal to light up. I had not begun to smoke yet. The diner was clearing as men hurried out to work. A few greeted one another; most ate their food in silence.

I was relieved that no one seemed to notice my presence. I saw men leave bits of change by their plates, which the waitress pocketed in her apron. I set a quarter next to my plate as I asked her if there were any shoe repair shops nearby. I intended to try them first.

Tony’s is right around the corner, she said. First street on your right as you go out the door. Turn right next to the beauty salon. I tried to thank you, Mam her, but she was already gone to a customer who had waved her over.

Tony’s was a one-person shop though there were two lasts, an indication that there may have been another person working there before me. I did not ask, and he did not say. What was important to me was that after I told him my background in shoe repair, he hired me.

Twenty-one dollars a week, start on Monday morning, he said I was elated. It had been so easy. Walk in off the street, talk with the owner and just like that he hired me. No questions asked beyond where I lived and if I could begin to work on Monday. On reflection, I wondered why I wasn’t asked more. My silent query was eventually answered when I learned that Tony had told the owner of Nick’s Diner that he was looking for help. While I had walked toward his shop, Mitzy phoned to tell him that I seemed a likely prospect. So my thank you, Mam apparently had not been wasted after all.

With the question of a job settled, I wandered around town, careful to note the location of Sunrise Highway. If I remembered that, I could find my way back to the Wilsons’.

The March sun was mild so my walk was pleasant. Rockville Centre, Nassau County, was a substantially larger and more prosperous looking town than Orangeburg. I learned later that the county was one of the richest in the United States. A bedroom community for New York City, money seemed its signature: wealth was demonstrated in the size and structure of most of its houses— the way they were set back from the street with neatly trimmed lawns—in its stores filled with expensive items, the wide paved streets, and bustling citizenry. The business section was much larger than Orangeburg’s, much more solid––a solidity only money could provide.

When I had walked myself hungry, I returned to Nick’s for lunch, again arriving on the ebb tide, most diners having eaten and hurried back to their jobs. I felt pretty satisfied with myself: a job and a place to eat breakfast and lunch.

You found a job! Mrs. Wilson exclaimed when I told her. Praise the Lord. That’s really nice.

Yes’m. Man asked me how much experience I had. I told him. He said I’d be doing pretty much the same thing for him. Name’s Tony.

When the children came in from school my good fortune was again extolled. I began to feel embarrassed when she repeated the performance to Mr. Wilson that evening. I felt I was being held up to the children as a model, which made me uncomfortable, since I would need these children as friends. I knew you do not make friends with models.

After the praise session, I excused myself and went down to the Avenue, as Central was called, to check out the café-restaurant I had noted in passing.

Central Café was a pleasant surprise. It had a drummer with a full set, working softly, paying little attention to the customers who were filling up the restaurant. It was Friday night. Having to watch my money, since one of the two fives Mama had given me had already taken a hit, I ordered a bowl of vegetable soup and a slice of cornbread. Thus began a practice I followed all summer and have found useful for most of my life: a substantial breakfast, a solid meal at mid-day and a light meal in the evening.

The restaurant section of Central Café opened only on weekends, when people were off from work. The back area had tables covered by white tablecloths that reached almost to the floor. They were arranged around a small open space, used for dancing, which could be closed off from the café. Since the same menu items cost more in the restaurant section, I confined my eating to a stool at the counter.

The Central had become a convenient place to stop in after work. I could eat there and hang out with the drummer, a polio victim with whom I got acquainted, who almost succeeded in teaching me how to play the drums. It also gave me some place to spend time outside the house. The attic space I shared with my sister Edith and Edna often felt too cramped for adequate relaxation. Counting the six Wilsons and two Millers, there were eight people competing for space in that house. Fortunately, not all of us needed it at the same time.

On Sunday morning Edith was dropped off by her employers at the Wilsons’ in time for us to go to church. I needn’t have worried about what Edith might say to me about the reason for my exile. After a brief greeting all around, she hurried her things upstairs so she could join us for the trek over to the Mount Pisgah AME Church on Sunrise Highway.

Everyone prettied up for church; we dressed our best to enter the House of the Lord: women and girls in gay spring dresses, men and boys in spit-polished shoes, shining like mirrors. Each woman had her hair styled differently and topped by an outrageous hat, worn in contrast to the demure countenance beneath it, meek in the presence of the Almighty. Once seated, each one looked around her to see who might be wearing what and how she compared. Satisfied that she held her own with the other women, she settled in to be uplifted by the sermon.

Men wore conservative suits and ties, and perched their hats on their knees during the sermon. A few boys wore zoot suits in the style of Harlem youth, their pimp chains dangling and pants pegged. I had not dared to peg my blue herringbone pants as narrowly as the boys in Harlem and some boys in Orangeburg, and good for me that I had not. Mrs. Wilson detested zoot suits. I think she must have associated them with various civil disturbances that had taken place in Harlem and Los Angeles.

Don’t you let me catch you with any of that trash in this house, I heard Mrs. Wilson tell her son Buddy.

Aw, Maaa! was a response I would hear all summer whenever Mrs. Wilson put a check on some action of her only son. In contrast, and to the chagrin of the two girls, he was not checked often.

Sunday church was the big event of the week for many in the small black community. Like Down Home, working people, maids, gardeners, delivery men, barbers (You want a haircut, better git it on Sat’day; Sunday, barber he and his family they gon’ be in church!), all there mingling with the lawyer, the undertaker, the school teacher, all equal under their God for these few hours of common prayer and jubilation.

Sunday was the day off and church was the focal point. There, a body could bring the trials and tribulations of the week, the nagging mistress, the driving boss, the spying landlady, the cheating spouse, every misery could be brought to His altar: Take your burden to the Lord and leave it there is a line from one of the congregation’s hymns.

Sunday church was also a secular gathering. When our party arrived, the children’s Sunday Bible school was still in session. We found a large group of adults standing about, greeting, hugging and complimenting each other. After quickly hugging a woman she knew, Mrs. Wilson hurried with Edith and Clara, her elder daughter, to the choir room where they would robe up for the midday service. Mr. Wilson chatted with a man he recognized. In our bright attire, we were like multi-colored birds in ever shifting groupings. I was reminded of standing around outside our AME Church at home. It looked the same on the surface but felt different. In Orangeburg everyone was well acquainted with everyone else, so the atmosphere was more settled. In Rockville Centre most of us were new migrants from different towns and cities in the South, mainly the southeastern seaboard. We were all seeking something. There was anticipation in our gazes here, a sense of expectancy that gave our groupings a liveliness, a vibrancy that had been lacking in gatherings at home, except on rare occasions.

Mr. Wilson registered me with a Deacon at the door as a guest of his family. I was one of several newcomers. At the appropriate time in the Order of Service, we were welcomed and invited to consider Mt. Pisgah our church away from home. This is your spiritual home, you’re always welcome to come here, Reverend Richardson intoned.

On hearing his words I was hit again by the fact of my exile. Instinctively, I looked around the church to see if there might be anyone from Orangeburg present. There was no one. Relieved, I thanked the minister, said I would be happy to be considered for membership in his congregation. This was met by the usual Amens and Praise the Lords. I had trouble following the sermon, something about the Resurrection. The choir sang, Were You There? a doleful spiritual about the Crucifixion of Jesus. On getting out of that church, I thought the afternoon sun had never felt better. So anxious was I to leave that I did not stay around to give the Church Secretary my information. When I did remember, almost back at the house, I rationalized that they knew I lived at the Wilsons’. That should be enough if they wanted to reach me.

I was feeling hypersensitive about the possibility of running into people from Orangeburg, about what I might say to them if our paths crossed, what questions they might ask. Being jailed had affected me in ways I did not understand, having no tools or training to help me do so. Those days in jail had killed something vital in me. They stunted what had been a budding executive intelligence, a can-do feeling of confidence in my decisions, the belief that I could go places, do