Michele Norris’ Grace of Silence
The Grace of Silence
by Michele Norris
Reviewed by Melissa Harris-Lacewell
In an era when the intimate moments of ordinary Americans are broadcast on reality television and individuals use social media networking to tell strangers about everything from their political views to their breakfast preferences, it is hard to remember the multiple ways that silence shapes our lives. Michele Norris’ captivating new memoir The Grace of Silence is a vivid reminder that in the human experience, that which is closely guarded and left unsaid is as revealing, as powerful, and as meaningful as that which is shared and spoken.
Norris is the award-winning journalist whose familiar voice and insightful analysis on National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered" accompany thousands of listeners on their evening commute. But if you think you know Norris just because you have listened to her for years, then this book will be a stunning revelation. It is a journey into the past and into the heart and spirit of someone profoundly familiar who nonetheless still has many surprises to share. Norris’ memoir began as a more traditional project of journalistic research when, inspired by the political events of the 2008 election year, she sought to understand how Americans think and talk about race. But what began as an effort to study her fellow citizens quickly became an exploration of her own family’s extraordinary journey through American racial politics in the 20th century.
Norris was raised in Minnesota, which is not an obvious location for telling a story about the black experience, but we quickly learn that Norris’ family journey is emblematic of sweeping processes of race, migration, economics, politics, and struggle that reshaped America following World War II. As part of the Greatest Generation her father enlisted in the Navy to serve his country. The military’s policies of racial segregation kept this healthy, willing young man out of battle and consigned him to a kitchen. When he returned home from duty he was not greeted as a hero, he was shunted into his “proper place” by the Jim Crow policies of the South. When he tried to walk through his country as a man, he met violence and exile. Despite the rejections and abuses, Norris’ father became a model citizen: moving to Minnesota from Alabama, working for decades for the U.S. postal service, buying and meticulously caring for his home, and raising a family of achieving children. But this is not a facile story of how individual will can triumph over institutional racism. As Norris digs deeper she uncovers the secrets and the scars that marked her father forever. She learns stories he never told and imagines the pain he never shared. As she fills in the blanks of his silences Norris comes to truly understand her father for the first time.
This is the story of a daughter and her beloved, complicated father. It is also much more than that. Norris' memoir is a clear reminder that the personal is political. Norris resists lionizing her parents and refuses to descend into sappy sentimentalism. She retains her investigative instincts so that each new revelation is treated as a piece in a larger puzzle of understanding the world that shaped her parents. Because she insists on unflinching honesty and relies on deep curiosity, this story of her family becomes a way to make concrete and personal the key themes of race and politics that have animated African American scholars for decades. Echoing the work of historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham and political scientist Cathy Cohen, Norris explains how her parents enforce rigid codes of respectable behavior in order to ensure that they were never guilty of shaming the race. Norris’ discussion of her father’s difficult struggle to reconcile his status as a veteran with his second class citizenship as a black man reveals patterns discussed by historian James McPherson and political scientist Christopher Parker. Norris’ struggle with her mother over issues of hair and emerging sexuality is indicative of issues raised by cultural critic Noliwe Rooks. Norris’ compelling discussion of her grandmother’s complicated personal and economic relationship with the degrading stereotypes of black womanhood resonates with the work of black feminist scholars like Paula Giddings and Patricia Hill Collins. In short, Norris has written a personal story, but not an individual story. Hers is the shared experience of two generations of African Americans whose labors, loves, and lives constituted the remarkable era post-WWII America. By reading this book we learn how the institutional forces of historical change were experiences as the everyday realities of black people.
Like Norris, I too am the child of an African American man who came of age in the Jim Crow South. I have felt the weight of his silences and wondered if the set of his jaw is a reaction to indignities suffered decades earlier. I too am the granddaughter of a woman who supported her family with domestic work and I am proud of how she navigated the ugly stereotypes of her race, gender, and work with such dignity. I too am the mother of a young black child who is growing up in a vastly different world, but one still marked by the danger of a million tiny acts of brutality, humiliation, and micro-aggressions that can silence her voice. Like Norris I am still wondering whether the election of President Obama means that these men, women, and children we love so much can finally speak without fear or whether they must continue to keep their secrets. Through this memoir Norris has given voice to her parents and she has recorded the story of a people.
Melissa Harris-Perry, an associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University, is completing her latest book, Sister Citizen: A Text for Colored Girls Who've Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn't Enough. She is a contributor to MSNBC.
The barns were unpainted. I wondered why Canadian farmers would allow their barns to degrade from exposure to the elements. The answer, I discovered, was government. At the time, Canada taxed painted buildings, so farmers left their structures exposed to avoid the penalty. These things make quite an impression on a child.
Yes, but what if it's the wrong impression?
My fact-checking suggests it is. Large unpainted barns were often erected in Southern Canada in the late 19th Century --- and far from degrading, some of them were surely on the Armeys' route North when Dad took Dick fishing in 1950.
The Canadian government had nothing to do with the décor of those barns.
The reasons the barns were unpainted were culture and esthetics.
A childhood misimpression casts a long shadow. At some point, Armey might have run across a different explanation. But this one fits his politics so perfectly. And now he passes that misinformation on.
Misperceptions can be useful. In the early '90s, the economics professor cast his lot with Conservative Republicans at exactly the right time, beating the drums in the House of Representatives against Bill Clinton's efforts to reduce the deficit the old-fashioned way --- by raising taxes. Later, when his side was in charge, he was one of the Republican leaders who delighted in cutting taxes and growing the federal budget.
But consistency was never Armey's strongest suit. His view of the Clinton sex scandal: "If I were in the President's place, I would not have gotten a chance to resign. I would be lying in a pool of my own blood, hearing Mrs. Armey standing over me saying, 'How do I reload this damn thing?'" This quip backfired --- it inspired some of his former students to recall episodes of sexual harassment by Professor Armey. (There is now a second Mrs. Armey.)
In 2003, after eight years as Speaker of the House, Armey resigned and joined the Washington law firm now known as DLA Piper as a senior policy advisor, or, in plain English, as a lobbyist. The job paid well --- a reported $750,000 a year. But lobbyists are not in the public eye, so he also became co-chairman of Citizens for A Sound Economy, which, the following year, became FreedomWorks. The cause grew rapidly, and, by 2008, FreedomWorks was paying Armey a salary of $550,000.
The philosophy of FreedomWorks is straightforward: “Lower Taxes. Less Government. More Freedom.” Lobbyists have more pliable philosophies. So while FreedomWorks loathes national health care --- in his book, Armey and his collaborator, Matt Kibbe, write that “the government should be concerned with protecting my liberty, not my liver” --- DLA Piper represented drug companies that, at least initially, supported health care reform. FreedomWorks opposed TARP; Armey's firm represented General Motors, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch.
Conservative bloggers noted these conflicts and attacked. Armey said he was the victim of a conspiracy --- 'I wouldn't be surprised if it [the criticism] stemmed from information put out by allies of the Obama administration” --- but in August of 2009, he resigned from DLA Piper. "I hated to walk away from that kind of money," he said. “How many times in your life, or anybody's life, do they have an opportunity to earn that kind of money when they are 69 years old?"
These days money is not his problem. The Tea Party movement is. Not its numbers --- by Armey's count, the movement is hotter than Lady Gaga. And not its message --- that is now Republican doctrine.
The problem is that Armey and Fox and the right wing bloggers have been screaming “Take back America” for so long that I don't see how they fail to incite some event that sets “real” America against illegals, deviants, liberals and, mostly and especially, the President.
It gets worse. In the courts, the Tea Party is losing, The Administration vs. Arizona. Overturning Proposition 8. A New York lesbian on the Supreme Court. With every decision that “they” lose, you can picture their rage spiking.
At some point, this kind of volatility has its catalytic moment. At a Tea Party event, someone will turn on an idiot protestor. Or a Tea Party member will decide to right some wrong. A gun will go off. And there, along with blood and death, will be the media's useless and overdue finger-pointing.
On August 28 --- the anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington --- Glenn Beck is leading a march on Washington of his own. This is worrisome. Since January 19th, 2009, Beck attacked the Tides Foundation on his show 29 times; in July, one of his fans was arrested after a shootout with the California Highway Patrol. His plan: “to start a revolution" by attacking the American Civil Liberties Union and the Tides Foundation. So Beck has called for marchers at his rally to sign an oath of non-violence. Bring your gun if you must --- it's your Constitutional right --- but don't pull the trigger.
This is the key point: Glenn Beck must make sure he cannot be held responsible for any violence.
Ditto Dick Armey.
That is why, I think, Armey uses the final 65 pages of his 245-page book to make it clear that FreedomWorks is not a leader of the Tea Party movement. Nobody is. It's local. Grassroots. FreedomWorks is around simply to support those groups and give them tips on organizing their events and meetings. Talking points, rallies, slogans --- all that comes, spontaneously, from patriots whose names we wouldn't recognize.
These pages are not terribly illuminating. They are very likely untrue. But to talk about them in journalistic or literary terms is to miss their purpose. “Give Us Liberty” may bear a publisher's imprint --- surprise: the publisher is Rupert Murdoch --- but it is not a book.
Dick Armey has, cleverly, published his legal defense.