I remember being confused.
This was the usual Friday night routine at my mother’s new home in South Montgomery. My two best friends and I were all around 15 years old. We shot tires down the street and caught up, then one of the two friends came over to our house, mom ordered pizza and we played video games until we fell asleep.
Asking if any of them could stay over there was just a formality. This time there was a break. “I don’t know,” said mom. “I must think about it.”
Jimmy stayed over there the whole time. Why couldn’t Saladin? What did she have to think about? How long would it take? She was quiet again.
I called Saladin to let him know what was going on. I tried my best to explain, still confused, and told him I was sure she would come over. His voice changed. “I don’t know if I want to stay there now,” he said.
Mama heard me on the phone. She was shocked. “You told him?” Oh well. I was too ignorant to understand what was happening, or that it had anything to do with his being black. Little did I know that working in Montgomery for the past few decades had given me the luxury of that ignorance.
We failed to realize that we are the children of the civil rights movement, the first generation to grow up and accept the fruits of these changes as normal. I was just a kid who wanted to play with one of his friends.
It was a little different for Saladin Patterson. We had both been raised by single mothers, but when he moved from Tuskegee and went to school in Montgomery, he was one of the first black children to join the recently integrated Dalraida Elementary School. Every time he told a story about a friend at school, his mother would ask if the friend was white or black. He rolled his eyes and said it didn’t matter. Only in the past few years did he realize how different it must have been for her.
He was in high school when we met. He would grow up on racism, see places in the city where he was not allowed and hear ignorant comments – probably some from me. But his mother did what she could to protect him from most of the rest.
Life went fast for my mother. She attended a separate, rural high school in Alabama in the late 1960s, married her high school sweetheart, and had their only child as a teenager. In my early twenties, she raised me in a trailer on her parents’ small farm while she worked as a secretary and went to night school for a graduation. She always told me that my father would give us the last dollar in his pocket and then the shirt off his back if she asked. And he always did. She just tried not to ask.
She almost never interacted with anyone Black. Most of what she knew was passed on from older generations. I remember wondering why my grandfather kept calling Montgomery “Monkeytown” and decided it had to be a fun nickname that actually meant nothing.
She and I moved to Montgomery in 1983, and eventually the only house my mother would ever own. It coincided with the so-called “Todd Road Incident,” a violent confrontation between two white plainclothes police officers and black family members who had gathered for a funeral. It made national news, but neither Saladin nor I knew about it.
I found out the details recently while researching an article for the Montgomery Advertiser. Around the same time he found out when he was looking for the reboot of “The Wonder Years” that he is working on.
Saladin has spent decades producing some of the most popular shows on television. He is currently writing a reincarnation of “The Wonder Years,” which follows a middle-class black family in 1960s Montgomery. The pilot got the green light from ABC last weekend, and Saladin plans to come home to film it.
“Wonder Years” presented anew:ABC, Saladin Patterson plan restart in Montgomery the popular television show set
Saladin stayed at our house that night and many other nights. He and my mother got close. “I know your mother was in some ways a product of her time / generation when it came to racist views. I also know that it has changed over the years, ”Saladin told me this weekend. I saw this change as she spent time with colored people in the neighborhood and across town after moving to Montgomery. I watched as she questioned her own way of thinking and how her circle of friends changed.
Mom graduated and spent her 30s investigating consumer fraud cases for the Attorney General. She was once recruited by the FBI but refused because she knew it would mean moving and she didn’t want to uproot me when I made friends. Friends like Jimmy and Saladin.
When I caught up with Saladin after college, his first question was my mom. I had to bring him the news that she died young after years fighting breast cancer. I saw his face fall.
Saladin and I now both have our own children. Like many black parents, he had to sit them down and talk to them about what to do if they were confronted by a police officer. He had to explain things that I would never have to explain to my own children, at least not that way.
Mama bled for me to give me the best life she could. One of her most enduring gifts has been showing me how much people can change when they get together and really try to understand each other. I am now almost 10 years older than she was when she died. I just hope that I can continue to learn and grow as much as I did in your short life.
I hope the world can too.
Contact Montgomery Advertiser reporter Brad Harper at [email protected].
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