Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [16]
My father’s personality is just as strong as my mother’s. Despite their differences in interests and background, as a young man my father, with his broad smile, smooth brown skin, and curly black hair, must have been quite appealing to her. He was handsome (though “Handsome” was the nickname that went to his older brother, Ralph), energetic, and athletic. And he probably served as an antidote to the sobriety of the Elliott family. Where my mother was shy and reserved, my father was always outgoing and charming. Still, they were never an odd couple so much as a matched set.
My father loved to tease, to make us laugh, and to laugh at his own jokes even when others did not. I recall once having incurred my father’s wrath. Late at night, when my mother was away, I was whining about having to share my bed with two visiting nieces and nephews, having been used to sleeping only with my sister. My father took objection to being kept up past his bedtime to listen to my protest. I learned then that my father had his limits too. His one demand of us as small children was that we be quiet. “You all cut out that noise,” he would bellow in the evenings. Daddy still has great charm about him and the ability to relax and feel at home in almost anyone’s company. Yet he can also be detached and reserved. Like my mother, he is a product of his time—a time when fathers were not necessarily expected to be emotionally available twenty-four hours a day.
My earliest clear memory of him is watching him getting ready to go to the Sunday night musicals where he would sing tenor with his quartet, the Oklahoma Spirituals. Though as a farmer he was in the home much of the day, he did not work alongside us in the fields. He drove the tractors and tended the cows. On Sunday, however, we were all together. He would shave his face of all but his thick mustache and slick back his hair with Murray’s pomade. The orange tin of hairdressing was for his exclusive use. In the background, Negro spirituals played on the radio broadcast from a station in Muskogee. “Be quiet so I can hear the announcements,” my father commanded. The “memory lane” segment was a “must hear” for him. The announcer told who had died that week and which of the black mortuaries “has the body.” All the children were dressed, heeding our mother’s admonition to sit quietly. My mother, having concluded her responsibility to us, was also finished with her routine. But my father was a different story. He regularly finished his routine as the rest of the family waited, fully dressed. No one dared urge him to quicken his pace. We’d just wait patiently for him to enter the living room and ask of those gathered, “Are you all waiting for me?” My mother never learned to drive a car. Had she mastered this skill, I suspect that we would have waited at church for my father’s arrival.
My father’s most memorable church activity was his singing. I often anticipated hearing him sing “Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior” in his untrained falsetto voice. This voice was inviting and pleasant yet so unlike his speaking voice, it seemed completely unreal. As a child, I could not understand how my father’s gravelly speaking voice could turn to a high-pitched singing voice. By the same token, my achievements at school were a source of pride and delight for my father. Though he expected me to do well in school, he never understood my attachment to learning. And I am certain that he never saw the significance of it for my future. I was, after all, always his “baby girl.”
Every Sunday the family went to Sunday school at Lone Tree Missionary Baptist Church, the church my paternal grandfather had helped to establish. And on every first and third Sunday we went there to church. The alternating Sunday church service was a part of the rural tradition of the “circuit” minister who pastored two or more churches and visited them on a rotating basis.