IN THE BLINK OF AN EYE

I was irritated at mother the morning of Wednesday January 16, 1963 over something very minor. So minor that I can't remember today what I was mad about. Mother was lying in my bed next to the dining room door. She looked up and told me goodbye as I walked by the foot of the bed. I never failed to kiss her when I left for school but I didn't kiss her that morning. This was something that would bother me for a long time. I try to tell my wife and kids that I love them on a frequent basis. We are not guaranteed anything and life can end in an instant. Daddy, my cousins Roy and Alton and my brother Mark were already waiting in the car when I walked out the front door. The front passenger seat next to daddy was empty as I hopped into our white Ford Falcon station wagon. Daddy was quiet as we drove the few blocks to our school on Greenwood Avenue. Roy remembered him absentmindedly driving past the school entrance. He said "Uncle Bill, you missed the school". Daddy turned the car around and according to Roy drove past the school again. Roy said that he told him a second time that he missed the entrance to the school. Daddy turned around and this time he finally found his way into the school driveway. If it happened this way I don't remember.

The only class I remember that day at Bailey school was band class because I was sitting in the drum section when I heard the school secretary, Miss Greer, make an announcement over the school intercom. She asked for everyone that had a transistor radio to bring them to the office immediately. Laughing, I turned to the boy next to me and said something like "Yeah, I'm sure everybody is going to do that". It never occurred to me that this announcement was meant for me, my brother and cousins. Mother and daddy died around ten o'clock that morning and it was all over the news. Miss Greer didn't want us to hear about it that way. At lunch I walked down to the cafeteria in the basement. I ate at the same time as Roy but he wasn't there. Jerry Perry was standing in the lunch line and I asked him if he knew where Roy was. Jerry and Roy were good friends. With a smirk on his face he said that Roy was in trouble because he had hit a little girl in the face and that he was in Mr. Wade's office, who was our principal, crying over it.

Mr. Wade was a small slender bald headed man who reminded me a lot of Harry Truman. Miss Greer was our school secretary and she was a young, full figured blonde, who was very popular with the students. Jerry was always cutting up so I wasn't sure if he was kidding. I ran up to Mr. Wades office and as soon as I walked through the door I saw Roy sitting in a straight back wooden chair. He was crying with Mr. Wade and Miss Greer standing behind the chair trying to console him. A feeling of panic rose up in me because I knew something bad had happened. I asked him what was wrong. Mr. Wade and Miss Greer were not prepared to see me. They told me that Roy wasn't feeling well and I needed to go back to the lunch room. I begged Roy to tell me what was wrong but he was too upset to talk. Miss Greer had heard about my parents death on the news and she had called Roy to the office and this is how he found out. Which explains why she was asking everyone to turn in their transistor radios that day.

About this time I felt a presence behind me. I turned and saw daddy's 1st cousin, Howard Wilkinson and I knew then that something was very wrong. There was no way that he would be at my school in the middle of the day unless something bad had happened. Howard told me that he was there to take Roy home. Roy was the oldest and I guess the adults thought that he could handle things better than the rest of us. Howard wasn't expecting to see me and he told me to go back to class. I was determined that I was going home even if I had to walk. We argued back and forth for a while until he realized that he was fighting a losing battle. Howard turned to Mr. Wade and told him to dismiss Alton and Mark because he would be taking all of us home. I don't know what they were thinking. Did they really think that I wouldn't find out about my parents at some point before the day was over? The news was already out. I was told that after we left the teachers were crying as they told their students the news about my parents. Teachers and students were crying and hugging each other all over the school.

When we reached Howard's car Roy, Alton, and Mark sat in the back seat and again I sat in the front. As we were driving away I was begging Howard to tell me what had happened. Without saying a word he drove to the end of the school driveway and stopped. He was staring off in the distance as I continued to plead with him to tell me if something had happened to daddy or my mom. I am sure that he was trying to think of the best way to tell me the terrible news. I then asked him if something had happened to mother. He finally he looked at me and said both. I was feeling sheer panic at this point. He turned to me and in earnest asked me if I could be a man. Hesitantly I said yes, I guess so. Again, with more firmness in his voice he asked me if I could be a man. Almost shouting I said yes, I could. He then told me that daddy had shot my mother and then shot himself. Fearing the worst I asked if both of them were dead and he said yes. Howard's words hit me like a ton of bricks. I lurched forward with my head resting on the dashboard wailing like a wounded animal. The whole situation was so surreal to me that it seemed like it was happening to someone else. It was as close to an out of body experience as I have ever had.

As we pulled up to our house a crowd of people ran toward us. The only one I remember was Aunt Catherine who was the first to reach me sobbing as she hugged me. The yard and house was packed with people and almost everyone was crying. There were relatives that I had not seen in ages and relatives I didn't even know. There were also neighbors and people I had never seen in my life. My grandmother, who we called mama was walking aimlessly through the house weeping and talking out of her head. Every now and then she would say something that I had no way of knowing at that time and my aunt Didi would tell her not to talk like that. It might have been about the fact that mother was five months pregnant, which I was unaware of at the time. My mothers side of the family was very private about their personal lives and things like this were not discussed openly. I couldn't quit crying and mama would say, "listen to that poor baby crying for his mother". Mark was ten days short of his eighth birthday and I don't think I saw him cry at all. I just believe that he was so young that he really didn't grasp what was happening. He looked lost. Mark would ultimately pay a higher price than me because he was so young. Our life was chaotic after mother and daddy died and he would have to put up with the chaos a lot longer than I did.

I remember my Aunts Viola, Margaret, Lillian, and Freddie, which were all of daddy's sisters huddled together at our dining room table holding each other and crying on each others shoulders. My mothers older brother Uncle Doug and some other men were still cleaning the front bedroom where my parents had died. Curious, I opened the door and walked in. Luckily they were finishing up and there was no blood left on anything that I could see. They were putting a mattress on the bed and when they saw me I was shooed away. There was a constant flow of people carrying tray's, plates and bowls full of food. We had enough food to feed an army over the next few days. Grief can be a strange thing. One minute you are weeping from the very depths of your soul and the next moment you are laughing. Or you just feel numb and devoid of any emotion. I would run the full gamut of grief over the next few days and weeks. One thing that stands out in my mind was how beautiful the day was. The sky was a deep blue without a cloud in the sky. For some reason bad things seem to happen on pretty days it seems. In addition to the death of my parents, there was the Kennedy assassination, September 11th 2001, and the near death of my daughter Misty. These things all happened on beautiful days.

This is what I have learned talking to my grandmother, Didi, and from other sources over the years about the sequence of events that day. After we left for school mother got up out of my bed and got into Didi's larger bed in the front bedroom. Before lying down she placed an Elvis album on the Hi-Fi, as we called a record player in those days, and was listening to it as she fell asleep. Mother loved Elvis and she had seen all of his movies. She had taken me to see several of them over the years. Mama told my sister Donna that she looked at my mother lying there listening to Elvis as she walked through the bedroom that morning and she had a smile on her face. My sister Donna remembered the bed being at an angle in front of the fire place hearth. She said that mother liked to lay on the side of the bed nearest the large window facing Mckennie Avenue. After returning from dropping us off at school daddy undressed and lay down next to her. After a while he got up, putting on his pants, and walked to the back room to get his pistol out of the pocket of his trench coat. It was a Saturday night special .22 caliber, nine shot revolver. He had given this gun to mother because she had to make night deposits at Third National Bank on Church Street. For whatever reason she gave this gun back to him just before she was killed.

Daddy walked through the bathroom into Aunt Arda's bedroom and then walked through the living room. As he walked through the big wooden doors into the front bedroom he closed the doors behind him and locked them. There were two sets of these doors. One set opened into the dining room and the other opened into the living room. Daddy left the doors to the dining room unlocked. He then sat down at a dresser on the right side of the bed where mother was sleeping. How long he sat here Is not known but there were a number of cigarette butts left in the ash tray. Which means he probably sat there for quite a while building up courage. At some point he stood up, leaned over on the bed and fired three bullets into the left side of mothers head, just behind the ear. Almost immediately daddy shot himself in the right temple and fell backwards across the fireplace hearth.

The room my parents died in

 A .22 caliber bullet can produce a devastating injury to the human brain. I have heard that this is the preferred weapon of mafia hit men because the bullet is of such small caliber and low velocity that it penetrates the head but doesn't create an exit wound. It simply bounces around inside the skull, ravaging the brain in the process. On top of that, daddy was using hollow point bullets. For those who don't know, a hollow point makes a small entrance wound and a large exit wound. As a security officer I am supposed to use hollow points because the bullets disintegrate inside the body. Ball ammunition will pass through the body and can hit an innocent person in the line of fire. Police officers also use hollow point ammunition for this reason. So you can imagine what the death scene looked like. Didi told me that the bullets blew my mothers eyeballs out. I am being graphic in order to illustrate the horror that my grandmother encountered when she walked into that bedroom and found my parents.

Mama, my granddaddy, and Aunt Arda , granddaddy's sister were in the kitchen when they heard the shots. Mama turned to granddaddy and asked if the kids were home. She told me that the shots sounded like firecrackers and she thought that maybe one of us had not gone to school that day and we were firing firecrackers.. Granddaddy was almost totally deaf and didn't hear the shots. Mama walked through the dining room to the the big sliding doors that opened into the front bedroom. She told me later that she didn't see daddy when she opened the doors. This was strange because she would have had to walk over or around him to get to where mother was. Mama said that she walked to the foot of the bed and shook mothers foot but she was wouldn't wake up. She was probably in a state of shock at this point. Mama had to have seen the blood and gore. She ran into the kitchen and tried to telling granddaddy that something was wrong with my mother. Granddaddy told me that he thought that daddy had hurt her so he grabbed a chair to hit him with. Of course he put it down when he realized what had happened.

Didi was taking her 10:00 AM coffee break at Southern Bell telephone company about three blocks away. IThe telephone company was at the corner of Douglas Avenue and Gallatin Road. Southern Bell was the forerunner of South Central Bell. She said that a powerful feeling of dread suddenly came over her. Didi said that it felt like all of the blood drained from her body. She ran to the phone and called home. When mama answered she told Didi that my mother wouldn't wake up. Didi told her to try again and waited on the phone until she came back. When mama returned she said that she still couldn't wake her up. Didi then told her that she was leaving work and coming home. Unknown to Didi, in her haste to get home she left the receiver off the hook. Didi couldn't drive and wouldn't learn how until she was about forty years old. She told her supervisor that there was an emergency at home and could he gave her a ride.

When they pulled up in front of the house Didi jumped out of the car and ran through the front door into the living room. Upon entering the house she tried to open the big wooden doors that opened from the living room to the bedroom but daddy had locked them. She then ran around to the other doors leading in from the dining room where she saw daddy lying on the floor in a pool of blood but she didn't see mother. Like mama, she was probably in a state of shock and had tunnel vision. Didi tried to call the police but was unable because she had left the phone off of the hook at work. She then ran next door where she was able to get in touch with the police and an ambulance. In those days there was no 911. Each emergency service had their own numbers. Ambulances were owned and maintained by private funeral homes. The ambulance attendants only had a basic knowledge of first aid. The idea was to quickly transport the patient to the nearest hospital before they died. The profit motive led to some dangerous situations when rival funeral homes would race each other to the scene of an accident. This could result in some pretty bad wrecks involving ambulances.

The police and the news media descended on our house. Didi was never fond of Nashville's police department. She would disgustedly tell me how many police officers seemed to be there for no other reason than to gawk. An article was released on the front page of the Nashville Banner that afternoon about my parents. I was shielded from the news over the next few days but I was told that the story ran on the three local news channels that evening and it was on the radio. The story was on the front page of the Tennessean the following morning with a picture of my Uncle Doug being led away weeping by two friends. The murder-suicide occurred around ten o'clock and we probably got home sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 PM. The police, coroner, and news media couldn't have been gone long when we arrived home from school. The case was pretty open and shut. Later that afternoon I was composed enough that I walked to Daniel-Hoppe Rexall drugstore to buy a cherry coke at the soda fountain. They only cost a nickle then and I just felt like I had to get away for a moment. While I was sitting there two strangers were sitting next to me talking about the death of my parents. I never let on to them who I was.

Mother and daddy died on Wednesday and their bodies weren't ready until Thursday. On Wednesday night mama and I had a sleepless night. She sat next to my bed holding my hand as we comforted each other. Although my grandmother was not my mother she was the closest link I had to her. We talked all night. Mama sat in a chair next to my bed staring into the darkened bedroom where my parents died. She would do this night after night. She told me that she saw an angel standing over the spot where mother died on one of those nights. On Thursday I refused to go to the funeral home for the visitation. Everybody tried to get me to go but I couldn't bring myself to do it. One of my adult female cousins, who was part of Hughes side of the family tried very hard to talk me into going to the funeral home. She was granddaddy's niece and the daughter of my uncle Elmore Hughes,who was a railroad engineer. He married one of granddaddy's sisters but she died before I was born but I remembered Uncle Elmore very well. Many of the Hughes lived on Cahal Street in East Nashville and the whole family was very religious.

My cousin kept telling me that my mother was very beautiful and I would regret it if I didn't go. Mama was my champion because she came to my defense. She told her and everyone else to leave me alone. She refused to go to the funeral home herself because she didn't think that she could handle it. I wont lie, part of the reason I didn't want to go was my fear of death and the sight of dead people. The other reason was that I just didn't want to see my mother like that. I wanted to remember her in life. Didi took pictures for my benefit and it would be years before I could bring myself to look at them. In the pictures mother doesn't really look the way I remember her. Her head appears to be very swollen and daddy looks like a mannequin.

Didi told me that when she arrived at the funeral home that afternoon to make arrangements both sides of the family were there. Gale Robinson, who was Didi's lawyer, and an owner of Phillips-Robinson Funeral Home, told everyone that before anything was done a decision should be made about Mark and I. In other words the decision needed to be made about who was going to take custody of us? There was silence in the room until Didi spoke up and said that we would probably be more comfortable staying where we already were. Mama told me that she wanted to become our guardian but the court wouldn't let her because of her age. I will always be grateful to Didi for taking guardianship of us. She was an attractive single mother with two children and was only thirty-five years old. There was plenty of life ahead for her. Now in one senseless tragic moment she had two more children to raise.

In 1963 it was a man's world because most white women were housewives. Black women, for the most part, didn't have the luxury of staying home. It took both the man and the woman in a black family to make it. Divorce wasn't as common back then so a single divorcee like Didi had it rough without a man in their lives. Didi was fortunate because she was able to live with her parents and she had a good job for a woman. Although she still wasn't paid the same as her male counterparts. If women worked it was in the traditional jobs reserved for them. Such as clerical jobs, nursing, teaching, or retail. I didn't know until I was twenty-one years old that Didi raised us on her own income and was putting our social security and daddys veterans checks into a trust fund for us. After all of daddy's debts were paid there was only 10,000 dollars to be divided between his four biological children. Unfortunately daddy never adopted my sister Donna who was my mothers child by a previous marriage and she was left out of the settlement. A trust fund with 2,500 dollars each was set up for Mark and I. We were to receive it when we reached the age of twenty-one. Because of Didi I had almost 9,000 dollars and Mark had well over 10,000 when we were finally eligible to receive it. Twenty five hundred dollars was worth a lot more in 1963 than it is today. There are not many people on this earth that would have done what Didi did for us.

Unfortunately the relationship between Didi and I was never what I would call warm or close. It was pretty turbulent and we never had good chemistry. She tried to make it work but I was determined that no one would ever replace my mother. Years later Didi told me of an experience that she had one night just after mother was buried. She was sleeping on a pullout couch in the dining room. Didi said that she was lying there awake and staring into the room where mother died. The big wooden doors were open about twelve inches. Suddenly mother appeared in the opening between the doors. She was standing there in the gown that she had been buried in. Didi said that she wasn't frightened but instead it gave her a feeling of peace. It was as if mother was telling her everything was okay and there was nothing to worry about. I was shocked when Didi told me this story. She was the last person in my mind that would ever have had a supernatural experience and she was always so skeptical of things like that. This is what gives the story a feeling of authenticity to me.

The funeral was at 10:30 AM on Friday morning January 18 and burial was at 11:30 AM. My parents were buried side by side at Nashville's Woodlawn cemetery. I was told that the funeral home was packed. There was even an overflow crowd in the yard during the service. My parents had plenty of friends and relatives that came to the funeral along with people that came out of respect for Mark and I such as our teachers and fellow students. There was even a celebrity there by the name of Moon Mullican,. He was a country music singer that daddy had somehow befriended. Many Black people who loved and respected my parents were also there. They stood in the front yard of the funeral home during the service. The funeral procession extended as far as the eye could see. I was told that it was one of the largest funerals, as far as crowd size, that Phillips-Robinson funeral home had ever had to that point.

I have never had any regrets about not going to the funeral and I have only been to their graves a handful of times in my life. Most of the times it was because of a relative, or friends burial in the cemetery. Or we were at Woodlawn Funeral home to pay our respects to someone who had passed. Anybody who has lost a loved one will probably agree with me on this. The worse time in the grieving process is when everyone leaves and you are left to grieve alone. During the three days from the time of their deaths to the day of their burial the house was full of people and distractions. Most of the people were no longer around the day after the funeral. Relatives and friends would come by to check on us from time to time but I never felt as lonely in my life as I did during those days and weeks after they died. Mama was my pillar of strength. Every night she would sit by my bed and we would talk until I fell asleep. On Saturday morning I woke up and mama was gone. I asked why she was gone and was told that she had had a heart attack during the night. She had been rushed to Baptist hospital but I was told that she would be okay. Little did I know that this would be the first of five heart attacks. The fifth would kill her. She was diagnosed with heart failure but I think she simply died of a broken heart.