LITMIR.BIZ

      My mother Hooker, me, and grandmother “Mimere.” Cleveland Heights, Ohio, 1949. Photo credit: Alex Thiel. Courtesy of Chellis Glendinning.

      As a 1950s housewife, her artistic talents were now funneled toward fabled Halloween costumes, clothes crafted with a Singer sewing machine on the floor of the TV Room, hand-designed Christmas cards, and great ideas for things to do. The union of her parents, Edward Chellis Daoust and Clara Louise Bunts, had spawned backyard theater, and like my mother before me, I too crawled up the back stairs to the attic of grandmother Mimere Daoust’s house on Stillman Road to delve into the steamer trunks and don velvet dresses, ankle-length beaver coats, and fairy costumes of past smash hits among the rose bushes.

      Hooker also passed on the family Halloween tradition. From its creation in the 1910s, Stillman Road was a bona fide neighborhood, boasting unlocked doors and families sharing garden delights and practical jokes. Come October 31, Hooker and her siblings would stalk the ‘hood. If a house had lawn furniture on the front porch, they would heap it in a pile in the yard. The maples and oaks would be strung with toilet paper like tinsel on a Christmas tree. If a garden hose was to be found, one Daoust would ring the bell and aim the nozzle toward the front door while the other would wait to hear the signal that said door had opened and would switch on the faucet. I was encouraged to follow in her footsteps, and I did. And all this is not to mention my made-by-Mom costumes: one year, a window made of canvas complete with curtains and a paper black cat on the sill; the next, a pack of Lucky Strikes.

      But the Daousts had also known tragedy. In 1935 Hooker’s beloved older brother Buddy drowned in a canoe accident. Her father, Edward Daoust, died in an airplane crash on his way to Washington, D.C., six days before she gave birth to me. Too, there had been World War I, the Depression, and World War II. My upbringing was tinged by the grown-ups’ remembrances of these histories.

      And there was the tragedy that the brand-new picture box made public. In 1955 Rosa Parks refused to give her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and was hauled to jail for the “crime.” My mother was stunned. And upset. Having grown up with the one-liner “Slavery Was Abolished in 1865,” she had not been fully aware of the conditions that still prevailed. Suddenly the necessity for contributing to society instilled in her on Stillman Road flared up like a forest fire sparked by a lightning strike. That same year, my father was placed in a hospital in Philadelphia to recover from alcoholism. We rented a house in Swarthmore. There she met Presbyterian minister Joe Bishop and his parishioners, who told her about a nascent movement to demand civil rights. She spent that year learning U.S. history from the perspective of African Americans.

      When we returned to Cleveland Heights, Hooker launched the process that would define her life: she stepped up to the plate of social responsibility and became politically active.

      Picture our neighborhood: it boasted one humungous Gothic relic left over from the days of Rockefeller and Carnegie—now surrounded by blocks of newer and decidedly smaller middle-class houses, working-class homes, and apartment buildings. It was populated by WASPs, Italians, Jews, Poles, Romanians, Russians, etc. But African Americans were not welcome. The only ones who came up the hill from the Hough Area (seemingly) without fear were the maids.

      And so it was something of a scandal when my mother began inviting her Black movement comrades to the house.

      She also began to attend meetings in the inner city and to participate in organizing. In 1962 a Cleveland minister practicing civil disobedience against the construction of a segregated school was crushed to death under the treads of a bulldozer. In 1963 a bomb exploded in an Alabama church where civil rights meetings took place; four Black girls were killed. The following year in Mississippi three civil rights activists—one local and two northerners, all of whom had participated in Freedom Summer’s campaign to register Black voters—were abducted by Ku Klux Klan members and shot at close range; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam. Things were on edge. Black Nationalist leader Harllel Jones came to the same meetings that Hooker attended. Sometimes she was appreciated for her intelligence, but other times she was reprimanded for not organizing her own people to quell racist practices and dissolve racist institutions. Fortunately my mother was not burdened by the hubris that she knew everything. She took in criticism, was not uncomfortable with ambiguity—and never once considered dropping out. Following the directive, she sought out like-minded white folk in St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, where Clergy and Laity Concerned had been formed.

      In the mid-’60s Hooker met an ambitious African American man named Carl Stokes. Son of a laundryman and a cleaning lady, he had dropped out of high school, then after World War II had put himself through Cleveland Marshall College of Law, joining the Ohio bar in 1957. Now he strove for a heretofore unimaginable target: he wanted to run for mayor of Cleveland. After watching my mother in action as a thinker and organizer, he asked her to serve on his campaign committee.

      She had what are called blazing blue eyes: they radiated a hue reminiscent of a Canadian ice lake. When impressed by a person or an experience, she had a way of intensifying those blue eyes until they caused painters to abandon whatever style they were pursuing and become colorists. Knowing Carl Stokes and being asked to contribute to his run for office caused her eyes to blaze brighter than the stars in a Van Gogh sky. After all the work to pull off the historic campaign, he won. He won! History was made: Stokes was the first African American mayor of a major U.S. city.

      I try to imagine my mother’s exhilaration at the election night party, as I wasn’t in Cleveland. I had gone off to university, first for two years at Smith College, later to the University of California, Berkeley, to do what a college-age woman does: make her own way. And rebel. By the time I got to the West Coast, the generation gap was in full swing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much to rebel against: my brothers and I had been the only children on Edgehill Road allowed to cross the street by ourselves, a sorry privilege because when we got there, all the other kids were stuck on the other side. Later, at Smith, students were not permitted to stay out past 11 p.m., and then only with permission—yet I had grown up with little-to-no nocturnal restrictions. And now, for Chrissake, my own mother was a left-leaning activist!

      My political career had begun at age eight—walking around and around the collating table, stapling the resulting information/action packets, stuffing them into envelopes, stamping and organizing them according to postal code. In 1964 my mother picked me up after school on a Wednesday. We met with Blacks and whites in a parking lot in downtown Cleveland and rode all night in a bus to Washington. On Thursday we spent the whole day picketing the White House. We rode all night back to Cleveland, and I missed just one day of school. These sorts of experiences were normal fare for me. So were the mother-daughter chats we had about what she was learning and grappling with, like the one about being a white homemaker in a people-of-color movement. Or the contradiction between sending me to private school while other young people had no school at all.

      And there was the conversation about what it meant to be part of history. No excuse for sitting on the sidelines, she said. You have to do what’s there to do. First and foremost, my mother was a woman of action. She was dedicated to the electoral process—and for one brief moment I had a focal point for my own personal generation gap. She had grown up under FDR, after all; she was a flaming liberal, a “deluded” believer in working through “the system.” I, on the other hand, considered myself a radical. Maladjusted at Smith College, I had transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, and had just been released from jail after the People’s Park Mass Bust of 1969, wherein some 400 people had been hauled in opaque-windowed buses to the Santa Rita Detention Center. The phone call from my commune on Vine Street, in which I argued for a revolution and she was heartbroken, was one of just three arguments we had in our entire lives.

      In the early ‘70s Hooker traveled to Paris to stand witness to the peace talks in process and to attend a meeting between North Vietnamese representatives and U.S. peace activists. (Here began a decades-long joke with William Sloane Coffin about a very special British umbrella she had left behind in a shared taxi and he had picked up—which was only resolved after her death via an exchange of letters between him and me about said umbrella, bristling with Daoust/Coffin humor of the madcap sort.) She went on from her civil-rights and

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