Family Photo #5: Bob

Your photo is thin and creased, stuck between crumpled bills, receipts, and business cards. It’s forty years old and one of the few photos you took in 1968, a black-and-white Polaroid, grainy and smudgy from being taken out and passed around and put back over the years. You’re standing in front of our old house on Segrest Dr., more recently known as the former residence of well-known Dirty South rapper Lil Flip until he became just Flip, with bigger chips and a bigger crib. With your right hand raised, close to the top of your cap in the three-finger Boy Scout salute, holding your pinkie down with your thumb, you’re a slender boy of twelve or so, but you look younger than your years. The picture’s in black and white, but I can tell your socks don’t match and your khaki pants are about an inch and a half above your ankles.

Only a few months before you took this photo our family had moved to Houston, the “Energy Capitol of the World,” from Mound Bayou, Mississippi, where Dad was a surgeon in the all-black town’s only hospital, and Mama worked with the Head Start program. Isaiah Montgomery had led freedmen to develop this “autonomous” black community in 1887, and by the mid-sixties it thrived as a haven of black peace and pride, while nearby in Clarksdale, freedom fighters and local civil rights leaders plotted their freedom, protest mby protest. Dad and Mama had wanted to do their part, and Mound Bayou was the place to do it for a while, until we moved back to Texas, where Dad started his own practice. The same kinds of racial battles in Mississippi were going on in Texas. It would be fair to say all white Houstonians weren’t against integration. However, the movement needed the energy and conviction of young people like the thirteen college students from Texas Southern University who bravely and resolutely sat down to be served at the Weingarten lunch counter late one afternoon in the spring of 1960. Dad and Mama played supportive roles in the movement in Mississippi, with Dad traveling to Parchmon Prison to tend to the wounds of protesters and with Mama working in the offices of the new Head Start program. Dad had especially enjoyed his work in Mississippi, but he also was eager to start his practice closer to his birthplace. He’d heard about the battles between the Houston police and Texas Southern University students impatient with the city’s unwillingness to move faster on issues of integration and equal opportunity. Dad was a Native Texan, born in Beaumont, as were all the children except you and Enid, Dad’s youngest child with Mama. Enid was born in Nashville during the years he was doing his residency, but you had been born in Inkster, Michigan, where he drove a bus the last year before he started medical school. We had returned to Texas many times during the years Dad was completing his work toward the degree but rarely traveled past Bolivar Beach or Port Arthur or Beaumont and even then never farther than the environs of our grandparents’ backyard. So Houston with the landmark Astrodome and NASA, Mayor Louie Welch and the annual rodeo, was big and strange and flat with dogwood blossoms, mesquite and mimosa trees, the Azalea Trail, cattle and horses in the suburbs. Many Texans, black, white, and Hispanic, wore big hats and intricately designed cowboy boots, whether they’d ever sat a horse or not, but the full gun racks in the pickups and the very call letters for the radio station KIKK made me nervous and skeptical of claims that Mississippi was one of the least progressive states in its racial practices. You and Keith, who was eleven at the time, didn’t seem to mind the rifles, possibly because on Saturdays after Boy Scout meetings you two would grab your BB guns and take to the bayou behind the house to hunt squirrel or rabbit or whatever you could scare up. Dad wanted...