CHANGE OF HEART
A Black Man
A White Woman
A Heart Transplant
and A True Love Story
MITCHELL FINK
NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR
Published by Open Books Press
Smashwords Edition
Copyright © 2011 Mitchell Fink
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
He looked almost lifelike in his dark blue Pierre Cardin suit with the burgundy pinstripes, the one he liked to wear for all the special occasions. The matching burgundy Hugo Boss tie was knotted perfectly below the starched white collar of his clean white shirt. Hundreds of roses, mostly whites, yellows and reds, surrounded his open casket, as a video of his life in streaming still photographs played on three screens high above his head.
Men in designer suits similar to his and women in stylish hats with black lace veils filed into the Abyssinian Baptist Church and walked slowly down the long incline of the sanctuary for that one last chance to touch his clasped hands, pray silently, whisper farewell, and maybe even plant a soft kiss on his forehead. By the time Rev. Kevin R. Johnson was calling him “a brother, son, colleague, a soldier in the courtroom, a voice for the voiceless, and a savior of many,” the church was filled to capacity and there was gridlock outside from the double-parked cars and limousines on Odell Park Place in Harlem.
A slight, be-speckled black man in grease-stained clothing gazed at the long line of automobiles outside the church and smiled, seemingly to himself. Then, looking at no one in particular, he drew a deep breath and shouted out, “Man, oh man, it’s great to be alive, isn’t it?”
The irony of the man’s rhetoric surely would not have been lost on Robert Dunn. It was a glorious day for the day after Memorial Day: temperatures in the 70s, tolerable humidity, and the Yankees about to start a three-game series in Kansas City. Robert no doubt would have looked at that man outside the church, and he would have seen past his obvious drunkenness and probable homelessness to his wisdom and his timing and his unconscious ability to play the role of the street-corner philosopher. Robert probably would have given the man some money, perhaps even counseling him about his life during the transaction. At a certain point, though, Robert would have looked at his watch and realized that he needed to get home. The Yankees would soon be coming to bat in the top of the first.
What Robert would never know, of course, was how woeful the Bronx Bombers looked in Kansas City that week, losing all three games to the Royals, a humiliating sweep that was followed by two of three losses in Minnesota, then another two of three losses in Milwaukee, and then amazingly another two of three losses in St. Louis. If only Robert could have spoken from wherever his soul went, he might have reasoned how better off he was missing that horrible road trip. Robert hated losing. He was a winner, a hero to the hundreds crammed inside the church; at times their spokesman, and always their champion. But on that day after Memorial Day the time had come for them to speak about him. And so they came to the pulpit offering eulogies and testament as to what he had come to mean in their lives.
Rev. Rose McCray, a childhood friend, spoke of how he had motivated her to apply to Harvard, and then to graduate school later on. “Bobby lived large,” she said. “He told me that anything is possible. He was an awesome man who blessed us with every ounce of his presence.”
Judge Leslie Crocker Snyder said that no trial attorney ever dared talk to her in open court quite like Robert. “I overruled one of his suggestions,” she recalled, “and he started yelling at me, telling me, ‘You can’t do that.’ Then he apologized for the outburst and said it would never happen again. Of course, that was a lie because it happened all the time. He delivered some of the best cross-examinations I’ve ever heard. But he also took advantage of my feelings for him. He could sweet-talk anyone.”
His cousin Kent Dunn told of how Robert had rushed into a burning house when he was a pre-teen and found six children, all under the age of seven, huddled together in one of the rooms. “Their mother had left these kids alone,” Kent Dunn said, “and Bobby carried them all out to safety. He even had the presence of mind to turn off the gas in the kitchen.” Kent Dunn called his cousin’s heroics, “the defining moment of his life.”
Many among the sea of black faces who had known Robert Dunn since childhood nodded approvingly at the recollection. But for another family, the family of white people seated down front in a church pew directly behind Robert’s own next of kin, it was the more recent events of his life that mattered most. Unlike practically everyone else in the church, these white people only knew Robert for a short time, and yet they were privy to classified information that had not yet been provided to the others. If the majority of mourners had been aware of this information, they would have rightly concluded that the real defining moment of Robert’s life was not the selfless act of a pre-teen but rather the powerful, complex and racially-charged set of circumstances that preceded his death. Change of Heart is the story of those circumstances, and how one man’s decision to confront his darkest fears and twisted beliefs made it possible for him to find the most unique kind of unconditional love, a love that could only be experienced from the inside out.
The long line of two-family aluminum-sided cream-colored houses on 112th Rd., in the St. Albans section of Queens, had the monotonous feel of civilian quarters on a military base. Separated only by narrow driveways, thin hedgerows, and tiny fenced-in front yards made of dirt and trampled-down grass, it sometimes came down to the three-wheeler bikes outside and the muted tones of the living-room drapes that kept people from walking into the wrong house at the wrong time.
Robert Dunn’s earliest memories go back to one of those houses, where he lived in the late-1950s with his older sister Sharon, and their parents, Robert Sr., and Dolores. “It seemed everyone on the block lived cookie-cutter lives,” Robert recalled of his childhood. “Most of the men usually left for work at the same time each morning. Most of their wives stayed home. Children attended either the local public or Catholic school and spent their evenings in the street, playing stick ball, punch ball, or skelly, which involved flicking bottle tops. Everyone on the block ate dinner at the same time, and because the houses were so close, we could hear our neighbors washing their dishes.”
But there was one big difference about the Dunn family that set them far apart from the other families on the block: They were black, and everyone else was white.
Being the first black family to move into a predominantly Irish-Catholic neighborhood never felt like a badge of honor to Robert’s father, like something he had to hold up as a source of pride. He was happy enough just blending in and providing for his family like the other hard-working men in the neighborhood. Robert Sr. worked in those years for a man named Jack Allen, a local merchant who started in business selling carpet remnants on the sidewalks along Jamaica Avenue, and then door-to-door, until he had enough money to open his own shop. That shop, Allen Carpet, went on to become one of the most successful carpet chains in the country, and in the process, Jack Allen and his brothers became millionaires.
Unfortunately for Robert Sr., the wealth never trickled down. A few hundred times a day, Dunn would haul the carpets through the store, unroll them to show the customers, and then roll them back up and put them away. He did earn the boss’s respect and eventually he became Jack Allen’s right-hand man. But both men knew there was a glass ceiling that Dunn would never break through.
“God, Robbie,” Allen would say to him, “if only you were white, I’d make you a partner.”
Jack Allen did find other ways to compensate his loyal worker by helping him out from time to time providing jobs for his relatives. But it was clear from the outset that Dunn would never get rich in the carpet business. He did pocket some extra cash by occasionally selling carpet from the back of the truck that Allen allowed him to drive home, but he excused the behavior as an entitlement, something he deserved. After all, he had worked his ass off during the day, so why not make a few extra dollars at night? It seemed perfectly reasonable to him, even if he wasn’t disclosing the additional income to the Internal Revenue Service.
“My father had learned to live life by not straying too far outside the margins,” was how his son remembered it.
Robert’s father also found significant support in alcohol. Like so many others before and after him, he drank to escape the pressures of work and his responsibilities at home. An absentee father, he would often come home at 4 a.m., reeking of booze and demanding that his wife get out of bed to cook him dinner. “I can still remember my mother’s shrillness as she upbraided him,” said their son. “She wound up pushing him further and further away in order to protect us.”
But to the outside world, and even to their extended family members, Dolores kept a stoic front. She’d be out with her young son Robert, and people she knew would politely ask, “How are you?”
And Dolores’ answer was always the obligatory simple word, “Fine.”
Although they weren’t exactly her son’s first words, as soon as he heard his mother say “fine,” he got right in her face to challenge her. “If you are fine,” he would say, “then how come you and daddy are fighting all the time?”
Robert wasn’t yet three when his parents separated. Dolores Dunn and her two young children remained in the house on 112th Rd., and Robert Dunn Sr. moved into his mother’s house nearby. A similar two-family house, with his grandparents living downstairs and his aunt, uncle and two cousins on the top floor, Robert at least felt welcomed by his grandparents and the rest of the family.
But it was his father, more than anyone, who didn’t have a clue as to how to deal with his young son. When he wasn’t drinking, Robert Sr. was a quiet and withdrawn individual, especially around his family. “You would never know my father was so haunted by demons unless you were there to witness his behavior after a few drinks,” Robert said, looking back. “It was then that his hostility came to the surface, and it became obvious to me that my father didn’t care to be around me.”
“My father didn’t know how to deal with Bobby’s hyperactivity,” Sharon Dunn recalled. “And for Bobby it was the first in a long line of rejections. Bobby was always loveable, but he gave the appearance of being wild and unruly. Today they would call it Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD. And for my brother it definitely went un-diagnosed.”
But the rest of the family took a lot of interest in the Dunn children, Robert recalled, “Because we were from a broken home. Theirs was a house of intact families. We’d walk from church, and my grandmother would make us say hello to everyone we passed. ‘Howdy Doo’ to everyone. Not just hello. It had to be more. ‘How do you do?’ Or, ‘Howdy Doo.’
“My sister would say, ‘Nana, we don’t say that.’
“And grandmother would say, ‘Oh, but you will say it today.’”
As young Robert shuttled back and forth between houses, it didn’t take him long to realize that there were many more black families living on his grandmother’s block, and how differently he was being treated from one street to the next.
“From the time I started going out on the street in front of my mother’s house, none of the kids wanted to play with me,” he said. “I’d hear them say, ‘Don’t play with that tar baby’ or ‘that crispy critter,’ or ‘that nigger.’ I’d go back to my mother and ask her, ‘Why are they saying that?’ and, of course, she’d try to explain it as best she could, telling me not to pay them any mind. But it still confused me, and made me very angry.”
Robert tried his best to gain acceptance from the other children. He would often take his mother’s jewelry or coins from her pockets and give it to kids in the neighborhood, trying in a way to buy them. But it rarely worked, and as Robert got older he began to understand why. He was the black kid, and if he wanted to play anywhere beyond the few feet of sidewalk in front of his house, he did so at his own peril. His mother even tried to protect him by making him wear a harness attached to the backyard clothesline, to keep him from straying. Ultimately that didn’t work either.
One summer evening when Robert was an adventurous six-year-old, as the neighborhood glowed under the soft reddish hue of dusk, he grabbed the toy air gun he’d received the previous Christmas and walked around the corner to a construction site on 196th St. Three houses were being built on the site. They were larger than the ones on his block, and with the workers having gone for the night there was plenty of room for him to crawl around the dirt, shooting his air gun at imaginary Nazis and gunslingers from the Old West. He was just a kid in his own fantasy world, blasting away at targets that weren’t there, and never noticing for one second that five older white kids had crept up behind him. The trance was broken when they suddenly began pelting him with dirt and rocks.
“You little nigger,” one said. “What are you doing here?”
Robert dropped his air gun, grabbed a few rocks of his own, and began throwing back at his twelve-year-old tormentors. “I was outnumbered,” he said, “and as they closed in, I took off into a half-built house and scampered up a wooden staircase to an open landing on the second floor.
The white boys chased me inside and cornered me. A few climbed an exterior wall to get me—they didn’t even bother taking the staircase,” he said. “I promised them that if they let me go, I’d go straight home.”
“You’re not going anywhere, spook,” one boy said.
Robert couldn’t recall which boy threw the first punch. “All I remember is trying to fight back despite the odds against me,” he said. “They were on top of me, hitting me and kicking me repeatedly. Then one of the boys said, ‘Let’s throw him.’
They grabbed me by the arms and legs and swung me back and forth,” he said. “The whole side of the house was open—no windows anywhere, just open space. They swung me once, twice, and on the third swing they let go. I flew out of the open house into the warm night air, and landed in the basement area, two stories down, on a soft pile of excavated dirt. I can’t actually recall if I lost consciousness when I hit the ground, but I definitely had the wind knocked out of me. As I lay there, motionless, I could see one of the kids looking down on me from the landing. I think they were afraid, and they took off.”
Two weeks later, Robert’s sister Sharon was on her way home from Betty’s Laundromat, pushing a cart of folded laundry—the Dunns had a washing machine in the house, but no dryer. As she passed the same construction site, a group of older white kids stopped her and pulled her into one of the unfinished houses. They felt her breasts and pulled her clothes off, trying to get her panties down. She screamed and cried and tried her best to fight back until, finally, they let her go. She wasn’t raped, but she came home crying. Robert was too young to understand the sexual connotations of the attack, but neither child ever set foot near that construction site again.
That fall, Robert’s mother enrolled her son in the first grade at St. Pascal Babylon, a Catholic school just a few blocks from home. Most of the black kids in St. Albans went to public school, but Dolores thought her two children would receive a better education in more regimented surroundings. Sharon was a much easier child, and she thrived at St. Pascal, never feeling isolated or singled out.
“But I might as well have gone to school with a bull’s eye on my back,” said Robert. “I was hyperactive and hadn’t gone to kindergarten, so by the time I entered first grade, I was unruly, undisciplined, and unfamiliar with behaving in a controlled environment.”
There were other African-American kids at St. Pascal, and as more and more of them enrolled in the 1960s, their presence seemed to become a threat. “The nuns had determined that we were a breed apart—people who were raised differently, presumably more prone to violence in reaction to authority,” said Robert. “They felt they had to crack down on us, to teach us who was boss.
So the nuns would beat the crap out of me,” he said. “And I’m not talking about a whack on the hand with a ruler. Once four nuns shoved me into the broom closet, and all four of them took turns hitting me. I remember it clearly. The room was dark, with wooden shutters on the doors—little slats that let in tiny rays of light. The nuns kneed me. They pushed me back and forth, saying, ‘We’ll show you.’
“I had nightmares for years of these white hands catching light through the slats—chalky hands that wrote with chalk and never wore nail polish,” he said, “menacing hands with crooked fingers.”
When the school year ended, Dolores turned her two children over to the Fresh Air Fund, the independent nonprofit agency that had been providing summer vacations to inner city youth since 1877. Sharon was sent to live with a family in Chappaqua, a burgeoning upper middle class community in northern Westchester County. On her first day there, her host family threw a party at one of the community swimming pools in the area, and they invited all the neighborhood kids and their mothers, who came with beach bags full of towels, swimming trunks, snorkels, and water wings.
Sharon wasn’t much of a swimmer, but she jumped right into the pool. As she began flailing around in the water, some of the mothers panicked, yelling at their children to get out of the pool, yanking their skinny arms to pull them away from Sharon.
“My child is not getting back into the pool until it’s drained and cleaned,” one mother snapped at the host. Other hysterical mothers agreed. Sharon asked if she could use the phone to call home, and she was back in Queens by the next day. The experience devastated her.
The same day Sharon left for Chappaqua Robert boarded a train and was told he was going to Pennsylvania. No representative of the Fresh Air Fund, and not even his mother realized that the identification tag around Robert’s neck had been improperly filled out. When other kids got off the train in Pennsylvania, he was told to stay aboard. Four other boys also had the wrong tags, and the five of them ended up in Virginia.
The train platform in Virginia was crowded with white families picking up black children with correct tags. As the organizers herded kids to their assigned destinations, someone in authority suddenly realized that five boys had no place to go.
“We became like slaves on an auction block, standing side by side on an elevated platform and waiting for someone—anyone—to take us,” said Robert. “I was just a kid, but I can still remember the man holding his hand over my head and shouting, ‘Okay, who wants this one?’”
A woman whose friend was picking up another child spoke up. “I’ll take him.”
“My mother had no idea I wasn’t in Pennsylvania, much less in Virginia with a woman who had no connection at all to the Fresh Air Fund,” said Robert. “Too young to realize that I should be frightened, I was just grateful that someone, anyone, was feeding me and showing me to a room. But that night, after I was already in bed, the woman’s husband came home, and I heard a muffled argument erupt. Then the man came storming into my room, switched on the light, stared at me, and screamed back to his wife, ‘You said he was a spic. He’s a nigger. You don’t know the difference between a spic and a nigger? He’s a nigger.’”
The woman was so petrified by her husband’s reaction that she found another home for Robert the next day. The home turned out to be a farm, also in Virginia, which was run by another white woman and her fifteen-year-old nephew. They already had six black children living there. Robert Dunn became the seventh.
But this wasn’t the relaxing rural experience he was expecting. “The woman and her nephew used us to care for their animals and tend their fields,” he said. “I remember how the nephew broke a branch from a tree and whittled it until it was thin enough to crack in the air over our heads. That was his way of keeping us in line.”
And the living conditions on the farm were no better, as the seven boys had to share one outhouse and had no access to running water or plumbing. Instead, there was a tub on one corner of the roof that collected rainwater. To shower, one of the boys had to stand under the tub, while another boy, up on the roof, tipped the tub to pour the water on him, while the white woman scrubbed him with a hard brush. “Let me get the dirt and some of that black off you,” she’d say. “Boy, by the time you go home, you’ll be three shades lighter.”
“For three weeks, I endured the woman’s scrubbings, her nephew’s taunts, and unpaid servitude on the farm. Then I returned home to a neighborhood in transition,” said Robert, happy to recall the thought of being back in his own environment. “As black families moved into the neighborhood, white families moved out. Within a few years, blacks were the majority on our block, and as our numbers increased, so did the tension between the races. Soon there were constant racial brawls, with cousins and older brothers from both sides coming into the neighborhood to battle.
In 1966, when I was eleven,” he said, “the nuns at St. Pascal expelled me from school. My mother didn’t want to send me to the public school in St. Albans, so she sold the house in Queens, gave some of the proceeds to my father, and used the rest of the money to buy a house in Roosevelt, Long Island. By then, my attitude about whites was solidified: they were the enemy.”
In 1939, Helen Doherty and her three-year-old daughter Betty were riding through their predominantly Irish-Catholic neighborhood in the Bronx, off on a trip down to the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan, when the bus suddenly struck a steel pillar underneath an elevated subway platform.
There was some jostling inside the bus, and more than a few gasps, but amazingly no one was hurt even a little. Still, the bus driver insisted that everyone remain seated in place so he could check the exterior of the bus and then find the nearest policeman.
Although it would take the New York City Transit Authority another forty-four years just to begin the process of outfitting its buses with air-conditioners, the passengers that day in 1939 didn’t become openly hostile as the temperature inside the bus began to climb. Of course, that didn’t stop some of them from eyeing one another, almost suspiciously, as New Yorkers are often prone to do during a surprise communal experience, as though the accident might have been caused by the pillar, or another motorist, or maybe even someone on the bus other than the driver.
Like any curious three-year-old, Betty looked around too. The men in their suits and ties and dark narrow-brim hats and the women in their floral dresses and made-up lips looked mostly like the kind of people Betty had observed since infancy—white, working-class urbanites who always dressed for success when venturing downtown, whether they were on their way to work, or to Radio City Music Hall to see a big Hollywood movie and a spectacular stage show, or even on their way to the zoo to feed the animals and eat some cotton candy.
And then Betty saw him, the one man on the bus who looked nothing like his fellow-travelers. This man was definitely African-American, and he was staring directly at Betty. He was probably the first black person she ever saw up close, and the very idea that he was looking in her direction frightened her. But she couldn’t turn away either, and as he held her gaze, beads of sweat dripping down his face in the intolerable heat, Betty shrank closer to her mother, even more terrified. Sensing her little girl’s upset, Helen Doherty wrapped her arms around her little girl, pulled her tight, and whispered in her tiny ear, “You never have to be afraid of a black person. His heart is as red as yours.”
Betty never forgot her mother’s reassuring words, and many, many years later no one would live to appreciate that more than Robert Dunn.
Helen Doherty, a stately woman with deep-set green eyes and the thin, angular face of a fashion model, may have known instinctively how to protect her children while teaching them racial tolerance, but she could not ultimately protect herself from infectious disease, and in 1940, barely a year after that harmless bus accident in the Bronx, she died of tuberculosis, leaving her husband, William, as sole care of their three children: four-year-old Betty, her nine-year-old sister Helen, and their three-year-old brother, Billy Jr.
Parenting was not something that came easily to William Doherty, an Irish immigrant and a skilled laborer who became a New York City subway repairman and then took on a second job working at night in a lipstick factory when it became apparent that the war raging in Europe would sooner or later involve the United States. Even at four, Betty knew how hard her father was working just to provide for his family, and she even managed to figure out a way to help him.
“People would become very charitable on holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, and I remember that Thanksgiving walking alone up to the Grand Concourse,” Betty said of the expansive Bronx thoroughfare, “and asking for charity, with my hand out. Some people did give me money, and when I gave the money to my father and told him I got it asking for charity on the Grand Concourse, he cracked me across my face. He was a very proud man, and the thought that his baby daughter was begging for money in the neighborhood embarrassed him, and devastated him.”
In fact, William Doherty needed significantly more money than his youngest daughter could ever collect, and it didn’t take long before the strain of two jobs, coupled with single parenthood and heavy drinking, became much too much for him to handle. One night he gathered his three children together and told them they’d all been exposed to tuberculosis, the disease that had taken their mother. He said that because TB had grown to epidemic proportions, resulting in thousands of deaths, perhaps the kids would be better off living in a more rural setting. Betty took that to mean the family was moving, and she remembered feeling excited by the prospect of this new adventure.