January 19, 1979: Remembering the Barbara Lamar Car Accident

January 19, 1979: Remembering the Barbara Lamar Car Accident

By Riché Deianne Richardson, written January 19, 2008

I have never forgotten this day, nor have I forgotten what happened on it and the name of the woman who hit us-though hit is not the right word for describing what to me to this day remains an illogical and inexplicable incident, or rather, accident. In fact, every year, every new year since then, after all of the celebration passes, I hold my breath some, and wait to get past this one mountain in the first month of every new year. Only after the anniversary passes can a new year really begin for me. Next year, I can’t believe that thirty years will have gone by since that cheery afternoon that my grandparents took me to McDonald’s to buy me the coloring book calendar that I had wanted and wanted, a perfect canvas for the Crayola 64 that had been one of my first grade dreams. It’s been like this since that afternoon of January 19, 1979, the year that I was seven and a second grader at St. John the Baptist Catholic School in Montgomery, Alabama. It is one of the ways that I tell time and mark the passing of every year. The searing metal that day was doomed to sear that moment onto my mind, possibly, for the rest of my life. A few years ago, I was amazed that the anniversary once passed by without my remembering, and on January 20, proclaimed my freedom from the terrible memory forever. But then, the next year, it was back again. It is an incident that scared the living daylights out of me. Yet, I can’t say that it hurt me, or anyone else, at least not physically. On some level, I think that a part of me is still scared. I was scared even before then, and I think a part of me already hated and feared cars.

I loved cars growing up in the 1970s and knew more of their names than I know even now. I loved their shapes, their colors, and the kind that every person we knew drove. I also hated and feared them for a few specific reasons that loomed large in my childhood imagination. There are too many stories. Like the morning after her pleasant visit with my grandmother and me, I saw my Aunt Mae, a rare driver, try to make a three-point turn out in front of our house as a big orange garbage truck roared up the street. Like the tree falling on the car across the street in a storm, the same kind that destroyed the garage in our back yard. After that, my worst fear was that the one on our sidewalk would fall on our car. For nearly a year after that, I begged my grandfather daily to drive it all the way up in the driveway, out of reach of that tree. Every evening, I’d begin begging him to “put the car up.” To me, it is one of the definitions of love. I’d feel very relieved when I’d hear the motor start, and him making the short drive up into the driveway, to the place where he used to park the Pontiac before he junked it. And then, he’d come in, on his way back to the back, and ask, “Are you satisfied?”, and I’d say yes and know that I was in for a good night’s sleep. My grandfather probably knew that a tree was not going to hit our car. Yet he did that, every day, just to make me feel better. There is at least one lesson that I have learned from this that has served me in my life. Every girl should learn from her father figures that if a man loves you, really loves you, then he will never want to see you suffer, and will do what he has to do, just to make you feel better-even if he thinks it’s silly. It was terrifying to hear that my cousin’s stepfather who was not a licensed driver took his sister’s new car out, wrecked it, and that it was a total loss. And now, he was going to have to pay for it.

Then there were the stories of people I knew at school. Stories that we somehow learned on the playground at St. John, and held a collective hurt about. Children talk, more than adults might imagine. Like, why twin classmates in first grade (for they were there just one year) were being raised by their aunt, my mom’s friend, because their parents had died in a car accident. And another who was a grade ahead of us. How she alone survived the one that took her parents, and was being raised by her grandmother. A one-year old. Out in the cold dark night alone discovered as they had thrown her to safety. The girl we knew had been that child. Not child, but a baby, really. There was even an unwritten rule, it seemed, that with her, it was better to suffer peacefully. I’ve never been in a fight in my life, but something like the scratch I got from her on the playground one day at recess at the tetherball pole would certainly never have been grounds to provoke one. It never occurred to me to scratch her back. Always to us, no matter what she said or did, she was a blessing.

There was the day, when I was in first grade, that the seventh grade teacher ran over three lunch boxes. Her back tire was magnified 50,000 times as we watched before school in horror. We saw three of them bend up like aluminum foil as the back tire ran over them. Three lunch boxes!! And there were more that could have been gobbled up. The most prized possession of every student, like your book bag, was your lunch box. I had a Donny and Marie one that year. We felt so bad for whoever that was in third grade, and wondered how they would ever explain that. What would they eat that day? Could they get another lunch box? We always thought the seventh grade teacher was unstable after that. We knew nothing about her, and were too distant from the world of seventh and eighth grade in the classrooms above the church (she left a year or two later). In general, we were certain of some things in first grade, including that the bell at mass was rung by God in heaven. We’d look around in awe as we sat on the front pew at Mass, marveling at the power of God.

Every year, in the era before Happy Meals, the annual Ronald McDonald calendar was a big promotion at McDonald’s. For a few weeks, it was the stuff of my dreams. I think I wanted it more than any Christmas toy I got in 1978, such as baby dolls like the Dancerella ballerina doll and Baby That-A-Way, Fashion Plates, A Christie doll head for styling, and Lite Bright. Or I just don’t remember craving for anything at that time as much as I wanted that Calendar. Every day that went by in January 1979 made me think the new year might end up being too far gone and I would not get one after all, or maybe they’d run out before we could get over there to McDonald’s on Fairview Avenue to pick one up. All I know is that I was on top of the world the afternoon that my grandparents picked me up at St. John after school, and drove over and bought one for me. The coloring that I would do. To have in my hands, finally, that calendar, my very own, just like the ones that had been on TV. Black and white for me to fill in with color. My colors. My coloring. And not too many days in the new year had gone by. It was still January. I don’t even remember getting fast food that day, which was a nice treat from time to time. If I did, it would not have excited me as much as that calendar. It was like the cereal I wanted for the prizes. My grandfather would forbid me to dig my hand down in the cereal box to get the prize and told me that I should eat down to it. And in general, I had so many special rules in my childhood that no other kids around me seemed to have. Rules like don’t drink anything walking down the street. No running out in the street for candy like other children on the sidelines at the Christmas or Thanksgiving Parade. No dancing in public, ever. I could not do things at school like some other girls such as volunteer to wash the board or the desks because “You go to school to learn, you are not a maid.” In first grade, I had to stop picking up pecans with the other girls at recess once my grandparents learned that the sisters required us to turn them in at recess. I was told, at age five, “never to say, yes, ma’am to anyone, Riché, do you understand?” No riding my bike in sandals-shoes and socks at all times. And though we had the permission to come to school out of uniform, they wanted me to take my school day picture in third grade in uniform, because I should look like a Catholic school student. Always, I was envied for my toys, but could never take toys to school because “You go to school to learn, not to play.” When I was 12, the mother of my best friend (one of the two official ones I had at the time) asked if she could take me on a trip down to Panama beach with them; my grandparents let me go, but specified that “Riché is not to go near the water.” This was limiting to say the least, and by the end of the day, as I made myself busy looking for seashells, was thankful that she suggested I could wade a bit in the water as it rolled up on the beach, though it still wasn’t like how her daughter and another friend of hers who also came with us were splashing around a bit farther out in the water. Today, people often ask how I became so “different,” or wonder about the secret of what they perceive to be my success. A great education. A Ph.D. A book. Etc. But the truth is that from my earliest childhood, I was always different. Made to be different. Encouraged to be different. Ordered, even, to be different. Before I grew tall, even, I was always very different, very philosophical and always stood apart. The only child in second grade to stand up that day and spell “delicious” correctly. The only one in second to change a letter that we were supposed to begin with “Dear Mrs. Gadson, I love you very much” to “I like you very much” because I did not love her. She was perhaps the most beloved teacher at St. John, and thought to be so pretty with her golden skin, and soft black wavy ‘fro, and the baby hair framing her face. These were letters to say goodbye as she prepared to leave to have her baby. And our class got to miss Stations of the Cross one Friday for her going away party, where we had cupcakes. I remember thinking, “I like her, and she’s nice, but I love my grandparents, my mother, I can’t say I love her because I don’t and that would be a lie.” I have never been as embarrassed as I was the day when she read those letters aloud. To have my guilt over not loving the teacher, but insisting on just liking her, publicly revealed before the whole class. And then, in third grade, in a group at the board one day, I was the only one who was getting all my multiplication tables right. When the teacher arranged official reading groups and put me in “group two,” I didn’t like it, and I went home and had a fit, vowing that I would not be in group two under any circumstances and would not go to school if she did not put me in “group one,” because I could read better than most of the people she had put in it. She moved me. That year, I also wrestled for weeks when hearing that my mother’s boyfriend, Bernard, had a brother who was at “eternal rest,” because I knew that “Eternal means forever” and thought it meant he would never see the face of the Lord. I did not know that that was the name of a cemetery. By third grade, I had an intensely and even restlessly philosophical mind.

I remember the summer day that we went downtown with my grandfather to a car lot where he bought the white car. Me, and my cousins Lamar and Sharon, were there for some reason. I remember that the car lot was on the side of a hill, and that a train track ran below it. We saw the train, and it had a rhythm that we picked up and began to quietly tap our feet to, as we hit our hands on the beaded purses we’d gotten in one of those little grocery store packets where little girls get the necklace, the earrings, and the beaded purse. The white car was another Buick, my grandfather’s favorite car, and a replacement for the blue Buick, that had replaced the Pontiac. The brown seats that burned us that summer. It was a used car, but the newness was fun that summer.

We’d gotten the calendar and were back on our side of town again where my grandparents needed to run an errand. It was before typical afternoon traffic set in. The drive from West Fairview had led us to Adam’s street, with St. Margaret’s Hospital, where I was born, nearby. It was less than half a block away. We stopped at a traffic light. It was a stop like any other. The light seemed to be holding longer than usual. Long enough, in fact, for me to see a woman open the door to her car and get in, a car that was parallel parked in one of the spaces alongside the traffic lane we were in. There was nowhere to go but ahead. As I saw her put her keys in the ignition, a crazy thought entered my mind about that woman hitting us, but there’s no way that I imagined she would. It was just a silly fear. She saw the line of traffic. To start her car and move out would not make sense. It defied all rationality. My grandparents were talking to each other in the front seat and did not even notice her. But I did. I saw her start the car, and another surge of fear went through me. But this, too, I brushed off quickly. I imagined that she was just trying to get an early start, for when the line of traffic that we were in was gone. There was no way that she could move it. No way that she would attempt to drive it when even she seemed to be so tightly sandwiched between the cars parked in front and behind her. And even if she did, the light would change and we would be long gone before she did. Should I say something? And even if I did, there was nowhere for us to go. I felt so helpless. So trapped. Why was the light taking so long? Why wouldn’t it change? On any other day, it would have changed. It had to change. I became desperate for it to change. I was looking, in sheer terror, from the light, to her car, for what seemed like an endless time. The light was our ticket to freedom, our way out, and all it had to do was change. I was begging for it to change. I would have given every toy I owned, including that wretched calendar, for it to change. She had started the car, and then did the unthinkable, she began to move it. I couldn’t believe it. I was screaming out with everything in me for that light to change, and was utterly terrified. Why wouldn’t my grandparents look around at this crazy woman and see what she was doing. I wanted to scream and say what I was fearing most, that “That woman is going to hit us!” I saw her from the very beginning, from the instant she started her car. I saw the back left end of her car as it made the irrational move out of its space. I was petrified beyond belief as I saw her back that car out of the space. Why on earth didn’t she look back and see what she was doing? Then, the metal started to scrape as the left rear side of her car slowly stuck itself to our right front end. She just kept backing back. And now, for some insane reason, we were stuck to her. Stuck. I saw it every second as it stuck to us. Watched in horror as it stuck to us. And could not believe that it was sticking. This whole thing made no sense to me. It really did not. It should not have ever happened in the first place. She didn’t even hit us or anything. I felt nothing. No one got hurt. What she did would not have hurt us. It wasn’t that kind of accident. I think that for me, more than anything, the whole thing was absolutely irritating and senseless.

Sitting on that back seat that day was like being in the Twilight Zone. It was like the kinds of things that children see and perceive that adults around them do not. It only became real for my grandparents when they felt the cars. But I saw her, that woman, and what she was doing, what she was going to do, from the beginning. And yet, there was nothing that I felt I could do to stop it. She was like a phantom, like those cars that children imagine are following them. Once that year, I’d seen one, like that black one in the film The Car, that seemed to follow us all the way from Eastdale Mall. I was terrified, for Montgomery was close enough to Atlanta, where children were disappearing and in danger. I have never been as relieved as I was when it kept on down the Carter Hill Road and we made the turn onto our street. This was in the year when WSFA, before the news, would say, in a public service announcement, “It’s ten o’clock, do you know where your children are?”

My grandfather’s rule was always that no car should be moved until the police were called to the scene. I knew that this was not going to be a case where the white woman lied on him like one did Christmas Day in 1976 when we were on our way out to Uncle Frank’s. I saw her do it and she had no excuse. How would she ever blame him or anyone for her actions? They were purely her own. Through the back window, I watched the officer. He was on a motorcycle. The thing I remember most about him is that he had really red lips. Redder than most lips. Which stood out even more because of that helmet and those dark gold-rimmed shades he wore. His presence made me feel better. As if he had restored an order that had disintegrated in the moment that she actually stuck to us. He was like the officers I heard about at school. The policeman is your friend. Yes, today, this man was mine. He made me feel safe. Restored the safety that this woman took away.

It turned out that her name was Barbara, Barbara Lamar. Lamar like my cousin’s name Lamar. I’m not sure she ever saw me on the backseat, the little girl in the plaid Catholic school uniform. I don’t remember her face. I remember the officer’s better than hers. But I’ve never forgotten her name. Never. I bet that she has long forgotten this incident. I haven’t. She was a stranger, but that day, she became a part of my life and its temporality. Like her car stuck to ours, for we were still and not in motion, her name, and the memory of her, stuck to me.

I blamed myself. I think that a part of me has always blamed myself. If I hadn’t wanted that McDonald’s calendar, we would not have been there in that stupid place for that stupid accident, or whatever it was. I wonder why on earth I could not get the words out “That woman is going to hit us,” to warn my grandparents. Though even if I had, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do. For the other traffic lane was full, and the light was red. We could not have moved out of the way. It was really a hopeless situation.

The incident turned my joyful afternoon upside down. The reason I remember so well that it was January 19 is that that calendar was my perverse reminder. When I heard, after her loss, that the singer Aaliyah had been born January 16 of that year, I pinpointed it to three days before this thing with Barbara Lamar. Even now, it seems, the year only begins, and the days can flow freely, when I am over that January 19 hump. Even before the official King holiday began, it became one way in which I measured the month of January. It probably always will be. A part of me, that child in me, is still scared. It may explain in part why I’ve never been interested in owning or driving a car myself. I don’t. Not yet anyway. I have taken lots of driving lessons, got my license (at 27), and with just a little more practice to could take to the road. It’s just never been a priority, or a passion of mine.

It’s interesting. The two terrible bike accidents I had in childhood, at 8 and 12, occasions that left me tangled on the pavement, should actually be more of a lasting memory. In the earlier one, shortly after I learned to ride, I was doing what I’d been told not to do, riding from the top of the driveway to the bottom up the street, when the bike fell over and I fell hard down the driveway and skinned my knee very badly; I soon began to complain of pain in my legs and for a while, the doctor put me on medicine for it (I sometimes wonder if that medicine, whatever it was, above and beyond genetics in my average-sized family on my mother’s side, also contributed to why I eventually grew tall, beginning around age 12 when I reached 5’9” and for the first time, stood out from other girls around me). The other was when I was 12, was to resolve a dispute with my best friend over racing, something I’d also been told not to do. The deal, in the race between her, my cousin Lamar and me, was to make ten laps back and forth up and down the street. He finished first and went and sat on the front porch. She was called away momentarily, and I finished, so was stunned when she got off her bike and started jumping up and down saying she won second place. I tried to get Lamar to vouch for me, and all he would say, perhaps because of a crush on her, was that “It was mighty close.” I proposed one more lap up and down the street to declare the second place winner. We went up and as we passed my house, were neck and neck. I lost control of my bike and ran into the tree in front of the house next door, and then I remember my arms flying up in the air and landing hard at the end of our driveway tangled in the bike.

But I am stunned that I have become a woman, and still, have not forgotten this. Amazed that next year will mean that this incident happened thirty years ago! Thirty years.
January 19, 2008.