It was a relief to hear that the whole thing was a misunderstanding/hyper-sensitive overreaction and not an honest to God noose left in a black driver’s garage! I mean, Holy Crap, are there still people out there playing the noose card? So yeah, it’s very good news.
I was thinking about my Dad the other day trying to remember the few times he and I ever talked about race. Dad was born in 1924, grew up in an entirely different era where ideas about race relations were far different than today. Honestly, it wasn’t a topic he enjoyed talking about much. He would talk about it sometimes in his sermons, but not an awful lot, like most people of his time. But I remember once when I was in college asking him what he thought about racism and he told me a story that I have never forgotten.
Dad grew up in the sticks of Buckingham County, Virginia. His Dad, my grandfather worked a farm as a share cropper. One of the other sharecropper families who also farmed for the same landlord was black and had sons my father’s age. Each year when it was time for harvesting, the families shared the combine and worked together. Dad told the story of the first time in his life when he realized what racism was. He said he was about ten years old, maybe twelve. He was working together along with all the other men when it was time for lunch. The first day lunch was served at the black family’s house. The next day lunch was served at his house. Dad said how confused he was when all the black men were served their lunch out in the yard under the shade tree, while all the white men went inside to eat. Dad ate his lunch outside with his friends but remembered feeling a strange sense of guilt. That night he asked his mother this question, “Mom, how come at lunch today my friends had to eat outside while everybody else went inside?”
My Grandmother was born towards the end of the 19th century, over 120 years ago, and her answer was the best she could do. She looked at him with what my father described as a tired sadness and said, “Emmett, I don’t know why other than to say that’s just the way its always been.” My Dad, ten years old, confronted for the first time with one of life’s many injustices replied, “But, Mom...they worked just as hard as we did in the same hot sun...”
And that’s where the story ended. No other explanation was offered. It’s just the way it had always been...was the best she could do. My father never forgot that moment because it was the first time he ever remembered understanding the concept of sin, the irrefutable truth that there was a right way and a wrong way, fair and unfair, just and unjust.
My father was no crusader. If he were here to speak for himself he probably would say he should have preached on the topic of racism more than he did...or maybe not. Dad wasn’t a man of many regrets. But for most people, the feeling you get in your stomach when you read of nooses being left in NASCAR garages was the very same feeling that stirred within the heart of my ten year old father under a shade tree in 1934. Some things are forever wrong, for all time.
No comments:
Post a Comment