It was the early 1950s. I was a child visiting my mother's family in a sleepy riverside town on the Mississippi. That summer evening I was in Gram's little apartment on Broadway Street, above a store. Her boyfriend was a good old boy named Alvin, a funny guy who came by for supper and sat around afterwards drinking Griesidieck Brothers beer from a brown longneck bottle in the fan breeze that made the stuffy little room and kitchenette a bit less sticky. He told humorous real life stories in the good old cracker barrel tradition. He was a local salesman and they were his stock in trade, the grease that made the little wheels of commerce go round in the town.
He had an infectious giggling laugh. His unbuttoned shirt showed a scrawny white chest whose concavity fasciinated me, but it wasn't quite repellent. He was good to Gram, and took us out to the fish camp to set trot lines for catfish, drove us hours down the river in his Plymouth sedan with the sailing ship hood ornament to the big city to see the animal shows at the zoo. Gram was a quiet slender woman who tolerated his endless stories with a soft smile and would sit for hours listening to him talk. He was the man she had, and she appreciated his kindness to me.
Until that night.
Alvin started on a story about the Negro janitor who cleaned up the scruffy little office he kept with some cronies in the back of an auto parts store. The janitor for some reason that day had an urgent need to use the toilet in the little closet off the office. He had to go, and go now. Alvin and his buddies knew this was going to happen, I can't recall how. Either it was the janitor's habit, or they had somehow put something in his food or drink to bring the situation about.
Anyway, they had spread battery acid on the toilet seat, and things were so arranged that they could see his reaction when he sat down.
I remember Alvin's piercing giggling laugh as he described "the nigger's" big round eyes bulging out as he tried to decide whether to stand up half finished or endure the growing pain until he was done. Alvin laughed and laughed, describing it.
Gram was the soul of gentleness and loving kindness. She never uttered a cross word or a criticism of anyone that I remember, before or after this moment. But at this moment she became a raging Fury. Her soft voice was hard and sharp as honed steel as it sliced through Alvin's laughter. Gram skinned him and his friends, not just for what they had done to the janitor, but for being pathetic bums with nothing better to do than sit around talking "nigger this and nigger that" and thinking they were smart and funny to humiliate a harmless human being because he was black, and therefore fair game.
Alvin's jaw dropped. He stuttered incoherently. He had awakened a tiger. She went on, at length, and finally threw him out of the apartment.
I was frightened. This sweet woman who loved me might turn on me if I ever, ever did anything like this. I never did. I never said "nigger," and the crude stereotypes I grew up with from then on never infected me. But of course, the subtle things did, and I catch myself to this day, fifty-odd years later, having to remember that lodestone moment, that window into the truth of the matter, when I slip into easy attitudes about race.
Gram's daughter, my mother, was much more like Alvin than like her mother. Black people were "niggers" to her, not in public nor in polite social discourse, but when her guard was down and she was passing on her wisdom to me. The idea of interracial marriage and/or sex was horrifying to her, although she allowed that "pickaninnies were very cute."
These attitudes went unchanged until she died. I argued with her, but never made a dent. She was set in stone, and that was that. She was a fiercely loving mother and very intelligent, a good person, but somehow a victim of this demon. I wonder now how she missed out on Gram's clear vision, but it's a question that can never be answered. I was fortunate to be present at a moment when Gram's pure soul manifested itself as a searing flame that burned an ethic into my young mind. I am not free of prejudice, but I know that it is wrong.
I tell these stories because Obama's magnificent gamble requires it of me. He believes that the American people can face the truth, and that it is time to open our hearts and minds to one another, to tell our stories, reconcile, and go forward. I hope he is right. I believe he is.
Thank you, Gram, and thank you, Mom. I love you both, rest in peace.