While listening last night to Senator Obama remembering his grandmother, I realized that there was a silent hero in my own past that I need to share. It is a story of love and hate, tragedy and hope. It is a story of a man who until a year ago was a silent aberration within our family. A man who, while we knew that he existed, we never talked about. Indeed, it took me a month of research to discover his name. My goal in writing this is that others will know and remember this man, my silent hero.
In 1929, my great grandmother was alone. Her husband, who gambled away all of their money had left her alone with five young children. They lived in an old tin chicken coop. The floors were dirt, and my grandmother remembered that when it rained the roof would leak turning the floor to mud that they would in turn have to sleep on in the night.
They lived in rural Grant County, Indiana. Jobs were scarce everywhere in the late 20's, but great-grandma was lucky. She found a job at a local laundry.
One day, while at the laundry a young man came in. He was doing construction work locally, but the projects had dried up. He hoped to find work there at the laundry. The owner said she really didn't need any extra help, but would let him fix things up a bit. During this time, my grandmother and this man became very close. After work, he would come home with her and help around the house. Eventually their friendship would grow into more. He was a loving man who took to the other children as if they were his own.
Their love was not without risk. You see this man, Orange Gibson, was a black man. A black man, in one of the most racist areas in the nation, seeing a white woman. Just a few years before, you can imagine the horror that this community must have felt as a man was dragged past complacent guards and hung from a tree in the court yard without trial, because he supposedly raped a white woman. One cannot underestimate the personal risk Orange put himself through to love my great-grandmother.
This relationship could never have come to marriage in this time and in this place. Indeed, I don't believe that they ever even lived together. Although, they did have my three wonderful aunts.
Orange was a man like many others around this great country. A man who saw a responsibility that was not his and embraced it, a man who saw children without a father and loved them, a man who would have died for the love of a woman. Orange was a hero. So, today with my daughter standing next to me. I didn't vote for Barack Obama. I voted for all of those silent heroes, including Orange Gibson, without whom, my grandmother may not have survived the depression. I owe Orange so much. He was dead long before I was born, and he lies somewhere in an anonymous grave. I wonder if there is someone to put flowers on his grave, and if anyone stops to say thank you. So, I say it here, now, thank you Orange, thank you for my grandmother, thank you for my daughter. Thank you for this day, for without men like you, where would we all be.