In God’s Image
A lesson from Grandpa
I spent a lot of time with my Grandpa while I was growing up. As a young boy, I thought my Grandpa was the smartest man in the world. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to realize he just may have been.
My Grandpa wasn’t an educated man. He wasn’t a man of great oratory skills. Grandpa was a man of few words, with a simple view of the world. It was a view that made sense to me then, just as it makes sense to me now.
One Saturday, Grandpa and I headed over to the pool hall to shoot some pool. When we walked in, I saw the two boys playing pool at the other table. I saw them, but I didn’t pay them much attention. I was much more focused on Grandpa helping me with my bank shot than I was on who was playing pool at the table next to us.
There was a man drinking a beer at the bar. He said a few things to the two boys playing pool at the table next to us. I was about eight years old at the time, so while I could hear what the man was saying, I didn’t really understand what it meant.
I could tell the boys at the table could hear him because every time the man said something they looked at each other. They never looked at the man at the bar. They never looked at Grandpa or me. They just played pool and looked at each other. They looked sad. I didn’t understand why they didn’t just tell the man at the bar to stop, but they didn’t. Neither of them said a word.
I could tell Grandpa heard him, and I could tell he didn’t like what he saying. “Just keep shootin', son,” he said and nodded to Cliff behind the bar. Grandpa walked over to the man at the bar and told him it was time for him to leave. I didn’t hear what the man said to Grandpa, but then he turned towards the two boys and spat, “Niggers.”
Grandpa broke the pool cue over his knee and jabbed it into the man’s side. “You’re not wanted here, so get out before you get yourself hurt.”
I stood there watching this with my eyes as big as saucers. The two boys who were playing pool at the table next to us came over and stood on either side of me. Cliff came around from behind the bar with his baseball bat and told the man to leave, and “if you ever walk into my bar again, you won’t be walking out,” Cliff said.
Grandpa ushered the man out of the bar. A couple of minutes later he came back in and locked the door. Grandpa invited the two boys to play pool with us. We played two games and then the boys left. Grandpa walked them out when they did and returned a couple of minutes later.
Grandpa offered to pay Cliff for the pool cue, but Cliff just laughed and said something about being glad Grandpa could still move that fast.
As Cliff was filling the beer coolers, Grandpa and I sat in a booth and talked about what just happened. Some of it I had already figured out; some of it I hadn’t.
I asked Grandpa if the reason why the guy at the bar was picking on the two boys was that they were black. He said it was. I told him I didn’t understand why he would do that. Grandpa said he didn’t either, because “ignorance is a really hard thing to understand.”
“Grandpa, why do some white people hate black people?”
“I don’t know son. Some do, but that doesn’t make it right.”
“I think my father hates black people,” I said.
Grandpa didn’t respond. He didn’t like my father much, but he never said anything bad about him.
“Why don’t you hate black people, Grandpa?”
“The way I see it, the Bible says we are all created in God’s image and God loves us all the same. That’s good enough for me.”
I was eight, I had to ask. “Grandpa, if some of us are black, and some of us are white, and some of us are brown, how are we all created in God’s image?”
Grandpa just laughed. “That’s why they call it faith, son. We don’t have to understand how God does things. We just have to know that he does.”
That afternoon my view of racial equality was born. Granted, my understanding of racial justice has evolved significantly since I was a little boy, but my view of equality is still rooted in the lesson I learned one Saturday playing pool with Grandpa. Equality is God-created, faith-accepted, and Grandpa-approved. It’s a simple view I learned when I was eight from the smartest man I ever knew.
