The Day a Black Man Came to My ‘Racist’ Granddaddy’s Funeral
Our perceptions don’t always reflect reality
I don’t remember when, exactly, the conversation took place — sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s. I don’t really remember what the conversation was actually about.
But I remember my granddaddy saying something about a “colored boy” who worked with him in a gas station thirty years earlier.
My grandmother gasped, horrified, “Edward!”
Grandaddy looked at her, looked down at the floor for a moment, and then looked back up at me. “Sorry. Black man.”
And I remember wondering, at the time, whether Granddaddy was a racist because he’d used the “c” word. At least it wasn’t the “n” word, I rationalized. But my bussed public school-educated preteen/teen mind was finely tuned to pick up on anything even remotely racist.
The comment didn’t make me love him any less. It didn’t make me like him any less. But that comment, and my grandmother’s sharp reprimand (I guess she thought it was racist too), never left my mind.
Obviously.
I’m still thinking about it thirty years later. Maybe more so now that racial tensions in my city are at a fever pitch, and no one seems to know what to do about it.
