The newspaper story took me back
A few weekends back, I read an article about Conway, eight miles from Myrtle Beach: Cross burning in South Carolina stirs debate over hate-crimes laws by Tim Craig in the Washington Post.
The news article was about a middle age black couple looking to retire and dreaming of the ocean. Husband and wife both were military folk, and Conway was the town they chose. Conway used to whip my high school in football — in Carolina low country, not so far from where I grew up.
We played football with Conway when I was in high school. Back then, Conway too often whipped our butts.
I figure the Conway boys weren’t any more advanced in life than Sumter boys, and it’s amazing what a body can believe before learning better. Some never do, and that’s a problem needing work.
The newspaper story goes, the ex-military family was looking to retire close to the ocean, buying a house in Conway, and finding out their next door neighbors were not too happy they’d moved in. The cross-burning was a clue.
The dichotomy of military-lovin’ racists is worth a long study. I’d like to think their numbers will dwindle, but I know how deep that shit goes.
Got my primary education in South Carolina, kindergarten and eight years with the nuns and then public school. Ninth grade was hell. High school wasn’t great. Got a degree from Clemson, itself an ex-military school whose admin building was named for Ben Tillman — Pitchfork Tillman to his admirers.
So many stories, so many bean sprouts — this story is more a lamination like from the Bible.
Where I grew up, racism had a’holt of the low country fo sure. Had as good a hold on the rest of the country ever since the original thirteen baked it into the Constitution to keep the slavers happy. But there were times growing up I felt I was living in the Devil’s place still thriving.
That mighta been what Granny would say to herself and her daughter woulda scolded her, except my mother was working to keep a roof over us waifs from up north, so she never heard.
The nuns in elementary school teaching our small class may have preached love, but it was a theology missing specifics— like hippies used dream of. But Granny and our mother taught we littles good, and I heard nary a dispute about morals between them.
What woman would ask her mother to move in to take care of her littles if she didn’t need to? Mother’s heart was broken only this particular sprout couldn’t comprehend why it broke her so bad.
The only blacks I saw were the garbage men coming once a week. I wrote a poem about Granny showing love toward those uns sweating in the summer. Granny had held her own mother’s leg down when they sawed it off, gangrened from diabetes. She musta learned love the hard way.
My senior year, our high school ‘accepted’ non-whites for the first time. Four negroid kids — four of ’em. I recollect two — I most certainly do. I expect a few of the town’s racists remembered her too, seeing Lucy was our high school valedictorian, got her a doctorate and taught at Duke later.
Our senior year, Frank took the track team to the state championship. Lucy kept to herself back in high school, and Frank was folks from when we’d met in homeroom. He went on to retire Dean of George Mason Law School. I ‘spect he came from smart folks.
If you sit with a person long enough, they’ll offer you their soul, scarred at it may be. So listen up and be kind.
I grew up in a racist place, only I didn’t know how deep the disease was rooted. Why’d I know? Because that’s what my family believed. It wasn’t something brilliant I figured out. I was too busy running in the woods and playing backyard football. But times with my friends, hearing what fools kids can be, I knew racism was an offense to life.
My Granny, daughter of off-the boat immigrants, may have been uncomfortable around those large dark-skinned sons of slaves, but she saw to it I brought them ice water in her best Mason canning jars, largest she had with the ice still melting.
Niki Haley may not save the Republican Party from its demise, but, as Governor, when she announced the Cross and Bars was being taken down in Columbia, just the other side of Wateree Swamp from where I was born, I did hope the state’s darker citizens might could rest some easier.
If the choice is between Haley and Trump, there is no choice. One of them has a soul.
One day at Clemson, I ran into Frank. I was campaigning for the Clemson student senate, walking the dorms distributing flyers, and there was Frank from high school. He was sitting with four or five other black students crowded into a two-person dorm room. Interrupting their conversation, I was let in anyway. Frank had to know I wasn’t an enemy. Martin Luther King hadn’t been assassinated by then.
I knew Frank wasn’t that kind of person. I didn’t stay longer than to hand a few flyers and ask the room to vote for me. I couldn’t pretend Frank and I were close, but we did know each other. And I won the election, long hair and all.
Charles Blow, an editorial writer for the NY Times, did a PBS documentary on blacks moving back to where they were born. The scene of him and his kin gathered around an outdoor table in Louisiana with food and love is the film’s high point for me. Good Louisiana fixin’s are hard to beat.
Blacks have given white southerners chance to recover their souls.
Blacks rewrote the king’s English, and they taught us the blues, and Martin taught us peace. Far as I’m concerned, that closes the issue; we badly need them souls living here. In loving peace.
I’m not living in the low country any longer, but if I get by Conway sometime, I’ll be hopeful to find it changed from when I graduated with Lucy and Frank. And more, I hope that ex-military family find a place to retire. I truly do.
