Mom’s Cousin Told a Racist Joke and a Lesson Was Learned
But it wasn’t the one she intended
A few hours earlier, my mother’s ashes were buried in the cemetery beside Linn Baptist Church, one of the innumerable small chapels scattered throughout the Mississippi Delta. I flew in from Seattle two days before, and so my brother Jim and I were there for her final moments. She had been sitting up in her bed, wide-eyed as her stomach began to expel brown fluid that filled her one remaining lung and spilled out of her mouth, the result of at least sixty years of an unbreakable addiction to cigarettes. We watched in silence as she drowned in her own bodily fluids.
That’s not a sight one forgets.
The funeral had been a small affair, perhaps ten family members and as many friends. Jim and I hosted them at the house afterwards, and most brought something for everyone to eat. About five of the friends who attended were Black, including a woman who was her home-health nurse for perhaps the last twenty years, and a man named Eddie who was the all-around yard worker and handyman while my mother aged and my brother grew lazy. Jim had long seemed to feel himself above such menial tasks as mowing the yard and clearing out the detritus accumulated in the forty years we’d had that house.
