Those words have played over and over again in my head since my mother spoke them the other day.
My parents are children of the segregated South, and they grew up in the era of Jim Crow, separate bathrooms and water fountains--things I cannot conceive of. My parents' families lost everything in the Depression, but if you go far enough back in my family tree, there are plantation owners as well as a great-great grandfather who crossed the Mason-Dixon line and fought for the Union. Go a little further back and you'll find Haitian plantation owners who were just about the last white folk off the island when the slaves rose up and overthrew them. I have no doubt that there are branches of that same tree that are black, but I also have no doubt that they were never listed in the family bible. In other words, you can't get much more "cracker" than me.
My parents left the South and moved all over the country when they got married, settling down in a different area than where they grew up when my brother and I came along. I think part of them wanted to go back, but Brown vs the Board of Education happened about then and the violence in the South concerned them--they didn't want my brother and I exposed to that. Nor did they want us to grow up around racism. My mother once said she couldn't do anything about her upbringing, but she could do something about mine.
They raised me and my brother to think for ourselves, to question everything, and and as a result they're stuck with a couple of "libruls" for offspring. This has resulted, over the years, in lectures from my brother and myself--once we reached the age that we were sooooo much smarter than them (16? 18?)--about words they could not say, about political and social views that were "wrong", etc.
It has been years since those words were used in my presence, and I do not regret refusing to allow them to be spoken in front of me, but I do regret the snotty and arrogant way I know that I treated both of them about it at the time. I did not approach them kindly or gently, but with the arrogance and bravado of youth that I now know simply drove those words and viewpoints underground. I had no desire to try and understand; I was right, period. My parents had unwittingly seen to it that I had no frame of reference for understanding or forgiveness when it came to issues of race.
I vividly remember being at my grandmother's house for a visit and she and her sisters were apoplectic about the fact that the local cemetery was now "mixed". My brother and I were totally confused about this, thinking maybe they were putting dead people in a blender or something. When mom quietly explained later what that meant, we rolled on the floor laughing because we thought it was about the silliest thing we'd ever heard. We were sternly warned not to say anything to grandma or her sisters. The freedom to lecture only extended to the immediate generation, NOT the one before.
Early on in the primaries, we talked about all the candidates, but when it finally boiled down to just Obama and Clinton, those conversations stopped. My parents have never liked Clinton, and they hate Bush--and by extension, McCain--and they've never NOT voted, so I got the feeling they had a bit of a quandry in front of them. Our state primary is coming up in May, and I've been wondering what they will do. I didn't want to ask them if they were struggling with the idea of voting for a black man, or even if they had ever voted for an African American at all. So, I will admit my mother surprised me when she asked me for a link to see Obama's speech. When I mentioned it to my parents, I fully expected them to shrug and say they didn't want to hear it. But they both did.
I've had more discussions about race in the past two weeks than I've had in my entire life. Some have been uplifting, some frustrating, some depressing, but all of them fascinating in a way I can't really describe. Obama dove into the middle of the race issue and now it seems the country is dipping toes in the water, and slowly wading in to find that the water isn't as cold as they thought. But until last week, I had never had a conversation with either of my parents about it.
So I'm sitting at the kitchen table with my mother and she's telling me this story. She's in the grocery store, needs change for a large bill and the cashier sends her to another line. The woman next in line has a cart full of stuff and my mom asks is she can just step in and break the bill, won't take a second. This woman, black, snaps at my mother. "I'm tired, my feet hurt, I've been standing in line waiting, you'll have to wait your turn like everyone else." So my mother did. She went to the back, in spite of the two other people, one white, and one black, telling her she was welcome to go ahead of them. And she waited, got the bill changed, finished her shopping and left.
She looks across the table at me and says, "I can't help it, some part of me looks at her and thinks she's less than me." She says this to me in a voice that breaks, with tears in her eyes. There is no malice, no arrogance to this statement. It hurts her to tell me this--and my heart breaks for her. Because I know she is waiting for the lecture from me, waiting for me to pile on more guilt, berate her for being racist...but I don't. I can't. She is not telling me she thinks this is true, she's telling me she knows this is wrong but feels helpless against her immediate reaction. And for the first time, I hear her.
And so I reach across the table, take her hand, and give her another truth. They raised my brother and me to believe that everyone is the same, no one is any better or any worse than anyone else. They did this in spite of the background they came from and in spite of the fact that they struggle to live that themselves. And they succeeded. They succeeded so well, in fact, that they often don't understand how it is that my brother and I give them baffled looks at some of the things that trouble them.
I look at my parents and I see them, now in their 70's, standing on shifting sand in a world that is, in many ways, totally different from the one of their youth. They see changes in attitudes on race that, while they recognize the rightness of it, make them feel like strangers in their own land. Change comes in many ways, and in some cases, that change shakes the foundations of a life. Did either of my parents ever intentionally demean or degrade anyone? No, I don't believe they did. But I think they also know that it did happen, that they did inflict hurt on other people simply by NOT recognizing them or responding to them or looking them in the eye. Because that's how it was where they grew up. Wrong though it was, that's the world they grew up in and they cannot take it back. They can only struggle to overcome what was ingrained in them from birth.
The audacity of hope, indeed. They're both voting for Obama.