On Friday, October 14, 1938, newspapers across the U.S. reported the lynching of nineteen-year-old R.C. Williams the previous day. The young black man had eluded law enforcement after being accused of the molestation of a white woman and the murder of her boyfriend. He was never tried. Three days into the hunt for Williams, three boys found him and marched him to a waiting mob. The location was Choudrant, near Ruston, Louisiana.
That October 14 morning that the rest of the U.S. was learning of the lynching, my freckled, blue-eyed, eleven-year-old father and his year-older brother would have woken in their shared bedroom thirty miles away. They were probably tired. Perhaps their hair still smelled of smoke.
According to what my father confided to a family member not long before his death, he and his brother had been at the lynching, brought by their father.
I didn’t learn of my father’s presence at the lynching until the year of his death, when he began donating money to the surviving family of James Byrd, Jr., a black man dragged to death on June 7, 1998 in Jasper, Texas. When I told my sister about the donations, she told me about the lynching.
Did my father have reparations or atonement in mind when he made those donations? He was brought to that lynching as an eleven-year-old, too young to refuse to go or adequately give his consent. Did he have anything to atone?
At that age, my father was skinny, with a wide smile and the big teeth he bequeathed me. In photos, his face is open, laughing. Even as an adult, he had a slight build and that wide smile. He weighed in at about 135 pounds. In his engagement photo with Mom, he wears a Hawaiian print shirt he must have purchased while stationed in Hawaii.
He was a generous man and would have given that Hawaiian shirt off his back to anyone in need. Yet, he was racist. I’m nowhere nearer figuring out how those two traits coexisted in the same person than I was when I was eleven.
That’s the age I was when I was involuntarily made part of the white-flight movement. My parents bought a house in an up-and-coming nearby small town that had two primary recommendations in my parents’ eyes: new, cheap housing for families and a low or non-existent black population.
When I argued in support of integration, my father took me for a drive to an area where black families lived. While I slumped on the seat in a mixture of horror and shame, he pointed out the contrast of a few late-model cars parked in front of homes that sometimes met no building codes. His convoluted argument, an argument I certainly didn’t share, was that blacks could not even manage their money, spending it on flashy cars. Did I want to share classroom resources with such people? Did I want to be taught by such people?
I knew he was wrong. Wrong to believe what he did. Wrong to try to teach me his beliefs. I was old enough at eleven to know right from wrong and justice from injustice, but I had no power to enforce my beliefs. Whether my father had also been mature enough at eleven to know right from wrong when he was brought on a much more heinous presumed teaching experience, I don’t know. He should have been. Whether he feared being beaten by his father if he refused, I don’t know. I know only that he made the choice to embrace racism after he was eleven, even after he had seen its horrific results, up through my own eleventh year and those of my younger siblings. He tried his hardest to inculcate his children with his racist views, too.
Did he need to make atonement? Yes, he did. He owed it. He tried to perpetuate those views passed down to him. I don’t know if Dad’s attempt to make atonement was enough, but I’m glad he tried.