So much of who I am and who my children have become is the direct result of the stories that my grandfathers, grandmothers, father and mother shared with me as I was growing up. Stories from Tennessee, Missouri, Kansas, the Indian Territory and Texas. Flatlanders and hill folks, farmers and ranchers, outlaws and local law, religion and politics. The Civil War, before, during and after. That heritage and especially the way it was told to me has shaped me and my family’s life and love of history, the leaders, the spokesmen and the common man that endured and relished in life, as only this country can provide.
I had relatives on both sides of the racial divide. As a young boy, a clear memory of my great-uncle who was a chain gang guard in southern Missouri, when asked if he had ever shot anyone replied, “never shot any white men”. I remember how his comment confused me. I asked my father and he related that people were all different and that time, circumstances and environment sometimes dictated people’s thinking. It still baffled me.
An event at our dinner table, when I was ten going on thirty, I used the N-word, my father slapped me out of my chair and admonished me to “never use that word again in his company.”
I learned from other relatives that my father’s mother was very ill after his birth. A neighboring black farmer’s wife had nursed him when he was an infant.
The farming community where my father’s family lived was inhabited by mainly subsistence laborers, poor, white and black. Neighbors were, more often than not, split along a racist mentality. The Klan was active in the community and my father’s younger brother had a completely different racial mindset than my dad’s.
Community violence, in rural southern Missouri as told to me, seemed almost a way of life, even though the church was a mainstay in all families. This post is a reminder of the undertones of a divided people, of lost causes and of a mystery that is still hard for me to fathom today. To put it bluntly and I don’t consider myself a liberal, some of the alternative sites “blow my mind”. I just can’t fathom their position on a dream world of self-indulgence and ridiculous myths regarding people, places and events. My formative years were filled with folks like these and I discovered many years ago how destructive these self-centered lost souls can be.
There is so much to share on this topic and the impact it had on my genesis, it will just have to wait for another time and place.
Bummer
