I spoke with my mother on the phone last night.
It’s the first talk we’ve had since the election. I called her and asked how she felt. I haven’t had the time or emotional wherewithal to speak with her before yesterday, as I’ve found myself experiencing so many emotions in between the demands of my schedule.
“So how are you feeling, Mom,” I asked. “You know,” she said, “I can’t talk about it it too much. It makes me too emotional, and I can’t really do that to myself right know. But you know, this isn’t only a victory for blacks. Some of us have had this dream for a long time, some of us have been fighting for this for a long time, in our own way, as best we could, and I can barely believe it.”
My mother, a single working mother in the sixties, was packed and ready to go to Selma. She told me the story again last night. I remember it well. It is one of those I treasure, one of my favorites.
“I would have gone. I would have been right there with Dr. King. Lots of whites were marching, but your grandmother wouldn’t babysit. She refused. She said, ‘Florence, you’re a woman alone with a child. You have to think about your baby. If you go down there, you might end up dead, those racists will kill a white woman standing up for blacks. You can’t leave your child alone.’ And she was right, but I would have gone. If I didn’t have a baby, I would have gone. I wanted to be there more than anything in the world. I wish I could have gone. If only your grandmother would have babysat.”
She then proceeded to tell me about her Sunday school class, full of nice polite white folks learning about the Lord and the Bible. The adult Bible study turned to a discussion on “mixed marriages,” and most were against it, for the most thinly veiled of reasons. My mother’s white, married, middle class church friends were shocked when my mother announced that she “didn’t care if her only daughter married a black man. No black man could be any worse than the blond haired, blue eyed son of bitch that I married.”
Honesty, you gotta love it in middle class America.
Her pastor politely turned the conversation, “well, I think Florence has made her point,” after my mother’s bombshell. She easily remembers the “hoity-toity” racism of the church members, and her need to drop the bomb to make her point. “I wasn’t raised with a Bible that taught racism. That’s not my Bible, never has been, never will be. We’re all God’s children, period. End of story. I just won’t tolerate racism in the church, just won’t.”
Every so often, dogmatism has its redeeming values.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed on my mother’s birthday, April 4th.
My mother spent the night crying, said a prophet of God had been murdered. How could we survive the death of a prophet of God? What was the nation coming to? She still believes that the U. S. government was behind it, knows it without a doubt.
That evening, everything just sunk into an abyss of desperation. And hopelessness.
She couldn’t talk too long about Obama last night, didn’t want to cry too long or too hard, as her health is not good these days. “A lot of whites had that dream too. It’s too hard to talk about, but I can’t believe it’s happened.”
The shadows of April 4th haunt her today. But she won’t talk about it. It’s the underbelly of inexpressible joy, what so many are thinking but refuse to say aloud, fearing the country’s history and its demons.
“It’s too hard to talk about.”
Indeed.
