Granddaddy

He called me "Daughter." With so many grandchildren, perhaps his aging brain couldn't recall my name. But I liked being called Daughter. I liked the old, clean smell of him, of soap and Prince Albert pipe tobacco, the gentle scratch of his whiskers on my cheek, and how far down he had to bend to give me a hug.

He taught me to play checkers, and respected me enough not to give me easy wins. It was enough for me, at four years old, to gain a king occasionally. If my king jumped one of his, I was elated. I celebrated, even as I fell into his trap. He was a jolly, vibrant old man with me and the checkers. I loved hearing him laugh.

Before meals, he washed my small hands with his huge ones, then gave me one end of the towel as he dried with the other, chanting, "Dry together, be friends forever," in his soft, Georgia-tinged accent.

He and Grandmother raised eight children on a west Texas farm. It couldn't have been easy. They had moved from east Texas after four of the babies had been born. I wonder if it was to keep their children from witnessing the lynchings that were still common there. In their new county, there were only white people. Both the proud Comanches and the great herds they had hunted there were gone. We never thought of them.

Granddaddy's neighbors elected him county commissioner. I remember a road grader parked in the long driveway leading to his farmhouse. Aunt Ina Rae told me that Grandmother said being elected ruined him. All he wanted to do was go to the courthouse and talk. But it didn't last long. Elections are won and elections are lost.

He owned a grain elevator that could be seen for twenty miles across the High Plains. It burned, but he must have risen from the ashes, since that happened long before he taught me to play checkers, to wash my hands and to be friends forever.

It's sad, remembering his long and lonely decline after Grandmother's stroke. His mind weakened and departed while his body was still strong. How shocked I was, at thirteen years old, when he came home from town raving about there being a n______ in town. Granddaddy's face was red. His eyes were bloodshot with rage. He was yelling at the top of his voice that this man was walking on the sidewalk with white people. He kept repeating, clearly horrified, "ON THE SIDEWALK!"

That was 1950. It would be years before I enjoyed the pleasure of a racially integrated social setting. But I think I knew even then that integration was coming, and anticipated it with satisfaction. The twentieth century was at its midpoint and still had much to teach us. Granddaddy had taught me about love and light. At that moment, when he so horrified me in his horror, he taught me something else. We do not escape our inner darkness, no matter how far away we move from its external forms.

Jann McGuire, September 13, 2006

 I find I don't have much to say about this piece, except to celebrate once more the progress we've made in race relations in this country. I have to remember that on those occasions when  the inner darkness of racism makes itself clear. May all wounds of our history be healed and their scars erased. So be it.