As I've mentioned before, I grew up in the heart of East Texas. My homeland has a simplicity of life that escapes the city slicker. There is a neighborliness that seems inherent in this type of life and which seems elusive to those who live in the more concentrated population centers. The extended family seems more important. A closeness to your aunts, uncles and cousins seems a given there. Lest I paint a picture that country living is all goodness and virtue, I must also state that there are ugly things, too. Some are very ugly.
Simplicity of living often coexists with willful ignorance. Come to think of it, living in general usually coexists with willful ignorance, whether in the city or the country. Some of these country folks never question what they were taught as they were growing up. This can lead to wrong thinking and erroneous beliefs, all rooted in the ignorant notion that things are the way they are and that they don't get better and won't change.
The Ku Klux Klan had a foothold in the community I lived in--perhaps a tenuous foothold, but a foothold nonetheless. The KKK preys on ignorance because around this type of ignorance, racism flourishes like Johnson grass on an East Texas roadside. I grew up among some racists, and I'm sure there were people I knew who were secretly involved with the KKK, but it remained a secret, outside the knowledge of myself or many others in the community. It's not the kind of thing you would be proud of, like a new grandbaby. There would be few who would want talk about it.
I remember a time in the early 70s when the KKK approached our school to do some recruiting. They entered a meeting of Young Homemakers on the high school campus one evening, scaring those ladies nearly to death.
When I was in high school, I remember seeing signs promoting a Klan rally in the area. Not too many days after this rally, I remember seeing photos in a regional newspaper that had been taken at the rally. Amongst those photographed were two boys that went to our school. They were wearing their hoods like good little Kluxers, and were carrying guns, too. I remember how hateful and mean these boys were in their everyday lives. I remember wondering if their hatred came from being aligned with the Klan or if it was a more general hatred that drove them to the Klan.
I remember some people I knew had a card labeled a "Ni**er Hunting License". They would flash the card, thinking it funny. I remember how wrong it felt just to read that card.
I think we all carry around a touch of racism. There's certainly a meanness in us all. Most of us are able to outgrow it with maturity, sort of like we overcome the unpleasantness of bed wetting. I also don't think that whites are necessarily the only ones guilty of race-focused hatred. It can come from both sides of the tracks.
There are times when I go home to visit family and I hear the people from this community say things that I now find shocking. Names are called, epithets hurled. You hear the wrongness, not as much in the words themselves, but in the tones used to communicate the words. They are tones that communicate dislike, distaste, and on occasion, simple hatred. The ignorance that fuels the Klan is the same ignorance that fuels this kind of latent racism, too, though perhaps to a lesser degree.
It's one of the things about my heritage that I despise. It's one of the things I'm ashamed of, not because of what I've done, but because of the dark stain that has been left on my heritage by racial hatred. I don't feel that I'm necessarily better than those folks I grew up amongst and around. I know the same darkness lurks in me, too. My mind can still conjure up the darkest of thoughts, the vilest of feelings and emotions. My heart is not immune to hate. I just have it under my control most of the time.
I remain thankful that the curse can be broken--that there is a power greater than the power that can decompose a person's soul with hatred. May I always give that greater power the rule of my life.
Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth. This then is how we know that we belong to the truth, and how we set our hearts at rest in his presence whenever our hearts condemn us. For God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything. ~I John 3:18-20
That looks like Jimmy.
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