It is a Monday morning at 8:55. We are standing in front of the bank in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, waiting for the doors to open. It is Mother and me, and she is holding baby brother, who is asleep. Next to the door, off to one side, is a Black woman with several small children. They are quietly peering out from behind her. Everyone in their group looks apologetic.
There are several people waiting to get inside and conduct their financial transactions. I eye the children with the woman, interested as all children are, in others their age.
The doors open and we walk inside. Several White folks walk right up to the teller's windows. The Black woman and her children sit off to one side on a wooden bench. It is only then that we can see she is pregnant. Mother motions for her to go ahead of her. Mother always had painful varicose veins during pregnancy and knew how uncomfortable it was to stand for any length of time. Let this woman go ahead and go home to get off her feet.
The woman smiles sadly and shakes her head, "no." The teller glares at Mother and says, a little too loudly, "What do you want here?" Mother deposits Daddy's check and turns to leave. She smiles again at the woman on the bench, waiting for all the White people to be served first. The lady looks down at her hands. Her little ones are sitting next to her, a little too quietly for small children. No kids should be so self conscious that they squelch the happy abandon that comes with being naive observers of the world.
The teller yells coarsely across the bank lobby to the woman, "What's your business, now?"
We leave the bank and Mother is angry.
"Mommy, why did that lady have to wait?"
There's a question that has rung in my head for decades and caused me to feel guilty for being the member of a group who so persecuted another group.
You see, whatever happens to one group in society has implications for other groups in society as well.
It is like having a child with cystic fibrosis in the family. The entire family reacts to it, and the emotional and psychological symptoms are not limited to the ill child. The illness becomes something that the family organizes their activities and emotions around. Parents worry that they will overlook symptoms of a relapse. Children worry that they will play too roughly and cause the child to become ill again. They worry that their sibling will die if they say mean things to her. They wonder why she gets all the attention and their accomplishments and needs are overlooked so many times. The parents wonder if anyone notices how hard they are working to preserve her life, and are grateful that the other children do not require the level of intervention that she does. The marriage can become neglected as they focus on the endless round of postural drainage,nebulizer treatments and trips to the E.R. Yes, everyone is affected in such a family.
The Civil Rights Movement affected us all, too, whether or not we were from the North or South, or were Black or White. There is nothing in my White experience that can compare with the hatred I witnessed in the South towards Blacks during those, and subsequent years. I have rarely ever been in a position where I was discriminated against or felt like an unwelcome minority. But I was affected by the weekly horror of seeing hideous acts that were flashed across our television, by hearing people--Christians--refer to Blacks by a variety of cruel and prejudiced terms, by seeing pictures of the waterhoses turned on defenseless people, hearing adult men and women screaming epithets at a little Black girl who only wanted to go to school. My parents' outrage and commentary about what was happening was unrelenting while we lived in the South. That stays with a person and plays out in interesting ways over life. The Black students relegated to the back rows of classrooms, who tried to maintain their dignity whilst nothing else in their surroundings supported that, parents who had to be denigrated and humiliated in front of their own children--these crimes are seared into my mind's eye. Even though the abuse didn't happen to me or people who look like me. We all still are still paying for it.
Yesterday was a historic day in America. We don't know what President Obama will do, how he will manage the impossible economic problems we face in this country, or how he will be able to keep his sense of ethics in the face of pressure from all sides and the lure of being at the top. But yesterday was one step toward the healing of this enormous wound our country has sustained. I cried as I watched him take the oath and heard Aretha Franklin singing where decades ago, she would not have been allowed to linger because of her skin color. Seeing the tears of so many in the crowd, and noticing that enthusiasm was expressed by people of all races, it seemed that over the course of a few hours something shifted. Unfinished business for victims and observers of the Civil Rights struggle came one step closer to resolution. It's not done, but I, along with many others in this country, slept a little better with last night.
I only hope that pregnant woman in the bank was able to witness the innauguration yesterday.
God bless our country.
