It happened one evening when my younger brother and I were at my grandparents' home. I was nine or maybe ten at the time. We were sitting on the floor of the living room watching a TV show that was popular back then. I don't remember much about the show, only that the main character was a nurse who was raising a son by herself. Also, she was a negro woman, which is how we would have described her in those days.

When my grandfather passed by and saw what we were watching, he exploded in a fit of anger. He stomped over to the television and twisted the channel knob violently as a further demonstration of his disgust. Then he turned his attention on his two frightened grandsons.

“If you watch THOSE PEOPLE on television, you'll end up JUST LIKE EM!”

His outburst of rage left us stunned and speechless there on the floor. I had never seen my grandfather angry like this. It had never occurred to me that Papaw got angry at all. When I thought of him, I thought of ice cream, rocking chairs on the back porch, silly stories, and his boisterous and contagious laughter. It was a naive and childish way to think, but I was naive and still a child.

My brother and I nodded in submissive agreement, though I don't think either of us understood what he was talking about. I only wanted Papaw to stop being angry with me, and it seemed like a respectful nodding of the head might help matters. I wondered who he was referring to when he said, “Those people.” Someone on the television, obviously. Nurses? Women with children but no husbands? TV people in general?

And then somehow I knew. I knew that he meant negroes, and I was old enough to know that he was wrong. I was old enough to know that this kind of thinking was very bad.

The whole encounter was shattering to me and left me profoundly disoriented. The idea that there was something bad in Papaw was unthinkable. It didn't make sense in light of all the goodness I knew in him. On top of that, the realization that I understood a moral truth that my grandfather somehow did not understand caused a seismic upheaval in my simple way of looking at the world. I thought the grownups in my family knew all the answers about what was right and what was wrong.

Like I said, I was naive and a child.

As I look back on this event now, I find myself wondering why he didn't use the word, “nigger.” I wonder why he didn't say, “If you watch niggers on television, you'll end up just like em.” I know that's what he was thinking, for my mother tells me that he usually wasn't shy about using that word. My great-grandmother apparently knew no other word for dark-skinned people. Her small, East Texas world was filled with “nigger-boys” and “nigger-girls,” and she jabbered about them in the due course of conversation with no shame whatsoever. It was the way everyone talked, as far as she knew.

But this event with my grandfather took place around 1970, and those were the days when the word “nigger” was moving underground. It was becoming a word that white people whispered to one another in coffee shops and on street corners. You looked around briefly to see if any of “them” were nearby, then you leaned in close to your friend and said whatever you were going to say about the niggers. Your friend would nod knowingly. Everyone understood the rules somehow. If you were going to use that word you had to make sure you only used it around people who “understood.”

I think Papaw avoided the word because his oldest daughter and her young husband had taken their first strong stand against their parents and made it clear that they were not people who “understood.” He knew they didn't want him to say that word around his grandsons, and he respected them enough to comply.

My parents had left the rusty, red earth of East Texas, where the thick forests of pine make it difficult to see the interstate, much less the world beyond. They left not consciously trying to escape, but because life pulled them outward and beyond. They left seeking education and found it. They left following a calling from God to minister in other parts of the world. Along the way they befriended people of various colors, and they discovered that there was more to the world than they ever imagined. They had opportunities that my grandfather could never dream of, and they grew both in mind and spirit.

And when they had children of their own, they came to stand between two generations, guarding the one that came after from the rough edges and unhealed wounds of the one that went before. They were determined that their sons and daughter would grow up knowing the truth.

Will Campbell once said that anyone who can understand the cycle of poverty should also be able to understand the cycle of racism. It is the secret tool of the powerful, and it flays the souls of all who fall under its influence and cannot or will not rise above it. A truly radical person will have both a rock-solid commitment to justice and truth, and a soft heart, filled with compassion for people who are caught and forever limited by cycles of poverty and prejudice.

Though Christianity, to our shame, was often used as a tool of racism in those days, it was that very Christianity that taught my parents the truth and set them free. They turned their backs on this part of their heritage not because they were smarter or better, but because they were ready and able to see the light. They gave their lives to following in the way of Christ, and they were innocent enough to swallow his whole message.

Papaw's religion was so hopelessly enmeshed with southern culture that it was nothing more than an emasculated caricature of the real thing. His idea of Christianity was a hodgepodge of tent revivals, smart talking preachers, and a gut-level feeling that one ought to do right. I also suspect that he had a sense that there was something vaguely feminine about the whole thing, as if the church was run by women and womanly men. Men like him, coarse and rough, never felt quite at home stuffed into cheap suits and herded into hard pews at 11 am of a Sunday morning.

And though he would have claimed to be a Christian even as a young man, he rarely attended church and had no real understanding the bible or of the radical nature of the teachings of Jesus.

But that wild shoot of Christianity that could find no purchase in him took root and grew like Kudzu in his children, driving out their racism and replacing it with a raw and throbbing social conscience and a passionate belief that all humans stand as equal in the eyes of God.

And the strong work ethic that marked his life also drove his oldest child - the little girl in the picture - to go to college with her fiance and to make good. They outgrew him economically, socially, philosophically, and spiritually. In every way the seed of his loins grew beyond anything he could have imagined.

So my parents stood between their tender and curious children and this part of their father's life that wanted to pass itself on to the next generation. This is how racism spreads. It is passed on.

But my parents said, “No!”

And even as they stood firm, they reached out and embraced every good thing about Papaw. They never wavered in their convictions, and they never showed him anything but love. Somehow they maintained this tenuous balance between guarding and embracing so well that this is the only episode I remember where this dark side of Papaw reached me.

The television incident eventually faded in my childish mind. I came to count it as some sort of aberration. When stacked against the goodness of my grandfather, it was overwhelmed and simply set aside. Indeed, I have not thought about that day for many years. Now that I am older, I have pulled this memory out of my own secret closet so that I might better know the story of my family. I think I have come to understand my grandfather better, both his strengths and his limitations, and I find that I love him as much as I ever did.

My grandfather was a racist. Yes, he was. It was all he knew. In my grandfather's mind, the color of your skin was of great importance. It determined your place in the world, and he understood that no one is allowed to step out of their place, certainly not poor, uneducated working men from East Texas. This limiting truth was for him as natural as breathing and living. Resignation and acceptance were ground into his soul long before I knew him.

Ironically, the very features which made him such a handsome young man were bequeathed to him by his great-grandmother, a Native American woman. The truth of his own mixed heritage may have been a shameful thing to him in his youth, and fierce anger is often born of such shame.

I don't know that my grandfather made much progress in the way he felt about people of other races, but he certainly changed the way he spoke and acted. His children grew strong and wise, far stronger and wiser than he even knew. So strong that their influence left its mark on his life, though he may never have recognized it. So strong as to stop his mouth from uttering an evil word to his grandsons one day in front of the television. I wonder if he had a sense that something powerful was at work in his life.

The mustard seed of the gospel had sprouted in the lives of his children, and the resulting tree had shade enough to cover even Papaw with its goodness, while birds nested in its branches and sang music never before heard in East Texas. My grandfather rested in the shade of their tree in his old age and grew gentle and kind himself. In some way their lives helped to redeem his, and the redemption took root in some shallow way. I believe that it did. Even his racism was tamed, silenced, and forgotten in the end.

Late in life, my grandfather even returned to the country church he abandoned as a young man. He got religion in his old age, Lord love a sinner, and even helped repair the church roof. Once, near the end, he prayed before our Thanksgiving meal, while his eldest daughter wept silently, for it was the first and only time she ever heard him pray.

He always called my mother, “Girlie,” like he did in the days when they lived in the Humble Oil Camp. He would come home in his car with a treat in his lunchbox, and she would leap onto the running board and ride up the driveway with him. I think Papaw understood that his Girlie had grown beyond him, and that was okay. The man who once dropped out of school so that his younger brothers could attend always wanted something better for his kids.

There were new truths in the world, and he didn't understand all of them. But his children seemed to understand, so he gave himself over to their wisdom, I think. The children know about these things. Girlie knows.

This is the way redemption happens in the world. Evil is often vanquished not with a battle, but by the steady and determined presence of goodness. Sometimes redemption occurs quickly and in one lifetime, but often redemption is a generational thing. One generations stands on the shoulders of another. Those who stand at the bottom carry a heavy load. They may only get a glimpse of what is to come, but they hope and pray that their children will not wander forever in the wilderness that held them back, but will one day reach the promised land.

And like Moses on Mt. Pisgah, just a glimpse of that Promised Land was enough and almost too much for my Papaw.

rlp