James 24:7

Last week, during the inauguration of Barack Obama, I could not quit thinking about the souls who peopled my life when I was a kid.  I wanted to write about them but feared that in doing so I would sound condescending or mire myself in sentimentality or somehow romanticize people who lived in wretched circumstances.   If I do any of that, forgive me.  I only intend to point to that great cloud of witnesses who played a part in shaping my life.- Jim Street (www.jim-street.com)

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My grandfather's little hole-in-wall grocery store was my favorite place to be when I was a kid.  A little concrete building not much larger than the first floor of my house, "the store", as we called it, was a place of peace in a world of domestic tension that defied my capacity to understand.

Although it was just a tiny speck of a place, it was visited by customers who were, to me, nothing short of exotic.  Some of them were old.  Most of them were poor.  Some of them were as rough as a macadam road and a couple were as mean as snakes. 

"That man spent time in Milledgeville because moonshine drove him out of his mind," my grandfather said about old J.D., whose eyes sat almost on the side of his head and who swore like the antichrist.

"That fellow lynched a man," he said about a round man whose name I never knew but whose white-stubbled chin was perpetually stained by tobacco juice. 

"That fellow's brother had his skull crushed when he poked with his head out of the window of a pulp wood truck in a fog and was hit by a truck coming the other way."

Looking back it seems to me that about the only people who ever "traded" with my grandfather were people who were too Southern, too country for Flannery O'Connor stories.  

However, these were not the folks I was thinking about last week during the inauguration of Barack Obama.  I was thinking about all of the black folks who traded with my grandfather, people like Thelma, Jeff and Martha Shack, Julia and Dawnie and Mattie and Buck Brewer.

Thelma called my aunt "Ms. Newt" because her husband's name was Mr. Newt.  He had a severely retarded and palsied son who road and writhed in the back of his beat up pick-up truck while Thelma came into the store and picked up salt pork, salt fish and snuff.

Jeff and Martha Shack knew Methusala.  I have no doubt that they were the children of slaves.  They lived in a shack way back in the woods and would come to town every so often to pick up some groceries from the store.

I remember that Martha never said a word but always had a slight smile and about a half a pound of snuff tucked beneath her bottom lip.  I also remember that she had one gargantuan tumoruous knuckle on one of her hands. 

I enjoyed it when Jeff and Martha showed up because, if my dad was around, there was bound to be an argument about who grew the biggest watermelons.  (My dad was a gardener but never grew a watermelon in his life.) 

"Jeff, I grew a watermelon so big you couldn't tote it in a cotton sack," my dad would say.

"Mr. Buck, you ain't never seen tell about the watermelon I growed.  Big man like you'd look like a boy in short pants next to it." Jeff would say.

And on and on....

Dawnie always showed up at the store dressed in the white uniform of a maid.  She once told my uncle Newt that she did not believe they had put a man on the moon because she "looked up there and didn't see no flag."

And Julia, a large smiling joyful soul, would buy her groceries while devouring a pound bag of hard candy and polish that off with a diet drink.  (The theory at the store was that Julia thought the two would counteract each other...but maybe she just liked that combination.)

And then there was Mattie.  Mattie worked every now and then for my grandmother when my mother was a child.  And then, after my mother and father brought us into the world, Mattie ironed for us one day a week and got paid two or three dollars for her efforts.  

We were poor but Mattie was destitute.  She lived in a shack with her old husband Tom who did little more than sit in his old slouch hat and stare.  She'd often tell us how once again she had to throw a snake out of her house.

I won't play the old Southern game about how much "we loved our Mattie."  We did love her.  But what is more important is that Mattie loved us.  Even in later years when I had left Mattie in the dust of my childhood, my mother would tell me that Mattie worried about me when she heard I was driving "up in Atlanta", a city not 60 miles away but which Mattie had never seen in all her ancient days.  

Buck Brewer would stop by the store every now and then. He worked for my dad at the concrete plant.  He was drunk or planning for it most of the days of his life.  I can still remember him standing outside our house and waving as he tried to get my dad's attention.  My dad would go out and before long a dollar or two would cross from Buck Street's hand to Buck Brewer's hand.  My dad would come in and say, "He needed milk for the baby."

Somebody threw Buck Brewer off a bridge one time and almost killed him.  One night "he fell asleep on the train track" and was killed when the train came barreling through.

Buck Brewer died of euphemism poisoning.

These people might well have been described as the "wretched of the earth."   I mean that in only one sense and that is the deepest sense of the word "wretch". 

They were "exiles".   They were all the children of people who had been snatched from the land of their birth and brought to a place where they were treated as nothings, nobodies and no-counts.

They were "exiles" because they lived in a land not of their choosing and treated as unwelcome in any place other than the place to which they had been assigned by the principalities and powers in straw hats and white church-going gloves. 

They were the "crushed", the "poor in spirit", indeed, the "poor". 

And they were to me, a child in the late 1950s, a wonder to behold.

They had no idea the effect they would have upon my life as I navigated the deep south "pre-integration" years of the 1950s and early 1960s in middle west Georgia.  

I was as pressed into the mold of the old South as the next kid and schooled in the rubric of "place".  I was taught that "they are alright as long as they stay in their place" without the postmodern rejoinder that everything that is said is said by a "somebody" who is bent on maintaining his own place in the social hiearchy.  (Imagine that!  A people pretty low down on the social ladder taking pride in how much lower "they" were than us!)

Like I said...I was a kid when these people traipsed in and out of my life.  I didn't know that I could love them.  I  knew I wasn't supposed to.   My feelings for them are complicated by longing, by regret, by wishing to feel better about myself in the present, by wanting to be more than I know that I am.

I confess. I have spit the poison of racist words in my time.  I have concealed fear in racist humor and sought acceptance by ignoramuses by speaking words I didn't mean.  I have been silent when I should have spoken and spoken when I should have kept silent.

And all the while this great cloud of witnesses has peopled my mind, and yes, my heart and have said by their simple and sad presence, "Son, you are created in the image of God and destined for better than that."

While Obama was taking the oath of office, I was thinking of them and finding that in spite of everything, indeed I did and do love and appreciate them.  They could not know nor could I the wonderful influence they had on my life.

I could not see Obama without seeing that great cloud of witnesses and I just wanted, in some small way, to remember them to you.