|
Finding The Man In The Picture
Note: This story originally appeared in two parts.
There is a framed picture hanging on a wall in my parent’s home. This picture fascinates me. When I visit I often find myself pausing to stare at the image of a handsome and striking young man who sits with his wife and their two-year-old daughter. His face doesn't reveal much emotion, but something behind his eyes and in his story draws me to him.
The little girl is my mother, and some part of me understands that the young man is my grandfather. But this is not the man I knew as Papaw. His face is not old and sagging and marked with spots and deep lines, as I remember it. The face in the picture has a chiseled jaw line, prominent cheek bones, and smooth, brown skin. His lips are full, soft, and even sensual. His hair is black as coal and looks as though it received a lot of attention and was a source of considerable pride. The Native American woman who made a surprise appearance in our family tree a few generations back certainly left her mark on his face.
In the picture my grandfather is wearing a three-piece suit with a white shirt and tie. I never knew him to dress like that. By the time I came along he wore wore Coveralls all the time. I can hardly remember him wearing anything else. Obviously this was my grandfather in a dapper moment, dressing his best for a family photo. A closer look at the picture reveals the truth about him. An air pressure gauge sticks up prominently from the breast pocket of his fancy suit. The hand casually draped across his thigh had already begun the thickening process that would eventually produce the strongest pair of hands I ever saw.
This was not a man accustomed to suits and ties. This was a man who needed a tire gauge at the ready. This was a man who knew a day’s work. Spotting the gauge there in his pocket made me smile and was comforting to me for some reason. Yes, that’s the man I remember so fondly. I knew he was in there somewhere.
The first time I saw this picture I was shocked to realize that my grandfather had been handsome once upon a time. With his hair, that skin, and those exotic features, he could be on the cover of “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” next month.
But of course, he wasn’t on the cover of any magazines. My grandfather was a country man, hard and uneducated. He was not sophisticated in any way that you or I might recognize, though I imagine he could teach us a thing or two. And the life he lived soon turned those smooth, young features into something older, something rougher, something like worn leather.
The picture was taken in 1939. They had no way of knowing it, but the Great Depression was drawing to a close and World War II was about to begin, bringing new kinds of hardship and deprivation. My grandfather was nineteen when the stock market crashed. He was certainly not among those speculating in stock at the time. When it happened, I think it was probably nothing more to him than a bold headline in an East Texas newspaper. The depression hit his kind later, when paychecks shrank or disappeared altogether. When that happened, men like my grandfather returned to the soil. You can always grow food, and if you have food you can figure out the rest.
Sometimes I wonder what Papaw expected out of life. I have a sense that he expected to struggle hard and pull his living from the earth with his bare hands. This is what it meant to be a man – to know your place and to stand between your family and destruction. You had to make your own way in the world, by whatever means necessary. The Great Depression only made the thorns he already expected a little sharper and the sweat of his brow a little saltier.
His name was Van Zany Cox, and he was born in Oklahoma in 1910. He and his family were poor white trash. That’s the truth of it. That’s what people called share croppers who had too many children and lived in a boxcar. His mother, my great-grandmother, who lived long enough to hold a great-great-grandson, had to work in the fields while she was pregnant. She bent her back to pick cotton while his siblings hung low in her belly. Five of seven lived, three boys and two girls. Van Zany was the oldest, so he bore certain responsibilities. He was called upon to leave school as a boy to work with his mother and father and to help raise his brothers and sisters.
Family legend tells us that he swore his two younger brothers would never have to drop out of school, and they didn’t. Nolan went to Rice University and Lowell played football at Texas A&M.
When the Texas oil boom hit, the family moved to East Texas, hoping to find dream jobs with the big oil companies. There would be regular paychecks and real houses to live in, and a company store where you could buy clothes and food and even candy for the children sometimes, or so they heard.
They were like the Joad family in “The Grapes of Wrath,” only the handbills told these Okies to head for Texas oil. It was the right decision, and all of our potential lives hung in the balance. The way I see it, they carried us all with them in the jalopy, my mother, her children, my children, and all who will come after us.
Van Zany lied about his age and got hired by the Humble Oil Company. That company would later become “Esso,” then “Enco,” and finally, “Exxon.” My grandfather was always grateful for his job and proud of his company. He trusted that the company would take care of him, and as far as he was concerned, it did. He lived in the Humble Oil Camp in a company house. He shopped at the company store. His children were among the mobs who flooded into the public schools from the oil camps around the state.
Eventually he bought that company house and moved it onto his own land. He added a room or two, including a bathroom for himself complete with a real shower. He covered the old-fashioned slate with red brick and lived in that house until he buried the young woman from the picture and was later buried himself by his three children.
He knew his place in the world and was happy to have it. I think his shiny hardhat and regular paycheck were the best he could hope for in life, and he never stopped being grateful. He worked for the same company until he retired, and he proudly carried his Exxon credit card with him until the day he died. He was constantly topping off the tanks of his vehicles so he wouldn't get in a bind and be forced to buy some other, lesser brand of gasoline.
But most of this happened before I knew him. I am the third of his eight grandchildren, and I only knew him as Papaw, our beloved grandfather. He always kept ice cream in the freezer for his grandchildren - chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry - and he told us the same silly stories over and over.
“I had a little dog, his name was Rover. He died all over except for his tail, and it turned over.”
“I had a little mule, his name was Jack. I put him in the stable but he jumped through the crack.”
I recognize the full lips from the picture, but when I knew him some sort of paralysis had lessened his control over them, so that there was always a little drool seeping from the corner of his mouth that he wiped away with a handkerchief or the back of his hand. His hands and fingers were thick and calloused after forty-five years in the oil fields. As a boy I was fascinated by his hands and would watch, amazed, when he used them for some ordinary task, like carving turkey at Thanksgiving or tying a hook to my fishing line. Some accident along the way had caused him to lose much of the feeling in one of his hands. He used to hold his numbed fingers in the flame of a candle to our delight and amazement.
He had land enough for a serious garden and would sometimes load the grandkids into a makeshift train of wagons and haul us around behind his miniature tractor. When I was a small boy, I used to dream of driving that tractor myself, a thing I understood to be so far beyond me that I could not allow myself to hope for it.
He always seemed happy with what he had. His Humble Oil home was humble indeed, but it was enough for him, as was his land and his garden and his vacation trips. How he did love to travel after he retired. He was thrilled with the KOA campgrounds, the Stuckey’s, and the snapshots he and Mamaw proudly put into the albums they kept on the coffee table. The fruit he brought home from the Rio Grande Valley always seemed exotic and wonderful to him. His grandchildren, who had never wanted for fruit or much else for that matter, could not understand his delight at a Ruby Red grapefruit.
I think wanting more of the American dream was a kind of blasphemy to my grandfather. Anything more than he had was beyond his station and utterly out of his reach. Like me wanting to drive his tractor, there were things in life he dared not hope for. He didn’t even think of hoping for them.
This is what my grandfather and others like him came to know, came to understand and accept without question. You should know your place. You should accept the slice of the American pie that the powerful people give to you, and you should be grateful for it. To step out of your place and want more is to be selfish and spoiled, and perhaps is even against the will of the frightening God whose word thundered from country pulpits and billowed the canvas tents of small town revivals.
I think people who have been kept in their place by the immutable forces of power sometimes carry in their hearts the unfertilized seeds of lost chances and unclaimed dreams. These sterile and hardened kernels can never grow, but lie buried and festering. And if anyone else is seen stepping out of his place, that kernel can split open, not dropping tender roots of desire and goodness, but bursting with a pent-up and mindless rage that searches for no proper object, but only seeks expression and release.
I remember the day when the rage inside my grandfather rose up, as if it were something independant of him, and showed me a person as unfamiliar then as the man in the photograph is today. I remember the day I discovered that there was something angry and frightening inside my Papaw.
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 naïve and childish way to think, but I was naïve 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 naïve 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 fiancé 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
Humble Oil Camp
Picture of Humble Oil Camp House
Rio Grande Valley - Home of Texas Citrus Fruit
Stuckey's
KOA Campgrounds
Coveralls
Read about Moses on Mt. Pisgah
Will Campbell - One of the greates thrills of my life came when Will Campbell called me on the phone after agreeing to write a blurb for the back cover of RealLivePreacher.com. Click here to find out about him.
|
© Copyright 2005 Preacher.
Last update: 7/17/2005; 8:24:24 PM. Links
|
|
