!Chuck
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agk's diary
29 September 2023 @ 10:57 UTC
---
written on GPD Win 1
in garage with a little lantern
---
Mom's off to uncle Chuck's memorial. He was her
sister's husband and about the sharpest wit I ever
knew. His humor, tempered by humility and decency,
never trod on anyone's dignity in my hearing. I
never got the sense he saw anyone as beneath him.
I'd like to be there to hear stories that recall
him to me and complicate my recollection with parts
of him I didn't know--but I'm on call today, leash-
ed to a radius the memorial's beyond. I can still
tell, barred from the memorial's resurrection of
the man in others' stories.
My grandparents and I visited Thanksgiving one of
the years protesters kept specific young black men
shot dead by police in public memory.
The local dead man was a star athlete. He knocked
a white woman's door for help after he wrecked his
car into a tree. After work I drove daily to the
courthouse to sit behind the dead man's mom as she
heard police testify her son's white eyes in the
dark looked like an animal's.
I sat behind her. She silently bore witness to the
forensic expert who demonstrated trajectories of
each bullet that perforated his body, shattered,
macerated his organs as he sat, hands raised. This
one entered his shoulder from the rear. Its frag-
ments emerged from his lungs and liver, lodged
against a rib.
My grandparents and I discussed the case at break-
fast on mornings I wasn't at work. A friend who led
protest marches was tailed around town, pulled from
the courtroom, intimidated and harrassed by various
security services. I ambivalently participated in
some mass community meetings, spoke once for A.
Phillip Randolph's working class industrial democ-
racy, against milquetoast professional/managerial
"racial reconciliation" via getting to know someone
of a different race.
I unwillingly inherited leadership of our southern
city's too-liberal progressive-for-me chapter of
SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), a "white anti
racist" organization. I directed its members to
reflect on and build empathy for family and people
they knew well who're attracted to organized,
explicit anti-black vigilante stuff: Ku Klux Klan,
Aryan Brotherhood, owning a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog
or flying the confederate battle flag with its more
ambiguous shades of meanings.
We had to reflect so our judgment wouldn't be
clouded with self-righteousness, so we could think
realistically and strategically about how to oppose
a unity rally of national Ku Klux Klan and National
Socialist (Nazi) Movement leadership that was
coming up. When race and policing are major topics
of discussion on the news, facebook, the job, and
the table, these groups recruit. Why are their
recruits attracted to them? What can we do to
undermine or steal their appeal?
On SURJ's national chapter leader email list there
was an "action toolkit" about using Thanksgiving
dinnertable conversation to advance antiracism or
whatever, "calling in" white relatives and elders.
I hated the pedantic, moralistic, paternalistic
vibe, and the class-blind obscurationism of the
thing, but it was on my mind at my aunt and uncle's
Thanksgiving table.
My aunt, like my mom, went to highschool in the
nearby southern city at the height of 1970s deseg-
regation and bussing. Racial apartheid, become
illegal in schooling, was overcome by a system that
bussed black and white kids to schools outside
their neighborhoods, mixing them together. Many
whites protested, then moved. National guard hele-
copters were landed on her high school football
field to quell riots in the school. The long blonde
hair of some white girls was set afire on their
heads in the toilet. She graduated as the hysteria
was subsiding.
This particular Thanksgiving Chuck sat at one end
the table, mom's tall nerdy little brother Tim at
the other. My aunt and cousin faced my grandparents
and I over turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes,
casseroles, greens, cranberry sauce, and sweet tea.
My aunt sells insurance to truckers. She told an
insignificant racially-disparaging anecdote a co-
worker'd told her. Not something she'd usually say,
but race had been the topic of conversation every-
where for months.
I thought what she said was mean and small, but I
didn't say anything. Neither'd my liberal grandma.
My aunt thought the story'd be amusing, but nobody
laughed. Instead uncle Chuck, more white and south-
ern than any of us, said softly to her, "Don't talk
about my people like that, Momma."
Their son, my cousin, tag-teamed without hesitation
"I'm right there with you, daddy."
No moralistic lecture, no self-righteous superior-
ity, but without strife the conversation changed to
other things. My aunt knew she was wrong, no need
to belabor it. I was shook, though. I'd thought
Chuck was a redneck like his family member down the
road with a confederate battle flag on the tallest
pole for miles. His wit was quick, but he waited
and spoke slow, with a pronounced drawl. His lower
lip indicated the dip he'd chewed. He was a genius
in the garden, loved his riding mower, lived in the
deep rural south, and worked in a warehouse.
I asked him, another time, if he ever knew anybody
in the Ku Klux Klan. The town near where he grew up
was home to the 1958 "kissing case": a black 9 year
old and black 7 year old convicted of molestation,
sentenced to state reformatory til the age of 21
because a white girl their age kissed them on the
cheek. The local NAACP director organized Detroit
autoworkers in the '40s, then advocated armed self-
defense when 7,500 Klansmen gathered in the town of
12,000 in the aftermath of the kissing case. Jesse
Helms, a conservative senator from 1973-2003 was
from there.
Chuck told me about guys who passed flyers around
the warehouse where he worked to get workers to a
meal and movie about problems in the community they
darkly hinted at. His work-buddy went. He tagged
along. The obscene, lascivious movie was about the
spectre of black men raping white women.
Chuck realized what it was. He left, walked home. I
forgot some of the story. I believe he told me he
noted who was there, talked some guys out of
getting involved.
There was no countervailing force of trade-unionist
or socialist thought in town to denounce the Klan's
crude deflection of white male resentment away from
its source. Leisure produced by mechanization of
labor accumulated upward. Working people wasted
their resentment on each other.
Chuck couldn't swallow the lie because he was
decent and he loved the woman who raised him, a
black sharecropper on his papaw's land. He didn't
just love her sentimentally, he loved her practic-
ally. He saved money to move her out of the shack
into a small place in town. He visited her, minded
her, hung on her word, and buried her when she
died. She was his momma, more or less, and he was
her son.
I learned about her long after one of Chuck's once-
estranged daughters was confined to a nursing home
in another state with advanced multiple scerosis,
the other dying of brain cancer in another state,
his son who never got far from home recovering from
a dissecting aortic aneurysm, breathing through a
trach tube, Chuck disabled by a stroke. I cared for
grandma, whose dementia was well-advanced. I did
housekeeping and home health care for a well-off
woman in grandma's church who also had advanced
dementia. I was in my 30s.
I underestimated Chuck for most of my life because
I didn't live near, he spoke plainly after screwing
up his face and slow consideration, and he saved
his thoughts for those who could enjoy them. I only
noticed how funny, independent-minded, smart, and
principled he was shortly before the stroke that
made speech tough, memory opaque, and narrowed much
of his life to naps and looking at the TV from the
recliner.
There's so much more I wish I knew his thoughts on.
