Coming Home

I went looking for my home today. Not were I live now, I haven’t lost track of that yet, but where I grew up. With everything going on today, I thought I’d like to go back to a simpler time. I thought it would be soothing.

The town has grown, so I had to ignore everything that wasn’t there when I lived there. My side of town was the prosperous side, big houses along a wide boulevard for bankers and business leaders. It was a rich vein surrounded by rougher granite. If you took the boulevard down the main road into town and across the river, you came to the part of town where the caddies and waiters at the county club lived and the maids that cleaned the big homes. Some of them got rides to work from family members, but most took the bus. I don’t think many drove their own cars.

My family was fractious, but mainly in family matters not politics or social issues. My parents and grandparents were kind to others regardless of skin color. They didn’t raise their voices, not outside a family squabble, anyway.

Jim Crow was still the law and the custom in those days, but no one in my family ever made me feel they thought blacks were inferior. Segregation was just the way it was. One set of my grandparents was active in trying to improve educational opportunities for blacks. The other set was good to the ones who worked for them. But the racial stratification in town was pretty set in stone, so much so that it was like the seasons or the river to me, not something I considered to be changeable. Honestly, not something I gave much thought to.

Even when we had lunch counter sit-ins, I barely noticed. I should have, but I didn’t. The civil rights movement brought some unrest, but most of it was downtown, pretty far away from the country club.

I grew up a progressive Republican. Progressive because I thought people should all be treated well, as I had learned from my family, Republican because my father was. I can’t say I even really understood when I was young what it meant to be a Republican as opposed to being a Democrat. The Democrats were all Yankees, or that’s how everyone made it seem. I didn’t even really know what a Yankee was, only that they all live "up north." I knew about the Civil War, but that had been over for so long that I didn’t connect it to the term Yankee. 

I heard the jokes about blacks some men made. They were vile and racist, I see that now, but I more or less ignored them, the same way I ignored their crude jokes about women. Women didn’t come off much better than blacks when a bunch of good old boys had one too many.

I left my home town because I needed more freedom, mainly from my father, whom I adored but didn’t want to be controlled by, but also from the smallness of life there. It was like the local go-cart track. It could be fun, but after a few times testing the curves, it was boring.

Nostalgia for the good-old-days is making a political comeback now. We want to go back to factory towns and broad leafy lawns, to when people had a sense of place they could depend on, and a time when the could also depend on others to stay in their place.

The town of my youth gave me every opportunity, kept me safe, and set me free when the time came. I didn’t understand the cost to others of my privilege. I’m not talking about slaves building my home, although they did build one nearby, I’m talking about the blacks and women who made life easy for me, who let me glide down my freshly raked path oblivious to the scratches they bore from clearing the brambles for me.

I don’t know how I would have fared growing up in an environment in which I had to struggle to get the chances that others gave to me and that I took for granted. Maybe I would have ended up a petty crook, or maybe I would have worked hard and made something of myself and by that process understood that for most in this country what they have is not brought to them on a silver plater by a maid in a white apron and cap.

I see now that I didn’t see clearly then. And it makes me wonder if there are others like me, perhaps many. I don’t think you had to grow up in privilege to think you were privileged in the way you grew up. Maybe your dad had a good job at the local plant and came home in the evening and tossed a baseball with you, or maybe you lived on a farm and can still taste the sweet corn and fresh eggs.

There are plenty of kids who are raised in hardship, but many others whose families gave them the best start they could without talking about the sacrifices they made to do it. Those kids, like me, would have thought life back then was just nice. And when life got tougher down the road, they would look back on those gauzy memories and long for those times. It’s just human nature.

But it's not the truth of today. It's not something we can go back to. It is something we can re-create, though, if we can put ourselves back in those times and remember why we felt safe then. And try to offer some of that safety to others.