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A Really Safe Car

"T'were somewhere in the seventies--I have no sense of time; only space--when Gail and I drove south, to the fabled South, to look at colleges.  We looked at Duke, and North Carolina, at the University of Georgia, and the University of the South.


I had encouraged all of our kids to think large about themselves as individuals, and certainly not to go to a school only because their parents or siblings had gone there.  Paul had gone to Yale.  Kathryn chose Chapman College, in California.  Later Heidi chose the University of California at Santa Cruz.  But this was Gail's turn.  


We weren't a privileged family.  I taught at a small college in Iowa.  I know, and they knew, that if we had what it took, and if we worked hard, we had a chance at almost anything.  


There we were--Gail, me, and the car radio--exploring somewhere where no siblings had gone, looking for a place for Gail to become Gail, or more Gail than anyone else.  She did begin there, at Lenoir Rhyne, but ended up at the University of Arizona.  


But this is not about Gail, or Paul or Kathryn or Heidi.  This is about something savage.


Our tour went wherever we had t go, to get from place to place.  We were driving through what had been the Old South; through slave-owning country, and Jim Crow country, and we knew that because we listened to local radio stations.  


It was ugly.  It was pure racism.  I had not ever heard such racial anger.  I began to hope that the old tires on our car, or the dubious wiring and electronics, were adequate.  We were obvious northerners, obviously intruders; not at the universities, but in the small towns with radio stations. 


I don't know how, or why, racism survives.  I don't know why the university towns were the oases from racism, and the small towns were the last, best bastions of racial hatred.  It is not true that all the smart and rational people go to school. Some can't afford it, or never knew they could.  Some people at the university are smart bastards, but mean.  


Texas does seem to love to execute people.  Georgia seems not to care whether the case against Troy Davis made sense.  Something in the South still wants to hurt black people, to deny them a note, to call them boys, and even, sometimes, to drag black men behind a pickup.  


Ahh!  I don't know whether to curse or to cry.


It lingers, like a poison in our food.  Barach Obama is black, isn't he?


Someone should provide him with a really safe car.  

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