2. Paul's Epistle to the New Confederacy (Pt.2) Uncle Lanny Ross Jr.

Note: This story contains a profanity. Not a cuss word, the N-word. I asked one of my African-American students to read this and give me an opinion regarding the use of the word in this context. She assured, "Go ahead. It's OK. We get it."

**********************************************************************

My mom is the eldest of six. Her brothers and sisters do not usually travel out of Texas, but they're getting aged and know that their windows of visitation are becoming increasingly difficult to organize. The second youngest, my uncle, decided that he and his new wife would drive their pickup truck and trailer to visit her child in Montana --and afterwards swing by Oregon to see his sister and me, his nephew. We cooked salmon on the grill with asparagus and potatoes. My uncle watched me from a deck above while I cooked. He asked ‘cook’ questions. He was curious about the fish. He had never eaten salmon before. His was a lifetime of bass and crappie -freshwater fish. My answers seemed to satisfy him. I think he was proud of me and my pasture-like back yard. During dinner I asked him if he was enjoying his meal. My uncle, a very large man, put his hands on the table and told my delighted eyes that he'd let me know after his second plate.

Uncle, would you break bread with my brown friends? Uncle, would you call my brown friends nigger? Uncle, would you hate my friends who don't worship like you? Is it because families can no longer be sold like cattle?

My mom's sister's husband does not like to leave Texas. It is his choice. He married my aunt after she had already bore six children by her first husband. My aunt's second husband is a church-going man and the Lord told him to be a husband to my mom's sister and a father to six drifting children. My aunt divorced her first husband after several beatings by him. He was a lifelong petty criminal. When I was six, our family of five were living in an eighty year old, two bedroom apartment on Chicago's rapidly changing South Side. I was one of two white children in my kindergarten. But the apartment was cheap, and that is why we lived there. I do not remember how long we had lived in the apartment, but at some point my aunt's family of eight moved in with us because they had to leave Texas. My parents gave up their bedroom. I do not recall where they slept. I slept on the pantry floor. My aunt's family found their own apartment and moved out. One hot summer night my aunt left her husband because he beat her again. She and the six children moved back in with our family. Soon after, her husband showed up drunk on our front steps demanding to see her. My father, a mild man, confronted him. I did not know where my father found the baseball bat, but he had one in his fists. My uncle left and never came back. When my aunt went back to Texas, she met her next husband at church. He is an intelligent man with a facile wit --which he wields like an edged weapon. A career electrician at the local power plant, he provided stability for six traumatized children and their mother. Like all people with unstable childhoods, my cousins grew into adulthood with degrees of success; money not being the measurement. The consequences of witnessing what they witnessed surfaced in my cousins in ways mild and profound. The boy cousin closest to my age was a precious gift to Texas: he was a very handsome white kid who could run extremely fast. University after university sent scouts to watch him play sports. On one of our vacations I watched him command home plate and center field, envious of his athletic gifts. On that same trip, I helped him with his homework. We studied Texas history. He needed to pass Texas history to graduate. Shortly after graduation, he married his pregnant girlfriend and got a job building roads. He was going to play local, semi-pro baseball [part time] and be discovered. They got divorced after a couple of years and he got a new girlfriend. A job pulled him to a site three hours drive from where his new girlfriend lived. He fell asleep at the wheel one rainy night and drove off the road. His sister -another cousin- was living with us in a Chicago suburb when they called her during the middle of my sister's wedding reception at our house. Her oldest brother had died slowly from internal injuries. He went to Jesus. My mother went to the funeral. I did not.

My mother's Bible has the words of Jesus printed in red. As a child I would thumb the gold-edged pages and read some of the red sentences. I asked my mother why those words were printed in such a bold, different color. She told me that was because those were the most important words in the Bible. I have not read the Bible in a very long time. But I am certain that nowhere among those red letters did the person who uttered them ever call someone a nigger.

Dixie oh Dixie! Why are you so angry? What did we do? No one asked you to stop loving your family and Jesus. All we requested had been asked before, "'Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." Why are you so angry?