I read a story recently that illustrates what I’m talking about. Back in the days when racial prejudice was open, vile and violent, a man was raised in the South under the bigotry and prejudice of that day. His mother and father had been killed by whites. He lived with his grandmother and with his brother. One night men dressed in the white hoods of the KKK came to their home.
The family was frightened because there had been an uproar in the community. They burst open the little door of that rundown shack in the cotton field. They came in, got his older brother, dragged him out into the yard, put ropes under his armpits, and tied the rope to the horn of a saddle. Then they dragged him down a terrible rocky road, through the briar patch, and then around the courthouse down at the city square. When they got through with him, they brought his body back to the grandmother’s yard and threw him into the yard, bloody and dying. He died before they could get him into the house. Then the man in the white hood apologized because they had taken the wrong man! And added to that tragedy is that these men were never even arrested, much less prosecuted for the murder.
The next morning the grandmother got up to work at the white folks’ plantation house. She first cut up some turnip greens, then went back to the house and removed the salt cloth from the meat. Her grandson urged his grandmother, “Grandma, you poison those white folks food today! When you cook for those white folks today you put poison in that food. Don’t let them get by with what they have done to my brother!”
He never forgot how she disappeared down the road as she went to that plantation house, swept and mopped their floors, cared for their children, bathed their children,
cooked three meals that day. Tired and worn out, she came back home that night, and he asked,
...