The Day a Black Man Came to My ‘Racist’ Granddaddy’s Funeral
By: Mishael Witty
Tags: Perspective, Relationships, Life Lessons, This Happened To Me, Racism

I don’t remember when, exactly, the conversation took place — sometime in the late ’80s or early ’90s. I don’t really remember what the conversation was actually about.

But I remember my granddaddy saying something about a “colored boy” who worked with him in a gas station thirty years earlier.

My grandmother gasped, horrified, “Edward!”

Grandaddy looked at her, looked down at the floor for a moment, and then looked back up at me. “Sorry. Black man.”

And I remember wondering, at the time, whether Granddaddy was a racist because he’d used the “c” word. At least it wasn’t the “n” word, I rationalized. But my bussed public school-educated preteen/teen mind was finely tuned to pick up on anything even remotely racist.

The comment didn’t make me love him any less. It didn’t make me like him any less. But that comment, and my grandmother’s sharp reprimand (I guess she thought it was racist too), never left my mind.

Obviously.

I’m still thinking about it thirty years later. Maybe more so now that racial tensions in my city are at a fever pitch, and no one seems to know what to do about it.

Some background on my granddaddy

He was a farm boy, born in Lamb, Kentucky (an unincorporated community of Monroe County) on February 22, 1922. Firmly in the middle of the reign of Jim Crow.

As of 2010, Monroe County’s total population was less than 11,000, and 95% white. During the time at which my granddaddy was growing up, I imagine the percentage of white people living in the county was greater than that. So, he probably never had many dealings with people of color until he moved to Louisville in the early 1950s, after my dad was born.

That was when he started working at the gas station with the “colored boy.” Still during the reign of Jim Crow. No doubt, this colored (no pun intended, truly!) his perceptions of the world and how things worked. But did it truly affect who he was?

And, more importantly, did that one comment mark him as a racist?

Some people today say that it would, and I believed that myself for a long time … until he died, and a Black man came to pay his respects.

An unexpected guest and an overheard conversation

Grandaddy died on March 19, 1995, just two weeks after my eighteenth birthday. He was buried a few days later.

The man’s arrival at the funeral home was conspicuous. He was the only non-white person in the room.

He walked up to my grandmother, shook her hand, and said, “I’m sorry for your husband’s passing. I read about it in the newspaper. He was always real good to me. He was a good man. I wanted to pay my respects because he respected me.”

And I couldn’t help wondering if this man standing in front of my grandmother was the same “colored boy” Granddaddy had talked about in that conversation we’d had years before. I like to believe that he was.

At any rate, whoever this man was, he didn’t know my granddaddy was “racist.” But if he, the one person who should have known it, didn’t, then maybe …

Maybe Granddaddy wasn’t a racist, after all.

Actions speak louder than words

It’s very true that words can hurt. But it’s also true that actions speak louder.

My grandaddy may have said something “racist,” perhaps because of his upbringing, or the zeitgeist of most of the decades through which he lived. But his actions proved that he was no racist. He treated people of every race and gender kindly. He always tried to get along with everyone.

And the actions of that Black man at the funeral home spoke louder to me than anything he or my granddaddy said. You don’t pay your respects to someone who treated you unfairly 30 years before. You pay your respects to people you care about, people who impacted your life for good.

My granddaddy was one of the people who impacted that man’s life for good.

Less talk, more action

I don’t claim to have all the answers for racial healing or ending racism. But I do understand now how our perceptions of racism can be very wrong, if we’re only going by what people say … or if we’re only going by certain random incidents in an individual’s life. We have to look at the whole picture, examine the larger pattern.

And we have to focus less on words, in general, and more on actions. And I’m not talking about the kind of action we’re currently seeing throughout the United States — protests, rioting, and looting. What good do any of these things do, really? How do any of them help people?

Hatred stirs up strife,

But love covers all transgressions. (Proverbs 10:12, NLT)

What if, instead, we all showered our brothers and sisters of different races with radical acts of love — the self-sacrificing, foot-washing, tangible reconciling love modeled by Jesus?

Buy a cup of coffee, or a meal, for a stranger who looks different than you. Do what you can to try to comfort a grieving family. Offer to babysit a single mom’s kids so she can take a moment for herself. And always treat others with kindness and respect, no matter what they look like or where they come from.

You may not heal all the world’s racism problems, but you’ll work healing in one person’s life, if only for a moment or two. And the effects of that action may last for decades … even long after you’re dead.