Fuji Friday...For my Father (Purple Panel) Fuji...Edit

For My Father (Purple Panel Fuji)

Approximately 8 x 10" Prismacolor on Paper

Photo by Jay York

At the age of ten I was in the yard, in a new neighborhood with a new group of playmates, our right feet arranged in a circle. I started the locally accepted selection process... "Eenie meenie miney moe...catch a n****r by the toe..." My dad flew out of the back door. He said "Don't you ever use that word again! " I didn't ever use it again ...nor did anyone else in that circle... at least not within earshot of Mr. Amell. From that day forward we caught "turtles by the toe". 

When I was a kid, of an evening, families all over the country would watch the news on TV ...and could regularly expect to see things like Freedom Riders being pelted with rocks, menaced and bitten by attack dogs, or on the receiving end of Molotov cocktails ...there were children being thrown into  jails, or booed and spat upon by jeering bystanders. 

Demonstrators were jettisoned into the air and down the road by fire hoses ...operated by a peculiar species of fireman. 

Churches were bombed. One church was bombed while full of nice young people ...four girls just about my age lay dead after the explosion. All kinds of people, decent people, were getting maimed and killed ...frequently. 

I knew that all of this was wrong... because I was told that it was wrong. The viscera will tell a child something cruel or unfair is happening ...but a parent can drive an incident home one way or another. Both of my parents made it very clear that the police, governors and venomous crowds down south and beyond who were fighting against the Civil Rights Movement were absolutely in the wrong. The "N word" and all of the hateful freight it carried was not to be tolerated. 

My mother was raised by kind and moderate people. My father on the other hand was raised by people who were, like so many others at the time...vociferous racists. Somehow he managed to transcend that bit of his history. In those days I remember that he read a lot and that Martin Luther King's books were in his collection... he also read a lot about the Civil War. He was a union man and worked setting the presses at the Philadelphia Inquirer. I remember that there were often tiny lead shavings in his trouser cuffs when he returned home from his shift, carrying a fresh newspaper. 

Dad died a long time ago and I never had a chance to ask him why he was the way he was, or what circumstances may have formed his world view. 

More often than not these days, as I take in an especially bad bit of news or listen to the absurd pronouncements generated by small, hateful and fettered minds I'll think of my father. He held an entirely sensible conviction that in spite of everything... no matter what your upbringing might be, there were very specific things that people should never do or say based merely on malignant notions regarding race or class. I learned that there are certain actions that can never be justified.

Thank you for the lesson, Mr. Amell. Rest in peace.