SOUL FOOD -- MICHELE MARR

As the Fourth of July approaches, I thank God for the rich heritage of

freedom and hope it celebrates. It was my good fortune to be born in this

sweet land of liberty.

I can recall a string of years when all the Fourth of July meant to me

was a picnic, hot dogs and fried chicken with potato salad and ice tea at

the beach. Once the sun went down, there would be a stars-and-stripes

fireworks display at the stadium on the Marine base where my family

lived.

I was too young then to really comprehend the uniqueness of my

homeland. I hadn’t learned about explorers and Indians, pilgrims and

Puritans, discontented English colonists and the Boston Tea Party.

Even the meaning of the anthems we sang in church I hardly grasped.

But, as the accompaniment swelled and the voices rose, my heart did, too.

o7 “Our father’s God to thee,

Author of liberty

To there we sing:

Long may our land be bright

With freedom’s holy light;

Protect us by thy might,

Great God, our King.”

f7 I felt nothing less than blessed.

In 1959, each of us in my fourth-grade class had to memorize the

Declaration of Independence. It took me six weeks, a little more than 200

words a week, from start to finish to get it pat.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” I recited, “that all men

are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain

unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of

happiness.”

I was 9 then, and living in Mobile, Ala., with my maternal

grandmother, my sister and my mother. The Saturday after my recitation,

my grandmother took me Downtown to celebrate with a grilled cheese and a

Coke at the lunch counter at Kress Five and Dime.

The counter was crowded like it often was on a Saturday, so we had to

wait our turn just to get two seats at the end of the counter near the

restrooms.

While we waited for our sandwiches, we talked about what some of the

words I had memorized meant. My grandmother told me that unalienable

rights meant that no human being could be deprived of them.

We had to wait so long for our food that after a while we just sat

fiddling with the straws in our Cokes, nothing particular to say.

I thought for a while about pursuing happiness. It seemed like what I

did when I climbed the Chinaberry tree or asked for money when the ice

cream man came around.

Two drinking fountains were mounted on the wall near the end of the

counter. The handle on one was stuck, so I watched a thin arc of water

dawdle, then lurch, from the spigot.

A large woman in a summer dress and hat walked up to the fountains.

She had been out in the heat of the day. I could tell by the beads of

sweat across her forehead. Before the woman bent down to drink she took a

hankie out of a breast pocket on her dress and wiped the beads away.

Then she took another hankie from her purse, turned the handle of the

drinking fountain with it and stooped to drink. Her hat tumbled forward.

Above her head I saw a row of stenciled letters. I could see that they

spelled the word “colored.” If that word had been there all my life, I

couldn’t remember seeing it before.

I looked at the wall above the other fountain. Just as plain, five

stenciled letters spelled the word “white.”

In the mirror behind the lunch counter I could see the long row of

hungry heads reflected. Bowed over their plates, every face was white.

Every face, every pair of hands, was white.

I stirred my Coke with my straw. In the chimes of the ice on the glass

the melody of a song I learned in Sunday school came o7 to me.

“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red

and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight. Jesus loves

the little children of the world.”

f7 Did Jesus stop loving colored people when they grew up?

“All men are created equal,” I repeated in my head, “endowed by their

creator with certain unalienable rights. . . .”

All people except colored people?

I felt myself blush, embarrassed for myself and for my hometown.

Many years later and 2000 miles west, in my California high school’s

library, I came across a book called, “The Life and Writings of Frederick

Douglass.”

In it is a speech Douglass gave July 5, 1852, at an event

commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It reads,

in part,

“Fellow Citizens, I am not wanting in respect for the fathers of this

republic. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were brave men.

They were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and

the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their

memory. . . .

“Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to

speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your

national independence?

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer; a day

that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross

injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your

celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your

national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty

and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence;

your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and

hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and

solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and

hypocrisy.”

One hundred forty-nine Independence Days later, things have changed.

Slavery was abolished 30 years before Douglass died. The South is

integrated. But sometimes, in some places, the more things change, the

more they really do remain the same.

When I took my husband to see my birthplace and to meet my extended

family a few years ago, he was sometimes bewildered, sometimes surprised

and dismayed. I was simply dismayed.

The “n” word still rolled off the tongues of my kinfolks and others.

“Colored” people were characterized as dumb -- “they’ve got

monkey-brains” -- lazy and dirty.

On a car trip -- a walk in the park was too dangerous -- through

Bienville Square, an historic park in downtown Mobile, our guide -- my

uncle -- instructed my husband to get a good look at the squirrels on a

park bench.

After surveying the benches within eyeshot, my husband gave me a

puzzled glance. I tilted my head in the direction of two black men

sitting on a bench, chatting and feeding the park pigeons.

My husband and I, thinking at the time of adopting a child, were told,

bluntly, that if we adopted a child of any color we better not bring him

back to Mobile.

Maybe it’s mostly just my family. That’s my greatest hope. But just in

case, on Wednesday, the Fourth of July, I’ll offer up my prayers of

thanks -- and also of supplication.

Dear Lord, help us to better love one another as you love us. Amen.

*

MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

[email protected]