I was born in the bright sunny South on a humid July evening. My childhood was filled with playing baseball, catching catfish from the nearby creek, listening to long sermons at the Baptist church, and yes, fried chicken and sweet tea waiting at home as soon as the last altar call was made. Our family, I would learn, had 19 members who wore the Confederate gray. My grandmother would regale me with tales of our ancestors in Georgia who were burned out by Sherman’s wild-eyed troops on their infamous march to the sea.
“Yankees,” she would often instruct me, “are not to be trusted. Make sure you marry a proper southern girl!”
On Friday night, my friends and I would go to the high school football game where Dixie was played before the start of every game. Watching the older kids, I obligingly placed my hand over my heart while singing every word with a force that would surely have shocked my Sunday school teacher at church.
In the summer of my 12th year came a life-changing event. One night, as I settled into bed, I heard the blare of a loudspeaker. Words came spitting out with ferocity unmatched by anything in my young ears. Our two-story house overlooked a large field where, from my window on the top floor, I could see in the distance the unforgettable blaze of a large wooden cross. “The coloreds are a race of mongrels,” thundered the speaker, “who cannot be allowed to mix with the white race!” At breakfast the next morning my mother explained that our schools were getting ready to integrate and that a group of people called the Ku Klux Klan were against it.
“They are just trash,” she informed me emphatically.
That weekend I went to the library and looked up the Klan. Pictures of lynchings and stories about Emmitt Till and the Scottsboro boys filled my brain. The South, I was learning, wasn’t just about heroic battles and romantic plantations; there was darkness and pain as well.
It was then I remembered my grandmother had once mentioned my grandfather had been in the Klan. Not exactly understanding at the time who they where, now I counted the days to speak to her. Finally, several weeks later, she and I settled in on her front porch. “Your grandfather joined in 1927 at a time when most men his age thought it was the right thing to do,” she related.
Several months later, she went on, he was out turkey hunting with a neighbor called Willie who worked with my grandfather putting up telephone poles. As they walked through a cow pasture, Willie was suddenly accosted by three white hunters. “Well, look here!” said one. “We’re going to have to teach this boy a lesson about hunting on white man’s land.”
My grandfather stepped in front of Willie. “You’ll have to go through me first,” he said.
“Fine with me,” said the first, immediately coming at my grandfather. He put the first one down with a left hook before the other two jumped on him. It was over 30 seconds later (my grandfather never lost a fight) but it left him with a slight limp he had the rest of his life. That month he resigned from the Klan. “Too much hate,” he told my grandmother.
As we contemplate what happened in Charleston and the debate over the Confederate flag, it is tempting to look away, but we must not. “The South’s got a lot of wrong with it,” said the writer Pat Conroy, “but it’s permanent press and it doesn’t wear out.” (Amen!)