Soul searching can come at the most unexpected times. When we are caught off guard, God can quietly speak truth into our hearts.
As I glanced up from my lunch, I saw a couple across the dining hall rising to leave. He took her arm in a familiar way, and with intimate closeness, they laughed together as she shared something amusing with him. They seemed oblivious to their surroundings. And despite the open-mindedness with which I prefer to regard myself, an uncomfortable feeling reared its ugly head, rejecting my conscious attempts to repress it. You see, the young lady was white, and the gentleman was black.
Having been raised in the South, I am not immune to the disease of prejudice. Vague memories of seeing signs denoting different entrances for blacks and whites in my hometown of Oneonta, Alabama, during pre-school years are cushioned in blurred images. Mama would quench my thirst by holding me up to drink from the fountain that stood on the landing between the two floors of Watson's Department Store—our hometown's sole "skyscraper." I remember the bold black lettering taped on the wall behind the fountain. By the time I could reach the water fountain on my own and would have been able to read "Whites Only," the signs had come down.
I do remember that I regarded fellow humans whose skin was darker than mine somewhat suspiciously, somewhat fearfully, but as with all other elements in my life, with insatiable curiosity. In the rural community in which I was raised, there were no black families. Occasionally on the farms where I picked cotton, African-Americans were hired to help with the crop, but they were always designated a particular section of the cotton field away from us.
Sometimes I would pause in the high cotton that grew on the ridge of a terrace to watch and listen to the merriment going on below. With swift efficiency of time and effort, the distant men would whisk through their rows laughing and singing in incredible harmony. I would concentrate on picking the stubborn seeds out of a fluffy white boll while pondering the music and the people. They seemed to be having much more fun than their white counterparts. I suspect they would sometimes spot the wide-eyed little girl peeking cautiously through the stalks. On later reflection, I have often wondered if that was one reason they were laughing.
Saturday was the day my family went into town. I would later question Granddaddy Swann at length about the old black gentleman with whom he talked on Saturday morning. On the corner in front of Wittmeier Ace Hardware, the contrasting contemporaries would idle away the time while the ladyfolk made their weekly forays into the drygoods shops. Delegated to walk between Mama and Granny, I noticed that if Granny acknowledged her husband and his companion at all as we walked by, it was only with a respectful nod and polite "how do you do?" But then, Granny was a woman, and she knew her place. Her granddaughter was a child and she did not. I felt no particular qualms about boldly eyeing the two gentlemen in matching fedora hats exchanging laughs and pleasantries.
"He's a good man," Granddaddy would later respond to my inevitable questioning.
By the time I was in junior high school, civil rights marches had exploded onto the scene. There are times when I am profoundly thankful that there was no television in our home. The Birmingham Post Herald's daily headlines were enough to convince me the world was coming to the explosive end that wizened old men discussed at Wednesday night prayer meeting. Some foreign place called "Watts" was going crazy, and horrible atrocities were taking place in nearby Birmingham. Whispered phone calls from an equally terrified seventh grade friend frequently relayed the scenes from the six o'clock news. "We're all going to die!" she prophesied.
Since all progress comes out of pain and suffering, society was growing in maturity. Thankfully, as I grew beyond the sheltered life of my youth, times changed. Today, people whose skin is a different shade from mine are counted among many of my close friends, and we share a common concern about the seemingly renewed emphasis on the differences in our races.
The summer of 1993 had brought back haunting reminders of my junior high years. I watched my television screen chronicle the Los Angeles riots and wondered if the lessons of the 1960s had been lost. Hence the shame I felt in the dining hall. In the mysterious complexity of my mind, everything since my childhood was remembered in the time it took for the couple to pass by my table and cross the room. It was then I saw. The young black mail was holding the arm of his white friend so that she could guide him safely through the maze of chair legs and tables.
You see, he was blind.
In the flash of a moment, I realized God's truth. How complicated we make things. While we should celebrate our differences—black, white, yellow, brown, short, tall, man, woman—is there not a greater reason to celebrate life? We all share this planet for such a minuscule space in time, yet we pompously and mistakenly choose to harbor inflated views of our own importance.
I watched the laughing friends, still caught up in the animated conversation, exit the door. As I slowly munched on my salad, not really tasting the food, I was keenly aware of the poignancy of the moment. In the darkness, a white arm feels no different from a black arm, because the spirits housed in our skins have no color at all. Are we blinded because of our sight? Would the horrifying problems that are still paralyzing the nations of the world be solved if God had simply not granted us the wonderful blessing of vision?
As an increasingly crowded world grapples with the problems that arise from competition born of fear, may God somehow communicate to us all that our destiny depends on people of all races seeing as with the eyes of God, and remembering the verse we sang so innocently in Sunday school,
"Red and yellow, black and white... They are precious in his sight..."
Nancy Chapman Monroe is a freelance writer who has previously been published in Good News magazine and Decision magazine. She is the author of Hold Fast to Dreams and Earth Calling Heaven—Anybody Home? Her husband, Wayne, is pastor of Walker United Methodist Church in Greensboro, Georgia.
This article was published in Good News (September/October 1994).