As I sat down in my chair on the patio and watched the ingredients in the bowl on my breakfast tray change from white to yellow, memories started flooding back.
I had not had a bowl of grits with an egg for years. That is not until this morning. In fact, even the thought of grits as a breakfast food had been replaced with avocado toast, eggs with hash browns, a bowl of oatmeal with fruit and nuts or even just a cup of coffee.
But this morning was different. All because of Ernie.
Ernie is a friend of mine at the Senior Center where we have lunch. He’s a friend of everyone down there but a special friend of mine. But when we were growing up, Ernie and I would not have been friends.
Because he’s black and I’m white.
We spent a part of our childhood only about a hundred miles from each other. He was in Mobile, Alabama and I grew up in Pensacola, Florida during the days when whites and blacks didn’t mingle. In the midst of the segregated South.
Yesterday as I was sitting at a table with a couple of other friends waiting for lunch, Ernie came in and handed me a couple packets of instant grits and said, “I bet you haven’t had these in awhile.”
This morning, I opened one of those packets, mixed the white grits with water and a little butter and cooked them in the microwave while I cooked an egg over-easy.
When I placed the egg over the grits, the bowl and its ingredients were white. But when I broke the egg yolk and started mixing them together, I watched as the grits turned a bright yellow.
With the first taste, I was transported back to an earlier time in a different place. Memories of my growing-up years. For me, these were mostly good memories in the 40’s and 50’s. Shielded from the news of the outside world by my parents, we experienced evenings after school playing hop-scotch and jump rope in the street of my middle-class neighborhood. Weekends doing chores and going to church while enjoying the flavors of deep-fried mullet, catfish, and hushpuppies and peas and butterbeans from my mother’s garden. We had little money but great memories were created.
It’s not unusual for different tastes and even smells and sounds to trigger that memory machine hidden deep inside our brain. Others will have different triggers and different memories. But unless we develop amnesia, we cannot escape our past.
But we don’t live there. Our past may contain good memories but it can also contain memories we may have hidden in deep holes in our mind and tried to cover them so they wouldn’t resurface. Our past also contains things that were happening outside our own little world that we were unaware of. Or even accepted since it was accepted by our parents.
One of these things for me was segregation. It was a way of life that I grew up with and thought nothing of it. The only blacks that I saw were in the black bands marching in the parades and those who were sitting in the back of the bus that I rode to my weekend job downtown. The only black that I had even spoken to was Mamie, the black lady hired to care for my neighbor’s children while the mother did little. Mamie was wonderful to all of us kids who lived in the neighborhood and we loved her as we took her for granted. We were isolated from what was really going on in our world.
That is until one day around 1958 or 59 when I was in high school and, as our family did every Sunday morning, was sitting in a pew in my Southern Baptist Church. Fanning myself with a cardboard fan provided by a local mortuary, I was trying to listen to the pastor’s sermon.
I don’t remember the exact words that he said that hot Sunday morning but it was a sermon that I will always remember. He preached that the Bible taught that the separation of people with different colored skin was intended by God and that it was the right thing to do.
My thoughts began whirling as I tried to make those statements merge with what I had been taught about loving others as yourself, we are all equal in God’s eyes, and more. They didn’t mesh. And, in those moments, I knew that he was wrong and began wondering: what else had I been taught as right and wrong was true?
I realized on that hot Sunday morning that I had to stop just accepting what I was told by others and create my own beliefs about right and wrong.
I had that opportunity the following year when I was a freshman at Judson College in Marion, Alabama, the city that sparked Selma and the home of Coretta Scott King. Located 30 miles north of Selma. It’s where Martin Luther King Jr. was married, and where the murder of Jimmie Lee Jackson happened, sparking the Selma-to-Montgomery march.
Judson College was an all-white, all-girls, Southern Baptist College that Coretta Scott King would not have been allowed to attend. Because she was black. I served tables in the dining room to pay for my tuition and got to know the black cooks, cleaners, and gardeners who worked for the college. Some of the girls who had more money than I did sent their dirty clothes home to be washed and ironed by the black ladies. They washed them in a large black pot over a fire and ironed them with an iron heated on a wood-fired cook stove because they didn’t even have a wringer washing machine or electricity.
Some mornings between classes, I would go to my room where the black maid was cleaning. She would be tired and want to sit and talk. And I listened. I listened to stories of her kids who had moved north for job opportunities unavailable in Alabama, stories of her family and her life. And I learned. I learned a lot about what I had missed in that different world from mine while growing up in the South.
Five years later, the murder of one of those young men, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was only 2 years older than me, was murdered by a sheriff’s deputy just a short distance from that room on the campus of Judson College where one of his relatives told me stories about life as a black in the South. His murder resulted in the Civil Rights March from Selma to Montgomery.
This morning as I savored that mixture of grits and egg, those thoughts returned to haunt me. And then I thought of Ernie, who had given the grits to me. His skin is as black as Jimmie Lee Jackson and he grew up in the same segregated south even earlier.
But we are friends.
Through the years, much has changed in my beliefs and in the world. Some good. But also, some not so good.
My beliefs evolved and I am a much different person than I was that morning listening to my pastor’s sermon. But those memories are a part of my past and always will be. And Ernie’s memories of his dad being kicked in the behind by a white man because his dad didn’t get off the sidewalk fast enough for the white man to pass are a part of his past.
But those memories are behind us. We are friends who share lunch and conversation together at the same table at the Senior Center in today’s world and will continue to do so in the future.
White grits and a white egg with an intact yolk don’t amount to much alone. But when that yolk is broken and the two merge, something beautiful and delightful happens.