I drove to Franklin, Louisiana recently for a funeral. A good friend was laying his mom to rest. A quick glance at the route brought unexpected feelings when I realized I would pass through Jeanerette, the birth place of both my maternal grandparents. I had been before as a child, but I don’t remember much about the place. I’ve thought often of the place in recent years, after having dug into my family history. And I was surprisingly anxious and emotional about being so near an unrecognizable part of my own history.
As I crossed from Texas into Louisiana, the road went from concrete to blacktop asphalt. The day was warm, humid and gray. All aligning with my thoughts of Louisiana.
As far as I could see, there were twisted naked trees and overgrown weeds along the road side, concealing ancient mischief. Someone is selling boudin and hog crackling from the roadside in an old car. I pass a Louisiana State trooper, crouched in the median. The speed limit is 60. So I stay under it cautiously, hoping the law will protect me from the Law.
As my mind went back in time, the colors fade to gray, and I thought of what the place must have been like for my grandparents, young teens in the early 1900s. They had to have left Jeanerette for Houston somewhere between 1918 and 1920. Granddaddy would have been between 16 and 18 years. Weda even younger. The two of them together, just children.
I have little doubt why they left. There were whispers of industrial work for negros in the big city. Equally motivating, Louisiana was notoriously dangerous for black people. According to the Archives at Tuskegee Institute, Louisiana was among the nation’s leaders in the lynching of negros from 1882 to 1968, behind only Mississippi and Georgia. Ironically, Texas was fourth on that list. Though they didn’t go North, they were, in a very real way, apart of the Great Migration, which began in 1910.
My grandmother died when I was very young, but I remember my grandfather. He had a quiet dignity. He was proud but not prideful. He had the look of a man who worked hard; stooped and bowed. He was everything I imagine a patriarch to be, godly, strong, wise. His name is still etched in the cornerstone of St. John Missionary Baptist Church on Grey St., in the historic 3rd Ward.
My grandfather left Louisiana as a teenager with only a 2nd grade education. My grandmother never learned to read or write. Education was still separate but not equal. I don’t know how they traveled to Houston, most likely by bus. In the back, no doubt, with very real fears of what negros faced traveling the roads of Louisiana. Their ideas about life, about themselves, cemented in an age of Jim Crow, and one of the most notorious states in the union. They were young and vulnerable, but hopeful and brave.
My thoughts about them and their time is intensely racialized. Their place in the world was continually governed by “skin color,” and enforced by terror and strange fruit. I’m troubled by the thought of my grandfather having to continually cast his eyes downward, lest he offend, suffering the indignity of never entering through the front door. My grandmother, relegated to domestic work in homes of people who thought little of her, or taking in their washing and ironing.
Like so many of his generation, my grandfather did not talk much about living in the Jim Crow South, apart from the usual warnings to keep us safe. It seems that to return, even in their memories, would be to tempt sanity. But history speaks for them, and so must I.
When I started writing this, I had know idea what I was trying to say. I was just compelled by the intensity of my feelings. Feelings of nostalgia, sadness, confusion, anger. All working together to set me on edge as the nation debated Affirmative Action, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, absent of context and the bags I carry. Now I’m finding these thoughts are never far from me.
Are these thoughts overblown, are these feelings justified, or have I fallen prey to victimhood? I honestly don’t know, but what I do know is that they are there, they are real. And they are not singular to me alone. If these thoughts and feelings are unfounded, if they are unnecessary and unreasonable in modern America, if we have moved beyond our radicalized past, then it suggest one thing, I am not yet healed. But if they are not unfounded, if they are reasonable, if context does matter, then this suggests, we are not yet healed.
On the way back from the funeral, I pulled off the highway at exit 141 to Jeanerette to have a look around. It’s built up now in Iberia Parish, the ancient dangers have been paved over. The observable markers of Jim Crow are gone. But the place holds a mystique for me and I feel it. It has secrets, witnessed by my grandparents as they walked the dusty roads and worked the fields of Sugar City, as young children. I’m a product of the lessons they learned. Lessons they raised their children by. Lessons that serve to remind me, we didn’t get here from nowhere.
Blessings.
The Point of Reflection 