♦ ♦ ♦My brothers and sisters and I attended God’s Own Christian School, because Mom & Dad wanted us to study Leviticus for an
hour every damned day. But coincidentally, at GOCS, all the teachers and
students were white. When I was in 3rd grade, Dad got laid off from his job, so to save money my brothers and sisters and I all switched to public schools. Suddenly, non-beige kids and even teachers began to exist.It was not traumatic. Without Bible class,
school was less boring, but other than that there wasn’t much
difference. I’d hated the all-white private school, and hated the
well-mixed public school.

♦ ♦ ♦In my early teens, I listened from the living room one night, while Dad and my older sister Katrina had a long, loud conversation
in the kitchen. A black boy
from her high school had asked her out. She’d said yes, but Dad said no.”The purpose of dating,” he explained, “is to find the man you’re going to
marry, and you’re certainly not going to marry a black man, so —
absolutely not. I won’t allow it.”They argued and argued, but Dad would
not be swayed. My sister cried but relented, and said she’d explain it
to the boy. Instead she dated him secretly, all through her junior year.

That night, Sis had shouted that Dad was a racist, and she was right, certainly, by
present-day standards. For a man of his era, though, he had only a mild
case of the disease. Once, when a
TV news show reported that black people had marched for equal access to
lending, my dad said, “Well, good for them. They should have equal
access.”For the most part, though, race never came up in our household conversations, cuz like I said, we were really, really white.

♦ ♦ ♦Dad did scientific work for a giant industrial concern, and when I was still in kindergarten, the company transferred him to a different job, in a different city — New
Orleans, Louisiana. That’s a long ways and a world away from Seattle, Washington.I’ve heard that moving is supposed to be traumatic on the children, but when Dad announced it, I didn’t mind. I hated kindergarten, and had no friends to be uprooted from. Moving seemed like an adventure.
For Mom and Dad, though, there was a major
problem: they’d asked our pastor whether our denomination had a church in New Orleans, and the pastor had called someone and asked, and the answer was no.Oh, my. Where would we worship in New Orleans, twice every Sunday and for mid-week
meetings?

Their religion was a major part of my parents’ lives, so to answer that question, even before we moved, my
dad poured through reference books at the library. He researched where each
denomination stood on questions like Calvinism, determinism, infant baptism, the
Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, and all that crap.

Dad and Mom decided that the Nazarenes were close enough to their beliefs, so we’d be Nazarenes in New Orleans — problem solved. There were no other major concerns.We packed everything, and
moved from America’s progressive north to its very, very South in the
early 1960s, just as the Civil Rights movement was beginning to simmer.I am barely old enough to remember, but there were colored drinking fountains. Segregated schools, restaurants, theaters. Segregated everything, really. Welcome to the deep South in the early 1960s.

Dad was well-off and Mom was a slob, so we hired a maid, like on The Brady Bunch,
except our maid was black. She was pretty cool
for a grown-up. She was the first black person I’d known, and maybe my
first black friend.

Come Sunday morning, though, Jessie went to her black church, while
we attended the Nazarene church, which was all-white, of course. And then suddenly we weren’t going to that church any
more. I didn’t know why, probably didn’t even wonder. I don’t think my older brothers and sisters knew what had happened either, until some years later the subject somehow came up, and Dad told us why we’d switched churches.

It was only one sentence from one Sunday’s sermon. I can’t imagine the context, but the pastor said, “I lost my wallet, and I think some n-word lifted it.” Except he
didn’t say ‘n-word’, he said a word that I won’t even type.
Said it from the pulpit, in front of God and everybody.

Dad said that he and Mom looked at each other, started whispering to their six
kids, and they promptly walked us out of that church, never to return.For a lot of Louisiana white people in 1963, it would’ve been nothing, but suddenly we were Baptists. According to family
folklore, my oldest brother asked the next Sunday why we weren’t driving to the Nazarene
church, and Dad said, “We are not a Nazarene family.”

5/27/2021   
Republished: 11/12/2023