Image: Daniel Donaldson
I know many souls that toss and whirl and pass, but none there are that intrigue me more than the Souls of White Folk . . . I see these souls undressed and from the back and side. I see the working of their entrails. I know their thoughts and they know that I know. This knowledge makes them now embarrassed, now furious.
—W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk”
Presence dreams slice open my sleep. The night hangs heavy as an intruder lurks over the bed. The Presence is so haunting and deadly that it jolts me awake, sometimes howling.
As a teenager growing up in New Mexico, I hung an Old Timer hunting knife on the bedpost. Although I used its curved blade to skin a deer then, it can’t protect me now from the Presence.
In the mountains outside Corona, I also carried a cranky antique Springfield rifle bought with paperboy’s wages at the army-surplus store. I steel-wooled and re-blued the barrel and magazine, then carved a stock from a hardwood blank. My uncles admired the handiwork and cheered my incipient manhood for bagging a buck.
Before moving to Canada in 1974, I sold the rifle, but for years the Old Timer, dozing in its leather scabbard, dangled from the bedpost collecting dust. One evening after Trump’s election, I desperately wanted to shout over the world’s longest, wall-free international border, “I’m so glad I live here, not there!” Instead, I locked the knife into an attic treasure box, a wooden soy sauce crate lugged home from an alley in Toronto’s Chinatown.
Recently, a new nightly series has emerged: House-of-the-Dead dreams. These dead are ghost-story frightening, not terrifying like the Presence. The multi-storey house rambles to the top of a hill then burrows into a warren beneath it. Below ground, the dwarf-like dead keep the boiler room running but scurry out of sight when I appear. Like them, I work to keep the House of the Dead alive. It’s raining. I worry the place will collapse. I search the attic for leaks, tiptoeing so as not to disturb the ghosts, some of whom float vertically, others horizontally. They utter sounds. I reply in a language I can speak but don’t understand.
***
Grandma and Pappy’s house has a basement, a rare architectural feature in Clovis. I sneak into it, cutting through spider webs and stepping on centipedes. Pappy approves, Grandma doesn’t, even though she owns a stylish black dress with spiderwebs sprawled across it.
Leaving their home one afternoon, I spot a thick layer of dust on the concrete coping atop the bricks of the front porch. I crane back to see if Grandma is watching. She isn’t, so I finger “KKK” into the dust, then bike home.
Mom meets me at the door. “Did you write KKK on your grandma’s front porch?”
“Why?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with that?”
“Do you know what it means?”
“No, I heard it and liked the sound.” I lilt, “Ku Klux Klan, Ku Klux Klan” hoping she’ll sing along.
She doesn’t.
“Come in,” she says.
We spend the next half hour at the kitchen table, where she instructs me about the Klan. “Members,” she says, “carry weapons, wear dunce caps, and perform secret ceremonies. They hang Negroes from trees and say ‘nigger.’ The KKK looks down on colored people. And you should know they’re God’s children, just like you and me.”
Mom is the only white person I know who says “colored” or “Negro.” She reminds me that at age three I had pointed to a black couple, asking, “Nigger? Nigger?” Now I am ten. She is determined that the N-word should never again come out of my mouth. KKK shouldn’t come out of it either.
“Don’t ever say that word, and apologize to your grandmother,” she said at the end of our talk.
I assume Grandma is outraged by my being complicit with such an un-Christian group, so I yield to Mom’s demands.
***
During my high school years, I study the Bible with Grandma. Compared with my siblings and cousins, I am studious and devoutly fundamentalist. Grandma chose me for this instruction, knowing that God himself had. Mom’s mom is articulate, sure of herself, the smartest woman I know, so I readily consent to her tutelage. A black, leather-bound King James Version spread across her lap, she dominates my religious life until I leave for college at eighteen.
Grandma loves the Bible. She’s fond of sweets and bacon fat. “Fat’s not good for you,” she says with a girlish grin, “but I love the taste.” She smacks her lips, playing up the minor gluttony in a mock-confession across a can of Log Cabin syrup at the kitchen table, where we are discussing Bible verses over pancakes and bacon. I ask her advice, “Do you think I should drink coffee or tea?” I want to live a pure, Methodist life, no bodily encounters before marriage and nary a taste of alcohol. Coffee and tea are debatable.
When Grandma becomes president of the New Mexico Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, she badgers her kids and grandkids into signing cards pledging they will abstain from spirits—the wet, not the ghostly, kind. Curry County is her territory to “dry” out. That goal now seems ironic, since we lived on the llano estacado, a region so lacking in water, trees, and landmarks that Spanish conquistadors drove stakes into the ground so they could find their way back to Mexico. Thanks to Grandma’s activism, my Clovis High classmates have to drive forty-five minutes to Taiban, in “wet” De Baca County, for booze.
Grandma stands by most WCTU abstentions: alcohol, tobacco, abortion, homosexuality, premarital sex, prostitution, gambling, pornography, immodest dress, and drugs. Like many temperance activists, she keeps her distance from Catholics, Jews, communists, and black people. She believes in keeping Christ in Christmas, the reading and display of scripture in public places, and defending blue laws that prevent paid leisure activities like going to movies on Sundays. However, she also believes women should vote and make their voices heard publicly. And despite being a fundamentalist, she would argue down the apostle Paul, who insisted that women should remain silent in church. Whereas Pappy sleeps through worship, she dominates Trinity Methodist Church. The WCTU white ribbon symbolizes purity, but far from being acquiescent, these women couple purity with activism. Their motto: “agitate, educate, legislate.”
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the WCTU was the largest women’s organization in the United States and one of the first to send professional lobbyists to Washington, DC. Sometimes called “the White Ribbon army,” WCTU women carried a pure white flag. Its members pledged allegiance to the “Temperance flag, emblem of total abstinence, self-control, pure thoughts, clean habits; the white flag that surrenders to nothing but purity and truth, and to none but God, whose temples we are.”
In Grandma’s world, what you are against defines you as a Christian just as much as what you are for. I carry in the back pocket of my Lees—we can’t afford Levi’s—a John Birch Society pamphlet printed in red ink. It lists communist movie stars whose films we faithful should boycott. The comedian Lucille Ball is among the traitorous. She is, after all, married to Desi Arnaz, a Cuban musician, and we all know it’s a slippery slope from Catholicism to communism.
***
In 1966, after Pappy’s death, Grandma authors a book called The Truth Seekers as Mary Sargent Williams, highlighting her ancestry by replacing her middle name, Arlevia, with her maiden name, Sargent. The book’s epigraph is from John 8:12, “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” The first sentence of this, her only book, rings with self-assurance, “Every statement of mine in this book is true….” Its hundred pages, a sermon laced with Bible verses, are to be her legacy. All her kids and grandkids, as well as members of the Truth Seekers, the Sunday school class she teaches at Trinity, are expected to read the book and live by it.
New Mexico’s ex-governor Andrew W. Hockenhull writes an enthusiastic blurb for the self-published volume. She and Hockenhull are mutual admirers—his woodwork graces her living room. In the years we study the Bible together, as her face bends over the holy book, my eye drifts to the curvaceously layered cherry and maple of the lathe-turned lamps he’d made for her.
In The Truth Seekers, Grandma tells the story of travelling to Atlanta as a WCTU delegate. Her imagination being steeped in biblical imagery, a trip east from the drought-ridden high plains to the home of her ancestors, lush with magnolias and pines, surely makes her think of Eden. While in the city, she visits the Cyclorama, a large diorama of the Battle of Atlanta, where she finds the name of her great-grandfather, a Confederate soldier. She’s thrilled at the sacrifice her ancestors made for their country. It would not have occurred to her that slavery had already sacrificed a large portion of the population or that, by seceding, the Confederacy risked sacrificing the entire country.
Confederates on both sides of my family made their way from Georgia or the Carolinas, through Tennessee, then to Texas and New Mexico. Confederates on both sides of the bloodline—I stagger under the ancestral weight of their presence.
Between 1966 and 1968, when Grandma is giving away copies of The Truth Seekers, I drop two sacred flags, American and Christian. By leading mixed black and white study groups in Atlanta and by marching the streets of New York to oppose the war in Vietnam, I indulge in forms of activism that render me unpatriotic, not just to Grandma but to Dad and other church members. I carry The Truth Seekers on a bus from New Mexico to New York City, then flip through the pages, and throw it away. Years later, after Trump’s election, I borrow a copy from my sister, hoping to understand the entanglement of religion and racism in our roots.
In 1972, after a two-day, sleep-deprived bus ride from Appleton, Wisconsin, to Clovis, I slip into Grandma’s room behind a cluster of aunts and uncles. A stroke has robbed her of speech. Curled into the bed, her skin is a translucent bag barely able to contain her bones. Her sunken eyes peer through black circles. Her oldest son, not one to display emotions, is praying, then wailing. When Grandma sees me, she turns her face to the wall. The deathbed scene terrifies me. I am now an intruder, an unwanted presence, lacking the courage to push through the circle to touch her hand as she prepares to enter the House of the Dead. That, not the flag-dropping, was a shameful failure.
***
I weigh my grandmotherly heritage. The Grandma of my memory is really, really old. Now, I am older than she ever was. I am her senior, but she is my ancestor.
***
Compared to Grandma’s lay-preacher flamboyance, Mom is spiritually shy, discreet about religion, politics, and sex. But at age eight, when I ask how babies are made, she gets two dolls and shows me; she answers my barrage of questions without batting an eye.
No matter the degree of your devotion, adolescence ramps up rebelliousness, so Mom devises a strategy for dealing with her question-asking, talkback son. She invites me to the kitchen table. If I’m lucky, there’ll be devil’s food cake, if unlucky, angel food. Then she tenders the offer, “Let’s exchange compliments.” I know the ritual—first the compliments, then the criticisms.
Years later, Mom becomes the only Anglo teaching at La Casita, a racially mixed school near the smelly stockyards, some of which are owned by her father. White racism in Clovis focuses more on Hispanics than blacks. Mom struggles, not very successfully, to learn Spanish. Even so, Hispanic and black women sometimes visit our home for coffee, cake, and discussions about teaching strategies, a scene I never witness at Grandma’s.
Mom dies in 1985; Dad, two years later. After his death, while cleaning out drawers and closets, we siblings and spouses discover terse accounts of dreams that marked her last days, when she was struggling with breast cancer that metastasized to her lungs. In one dream she is jerky, “meat hung up to dry.” Before her death she confessed to having upsetting dreams but wouldn’t talk about them. Now, after Dad’s death, we discover her cryptic notes about them on the backs of old Citizens Bank checks.
Shortly before she dies, Mom calls my sister into the bedroom, shuts the door, and hands her a tattered Life magazine subscription envelope.
A few years later my sister gives the envelope to me.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“Mom gave it to me. She said not to show it to you, but she’s been gone for a while, so I thought maybe you’d know what to do with it.”
Later I open the envelope. Its top has been cleanly slit by a letter opener. Inside is a booklet. Folded into the booklet is a carbon-copy resolution dated 1924, Munday, Texas. The letter expresses “heartfelt sympathy” to William Osborne Sargent for the death of his wife, Grandma’s mom. William O. was a respected farmer and Sunday school superintendent in Munday’s only Methodist Church. One paragraph reads, “Resolved further: that in the loss of our noble Sister, the husband has lost a loving Companion, her children, a kind, patient and affectionate Mother and the Community, a noble Citizen, which loss to all is irreparable.”
The resolution, signed in black ink by two women, a Ford and a Campbell, testifies that one copy has been “spread upon” the minutes and another sent to the Munday Times.
William O. had moved from Cherokee County, Georgia to Texas, where he married Cassie Griffith. The firstborn of their twelve children was named Charles Wesley after the hymn-writing brother of John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church. The sixth child was Mary Arlevia, my grandmother.
At sixteen, she married Hubert Thorpe Williams and moved west to New Mexico, where they obeyed God’s command, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” They bought cheap land from the government and dominated it. Pappy fished. My uncles hunted. Together, Pappy and Grandma brought forth from their loins seven offspring, who in turn spawned myriads of cousins. We poor Methodist cousins lived in sand-blown eastern New Mexico. Our wealthier Baptist cousins lived back across the staunchly upright line that severs the west Texas panhandle from the high plains of New Mexico.
After rereading the consolation offered to my great-grandfather Sargent, I trip across a declaration that escaped my eye on first reading: “Mrs. W.O. Sargent was a worthy member and beloved Klanswoman.”
The line is a sledgehammer swung into the side of my head.
I spent much of the sixties engaged in civil-rights activities and now live in Canada, 128 km. west of St. Catharines, where Harriet Tubman helped build the first African Methodist Episcopal Church in Ontario. Here, many slaves, following the Underground Railroad, entered Canada. Although slavery ended in Canada in 1834, in 1850 the US passed the Fugitive Slave Act, also known as the Bloodhound Law, since it compelled citizens and officials to return escaped slaves to their owners.
Holding the Kloran, my hands shake. Also called the White Book, it is a ritual manual. The condolence letter, typed on onionskin paper, has been tucked inside for safekeeping. On the book’s cover is a white knight on a rearing white horse. Were it not for the pointy hat and crudely punctured curtain mask that makes his face resemble a Halloween pumpkin, he might look heroic.
Trying to weather the shock of touching a taboo object, I open the well-worn handbook and read aloud to the books and masks in my study, “The Kloran is ‘THE book’ of the Invisible Empire, and is therefore a sacred book with our citizens and its contents MUST be rigidly safeguarded and its teachings honestly respected. The book or any part of it MUST not be kept or carried where any person of the ‘alien’ world may chance to become acquainted with its sacred contents as such … No innovation will be tolerated, and no frivolity or ‘horse-play’ must be allowed during any ceremony.”
On another page, “Constitutional law was stripped by profane hands of its virtuous vestments of civilized sovereignty of four thousand years in the making, and was mocked by polluted political pirates in legislative assemblies; and by the diabolical enactments of these assemblies the hands on the dial of the clock of civilization in the tower of human progress were turned back thousands of years.”
The Kloran is fundamentalist not only about the Bible but about itself. It wants its readers to believe it is sacred: a direct descendant of the American Constitution, which is a direct descendant of the Bible, which came directly from God 4,000 years ago. It claims mere politicians—likely scholars too—have desecrated the Bible, the American Constitution, and the Kloran with horseplay and criticism, thereby turning back the progress of white American civilization.
On another page, among the “qualifying interrogatories” is the question, “Are you a native born white, Gentile citizen? Do you believe in and will you faithfully strive for the eternal maintenance of white supremacy?”
The manual and letter riddle my soul and rattle my brain. Why did Mom have them? Why give them to my sister? Why not to show them to me? Who had given Mom the package? Grandma probably, but where had she gotten them? From her mother? More likely from her father, to whom the letter was addressed. Was he a KKK member too? Probably. But why had Grandma, then Mom, then my sister kept this stuff? Why was the booklet so worn? The Life envelope was a disguise, protecting the manual from prying eyes, but whose? Mine, for sure, but who else’s? In the 1920s and ’30s, women moved readily between the Women of the Ku Klux Klan and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Had Grandma continued, or escaped, her mother’s legacy by joining the WCTU?
***
I have a truckload of questions for my ancestors, but the dead speak a language we mortals don’t understand—even if we can mumble a few words while dreaming in the House of the Dead.
My sister thought I would know what to do with the manual. I should; I study ritual. Each year I intend to do more research, but each year I sequester the shameful booklet and letter back into their Life envelope and stuff the bundle into the locked “treasure” box below Grandma’s Bible and the Old Timer hunting knife.
When I enter the House of the Dead, what ritual will my family invent to sacrifice these fraught objects?
***
I am a teenager, still living in Clovis. Grandma is explaining why the Bible, and therefore God, wants to keep the races separate. Like Mom, I am becoming an integrationist, although we don’t use the term. I listen dutifully as Grandma amplifies her biblical exegesis with an exposition, a story about a large black man who appears at their house back in Munday, “I see him coming down the lane. He stands there at the gate. He is huge. His presence is terrifying. I look at him through the screen door, and I know exactly what he has in mind.”
The story ends there, dangling. I listen and blink, not knowing what’s in her mind, or his.
***
Now it dawns on me what Grandma’s story is about. The Kloran, along with other KKK publications, considers it the solemn duty of white men to protect the virtue—the virginity—of white women from black men. Grandma had been taught well. She knew what was in the mind of the field hand, and she feared it. She couldn’t imagine that the visitor at the gate might have come from the cotton fields for a glass of water.
***
The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 at Pulaski, Tennessee, by six young Confederate soldiers. John Lester, one of the Klan’s founding members, claimed its rituals were based on those of Kuklos Adelphon, a North Carolina college fraternity. The original KKK was a secret fraternity that performed blackface satire, indulged in racial mockery, and performed awkward ceremonies in a stilted imitation of King James English. Between 1871 and 1882, this first wave of the Klan died out, suppressed by governmental and military intervention.
The Klan’s second wave was improvised a few days after D.W. Griffith’s film Birth of a Nation first played in Atlanta. The filmmaker was the son of a Confederate veteran, and Birth of a Nation was the first film ever shown in the White House.
At midnight, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1915, a Methodist minister named William J. Simmons dubbed himself Imperial Wizard of the renewed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. He and thirty-four others set fire to a cross on Stone Mountain, twenty miles from Atlanta, where they took the oath of allegiance to the Invisible Empire. The next year, they published the edition of the Kloran that now lies open on my desk.
Between 1912 and 1972, on Stone Mountain’s north face, massive equestrian figures were carved of three southern icons: Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.
***
In Decatur, an Atlanta suburb half an hour west of Stone Mountain, sits a white Plantation Plain Style home belonging to Mr. and Mrs. Cobb, an old but stately couple. I never presume to call him Cully or her, Lois. To my untutored New Mexican eye, their house is a mansion, even though it was long ago severed from its original 87-acre plantation. Access to the property is through large gates framed by an imposing white wooden fence. A bronze plaque hangs on the gates: “Be ye coming or be ye going, be ye soon or be ye late, be ye sure to shut this gate.” It is the mid-1960s, and I have been awarded a graduate scholarship to Emory University that includes residence in the garage apartment at the back of the Cobb house.
I make my way into civil rights in Atlanta without knowing my ancestors had migrated west from just north of the city. I organize a Bible-study group for black and white teenagers and later discover my name is being circulated on a blacklist of theology students involved in civil-rights activities. Church officials tell me not to ask the North Georgia Methodist Conference to ordain me as a Methodist minister.
Hearing about my growing involvement in civil rights, the Cobbs offer friendly advice: “You don’t want to cross a purebred Tennessee walking horse with a mere workhorse.” The couple declare their love for Mattie, the black maid who cooks and cleans their home. At Christmas, the Cobbs deliver money and presents to black Baptist churches, “to help keep those churches alive.” They also know that maintaining the churches discourages African Americans from arriving at the front door of Peachtree Baptist Church, which the Cobbs attend.
***
Not long ago, another House-of-the-Dead dream troubles my sleep. Several waves of young people begin moving into the Cobbs’ dilapidated old mansion. They are making messes, stealing each other’s food. Tensions are rising. Rain is sloshing on the roof. I hear a crash inside one wall. I pull aside a piece of crumbling plaster, and a load of rubble spills onto the floor. I say to my wife, “I’ll get Mr. Cobb. He owns the house and will know what to do.” Instead, I run upstairs to close the windows. Rain is blowing in. If Mr. Cobb see
s the open windows, he’ll know I’m not taking care of the house.
The Cobbs have long since departed and the mansion has fallen into disrepair, but I dream about their crumbling house in Canada, having carried a carpetbag of unfinished business across the border.
The air north of the border is better, but not pure. White nationalism lurks in Canada’s past and, some say, organizes while we sleep. In the 1920s, Saskatchewan boasted 40,000 Klan members who announced their presence with public cross-burnings. In Ontario, the Klan held large rallies in Smithville, Kingston, and London. Ku Klux Kanada was anti-French, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant. It failed to take root in Ontario because many of its goals were already pursued by the Orange Lodge. Both organizations aimed to preserve the Britishness, and therefore the whiteness, of Canada. Currently, La Meute—the “wolf pack”—an anti-Islam group, claims 40,000 members in Quebec. Although the number is probably exaggerated, hate crimes in Canada have been increasing since 2012.
***
In recent years my siblings have been reversing decades of westward migration by following money and jobs back to Texas—once a Confederate, now a Republican, state. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, one of my brothers told me some of his Texas buddies were buying guns. I asked why. He said they were anticipating a race war. Eight years in the White House brought no war, but white racism pumps up fear and hatred so poisonous that nothing Obama proposed would ever be supported by Republicans. We don’t call this behaviour racism, but it is. Sometimes overt and personal, racism is also institutional and entrenched. In either form it is armed and deadly.
In 2015, Dylann Roof desecrated a prayer meeting in Charleston, South Carolina by murdering nine worshippers at Emanuel, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South. Photos of him posed with a Confederate battle flag were displayed on his website.
By 2016 Donald Trump is running for president, endorsed by David Duke, a former Imperial Wizard of the KKK. In 2017, after white racists descend on Charlottesville, Virginia, Duke publicly thanks Trump for his honesty and courage. Membership in the Klan is growing. “Make America Great,” is shot through with the same assumptions: make it white, protect it with guns and fill it with believers who look and sound like us.
Upon Trump’s inauguration the world convulses and realigns. I slog again through The Birth of a Nation. I re-read W.E.B. Du Bois’ “The Souls of White Folk,” Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, and Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian. I discover Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, written as a letter to his son, and wonder what I could say to my own son and daughter about our family, about America, about the world?
I retrieve the Kloran and letter and tell them as much of the story as I can piece together. Surely this Trump-inspired, third revival of the Klan will inspire white people like us to ponder race, our own. By telling this story in public, I am prying open family closets. If we love our ancestors, let us feed them questions that will set their bones to rattling.
***
A month before the 2016 election, I propose to my American siblings that we meet in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for American Thanksgiving. We last gathered in 2010. I ask my brothers on the phone how they are going to vote. One, reluctantly, for Hillary; the other, reluctantly, for Trump. After procrastinating, I put the question to my sister.
“Not for Hillary, I can tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like her.”
“Why not?”
“I just don’t like her.”
“Your brothers don’t like her either, but one will vote for her, the other against her … So maybe you won’t vote?”
“I’ll vote all right—just not for Hillary.”
“I doubt there will be a third, viable candidate, so that just leaves…You would vote for Trump?”
“If that’s my only option. He’s anti-abortion. Hillary isn’t.”
“There’s only issue one issue you care about?”
“That’s all that matters.”
After the November 8 election, I suggest to my brothers and sister that we exchange online articles and cartoons, hoping an external focus will prevent us from chewing each other up. My sister won’t enter the discussion. She has heard from my brothers that I am angry. They don’t like my comparing our upcoming Thanksgiving meal to that of a pre-Civil War family gathered at the table. They seem to think I want to start a civil war rather than avert one.
Misgivings aside, my brothers come to Santa Fe. On Thanksgiving morning we three sit at Denny’s, the only place open, to talk about national and family troubles over eggs and waffles. My younger brother rehearses his reasons for voting for Trump. I just listen. My other brother, who claims he and I have never argued, says he was surprised at my anger during an earlier Skype call. I explain, yet again, that I am not mad at him. I am mad at everybody—Republicans, Democrats, myself—hell, the whole world for witnessing the pornographic scene of America going down in shame.
We discuss a dangerous old family argument. The story isn’t easy to tell or hear, since the result is a deafening silence in the family: Dad and I agree never, ever again to talk about race, politics, or religion.
Our conversation is tense, but it ends with a round of apologies and an air of exhilaration as we begin to plan a Thanksgiving feast of margaritas and chiles rellenos at Rancho de Chimayó. We leave Denny’s slapping each other’s backs and declaring, “I love you, brother.”
Between the election and Thanksgiving, my sister insists she won’t talk about politics, race, or religion in Santa Fe—not her Tea Party politics, not her End-Time Handmaiden religion. She doesn’t want to defend her beliefs or hear about mine. We agree that she can sit silently; she can avoid or leave any discussion. “My beliefs are strong,” she declares several times. “All I want is for the family to be happy at Thanksgiving.” I say I see no problem with her Texas family arriving happy and my Canadian family arriving in mourning. What are families for?
My sister might have guessed I’d arrive with troublesome questions: How could any Christian—conservative or liberal—support Trump’s vitriolic hatred? How are we to mourn the loss of America’s moral credibility? But I swallow the questions and try a diplomatic move. “Hey, when we come down for Thanksgiving, what would you think about getting together and driving over to Munday, Texas? Do you know where that is?”
“Sure, it’s not too far from Lubbock, east maybe. What would we do there?”
“I don’t know. Have a brother-sister talk, like we used to. Trade Grandma stories. Visit our great-grandparents’ grave. Consider our roots.”
In the end, my sister digs in, refusing to come to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving. She confirms her decision by consulting a woman who walks and talks with Jesus and has visions of Grandma weeping in heaven over my soul, so the refusal is final. Since then, phone calls have stopped, and emails dried up.
We haven’t yet survived Santa Fe. And we may never get to Munday. My sister prays; I question. Yet prayer has not saved us, nor has the truth made us free.
Like the nation, my siblings and I are up to our necks in the quicksand of unfinished business. We failed to gather the whole family. We failed to elect a worthy president. We failed to open the doors of the House of the Dead to question our ancestors. We failed to pay our debts for the land our ancestors took and the bodies they devastated.
***
If our family were ever to gather around our great-grandparents’ graves in Munday, Texas, I’d want to tell the myth of the town’s origins:
In the beginning, there are two villages separated by a thousand yards. Some say the split is the result of a feud about building the first church. One day a new Methodist minister arrives on the scene of this great divide. Using his considerable homiletical skill, he inspires townspeople to use skids, cables, and thresher engines to drag the buildings of West Munday to East Munday. In the end, the citizens founded a happy, unified town—with a cotton gin.
I’d have to bite my tongue to keep from asking who picked the cotton.
*For background on the writing of this essay see “Sleeping with the Author” from The New Quarterly.
—A CNQ Web Exclusive, February 2018