When Sweet turns to Sour

This is not a food or garden post. One of the few good things about 2020 is time at home to reflect, so this is part of my process. A note of caution: this post contains a few references to racial epithets. 

How long have magnolias symbolized Southern femininity? Surely before the 1989 film that I and so many daughters born in this region can quote by heart. 

A few weeks ago I walked down a street one block from my own, and took in the scent of magnolia blossoms in morning humidity. Heady but not overpowering, and slightly sweet and sensual. I stopped to admire the large creamy ivory flowers opened fully at their peak, and a memory came. 

Credit: Andrew Butko

My Grandmother Hazelene, my father's mother, and I used to sit and have a picnic in the low branches of a large old magnolia in the front yard of the home where she grew up, in Badin, Stanly County, North Carolina. 

"The Old Home Place," as she called it, had an old Frigidaire refrigerator with a chrome handle you had to pull way back to open it, and aluminum ice trays. There was a vegetable garden that my Aunt Winnie and Uncle Jimmy dutifully maintained each summer, barn cats and their kittens lazily sunning themselves next to the back porch steps, and a small white building, the "Pump House," where the men of the family would step out for a bit during holidays for a drink. There were several acres of pasture with cows, and I still have a long scar on one of my legs from snagging a barbed wire fence while evading a bull who took umbrage at one of my pasture walks one summer. 

These visits steeped in nostalgia and rural life were lovely, but the Home Place was sold in the 1990s to a young lawyer, my Grandmother died in August 2005 (right when Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast), and I just have memories; lots of them, and some are complicated.

Born in 1915, my Grandmother Hazelene was named for a local Black "girl," as she called her, who often helped my Great-Grandmother Mae with housework. And yet, my Grandmother was prejudiced against Black people. Her behavior was so contradictory to the sweet Methodist minister's wife, teacher's aide, mother and grandmother that our family adored; the clotheshorse who always left her house fully accessorized and in Estee Lauder makeup and perfume; and the kind neighbor and friend to many in her town of Salisbury, North Carolina. She was my greatest cheerleader, most dutiful pen pal, and a sharp Scrabble competitor. 

  

But I remember her use of an epithet (the N word) when she saw a Black person on the front page of The Charlotte Observer, when she had a Black employee of her church come to her house for some chores but insisted he "come around back" rather than walk in her front door, and the Christmas she and an uncle from my mom's side of the family waxed on about the "good ol' days" when you called Brazil Nuts and chocolate drops extremely crude things. At the time, when I pressured my parents to explain how my delightful Grandmother could be "racist," the answer always came around to her just being a product of her time. 

My late father. fortunately, did not share his mother's prejudices. A Methodist Minister like his father, he actively participated in racial justice movements in the late 1960s at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. He and my mother met at a YMCA-sponsored conference on Black/White relations in January 1969, at a United Church of Christ retreat center in Brick, North Carolina, just outside Rocky Mount.

"I left the retreat center on a Sunday, and that afternoon your dad called, and we had our first date the following Saturday at The Peddler, a steak house in Durham," my mom recalls. "Neither of us ever dated anyone else."

Is it possible that I am here all because two people of the South wanted more for all people in their communities and for their world? One minister and one social worker who devoted their careers in service for the greater good? 

That feels both beautiful and heavy as hell. 

When I consider the conflicting duality of lessons on race I learned from my family members, I wish I'd questioned and spoke up more often. To blame the times, rather than the person, is wrong. It felt wrong then and it especially feels wrong now.

I am reading, I am listening, I am donating money, and once this pandemic is over, I want to connect beyond my day-to-day experience with a wider range of people.      

Last week I walked by that magnolia tree, hoping to take in the fragrance. The blossoms were browned and rotting on the limbs. I frowned, and then kept walking. Nature may be temporal, but humans are more than just products of time.