Po' But Proud
I have played the clip above probably a hundred times over the past ten years. While it's Southern to an extreme, if you really want to know who I am, this is a good clue.
My dad was an enigma. He could be mean yet as gentle as you could imagine. He dropped out of HS in the 11th grade because when you grew up in Alabama in the 1940s farming was more important than school.
Everyone that I knew back 'in the country' where we lived, called him Mr.
Everyone. He commanded respect but he earned their respect for fighting for them.
Although uneducated in a modern sense, he educated himself with the classics. I never met anyone that read as much as my father. And he read everything. James Michener, Churchill, books about the civil War, books about Russia. He read the Bible I believe 3 or four times 'all the way through' as he would say.
But what he really gave me was an inner sense of right and wrong, and to fight against injustice. He showed me that things such as the earth, your neighbors (whether they be black or white as it happened to be for us), your personal attributes were worth caring about.
He'd have laughed about being called an environmentalist, but he was. We stopped using glass minnow jugs because it wasn't good for the environment. He picked up trash along the road for no other reason than it needed to be. He'd refuse to hunt on certain portions of our land to allow populations to build and to have birds be free.
Now, I'm older, somewhat wiser and after 10 years of him being gone, I fully understand all the decisions, all the things that seemed wrong at the time, but make oh so much sense now. Times like when I'd refuse to get out of bed to work on our land and get a douse of cold water.
Because who we are are shaped by our parents. Southern boys often being especially shaped by their relationships with their dads.
I ran away from home once, when I was about 16. A family who is very dear to me took me in. Because we lived in a small town, I asked if he had asked about me and they said no. At the time, it hurt.
But as bad as it seemed at the time, it taught me a few things. You can always go home again, and that the world isn't ready-made to do you any favors and you have to make your own path.
To all that knew my father we were both worse for knowing him at (infrequent) times, but all the much better for knowing him as well. He was like many (all) of our dads. Amazing yet flawed.
I loved him.
Editor's Note: This post and the 10 years that have passed since my father's death have inspired me to write. I'm finally going to write Po' but Proud: Tales from a Sharecropper's Son. Ask me about it, motivate me to write. After all, we're all just storytellers...
