God and Biscuits

“For the love of God and biscuits” Robert Arnold

Down the road from my grandmother’s house on the edge of one of those small, forgotten, decaying, towns in the deep South, is an old country cemetery where I spread my mother’s ashes some thirty years ago. My mother had purchased a plot there but when I called the county official to ask where it might be, he replied, “Uh, sorry, I can’t tell you. We stopped selling plots a while back. My wife used to keep all the old records but she’s in a nursing home with dementia and can’t remember a thing. Sorry. Just go spread the ashes anywhere you want. If someone sees you and gets suspicious, I’ll vouch for you. Sorry for your loss.”

Gracious, small town, caring because once it’s known your kin is from just up the road, well, you’re family, the kind no arbitrary faded law stored in some dusty ledger in the back room of the county clerk’s office, can touch. A family born of roots deeper than the old oaks shading the dirt drives, of porches where the next batch of peas waits for shelling, of Wednesday evening prayer meetings, always followed by the best fried chicken and pecan pie you’ll ever eat. This is the South. This is that family. My family.

Still, we know the South carries a dark history lurking in the shadows even the abundance of fireflies that come out at night can’t erase. You see, today, if you go to that same cemetery, walk to the back, you’ll come to a rusted fence, almost hidden and bent low, under the weight of sprawling vines. Look closely and you’ll see the tops of a few headstones still jutting up defying time. This was where the Black folk were buried. Even in death, kept separate.

So, on election day when I heard that Scott Colom was in a dead heat for the senate race in Mississippi, I had a visceral reaction that surprised me. While U.S. House of Representatives, Bennie G. Thompson, former chair of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee, is the longest serving African American elected official in Mississippi history, the last Black senator elected from Mississippi was Blanche K Bruce in 1875.

Today, the state’s Black population, overwhelmingly Demoncratic, is 37 percent, the largest proportion of any state. But the white population is overwhelmingly Republican so it’s always been clear that any Black candidate hoping to secure a U.S. Senate seat would need to build a Black-white coalition and Scott Colom has done just that. Indeed, as the New York Times reported, a middle school teacher in Meridian, Mississippi, described a Colom political rally she attended as one where she couldn’t tell if there were more white or Black people.

It’s said you can take the girl out of the South but not the South out of the girl. True. Except for a few years in Maine, we’ve called New Hampshire home for over forty years. Still, when I go “home” I go South. But sadly, particularly over the last 10+ years in the era of Trump and the rise of white and Christian nationalism, I’ve sometimes felt deeply estranged driving down the old roads.

It has been, however, very heartening to witness the times change. When my great-grandparent’s home of 200+ years in deep Alabama was sold, the same home that had a secretary desk in the hallway said to have been made by the slaves, it was a Black man who bought it. He graciously allowed us one last walk-through when we visited. When he talked of how it’d been the land that had first called to him, I knew then and there the fields I’d once roamed as a child would now be held and tilled by good hands.

Of course, my childhood memories, largely before the Civil Rights movement, can only be siphoned through the sieve of white privilege. I had no knowledge of the Green Book or how, for every Black child my age, there would come a moment when they’d realized they were different, and that difference meant they were less than and, worst of all, couldn’t be changed. I had no idea they were raised to say “Sir” and “Ma’am” to white folks and told to always keep a downcast gaze. And, of course, today, while change has come, there are still many hiding inside their clan sheets.

What’s happening down Mississippi way is important as it represents hope, the kind that can build a bridge, though still fragile in the making, from a past, a time when Black and white hands never touched, to the present where those same hands can now eagerly join and pray together for the love of God and then say to one another with the biggest smiles ever, “And, please pass the biscuits!”