Stories about my Father - 25

Racism seeps through every single pore of this country’s 246-year-old skin. I knew I was going to find it when I started digging through my family’s past. How could I not? My mother was the first person in my entire line not to have been born in this country for over three hundred years. My father’s side of the family has been here since almost the beginning of the European invasion. They fought against the British in the Revolution, and they fought against the North in the Civil War.

Like the rest of the men in my branch of the Hester tree, I was born in the South. Barely. My father was working in Washington D.C., so I arrived just across the river in Arlington, Virginia. I don’t remember anything about our time there. My memories start after we moved north to New Jersey. My parents were both well-traveled and had lived in a variety of different places overseas by the time we hit New Jersey so, despite how they were each raised, they were already both more liberal by simple osmosis. The main ingredient of prejudice is ignorance. Start chipping away at that and the biases you were brought up with start to crumble. Though not all of them. And maybe not right away.

By the time I was old enough to participate in conversations with my elder relatives, they were already couching what they said to me in language that wouldn’t offend my northern sensibilities. If somebody used the “N” word, my father would gently take them to task. I’ve mentioned this before, but the conversation that sticks in my memory is one where my grandfather was talking about one of his clients and described him as, “a good n---.” My father looked at him and chided, “Daddy.” My grandfather responded sincerely, “What? He was.”

What I am reading now, are letters that my Southern relatives wrote to each other. They aren’t being careful of their language at all. They weren’t expecting that what they were expressing would end up in the historical record. They were just talking to each other. Their racism is casual and offhand and deeply embedded. From my lofty perch in New York in 2022, I find some of what they’ve written to be shocking and often difficult to read. I cannot imagine that any of the recipients of the letters would have had that response then.

I don’t think that any of my relatives were evil. With each new letter, I wonder if I am going to finally find something I can point to that seems like sociopathic behavior that would let us all off the hook in some way. It just doesn’t seem to be there. They all seem to be decent people, albeit living comfortable lives built on the blood and sweat of those less fortunate around them. I’m not pointing fingers. I am typing on a computer that has metal in it that probably is a result of exploited labor. I am sitting on a leather couch made of the hides of several animals that may have suffered very cruel deaths. The energy that it took to create the furnishings of the room I am sitting in has added to the burden of environmental destruction that is causing our planet to overheat. I seem to be fine enough with all that to just keep sitting here. Maybe a hundred years from now, my niece and nephew’s woke descendants will read this with the same open-mouthed sadness that I sometimes feel reading these letters from the past.

My Aunt Helen who passed away earlier this year was a truly kind and generous woman. Like her mother before her, she was educated and accomplished. They both graduated from Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia in an era when it was still not usual for women to go to university. She spent most of her working life as a Librarian up north among the Yankees in New Jersey. My sister and I had always felt somewhat sorry for her because she never seemed to do anything. She never married and when she retired, she moved back down to my grandparents’ house to take care of them during the final parts of their lives. When they passed, she moved into the Westminster Canterbury nursing home and lived there on her own for nearly twenty years. 

When she died, my sister and I held a graveside service for her in the spring because we thought that was what she would have wanted. We weren’t expecting anybody besides us to be there, but a group of friends of hers from church showed up. Much to both of our surprises, they talked about how brave they all thought she had been. She left the safety of the town she knew and ventured out alone into the male-dominated work world. They saw her as a pioneer. My sister and I had been looking at her choices from where the world sits now and, because of that, we’d missed the significance of what she’d done.

Helen Hester c. 1936

There’s a character in our family lore named Met that I’d never paid much attention to because, in truth, I had no idea how he fit in. He was mentioned enough in passing over the years, that I was aware of the name, but he was never talked about in a way that made me question his part. In a family as photographed as mine has been, there are no pictures of him that I can find.

Yesterday, however, I came across a short story that my aunt had written about him for a class while she was at college. It’s clearly deeply felt and oddly compelling. My aunt, to the best of my knowledge, was not a creator. She was a curator. Reading this, though, makes me think she could have explored her artistic side in the same way that my grandmother and her Uncle Scott had done. At any rate, I now know who Met was. I give you fair warning, now, that there is a lot of language in her story, not to mention parts of the story itself, that any reasonable person will find deeply offensive. In 2022.

“The small Negro church in the country was not warm, for the wood stove could not compete with the February cold outside. Huddling around the stove were my parents and I, two other white women, and a few colored people… It was cheerless in the little church… For in front of the pulpit was a grey shopworn coffin.”

“I remembered Met. As a shy colored boy in his twenties he had come to live in our house, because he had no other place to stay. I don’t know much about his life before he came to work for us. I am told that one day while he and his brother Etress were playing in some mud behind the wood house, they saw a white lady talking to their grandmother. The old darky who had raised them was listening quietly and nodding her head sympathetically. Soon she looked over toward the two boys.”

“Hey, dere, boy, you and Etress come ‘ere to me.” Slowly and suspiciously with their eyes wide open, the brothers crept from behind the shack toward their grandmother.

“Which ‘un would you lac, Mrs. Blankenship? Dey is both fine boys.” Mrs. Blankenship looked from Met’s round black face to Et’s long tan one and back again.

“I believe I’ll take the little dark one, Martha.” The white woman smiled at Met. “I’ll take good care of him and he’ll come to see you whenever he wants to or whenever you want to see him.”

So, Met was taken away from his grandmother and became a companion to Mrs. Blankenship’s son Bobby, who, because of some childhood illness, could neither walk nor talk. Met did everything for him: nursed him, fed him, and played with him. Soon after, Mr. Blankenship suffered a stroke that partially paralyzed him, so Met started taking care of him too. Eventually, though, Mr. Blankenship died.

“There was nothing left for Mrs. Blankenship to do in Rustburg now. Bobby, who didn’t even know who she was, was placed in an institution. But that left Met. What was she to do with him? She hated for him to go back to his cabin home. She thought of us. We were looking for a cook then. He could help us some, Mrs. Blankenship told my mother.”

So, Met moved into my grandparents’ home and lived in the cook’s room in the basement. He stayed with them for many years doing odd jobs and cooking. My aunt goes into great detail about how much they all came to love him. Met suffered from asthma, so when World War II came around, the Army wouldn’t take him.

“Since he was restless, Mother let him work out for other families who had grown to appreciate his services. He could do everything – washing, cleaning, cooking, serving, gardening. He had an artistic hand for arranging flowers. He even liked to dab with my mother’s oil paints. It seemed that there was nothing he couldn’t do. Yet, with all his work, he was still restless. He wanted to do bigger things. Once he spoke of Washington. Daddy, who felt that Met had been lent to us, told him to wait and talk to Mrs. Blankenship when she came again.”

It was worse writing that out than it was reading it. The complete blindness with which my aunt views Met’s life is truly shocking. Of course, it is a blindness that everyone around her was afflicted with, too. I don’t know what happened to Met’s parents. His grandmother must have struggled to try to raise two young boys. Did Mrs. Blankenship offer her money or was it just the thought that Met would be fed and clothed enough for her to let him go?

Met’s life was traded back and forth for at least the first two decades of his life. My aunt’s point of view was that it was a kindness that my family took him in. Everyone “hated for him to go back to his cabin home.” I wonder if any of them thought to ask Met how he felt. He ultimately got a job at the Commonwealth Club in Richmond. He was still serving white people, but at least now he was his own man. Mrs. Blankenship and Met remained in touch. When he got ill, just before he died, she went to visit him.

I am sure that both the Blankenships and the Hesters had genuine affection for Met. I don’t want to say that it was the same affection that one would feel for a pet, but, in truth, it can’t have been the full love that one would feel for an equal. Met was never equal in their eyes no matter how fond they were of him. In their eyes, he would never paint, he could only “dab”.

My aunt wrote this story for a class at Randolph-Macon. Her teacher told her that it was the best thing that she’d written all semester and that she should submit it to the campus literary magazine. Nobody anywhere near my aunt was reading this story with anything close to 2022 eyes so nobody questioned what had happened to Met. It would take an extraordinarily aware person to be able to step back in those years and see that culture for what it was. Why would you question something that was such an accepted and ordinary part of daily life when nobody else was? As I said before, it’s not like anything has changed. Nobody seems to have the ability to step back even now. We may have slightly opened our eyes to the insidiousness of racism these days, but there is plenty around us, that we are more than willing to turn a blind eye to.

I don’t mean to pick on my Aunt Helen. She may be among the best of us. I don’t doubt that she cared for Met. I don’t think, however, that she gave a thought, at least while she was in school, about who he really was.

I can’t help but view Metress Alexander’s life as a tragedy. Would it have been better if he had stayed at home with his grandmother and younger brother? It would have been a harder life in some regard, for sure. I have no doubt that their daily struggle would have been backbreaking and soul-destroying. The lack of opportunity for young men of color was and still is, a solid stone wall purposefully designed to keep them from getting ahead. So, would it have been better if he’d stayed behind with his family and had never been taken away? 

I’m going to say, yes.