July 25, 2024 – C

David Brooks suggests that we ask,
"How did you come to believe the way you do?"
when accosted by someone pushing their
view upon us
or attacking us for our views.

It is a beautiful shift in direction.

When we tell our stories--
even partially,
with only a sentence or two--
everything changes.

Story is magical in this way.
We are no longer in attack/defense mode.
We are sharing who we are with others,
with strangers,
acknowledging that we all share common ground.

The more common the ground,
the less bitter the confrontation.

I spent the first six years of my life
largely in Itta Bena, Mississippi.
Ten miles from Greenwood, 
where I was born because that is where the hospital was,
and still is.

You can Google map Itta Bena
on street view, 
and what you see isn't much different
from the way it was nearly 80 years ago.

In Itta Bena in the late 1940's,
my adult friends were black men,
Matt White, Shorty, and John Taylor.
John Taylor did not live in Itta Bena.
He and his wife Annie
lived on my uncle's plantation
near Inverness, Mississippi.

Anne left John and moved to live with relatives
in Chicago in the late 50's.
I expect it was a better life.

The three black men were my friends,
and the friends of other boys my age in Itta Bena.
We all shared the common fate 
of being treated with no respect
by the white men in town.

The black men taught us how to dig for worms
and fish for bream (Sunfish) in Roebuck Lake,
which had a large fish population
in the days before Round-Up was used to kill weeds
growing in the cotton fields,
and was washed into the lake by summer showers,
killing everything with gills.

All of the Delta lakes died that way,
Three Mile, Six Mile, Mosquito, Macon,
and hundreds of others I never knew.

Part of me died there, too.
The innocent part.
The trusting part.
The best part.
And I am much more like I am now
than I was when I got here back then.
And the black men (and women, boys and girls)
had it much worse than I did.
I still cry for us all, as I am now.

And that is how I came to believe as I do.