LOVING YOUR NEIGHBOR


“Our prejudices are our mistresses; reason is at best our wife, very often heard indeed, but seldom minded.”
Lord Chesterton, Letter to His Son, April 13, 1752




“Today is May the 28th, 1998, and, it is Thursday. We are balin’ hay. We have hay rolled up and hay not yet cut. This has been the best hay year that we’ve ever had since we’ve been in this country. I talked to Jerry Meador yesterday and he said it was the best hay year that he had ever seen.
And while we we’re talkin’ about hay, I thought about Mamma tellin’ us that down yonder at the Tradin’Post (a nearby general store, a few miles from the house), there were two old black women and their brother that lived there, Dolly and Milly Hudson. Mamma said these women used to pull crab grass out of people’s corn fields and put it in bags to winter a cow. I thought today we could’ve easily carried them a roll if they were here now.
Now, these women, Dolly and Mille, they made baskets out of splits, and I used to go with Uncle Emmet Martin , that was Granddaddy Martin’s uncle and Grandpa Lee’s brother. He would go out in the woods and I would go with him and he would cut a little oak and make splits out of them. I’d go with him to carry them down there to them to make baskets. They were great at it, too. They would make you a bushel basket for a bushel of corn or a half a bushel basket for half a bushel of corn or a gallon and so forth down like that.”

The Audio Journal of Harold Martin


A slave is buried on the Kasey Seats Farm, and his grave site, I am told, is in the cow pasture somewhere along the Rock Castle Creek. Supposedly, the man escaped from a nearby farm, was chased into the pasture, shot, and buried unceremoniously where he fell. My father often wondered about the man who tried to free himself from his captivity and who had not been fortunate enough to escape his captors.

I do not recall knowing one black farmer during my childhood. At that time, African-Americans in our community had not progressed far past the level of Dolly and Millie Hudson. Of course, I knew more than one individual who worked for white farmers. Both my grandfather and my father hired young men from the community of African-Americans that still thrives along a portion of Hendricks’ Store Road, near the first Shoprite grocery, to get up hay each summer.
Ingrained in my mind from my earliest recollection was my fathers’ steadfast belief that “blacks have been mistreated in this country.” I have heard him say, while recollecting on the civil rights movements of the 1960s, that had he been born black, he would have gladly marched right alongside the other protesters. My father worked with my grandfather on a construction site in Danville when a group of high school students marching to the Municipal building were turned back by fire hoses and he recalled how shoes and clothes had been torn from their owner’s feet as they were driven back behind police lines.
My father, of course, had also seen instances of prejudice practiced against blacks closer to home. Once, at a Moneta business during the early 1940s, he witnessed a “colored” man whom he knew who was refused service because of the color of his skin. “They oughta had a sign in there that says ‘no niggers allowed in here’,” the embarrassed man said loudly as he walked back outside the establishment after being refused the purchase of several sandwiches. His remarks, my father reasoned, were not confrontational, but to salvage some measure of self-respect following his humiliation. Dejected and with his pride wounded, the man slighted himself to make his audience laugh and his humiliation easier to bear. If the crowd laughed with him, not at him, he could, perhaps, preserve at least a shred of his dignity.
“Now they could’ve taken that man’s money but they were too ignorant,” concluded my father.

Although I never asked him, I wonder if my father had ever felt guilty for not speaking up for his acquaintance, or even offering to go back inside the business and make a purchase for him. Probably, he did. Maybe fear of his own humiliation prevented it. Perhaps, being a young man, he was not offended over an incident that was, for the time, commonplace. But, as the years went by, he no doubt reflected often on the event and regretted that it happened. Though he was not and could not have been completely free from prejudice (he had used the “n” word and so had I), he knew it was ugly and wrong and he taught me that God made us all and loves us all the same.
My father must have thought about that missed opportunity often while watching the turbulent Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s unfold on the evening TV news. But overcoming prejudice entirely is not always easy to do. My parents enrolled me in a private school, Otterburn Academy, established in 1967 and located on Route 122, from grades 1-11 as a result of the white migration out of the nations’ public schools. Whether right or wrong, they did what they thought was best for me. My father would have gladly used his tractor to take hay, without charge, to Dolly and Milly Hudson. In our butcher shop, my parents would often give a discount to or include a free gift of meat to the poorer people in the community, who, regardless of their skin color, would come in shopping for the cheaper, end cuts of beef and pork. For them, it was just the right thing to do. A man with a tractor, able to help a neighbor, any neighbor, who was less fortunate, was, both to my mother and father, an obligation. As he looked back on other early events in his life, so, too, was helping a black man to make a simple purchase in a country store. He didn’t do that, but he shared the experience with me many times over the years and, in doing so, he taught me not to reject people because of the color of their skin. As Lord Chesterton would agree, it is best to mind the wife.