A Change Is Gonna Come

Recently, my brother, John, reposted on his Facebook page an item from a group devoted to old Mississippi photos. It consisted of a Hattiesburg postcard from 1907 that pictured a Lindsey logging wagon pulled by four teams of oxen and loaded with a single log of virgin pine. I was awed by the size of that lone piece of timber—the tree from which it was cut would have been a magnificent sight. Imagine the vast forests of comparably-sized timber that was to be found scarcely a hundred years ago here in the pine belt of Southeastern Mississippi.

After marveling for a moment at this log, what actually piqued my interest was the handwritten message below the photograph. It was hard to read at first, given the old-style cursive writing and the poor spelling, but as my wife, Gena, and I sat on the patio with our morning coffee, we took it as a challenge to decipher this caption. After debating this and that word for a few minutes, we were both aghast when we finally realized its full meaning.

Courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History

With my corrections for the spelling, the inscription dated March 20, 1907, said, “Dear friend, they hung two coons here this morning to a big oak tree. It was awful. And in 10 minutes after it happened all disbanded. From [name illegible].”  

I immediately called John, and he was likewise taken aback when I pointed out that this message was written by someone who had just witnessed a lynching. He at once deleted his post. In his defense, he admitted that he couldn’t make out much of the inscription and just assumed it was some innocuous personal greeting. However, he did think it was odd that the author referred to a “big oak tree” when the pictured timber on the postcard was clearly a pine. 

I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’ve been dwelling on it. No doubt some of my relatives, not more than a generation or two removed, witnessed, condoned, and possibly participated in similar atrocities. Their racist attitudes were deeply ingrained. It was in their actions as well as their language. I know this because I grew up in the era of desegregation and I witnessed firsthand many extremely troubling incidents.

Big Level, the community of my boyhood, and the nearby county seat of Wiggins were, and are still, a quintessential microcosm of rural and small-town life in the Deep South. The zeitgeist and social patterns that emerged during Reconstruction continued to define the area for generations. Notwithstanding the advent of several modern technologies, not much had changed those attitudes by the time I came along in 1953. In many respects, the Big Level of my birth differed little from that depicted in the photo above. The white folk of the community, many to whom I was related, were decent, honest, God-fearing people. Their values, long steeped in traditions of the era, were rooted in the belief that this was a white man’s country, and that it should remain so at all costs. As a youngster in the 1950s, sitting in my all-white rural school and church, being careful in town to avoid the water fountain labeled “Colored,” it was natural to assume that the ordered life of my parents, my grandparents, and my great-grandparents would continue indefinitely. Not that I gave conscious thought to it. I simply accepted it as the way things had always been. As a child, it never occurred to me that it would change. 

And yet, change came. Not that all matters of equality have been resolved, nor have the old ways of thinking completely died away, but monumental changes in civil rights and racial justice have come in my lifetime. It seems now almost unimaginable that mine would be the last generation to come of age in the segregated South. I don’t have the words to adequately address the topic, but I sometimes wonder if my own belief system has kept pace with the times. Do I still have a foot planted in the segregated past? 

Here’s a thought experiment for you: What beliefs do you and I and our larger community presently hold that we think are perfectly acceptable, but that future generations, 100 and 200 years out, will look back on us and say, “My Gosh, what were they thinking? They were still doing such and such! Bless their hearts, didn’t they know any better?”

Words to Ponder

zeit·geist (noun): the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time. From German ‘zeitgeist,’ from zeit ‘time’ + geist ‘spirit’ or ‘ghost.’ Scholars have long maintained that each era has a unique spirit, a nature or climate that sets it apart from all other epochs. In German, such a spirit is known as Zeitgeist.

a·ghast (adj.): filled with horror or shock, from Middle English, past participle of the obsolete verb gast ‘frighten.’ The spelling with gh (originally Scots) became general by about 1700, probably influenced by ghost; compare with ghastly.
  www.merriam-webster.com

Song of the Day

“A Change is Gonna Come” by Sam Cooke (Ain't That Good News, 1964)