Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Laundry
My dad was almost ninety when he said it. He held a cup of warmed up coffee, having long since given up his nightly gin. We’d had a day of driving fast on the country roads near his house, his car bouncing hard on the hills. I’d held on to the door handle and the end of my seat belt and tried to look relaxed like I always rode with old men who drove insanely fast on two-lane roads.
“My dad was in the Klan for a while,” my dad said, taking a sip of now cold coffee. I stared at him.
I was sitting on the old red plaid couch in my parents’ den, watching TV news on mute. It’s what my dad did. Turned the sound off. Read the captions. A segment had come up on a Klan meeting. White hoods, a cross burning. The caption read, “Klan meeting in Ohio disturbs town’s residents.”
“A lot of people were,” he added, like he was explaining how folks had gotten infatuated with hula hoops or pyramid schemes.
He went back to his book. He read five books a week, all spy novels. Sometimes he would check out a book at the local library and see his name on the card from a few years back. He checked it out anyway. It was his deal, the checking out of a stack of books, right after he went to the bank, and before he went to the grocery store.
He said it as a fact, not as the beginning of a story. He didn’t say, “Let me tell you about the time my dad was in the Klan.” The subject was closed the second it was opened.
I remember my dad’s dad. He was an old man, a retired carpenter, with a butch haircut, his gray hair pomaded so it stood straight up like a five-year old boy posing for a school picture. He wore baggy white t-shirts and held his too big pants up with suspenders. He had a worm farm out back and would take me out there to watch him take a pitchfork to it, stabbing the hill of black dirt and turning the clods over, hundreds of worm heads and tails writhing. I knew about night crawlers. I knew how they grew fat and had bands around them, like rings on a tree. I could pull a night crawler apart without flinching and bait a fish hook. It never bothered me. Even their worm blood or their worm shit, it’s didn’t bother me. They were just worms. I learned that from him but he never said anything about the Klan.
My dad died soon after that night when I sat on the plaid couch and he told me his father had been a member of the Klan. He died watching a live broadcast of the Canadian Parliament on mute. I don’t know what Canadian policy debate would have intrigued him. He lived in Michigan his whole life. He kept a lot to himself.
A few years ago, I bought a book about the Klan in Michigan. I right away looked in the index to find my granddad’s hometown or his name. His town was there. The Michigan Klan was angry about Catholics, that’s who they thought was stealing the jobs and ruining the country. They hadn’t yet gotten around to black people or Jews. That made them sound harmless. That they hated Catholics but not the others. I was looking for softening. My granddad wasn’t in the real Klan. He was in an amateur Klan, less lethal.
I didn’t tell anybody about this.
At first, it seemed deeply shameful, embarrassing that I would have this heritage. And then talking about it seemed opportunistic like I’d discovered some new deadly cancer on my body and couldn’t wait to go to press about it. And then it seemed like one of hundreds of stories of people who reclaimed themselves from their own racist history.
And then there is now.
I am the descendant of a carpenter, worm farmer, and Klan member. I am just going to hang that on the line with a couple of wooden clothespins and let the wind blow.
________________
Photo by Lautaro Andreani on Unsplash
14 Comments on “Laundry”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
My mother was a communist. Not aligned with the Soviet Union, but definitely a communist. She transformed into a socialist because (are you ready?) the boys were cuter, so there was a better social life with socialists.
It wasn’t a big deal back then. It was the Depression and everyone was looking for answers.
I think we are who WE are. What our parents were is interesting, sometimes instructive, frequently embarrassing — but we aren’t them. At least I hope not.
I’ve read that book. I was struck by how quickly the Klan flared up and then how quickly it faded away (mostly, for a while). Wouldn’t it be nice if that happened with Q and the MAGA folks.
Powerful piece, Jan The Klan comes in many forms. It was wrong then, wrong now and wrong forever, no matter how deep we try to bury it.
Reblogged this on Red's Wrap.
What year do you think that might have been? It was never right, but compared to today, it seems a lesser sin, more of a way of life.
It was in the 1920’s. The Klan was a big deal in Michigan and Indiana; their focus was on Catholics and immigrants. A British researcher came across of ton of Klan info that had been hidden for 70 years and wrote a book called Everyday Klansfolk – it’s about the Klan in one Michigan county. It was ubiquitous. Scary.
Great post. I felt his presence through your words. I also identified with your shocking discovery.
My paternal grandmother’s aunt married a sister of General Robert E. Lee before he became commander of West Point, before he commanded the Confederate Army. I’ve read through the family history going back to 1700 something and how a woman and her five sons escaped from Ireland to America on a cattle ship. The generation before me and the one before that voiced shame for being related to Lee. History is history. It is what it is.
I came from a racist background. Thank God people can change!
Wow ! You have done well to put it out there !
What a thing to find lurking inside such an apparently mundane carpenter’s life. But there it is out in the open–ridiculous and ugly and hateful and pointless–to be dealt with or ignored like so much worm shit.
Beautifully written, as usual.
And good for you, too, Jan.
That’s a lot to have on ur shoulders….
Great story! I’m from Indiana and I know there was a big Klan presence there. My family is very racist, I use to be, but I woke up and realized that black people are just like everyone else. When my mom found out my black friend Mike visited our house, she almost had a stroke. She was doing her best Red Foxx impersonation and clutching her chest like she was having a heart attack. Know what she said? “He didn’t sit on my good chair did he?” She was a rotten person.
So encouraging to hear that even one former racist was able to change her mind set. Good for you and good for you for telling us!!!