As Told to Me by Clifford Owens

Growing Up Cracker

I am Clifford Owens, God fearing man, and what I am about to tell is true. By true I mean as true as truth can be. Since I am a man, I can only tell a thing from how I see it. It’s all a matter of view point.

Consider a hunter in the woods who shoots a deer. If we in some way could get the truth from both the hunter and the deer we would get two very different versions of the same event. 

I need to tell this story about when our country was in a state of change, but mostly it was my heart that changed during that time. Moment by moment the truth like a white hot pendulum slices an arch through my soul demanding, ever demanding I speak the truth of those days. These events happen long ago in my life, but I still see them like they happen yesterday as bright and detailed as brisk fall morning.

Every day I pray that the memories fade away like a sepia photograph, but they remain vivid and so terribly clear.  My story is painful to me and to others of my time, but my testimony remains faithful to the big picture. Faithful to the larger truth, kind of like the Bible. So help me God. Amen.

 Chapter One

           

In the nineteen fifties Georgia was a rural place. Not bucolic, but rural. No one drove SUV’s or those big Toyota trucks. We rode in beat up Ford pickups and the occasional mule and wagon. It mattered little if a settlement, a town, or a city like Savannah or even Atlanta was home. Your livelihood never wandered far from the dirt between your toes.

 In Augusta, Georgia, the most sparkling white communion gown had its roots deeply planted in the rich, black dirt of the Savannah River basin. It was and remains today a place filled with contradictions. We loved our country with a patriotism I have never seen equaled, but held in absolute contempt any place north of Virginia. We regarded California as a foreign country long before it became a fashionable concept. The individuals that populated my childhood were at the same time gracious, loving, and kind, yet blind to the injustice around them, as was I.

Unlike puppies we were not born with our eyes shut and given sight as we matured. We were born with God’s clear vision that, as we became aware, grew cloudy with the cataract carefully cultivated by our rich, Southern culture. How else could a people who had demonstrated a decent, loving nature in so many ways grow to hold half our population in less esteem than the family dog? It was the cataract. How else could we live such a contradiction? I believe that without this cataract there would have been mass suicide among the white population in my state. Maybe some of us would have been better off.

Nigger.

There I said it. You will not hear it again from me. I struggled putting that word to paper. I don’t feel any better after putting it down, but anyone claiming to tell the truth about the times and place where I grew up without using that word at least once should be tried for perjury. Many will think this makes me guilty of a racial crime, and I suppose I have no choice but to agree. I also should caution you against convicting me for the use of what has rightly become a profane word in our present society when I have committed far worse crimes than typing a word on a page.

For much of my life I allowed my cataract to grow, even fertilized it, while in my secrete heart I could see with sparkling clarity the hypocrisy of my character.

As did most low to middle class white children in the south, I played with ‘colored’ kids until the magic moment when both they and I realized we were too old for each other. My cataract was in place, and their sense of hope had been subdued.

At that point they would retreat to their world, and we would return to ours. Each week the separation between us became more authentic than our former association. By the time we were old enough for a drivers license these early friendships had become a sequestered memory as unmentionable as incest on society hill.

 I would like to say that I do not remember when I bricked up those memories in the basement of my mind, but that would be the first lie told in this story.