The Restaurant

February is Black History month and current events illustrate the distance we have traveled since the beginning of the Civil Rights movement and the recent election of Barack Obama, our first African American as well as our 44th president of the United States. Even so, for many of us, the experiences we lived through during the years before his election shaped our lives in several special ways.

When I was 6 years old, my father bought a house in a rural area of central Maryland. The little town we lived in had one school that housed all grades from first through twelfth. I began first grade in 1950 in a school that was already desegregated and many of my friends came from both races. It is true that I was very naïve and not very "worldly" and did not actually realize that other people did not necessarily believe the same things I did - at least, that is until I was twelve years old.

Each winter from the time I was born, it was a family tradition that we always had our vacation in Tennessee in order to visit our grandparents and cousins. In December 1962, it was time once again to go visit my grandparents and my entire family was excited to be going there for two whole weeks. This was over a year before Dr. Martin Luther King made his famous I Have a Dream speech on August 28, 1963 and a little more than five years before he was shot and killed in April 1968. Yet, those events were not things that stood out to me at the time, not like the event I lived through while visiting my grandparents.

My paternal grandfather owed a restaurant in Knoxville, Tennessee and that was where he worked six days a week. He never worked on Sunday because that was the day to go to church. He was only open for breakfast and lunch and typically only made sandwiches for people to eat instead of meals on a plate. He also sold a variety of sundry items to those who came in and the restaurant doubled as a small Five & Dime store.

One of my favorite things to do that year was to go with him to the restaurant where I could help and I was the only one of six children that was allowed to do so. He would let me restock shelves and, once in awhile, would let me serve coffee to a customer when they came inside. It was a thrilling and unusual time for me since I seldom met people who lived in a big city.

One day my grandfather had to go to the storeroom, located in the basement of the restaurant, to select items he needed to restock several of his shelves and he left me "in charge". Not long after he had gone down the steps, a gentleman came into the restaurant and sat down at one of the tables. Thinking I could show off all the skills I had learned under my grandfather's supervision, I immediately went to the table and took the man's order. He only wanted a cup of coffee, which for a twelve-year-old girl, was certainly a simple enough request for me to do without having to call for my grandfather to help.

I happily poured his coffee and carried a container of milk he had asked for to the table. He thanked me and I told him he was welcome. I went to stand behind the counter where my grandfather made his sandwiches for his breakfast and lunch crowd, just as proud as a peacock that I had managed to do a job "well done" without help. I could barely wait for my grandfather to come back upstairs so I could tell him what happened and how well I had done. In the meantime, I continued to refill the man's cup, he would again thank me, and I once more would go stand behind the lunch counter. I felt almost grown up.

All this happened within a period of perhaps twenty minutes and no one else had entered the restaurant. Then my grandfather finally came up the stairs, carrying several boxes in his arms. I ran over to tell him what I had done and once he had heard my story, he suddenly and literally threw down the boxes he was carrying. Striding over to where the man was sitting, my grandfather knocked the coffee cup off the table and demanded the man leave the restaurant. In shock, all I could do was stand trembling in the middle of the floor with my hands pressed to my face and, at that point, I had no idea what I had done wrong.

The gentleman quietly stood up and put on the hat he was wearing when he first entered. With my grandfather at his hells screaming at the top of his voice, the man silently walked out the door. Then my grandfather turned and began to yell at me for serving someone who was "black". I do not remember every thing he said as he was practically frothing at the mouth telling me I could never come back to the restaurant with him again. By that time, I do not think anyone could have dragged me there with a team of horses anyway.

Nevertheless, as my grandfather loudly berated me (and the rest of my immediate family including his son) for our "love for those people", I could see the man as he walked by the huge plate glass windows of the store. Just as he reached the end of the building, he stopped. Turning to face the store, the black man peered through the glass, tipped his hat, and smiled at me. All I could do was weakly smile back and wiggle my fingers in a wave, neither of which did much to endear me more to my grandfather.

When my father found out what happened at the restaurant that day, he packed up his family and their belongings into his car and drove home to Maryland. It was the day before Christmas. I never again went back to that restaurant.

My father moved away from Tennessee because of an incident that occurred when he was a young child and one that shaped his views long before I was born. The first time he had seen an African-American, he pointed to him and asked his mother "who is that?" His mother replied with a term that today is considered a negative term. After he became an adult, he began to understand exactly what he had been told as a child. Deciding he could not accept that way of life, he decided to change his surroundings by moving away from Tennessee and those who believed differently.

I was fortunate enough to be raised in a home that did not believe in racial prejudice or inequality. It was a hard lesson to learn that not everyone thought the same way I did when I was twelve; however, I learned that lesson well. All my brothers and sisters were taught that each person is responsible for his or her actions and that each individual will be judged by those actions regardless of race, religion, or creed. Nor, as even my grandfather learned, did it matter what color.

It was many years later that I learned the true story of why he was so angry and it had less to do with racial prejudice as it did with fear. Not fear based on people of color, but based on fear of those of his own race. He was sadly - a victim of his own time.