most of us live in a black and white world. we believe in what our parents believed in. or not. we were dressed up in our sunday best and hustled to church to be precluded by sunday school and followed by fellowship. a fancy way of saying coffee and cookies and gossip. we were paraded out for christmas pagents and midnight mass and sunrise services. we sang hallalujah in a choir or rang bells in a balcony. we knelt. or not. we ate unleavened bread and drank grape juice. the body. the blood.
we confessed on saturday. went to church on sunday. stabbed our neighbor in the back doing business on monday and fucked our best friends' wife on friday night. saturday we confessed and all was clean and holy again.
you were with 'em or against 'em. friend or foe. take 'em or leave 'em. one for all and all for... what? black and white.
they were different. they were niggers. nobody wants them in our neighborhood. oh... they're the new minister. that's different. we want to be friends. we'll show them how we can all get along. we want the daughter to be our best friend. we like niggers.
we don't drink in this county. this here is a dry county. you have to go across the state line iffin you're going to get liquor. we don't believe it to be a proper thing. here's $20. bring me back some whisky.
black and white. as long as it suits us. right and wrong. do as i say, not as i do.
she lives in shadows. her world revolves in layers of gray. she sees things that aren't exactly there. things that aren't black. aren't white. things that lay in the spaces between. things that aren't supposed to be seen. she knows they are there. she sees them out of the corner of her eye. she senses them on the nape of her neck. her animals react with confirmation. she would like it to go now. it won't. insanity or just another shade of gray?
4 comments:
The first part of this post is so true. On Sunday's I would marvel at how my grandmother could just ignore all of the hypocrisy. For her it just did not exist. The church and the members were perfect. While I always saw the wizard behind the curtain. I would see those who proclaimed to be holy cussing out a fellow member in the parking lot after mass. Even my grandmother when she talked about a black coworker she would not use the word nigger but she would say they were different than the rest of those people. Like somehow that made things better. Than when I would question my grandmother she would always say the Catholic Way was the Only Way. I never bought it. I believed in God but not the church. I kept going to church until she died but have rarely visited since.
I don't know how I found you, maybe by accident but glad I did.
You say this so well.
Take Care
Michael
Thank you, guys...
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