AUTHOR'S MESSAGE TO READERS
Page 1
[INTRODUCTION TO THE AUTHOR]
Readers seldom know the true mindset of the author so as to gage the validity or purpose of their work. I provide the following micro view of my early life to give you this view into my obviously non-politically-correct mental processes and sometimes dry humor.
I have been interested in the mysteries of religion since my early childhood. As a child living from Southern Arkansas in share-cropper housing to West Coast Migrant Camps we were barefooted, unwashed, dirt-floor, tarpaper shack migrants. We worked for poor share-croppers. In Arkansas in the 1940s we were called “white niggers” and accepted our place in the social hierarchy.
In 1940s southern Arkansas we lived in a small log cabin with a dirt floor and our water was available by a hand pump located outside. I vividly remember the fall season when the hogs were rounded up from the swamp by horseback riders and sent to market. Two or three hogs were butchered in the yard, yielding items for the smokehouse, lard for the coming year and various other things. One item always made was lye soap.
My job [a four-year-old] was to recycle the bucket of water poured into the top of a wood ash-barrel, with a spigot at the bottom. The liquid would take on a green hue with each cycle and was complete when the liquid was a bright green. This was the lye which was placed in a large cast iron vat over a wood fire. Hog fat and lye were boiled together and when later cooled formed a two-inch-thick curd on top. This was cut into bars and was our soap. I remember standing in a wash tub and being soaped with the lye soap, watching the barn fleas jump off my skin.
These are not unpleasant memories; they are just a child’s view of the world. This was our normal life without any thought of life changing. Traveling Tent Preachers told us God would care for the low-class humans, it was written and it was so. Work hard, don’t look up, Jesus loves little children.
Tent preachers awed us with stories of God and Paradise where you would not go hungry or be worked from dark to dark and you would live forever in a wondrous cloud. That is, if God liked you. If you ever thought of nasty things, much-less do them, then God would burn your ass in Hell.
We would go to the back door of “The Big House” and ask the “House Niggers” for anything we needed. Field hands and low-class workers, of any color, were addressed as niggers.
The 1940’s were a turbulent time for America, World Wars, rampant racism, many people trying to recover from the Depression and the Dust Bowl. I remember walking the few miles to “The Corners” which consisted of a board walk country store with a tall glass, hand pumped gas pump in front. I was approaching the Corner with my brothers and Dad when I noticed two Black Men hanging from the floodlights of a billboard. This was mid-morning and no-one seemed to notice the sight. I tugged on my dad’s pant-leg and pointed and he said “not your business son – just look straight ahead”. This was the mind-set of the times; do not get involved unless something actually directly affects you. Later in life my older brothers told me these men had apparently “disrespected” the matriarch of this area because they did not get off of the boardwalk when she passed them.
I do not use pejorative language lightly. I use it because it was the social and religious “truth” in the 1940s [and in many venues today]. My use of this language also gets your attention and lets you know I have first-hand knowledge of society’s prejudices. I lived these circumstances rather than just reading about them. It would be a lie to pretend that the use of these terms to describe social status and skin color prejudices were not widely used and taught in churches and in schools. The Civil War ended slavery in America; it did not end religious fables and unrepentant prejudice.
In today’s USA politics terms of “White Privilege” and “White Guilt” are tossed around to cause dissention, intimidate, separate and disparage a population strictly because of the politics of Socialism. The same politicians teach some Americans they were born victims of injustice and must “rise up” to defeat this injustice. When taught these destructive tenets of life as a child it is extremely difficult to realize they are false. Once realized, any American can achieve their life dreams. Politicians need victims of any social issue to maintain power over the masses, just as Preachers need “sinners” to flex their social influence.
