Leaving Alabama
Claire Lynch’s song “An Alabama State of Mind” presents the picture of Alabama that my mother wanted me to have: Sunday dinners after church when Uncle Toliver would deliver a blessing longer than the preacher’s sermon, floating down the river, walking down a road killing time, a picture of a place she called home. But there was too much of something in me that knew the Alabama state of mind was filled with hate that grew out of an ugly racism that first was focused only on African-Americans, you know, the “colored,” the “nigra,” but which is now focused on immigrants, seen as invaders of another color and another race.
Oh, it wasn’t all are “equal in his sight,” we sang in Sunday School then, but all are “precious in his sight.” Precious, what a nice, nonthreatening word. It’s only when I read of such events as Senator Sessions’ tirade against the Dream Act or the new Alabama law that would even criminalize a person taking an undocumented person to church that I am ever so grateful that my mother left Alabama. She didn’t really want to leave and never really understood my anger at the injustices I witnessed. Being deaf, she didn’t hear the racist language that poisons our society and our Nation. It wasn’t that she shut her eyes, but that sometimes looking doesn’t tell you the whole story.
The problem is, of course, is that leaving Alabama also involves a state of mind. It’s a past that’s not easy to shake off as much as I want to. Upset as I become about anti-immigrant legislation in states like Georgia and Arizona because it violates everything I have been taught about what our country is supposed to mean, the Alabama legislation affects me even more deeply. It’s not that I ever loved the state but that it was part of my family’s history, some of it proud and some of it caught in the mire of racism. It reminds me of what one of my uncles used to say about declaring oneself for Christ at those summer revival meetings: so holier than thou and so, so hypocritical. But these are the same so-called Christians who joined the KKK, killed “troublemakers,” and laughed when the bodies of Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney were found in a Mississippi swamp. Nothing, nothing has changed – only the target.
