{"id":2617,"date":"2020-07-17T08:48:57","date_gmt":"2020-07-17T15:48:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/welcometable\/?p=2617"},"modified":"2020-07-17T08:48:57","modified_gmt":"2020-07-17T15:48:57","slug":"darius-growing-up-black-in-the-1950s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/welcometable\/2020\/07\/darius-growing-up-black-in-the-1950s\/","title":{"rendered":"Darius: Growing up Black in the 1950s"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a>
Darius Gray\u2013a few years after this incident<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

I am posting daily to invite empathy into Black lives. My main focus is Darius Gray. This is an excerpt from our third book, The Last Mile of the Way. We refer to Darius as Aidan, which is what his family called him.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like many of us, Elsie and Derrus Gray subscribed to Ebony <\/em>and Negro Digest. <\/em>Around this time, the second of those magazines ran a series of articles by famous colored Americans titled \u201cHow I Told My Children about Race.\u201d Gwendolyn Brooks reported how she explained things to her son when the two of them were taking a stroll and a car full of fools hurled rocks and obscenities their direction. Arma Bontemps described how it felt to tell his five-year-old son why the Nashville papers included photos of the Vanderbilt football games but not the Fisk ones. Others told how they explained why newspapers showed white brides\u2019 photos but not any Negro brides.<\/p>\n

It was a hard thing\u2014harder than you might suppose\u2014for Elsie to tell her son he couldn\u2019t talk to a white girl. He\u2019d done it innocently at a roller skating rink, and word had gotten back to Elsie\u2019s employer. It\u2019s a bad, bleak task for any mother to tell her son he can\u2019t presume he\u2019s the same as other children. He\u2019s colored, and that means he will likely be invisible to whites. If they do see him, they\u2019ll see him as a sprout of danger.<\/p>\n

\u201cHoney,\u201d she said, \u201cI don\u2019t like it any more than you do, but you got to understand. Mama could lose her job if you talk to that young lady again. This is Mama\u2019s job.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aidan narrowed his eyes, for he loathed injustice. Nobody needed to identify it; he recognized it like he was born to. He may have been sickly, but he had his daddy\u2019s temper and his daddy\u2019s sense of right ways. He knew when ugly was ugly.<\/p>\n

Still and all, he was a hopeful, happy boy, for he was Elsie\u2019s son too. He sought out joy in a natural way, following her example. And he expected great things out of life, no matter what barriers tried to get in his way.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am posting daily to invite empathy into Black lives. My main focus is Darius Gray. This is an excerpt from our third book, The Last Mile of the Way. We refer to Darius as Aidan, which is what his family called him. \u00a0 Like many of us, Elsie and Derrus Gray subscribed to Ebony […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1301,"featured_media":773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nDarius: Growing up Black in the 1950s<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I am posting daily to invite empathy into Black lives. My main focus is Darius Gray. This is an excerpt from our third book, The Last Mile of the Way. 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