The following story is going to be included in one of the chapters of my next book: Living Jesus Out Loud: Fragments of Life. Once youve read it, let me know what you think. BTW, I was told this story by two gentlemen I recently met at a retirement center... they are awesome fellas! The Day a White Boy and a Black Man Both Had Their Lives Changed A few years ago I was told a story by a good friend of mine, Mark, that stunned me. Not long ago I was told a similar story by two men that so paralleled Mark’s own story I knew I needed to include it here. I was absolutely floored when Gerald and James told me the following story. I think you will be too. [Note: Due to the fact that both James and Gerald took turns telling me parts of the story I’ve taken the liberty of combining what they said so that it’s less disjointed.] In 1971 racism was still, unfortunately, alive and well in Alabama. Nowhere was this more apparent than the smaller, more rural towns in the state. Gerald, a 9-year old white boy, visited a local butcher shop to pick up some pork chops for his family. When he arrived at the store he stood in line behind two people: a young white woman who was placing her order at the counter and an older black man who stood behind her. Everything seemed to be fine until the white lady had gotten her purchase and the black gentleman (James’ father) stepped up to the counter. Gerald remembers being shocked when the guy behind the counter suddenly said, in a very loud voice, “Boy, you stand behind this man!” Feeling as though he’d done something wrong, Gerald jumped to one side and looked behind him. He hadn’t meant to be impolite to anyone. He remembers saying, “I’m sorry” and looking for the man he had accidentally stood in front of. To his confusion, there wasn’t anyone else in the store. The butcher glared at Gerald and asked gruffly, “What’d you say?” Gerald repeated in a very nervous voice, “I said I was sorry.” The butcher’s face screwed up in a look of anger. “What the hell you got to be sorry for? I was talking to this ‘boy.’” The butcher nodded upwards and towards the black man in front of Gerald. He continued, “I told you boy, you stand behind this man. You understand.” The black man, who Gerald said looked very scared, said, in a small voice, “Yes, sir. I’m sorry sir.” Then, to Gerald he said, “I’m sorry sir. You go right ahead sir. I’m sorry.” Gerald just stood stock-still, stunned and frightened. He had no idea what was going on. The butcher barked at him to place his order so he did. When he got the pork chops his mother had wanted he paid the butcher and ran from the store. Gerald told me, “The last thing I remember as I ran from the shop was the butcher yellin’ at Mr. Jim. ‘Course I didn’t know his name was Mr. Jim then but I found out later that it was James’ father.” When Gerald’s father (Robert) came home that evening and they were all sitting around the dinner table eating Gerald told his family what had happened at the butcher shop. Gerald relates, “When I got done with the story I looked at my father and he was just a-sittin’ there lookin’ at me with this big red head. I don’t mean his head was red but his face was. It was red. Almost like he’d gotten a bad ol’ sunburn. Father just sat there lookin’ between me and my brothers and sisters and my mother. All of a sudden-like he let out a sigh that sounded like a big ol’ snake hissing and he stood up. He told my mother, he said, ‘Ruth, you get these kids cleaned up… we’re going to go see Mr. Jim.’ Then he stormed outta the house like he was going to go beat somebody up.” About an hour later Ruth had gotten her children cleaned up (while trying to calm her children and telling them, repeatedly, she didn’t know what their father was planning) and they were waiting in the living room when Robert came through the door holding something big wrapped in butcher paper. Gerald said his father looked a lot less red than he had when he’d left earlier. Robert calmly told his six children and his wife to get into the truck and, once they were loaded up, they started down the road. James continues the story. “My entire family was sitting on our porch when we saw a pick-up truck coming down our road. It was dusk so we couldn’t see who was in it but we didn’t think anything about it because trucks were always coming to and from local farms until well after dark. But, this truck didn’t go past our house. Instead, it pulled right up into our yard. We didn’t have a drive way so my daddy and everyone who visited us just parked where the grass ended. That’s when I saw a whole family of white people sitting in a brown Ford truck. My daddy got up and I noticed he was shuffling his feet around like he was really nervous. My momma came out of our home and asked my daddy something. He kind of shrugged and told all of us to stay where we were.” Jim, James’ father, stepped off the porch about the same time Robert opened the door of his truck. The two men met between the house and the truck and everyone noticed how Jim kept looking at Gerald, who was standing up in the truck bed and peering over the cab. Jim started wringing his hands and shaking his head while looking towards the ground. It was apparent to everyone he was apologizing for what had happened earlier in the day at the butcher shop. “Somewhere in the middle of my daddy apologizing to Gerald’s daddy, Mr. Robert reached out and put his hand on my daddy’s shoulder. No one could hear what was going on but it looked to our family as if Mr. Robert was apologizing. Then, both men shook hands and my daddy turned to all of us with this big silly grin on his face. Mr. Robert yelled for his family to get out of the truck and he reached back into the cab where he and Mrs. Ruth were sitting and brought out a big white package of meat. “I will never forget what Mr. Robert said to all of us when he came to our porch. He actually apologized for the way the butcher had treated my daddy and told us that he and his family were Christians and they didn’t believe in that kind of nonsense and that he was sorry for how my family was treated by others in town.” To make a very long story much shorter, Gerald’s father said that they would never again shop with the butcher in town and that he was going to make certain everyone knew why. A friendship developed between Gerald’s and James’ family that went beyond simply taking a stand against the attitude of a single shop owner. “See,” Gerald explains. “There weren’t no other butcher shop anywhere near where we lived so if anybody wanted to get fresh meat we had to go there. So, one night when we was all around Mr. Jim’s and Mrs. Edith’s table eatin’ supper, my father and Mr. Jim got to talking and decided they would start up a butcher shop together. Now, neither of ‘em had any idea how to do the butcherin’ but my father said he knew a man who did and who he was sure could help ‘em learn. So, in 1972 there was, all of a sudden-like, two butcher shops in town. One was in the town square where it had always been but the other was in the back of our house.” James relates, “It took a long while before people in the town would even set foot in the door of the new butcher shop because most were worried that a black man working beside a white man was a terrible idea. I remember once my daddy told me that it took them almost six months to sell the equivalent of a whole cow. But, once old Mr. and Mrs. Callahan started visiting us everything changed. All of a sudden it was like, ‘this is a good thing and these guys are fair.’ So, the new butcher shop was an overnight success that only took two years to get that way.” Today, James and Gerald are still very close friends even though their paths parted ways for long years. Gerald joined the Army when he was old enough to do so and James joined the Navy. Upon doing their time in the military Gerald came back to Alabama to help at the butcher shop while James went to college and became a veterinarian. The butcher shop that came about because two men decided to stand against bigotry eventually employed three generations of their family. It finally closed after over 30 years in operation because of competition from bigger vendors but, the income generated from the business helped to put 14 children through college. Even though the butcher shop itself is no longer, the memory of it stands, if nothing else, as a symbol of what Christ can do even in the adverse environment of hypocrisy. Oh, and the other butcher shop… well, it shut its doors in the mid-1980’s. The butcher (who had originally instigated the opening of his only competition) almost ten years after the incident with Gerald and Jim, publicly repented to Jim – Jim died three weeks later. When the man’s butcher shop closed he gave all of his machinery (freezers, saws, etc.) to Jim’s and Robert’s family and, until he died at the age of 92, visited at least once a week to get what he called ‘the best cut of beef this side of heaven.’ Isn’t it amazing the wondrous relationships God can bring about as long as His children are willing to listen and act?
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 04:04:00 +0000
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