‘It Wasn’t Until Much Later’
i thought i'd do a confessional piece for my inaugural post . . .
wow so here’s the very first post of my very new newsletter ‘the rohn report’ / i have been preparing to release this for the last couple of weeks by learning about the Substack platform and all the different things that are involved in doing a newsletter email publication but at some point you have to push away from shore and begin your journey / start paddling / around the bend and over the rapids
so anyways for my inaugural post i thought i’d do a confessional piece / reveal something about myself / let you get to know me / or think you do / LOL
It Wasn’t Until Much Later
After watching the entire movie ’It’s a Mad Mad Mad World’ on YouTube, I realized that it was all hillbilly humor, there was even a cameo appearance by the Three Stooges. The whole movie, pretty much, was stupid jokes, situation comedy, calamity, buildings falling down, people falling down. It was funny. I laughed. I’m proud of my hillbilly. They was my people.
My daddy’s side was hillbilly way back there a few generations, I believe. And before that some of them were rascals from the old country, rapscallions who shipped over to the colonies to repay their debt to society.
My momma’s side was Mayflower Pilgrims and she was proud of that. Living a righteous life and being a Mayflower Pilgrim was part of the tradition she brought from her momma and her momma before her and on back to the religious zealots that floated across the ocean in their wooden boats to escape the tyranny and establish they own damn religion. Do it the way they wanted to do it.
My grandma, the only one I ever knew, was from my momma’s side and I only knew her as an old woman. We were not friends. During the brief time she stayed at our house, I do not remember having a conversation with her. The only memory I have of old Nettie Bowditch is of one Sunday morning, a cold winter’s day with fresh snow on the ground, and Nettie wanted to walk to church - the distance of about 5 or 6 blocks. My parents wouldn’t hear of it. The sidewalks were icy and she would fall and break her hip and that would be the end of her. Nettie stubbornly insisted on walking and my parents stubbornly refused to allow it. Nettie’s response was to simply sit down and declare, ‘Well I’m not going to church then.” At this pronouncement my parents grew frustrated and left the house to navigate down the icy sidewalks themselves. Once they had left, Nettie waited for a few minutes, then got up and proceeded to walk to church. I accompanied her so she wouldn’t fall and break her hip.
This was also the same grandmother who suggested to my mother that her newly born grandson, me, was evidence of black blood in the family tree, inferring that my father’s side was tainted. Can you imagine that? What vanity and meanness she must have had in her mind to say that to her daughter about her baby.
Of course I was an infant at the time and couldn’t possibly have heard it myself so how I came to know of it is a bit of a mystery. It’s like it traveled thru the bones and the flesh of our family somehow and I did know about it and accepted the role of the outcast as something just and right and normal.
It wasn’t until much later with my budding identity, high school and stuff, that I felt the burden of that. And why was I like this and what’s wrong with me, were questions that I struggled with. Then I remembered and acknowledged the grandmother’s curse and wore it like a ragged t-shirt well into my hippie days and my early adulthood.
It wasn’t until much later than this that I began to suspect that the curse had actually been a blessing. In my exile state, in my state of being ‘the other’, I had also found an exit from my grandmother’s world of dogmatic (and strictly enforced) righteousness - as tyrannical as any king of England. I began the quest to find truth. That’s a heady adventure for any young man. Or woman. A heady adventure for any human being. Thank you grandmother for the blessing, whether you intended it or not.
And if I am evidence of ‘black blood’ in the family tree then I am super proud of it. Everyone is unique, we’re all mixed blood. We’ve been marrying and intermarrying and invading and migrating for thousands of generations. Actually this is what gives us our resilience. There was no guarantee that this hairless monkey would even survive out of the trees in a world of large predators back on the African savannas.
Our ancestors had to be aspiring and clever, not dogmatic about it. The more perspectives they could bring to a problem the more likely it was they could find a solution, another way around it, a better idea. Some ancient Homo sapiens learned how to build a boat and sail it across hundreds of miles of open water. That’s how they got to Australia 40,000 years ago. Had never done it before, nobody had ever done it before.
We are all mixed blood, we are all cursed, we are all blessed. That’s what I’ve learned. We’re all human. It’s a cool species. Maybe a little confused about what to do with our tool building skills (bombs or bridges?) and our language skills (lie or tell the truth?) but we have some great features. We love adventures and we love stories. That should tell you something.
Mixed blood yes. My father, a worldly and scholarly man is also of hillbilly descent, full of outlaws and poor farmers of cotton and growers of wool. Once he told me on the way to the cotton gin, a very large horse drawn haul, representing the family's toil of 5 days, had overturned and spilled it's contents completely on the gravel dirt path. Well the cargo was as good as gone because to have salvaged anything would have meant the risk of carrying a small pebble to the gin and causing a spark and endangering the income of themselves and the entire community of Blysville.
In his teens he joined the US Air Force and met a beautiful young debutante daughter of a 3 star general under Franco's regime. He married her and brought her to St Louis and in 1967 their first-born was baptized Michael.
They are no longer together but still a part of my daily life, thank God. Now my family is also a mixture of Mexican- Americans and African-Americans. Of course during family feasts and celebrations we don't use those terms as the jokes fly out one after another as long a the kiddoes aren't around.
It's a beautiful, grand, mad web that we are in, and prolly my greatest blessing is to be linked in.
You probably redeemed yourself in Nettie’s eyes that day you walked her to church. You kept her safe and didn’t let her become a fallen woman. That must have been when she swapped the curse for a blessing. Or perhaps that’s when you did the switch yourself, and it just took you some years to realize.