!Chuck --- agk's diary 29 September 2023 @ 10:57 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 in garage with a little lantern --- Mom's off to uncle Chuck's memorial. He was her sister's husband and about the sharpest wit I ever knew. His humor, tempered by humility and decency, never trod on anyone's dignity in my hearing. I never got the sense he saw anyone as beneath him. I'd like to be there to hear stories that recall him to me and complicate my recollection with parts of him I didn't know--but I'm on call today, leash- ed to a radius the memorial's beyond. I can still tell, barred from the memorial's resurrection of the man in others' stories. My grandparents and I visited Thanksgiving one of the years protesters kept specific young black men shot dead by police in public memory. The local dead man was a star athlete. He knocked a white woman's door for help after he wrecked his car into a tree. After work I drove daily to the courthouse to sit behind the dead man's mom as she heard police testify her son's white eyes in the dark looked like an animal's. I sat behind her. She silently bore witness to the forensic expert who demonstrated trajectories of each bullet that perforated his body, shattered, macerated his organs as he sat, hands raised. This one entered his shoulder from the rear. Its frag- ments emerged from his lungs and liver, lodged against a rib. My grandparents and I discussed the case at break- fast on mornings I wasn't at work. A friend who led protest marches was tailed around town, pulled from the courtroom, intimidated and harrassed by various security services. I ambivalently participated in some mass community meetings, spoke once for A. Phillip Randolph's working class industrial democ- racy, against milquetoast professional/managerial "racial reconciliation" via getting to know someone of a different race. I unwillingly inherited leadership of our southern city's too-liberal progressive-for-me chapter of SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice), a "white anti racist" organization. I directed its members to reflect on and build empathy for family and people they knew well who're attracted to organized, explicit anti-black vigilante stuff: Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Brotherhood, owning a Rhodesian Ridgeback dog or flying the confederate battle flag with its more ambiguous shades of meanings. We had to reflect so our judgment wouldn't be clouded with self-righteousness, so we could think realistically and strategically about how to oppose a unity rally of national Ku Klux Klan and National Socialist (Nazi) Movement leadership that was coming up. When race and policing are major topics of discussion on the news, facebook, the job, and the table, these groups recruit. Why are their recruits attracted to them? What can we do to undermine or steal their appeal? On SURJ's national chapter leader email list there was an "action toolkit" about using Thanksgiving dinnertable conversation to advance antiracism or whatever, "calling in" white relatives and elders. I hated the pedantic, moralistic, paternalistic vibe, and the class-blind obscurationism of the thing, but it was on my mind at my aunt and uncle's Thanksgiving table. My aunt, like my mom, went to highschool in the nearby southern city at the height of 1970s deseg- regation and bussing. Racial apartheid, become illegal in schooling, was overcome by a system that bussed black and white kids to schools outside their neighborhoods, mixing them together. Many whites protested, then moved. National guard hele- copters were landed on her high school football field to quell riots in the school. The long blonde hair of some white girls was set afire on their heads in the toilet. She graduated as the hysteria was subsiding. This particular Thanksgiving Chuck sat at one end the table, mom's tall nerdy little brother Tim at the other. My aunt and cousin faced my grandparents and I over turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, casseroles, greens, cranberry sauce, and sweet tea. My aunt sells insurance to truckers. She told an insignificant racially-disparaging anecdote a co- worker'd told her. Not something she'd usually say, but race had been the topic of conversation every- where for months. I thought what she said was mean and small, but I didn't say anything. Neither'd my liberal grandma. My aunt thought the story'd be amusing, but nobody laughed. Instead uncle Chuck, more white and south- ern than any of us, said softly to her, "Don't talk about my people like that, Momma." Their son, my cousin, tag-teamed without hesitation "I'm right there with you, daddy." No moralistic lecture, no self-righteous superior- ity, but without strife the conversation changed to other things. My aunt knew she was wrong, no need to belabor it. I was shook, though. I'd thought Chuck was a redneck like his family member down the road with a confederate battle flag on the tallest pole for miles. His wit was quick, but he waited and spoke slow, with a pronounced drawl. His lower lip indicated the dip he'd chewed. He was a genius in the garden, loved his riding mower, lived in the deep rural south, and worked in a warehouse. I asked him, another time, if he ever knew anybody in the Ku Klux Klan. The town near where he grew up was home to the 1958 "kissing case": a black 9 year old and black 7 year old convicted of molestation, sentenced to state reformatory til the age of 21 because a white girl their age kissed them on the cheek. The local NAACP director organized Detroit autoworkers in the '40s, then advocated armed self- defense when 7,500 Klansmen gathered in the town of 12,000 in the aftermath of the kissing case. Jesse Helms, a conservative senator from 1973-2003 was from there. Chuck told me about guys who passed flyers around the warehouse where he worked to get workers to a meal and movie about problems in the community they darkly hinted at. His work-buddy went. He tagged along. The obscene, lascivious movie was about the spectre of black men raping white women. Chuck realized what it was. He left, walked home. I forgot some of the story. I believe he told me he noted who was there, talked some guys out of getting involved. There was no countervailing force of trade-unionist or socialist thought in town to denounce the Klan's crude deflection of white male resentment away from its source. Leisure produced by mechanization of labor accumulated upward. Working people wasted their resentment on each other. Chuck couldn't swallow the lie because he was decent and he loved the woman who raised him, a black sharecropper on his papaw's land. He didn't just love her sentimentally, he loved her practic- ally. He saved money to move her out of the shack into a small place in town. He visited her, minded her, hung on her word, and buried her when she died. She was his momma, more or less, and he was her son. I learned about her long after one of Chuck's once- estranged daughters was confined to a nursing home in another state with advanced multiple scerosis, the other dying of brain cancer in another state, his son who never got far from home recovering from a dissecting aortic aneurysm, breathing through a trach tube, Chuck disabled by a stroke. I cared for grandma, whose dementia was well-advanced. I did housekeeping and home health care for a well-off woman in grandma's church who also had advanced dementia. I was in my 30s. I underestimated Chuck for most of my life because I didn't live near, he spoke plainly after screwing up his face and slow consideration, and he saved his thoughts for those who could enjoy them. I only noticed how funny, independent-minded, smart, and principled he was shortly before the stroke that made speech tough, memory opaque, and narrowed much of his life to naps and looking at the TV from the recliner. There's so much more I wish I knew his thoughts on.