G. Frink's

Today I yearned to have my Grandfather George Frink with me to share Barack Obama's speech, just as we often read the newspaper together in the morning and watched the news on television together at night.

More than a century ago, after putting together a school committee and so securing the state funds required to construct the whites-only Hallsboro (North Carolina) School from which I eventually graduated, my grandfather secretly defied the KKK by subsidizing construction of a school in "The Quarters" there for the black citizens.

Grandaddy would have approved of Obama's epochal speech on living with and overcoming American racial division.

In our grandfather/grandson approach to active listening, we would have annotated that speech with discussion which ranged across how, when I was a child, Grandaddy taught me to speak my dissent carefully, softly.

It was a matter of survival.

He knew he had to teach me restraint, lest loud assertion then of my attitudes and ideas bring the Klan by to shut me up, possibly forever and about everything.

Heaven knows, my father, a Klansman, tried from time to time to shut me up. His militant racism broke Grandaddy's heart and divided us in ways I tried but could not heal. My mother's dividing hold over my father would not permit healing. Yet I did not and do not disown my father, who has passed away. Shunning is not about love or forgiveness, and I am. Nor is it possible, ultimately, to shun that which is as much a part of you as a parent.

It was through the softening, entangling web of memory that I heard Obama say of his former minister, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright:

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother -- a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.


These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Amid those words there returned to me the memory of Grandaddy's sawmill.

With its screaming, circular saws he cut mast from his own forest into beams and boards to "sell" to members of the Cherry family for money they brought to him in a well-used paper bag and a glass jar.

Almost all of that mast was cypress my grandfather cut down and hauled out of Columbus County's, White Marsh alone, behind a team of mules. He chose cypress because the termites were unlikely to eat it and it resisted rot.

He wanted that school to last and to offer enduring shelter to his friends' children as they received the education that he had himself been denied as a child. For despite being an inveterate reader whose interests ranged from detective novels to modern physics, Columbus County's poverty and the failure of his father's business had denied him the opportunity to finish high school.

He didn't keep so much as a penny of the school money.

Grandaddy walked or rode his horse alone through the late-night darkness of back roads to return it to his friends, who after a time would return by day to "buy" more of the lumber with which to build their school and maintaining the illusion that he was profiting from what the Klan believed were useless efforts.

"A man does what he can," Grandaddy always said, and he would know what a man can do now.

Just as I know.

Grandaddy and I would not lower our voices this time, or move stealthily through the mosquito-thick darkness to accomplish the good.

Not this time.

I know that together we would join Obama in proclaiming, "Not this time."

This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we would build one school together in the daylight, and celebrate what we have become.

This time we can build together at last the kind of society Grandaddy envisioned and secretly fought for, beginning more than a decade before my father was born.

This time, we can build it to last, the way Grandaddy would.

Note: Here are the text and video of Barack Obama's Tuesday, March 18, 2008, speech.