“Good people,” my grandfather says. 

It’s all I can do to twirl the receipt around in my hands.  I’m tired.  I’m sweaty.  I smell like the inside of a U-Haul.  I’m at ground zero of Nowhere, North Carolina in the sweltering, cricket-infused heat of August.   

My grandfather, I think, is an idiot. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love my grandfather, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s an idiot.

Let me recap the conversation that just occurred over the counter at the seedy little facility where he and I just dropped off the moving truck

(Southern slang/syntax and other anomalies have been left out for purposes of comprehension):

 Counter lady: “So where will you be teaching?”

Me: “At the Senior High School”

Counter lady: “Oh God help you, they’ve got a lot of blacks up there, don’t they?”

Me: *blank stare*

Grandfather (interjecting): “He can handle the blacks, don’t you worry.”

Me (feeling like a child): “Teenagers are teenagers.”  (that was weak)Counter lady: “Where are you living?”

Me: “Off of the highway in *****town.”

Counter lady: “Oh, they got a lot of blacks there too, you be careful.  There’s not many black’s here in ******ville, it’s a nice place.  *****town used to be a nice place until all the blacks moved in.  ******ville is nice though, good people.”

Grandfather: “Good Southern country people.  Those blacks need to stop ruining places they don’t belong in.” 

Granted, the lady at the counter was an idiot too, but I’m related to the other idiot.  Flesh and blood.  DNA.  Genes.  All that.

Yes, I love him, he’s my grandfather – but he’s a fiend.

He was a life insurance salesman until he retired 15 years ago.  He was good at it.

Think of the Smoking Man from the X-Files mixed with George Jones (the country singer) and there you have it – my paternal grandfather.

It is fashionable, I think, to assume that my grandfather and all like him are the products of a bygone era.

He was raised in poverty, a middle child of 9 children born to my great-grandparents (who were first cousins).  There was neither heat nor electricity, little food and long workdays on the farm.

But is that a justification of his behavior or an excuse?

I believe it is the latter.

I do believe that my grandfather is the product of a bygone era, but only in the way that his racism manifests itself.

My grandfather is only unique in that he does not think to be wary of how others perceive his racism.  It is “the way it is”, blacks are blacks and white are whites.  There are places for blacks and there are places for whites – to each his own, but not together.

Racism is only more subtle now.  It hides inside the misdirected malice of those who still possess it.  It is unfashionable, for the most part, and now must be more cleverly disguised.  It is dressed up in intellectual language and well-rehearsed metaphors and toted around by middle-class angries who now, for the first time in a long time, feel the true sting of a loss of power. 

You must understand that southerners are rarely rude to one another’s faces these days.  Outright physical manifestations of honest hatred lead to trouble, to riots, to protests, to ostracizing.  Those pictures of angry whites screaming at black students during integration are now bizarre little stamps on southern history – that’s not us, southerners don’t tell it to you, southerners let you feel it with awkward limbs or avoidant stares, whispers during church or nervous shuffles when you stand behind them in a check-out line.

My grandfather is fond of saying, “I have lots of black friends, but…”

First, no he doesn’t have a lot of black friends.

Second, this trite little dismissal is as absurd as it is vomit-worthy.

“I have plenty of black friends, but I think ‘they’ need to stay on their own side of town.”

“I have plenty of gay friends, but I think they’re amoral wretches who don’t deserve the same rights I enjoy.”

But they’re your friends, right?

Right.

Good people. 

Good southern people.