Waking Up In A Strange Place

When I was a kid we would make annual visits to our relatives in Lousiana. I loved that world down there. The house was an old Victorian two-story place, rich in history with mysterious customs and people different from anything I'd ever known in Oklahoma and always fun to explore. Once we arrived late at night and I was placed sound asleep in a downstairs room different where I usually slept. When I awoke the next morning the maid was vacuuming in the hallway just outside my door. Now there's two things you have to know about life some fifty years ago. I was a little kid who hadn't been around too many people of the darker skin coloring. The other thing is there were a lot of darker skinned people in Louisiana. Back then they could only get the lowest jobs and were paid far less than white people. So the maid was African-American. In addition, I was just too scared to get up out of bed, change clothes in front of an open door and walk past her to the kitchen where everyone else was already eating breakfast.

I remember lying there silently quite a while thinking about how my sister had already picked out the best flavor of those little cereal boxes they used to sell in packs and how very soon she and my dad would be exiting out the back door. That first morning he always paid a visit to his old stomping grounds where he would tell us stories from his adventures as a kid there. When I couldn't stand missing all that any longer I called out for my mother. I yelled and yelled until finally EVERYONE came running into my room only to hear this little kid in his pajamas was too scared to get out of bed. My mother, born without the discrete gene polite society has, still to this day loves to tell the story of how I was so afraid of the African-American maid. Somehow everyone else missed the fact that she was a woman, I was in my pajamas and she was a stranger.

Anyway, the lesson I choose to take from this is that we all have a fear of what (or who) looks different from what we are used to. We hope that as adults we would learn to override that instinct to peer deeper beneath the surface. There we will always find the same elements of greed, grudges, ignorance and love in different quantities and mixes. But we also need to remember that, at first, our only information about someone else are those visual clues that tell our instinct this is a familiar person or an evil stranger. It would behoove us all to pause a few seconds before we react. With our neighbor that shouldn't mean require than a second or two. With a politician it may mean quite a bit longer to find those true elements within. But they're all there - the thief and the saint, just below the surface, just below our looks, just below our words.