Virginia!
Virginia was born and raised in Elgin, Illinois around 1931. Elgin is a suburb of the city of Chicago. The year of my birth in 1949, the eighteen year old Virginia met and married the man of her life as he worked as a world war two veteran in a manufacturing plant in the Chicago area. As Virginia describes it, he had seen and done all that he wanted to in this world, mainly because of his wartime experiences, so they moved south in Illinois to Carbondale, where he had been born and wished to spend the rest of his life.
In Carbondale, Virginia would have experiences that she had never had before in her life. She went to the local Woolworth store to eat at the lunch counter and was told that she could not so that sort of thing there. She went to the local movie theater and had to sit in the balcony section because that is where those of her kind were forced to sit. She went to a movie theater in a neighboring town and not only had to sit in the balcony, but had to sit in an area above the regular balcony where she could not see those viewing the film below and had to sit on folding chairs instead of the usual movie seating that was provided for regular patrons. When she went to a public restroom, there was a separate one for those of her color. When she went to get a drink, the fountain said “whites only”. She was also warned about traveling outside of Carbondale after dark because many of the towns around had sundowner laws in place which meant that you had best not be caught there after dark. She attended a separate church where black people chose to worship because they were not welcome in the mainline churches of the town.
Virginia had never experienced any of these things in Elgin where she told us that all they cared about was whether she had good service and the color of her money. We told her about our experiences in Vienna, Illinois where we were born and raised and how we saw the way that people of color were treated. We told her how they had burned out the long existing black community after a murder and rape had occurred there in 1954. We have spoken of it here in the ramblings columns before. And we told her about how transient black families were taken advantage of by the local speed courts on their way to places like Elgin where they could find a life more or less free of southern prejudice.
Virginia is a part of our Bible study and her participation is one of the keys that makes it worthwhile. She prays the closing prayer each and every week and helps to send us on our way to a better day and a better life. And she reminds us constantly about how Jesus loved the very least and most transgressed of this world during his short three year ministry on this planet. And we are reminded of the small white clapboard church in Vienna where the black community came to worship just so that they could say that they could do at least one thing among the white community that gave them some sense of equality. That church stood in Vienna for almost sixty years as a silent reminder of the life and worship and love that had existed there inside of its walls before the terrible time came when those who had worshiped God there were driven away.
Virginia is eighty one years old now and one of these days she is going to pass away and we are going to lose her almost unique perspective of what it was like to move from north to south as a black person during an age where great prejudice was practiced on an almost minute by minute basis as a normal matter of course. And we read where the neocon conservative Republicans want to take the food stamps away. Virginia never needed them but she is concerned for those who do. It is the Christian way for the true believers who practice what Jesus truly preached. We remember how the Reverend Martin Luther King stated that blacks might have to be the consciousness of the nation and we can see that people like Virginia fulfill that role so very well as they remind us of the struggle and the climb to something better that occurred in the now receding past.
IOVHO,
Regards,
Joe
To say that "God exists" is the greatest understatement ever made across space and time.
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