Diversity Writing Contest Lessons At Lunch In Her Winning Essay, Author Recalls The Hard Truth Taught At The Lunch Counter

First Place

One doesn’t have to leave a country to be an exile from it. A person may live an entire life as an exile in the midst of those who have decreed them to be of lesser importance, or even of no importance at all.

Although my step-grandmother was a teacher of teachers and an active community worker, it was the teachers of exiles she taught and the community of exiles she served.

By the time I was born in 1947, all four of my biological grandparents were dead, but my late paternal grandfather’s second wife remained and so was the only grandparent I never knew.

In the 1920s, several years after granddad’s wife had died, he married a beautiful, graceful woman of mixed parentage - Native American, black and white.

She was a charming woman with a welcoming smile, a professor of history at an all-black college, a possessor of great depth, and gentleness under pressure. She was gifted with a lilting soprano voice that the church members admired.

But she believed that all the education and character in the world could not free her from her exile, that she had to wait on the slow march of time and progress, the unfolding of events, and ultimately, the consent of those who had created the exile to lift it. She was a woman of color in America in the first half of the 20th century.

Even into her 70s, she was still growing more beautiful, her shoulders never slumping, her manner never rushed.

She always seemed to have time for every chore, service to others, and still found time for problems that needed listening to.

Such a person is an inspiration and there are many moments in our short time together that deserve telling, but one stands out. It turned my life upside-down, inward and around.

It was in Indianapolis, 1952. I was 5 years old and we were on our monthly shopping trip downtown. Shopping with Grandma was a different experience than shopping with my mother … we went to a narrower range of stores, she did not go into the store restrooms with me, and she always gave me the money with which to pay clerks, bus drivers, and cashiers.

This was how I learned to count money before I began first grade.

After the shopping was completed, I began to wheedle and pester her to buy me the fancy-style hot dogs sold at the dime stores. We had often had Cokes at the downtown stores and I liked sitting on the high stools, feeling quite grown up. Grandma always stood behind me to “make sure I didn’t tip backward and fall.”

When she finally agreed, I ascended the counter stool not unlike a monarch who believed in the divine right of kings, very proud of my victory.

As always, I ordered for the both of us and, as grandma liked me to do, put the money on the counter so the waitress could see I could pay.

All the while I was asking her to sit beside me so we could talk, and telling her I was old enough to sit on the stool without her in back of me. Somewhere along the way she turned serious and firm in her insistence to drink her cola standing up.

I remember looking to the man behind the counter, suggesting he help me win the point, confident that he could not refuse me.

“Your nanny can’t sit at the counter,” he blurted out.

“She’s not my nanny,” I shot back … my bullets as good as his, “She’s my grandmother!”

“We don’t serve her kind at the counter.” His last shot hit home.

I turned and looked at this beautiful, gracious woman, and suddenly too many realizations flooded my head to ever remember what I actually grasped then and how many came in the following hours and days. We silently left the store and went home.

On the streetcar she gave her usual loving counsel. … “There will always be people who are unkind and unwise. That means they need more love, not less. There are rules that make no sense, but following them shows even more respect for the law than obeying just the ones easy to understand. Unloving attitudes from others can only hurt us if we give up our own loving attitude.”

But they were only words that day and took years to fathom.

That was the day I began to notice that people of color were spoken to and treated differently, seldom looked directly in the eye, and often obviously ignored when waiting for service.

I was expected by society to learn and follow the “proper” lunch-counter etiquette … to adopt the rules of my culture. Instead, I became somewhat of a rebel and, during the ‘60s, would join in the marches for civil rights.

I learned that the oppressed must be more insightful and understanding than the oppressor to survive intact; that rather than being strong, bullies are usually weak people; and that prejudice is a form of ignorance.

My grandmother was deeply in love with America and was as full of patriotism as anyone in the land of the free and home of the brave. But she was not free in the same way that I, an untutored, willful white child, was free.

She died when I was about 8 years old, but she had already given me an understanding of the principles of tolerance and nonviolence.

I had learned about injustice and observed her strength during adversity and prejudice, and carry with me her hope that the lunchcounter mentality, in whatever modern forms it appears, will end and America will finally free its exiles.