I’m experimenting a bit with including an audio of me reading the post in my best Southern accent, which I hope you can decipher. Hope you enjoy this first effort.
Though he had quit by the time I came along, my mother’s father used to be bad to take a drink. She seldom spoke critically of her parents, but on certain occasions, when she felt particularly morose, she recounted tales of his drunken bouts, the violence that ensued, and the scars left behind, both on the body and the soul.
One particularly harrowing memory stands out: when my mother was just nine years old, her father, in a drunken rage, struck her so forcefully that she collided with the fireplace mantelpiece, leaving her with a deep gash on her head. Despite her sisters’ desperate attempts to clean her up, my mother was sent off to school that day, blood staining her dress and matting in her hair.
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In Jasper County, Mississippi, in the 1930s, there were no social services to call, and the law didn’t like messing with a man’s home life. Instead, when someone’s behavior reached a tipping point, desperate families sometimes turned to an unlikely source for intervention—the Ku Klux Klan. While they weren’t busy burning crosses and terrorizing Black people, the local KKK worked hard at being seen as respectable. They portrayed themselves as upholders of Christian values, ingratiating themselves with the white populace through acts of charity and financial support to white churches. This facade of respectability allowed them to operate with impunity, and people agreed to overlook the atrocities against Black people.
One feature of their supposed Christian mission was to ensure that white men lived up to their family responsibilities by punishing husbands and fathers suspected of neglect and abuse. Somebody must have told on my grandfather because the Klan set a trap for him. They waited until they found him drunk in town, hijacked him in a Model A Ford truck, and tossed him into his preacher’s yard.
But even this public shaming didn’t deter him. The next time, they took him out in the woods and beat the hell out of him. They said if they caught him drunk again, they would burn his barn down.
That was the last drink he ever took. My grandfather was still a mean son of a bitch, but he was a sober one. He never laid a hand on Mother again.
I know it’s impossible to reconcile this one act with all the evil done by the Klan, but I look at it this way: they say even Hitler loved his dog.
How My Grandfather Quit Drinking