Freedom from Bigotry Bought for a Penny
America has been brought low by its racism and bigotry against people of color. Since this is Black History Month, I want to share this story about our nation’s historical racism against Blacks.
Freedom from Bigotry Bought for a Penny
The lowly penny. What can this modest coin buy you? At three years old, it buys me my freedom from bigotry.
It’s in the South in the 1950s. One morning, while at the grocery store with my parents, I inch ahead to watch as customers in front of us pay for what they want to buy. I call where we are a “grocery store” because this is long before the days of giant supermarkets, where you place your items on a moving belt and see them whisked away to be scanned by a cashier. And there is certainly no such thing as self-service checkout. Grocery stores are intimate places. You know your cashier, and you chat with the folks standing around you, even if they’re total strangers. Anything anyone says is heard by one and all.
No moving belt means people put what they want to buy on a ledge where the cashier can take each item and ring it up. After she finishes ringing up the man at the head of the line, I push forward to watch him reach into a pocket to get his money. As he pulls out his folded bills, a penny drops on the counter where his food had been. I want to help, so I stretch on my tiptoes to put my finger on the penny and push it closer for him to reach.
Suddenly, a big hand grabs mine, and from behind me I hear, “Don’t touch that! Don’t touch nothin’ a n***** has touched!”
I freeze. I don’t know what that word means, but I know the man attached to the hand that’s grabbed mine means business. As I look at what I’m told is an untouchable penny, the coin takes on a sparkling white glow. Then a thin shaft of golden Light shoots up from the coin. It happens so fast, and the Light is so bright, that my vision explodes and blurs. The Light seems to burn right through my eyes into my brain and down into my body.
For a few seconds I stand transfixed, my tiny finger refusing to retract from its position over the penny. Then I look up at the face of the man the penny belongs to. He looks down at me. Even a three-year-old knows what hurt looks like.
The man’s brown eyes have a deep, moist kindness in them, but there is an even deeper look of pain and humiliation. Whatever that word means, I know it really hurts his feelings. I keep looking straight into his eyes because I don’t want to look back at the man who’s grabbed my hand. I certainly know better than to talk back to the stranger, but I think, You’re not a very nice man. Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to call people names that hurt their feelings? Someone needs to wash your mouth out with soap!
I hope the man looking down at me can see how sorry I am that the other man has been so mean. When I get older, I come to understand what happened that day in the grocery line. I was introduced to bigotry and racism.
I say at the beginning of this story my freedom from bigotry was bought with a single penny that day, and it’s true. Throughout my childhood, every time I heard the “n-word” or witnessed any kind of discrimination, I remembered the Light shining up from that penny and the pain in the black man’s eyes. The Light from that modest coin gave me a priceless gift—being able to see the world differently from so many others around me. It relieved me of the burden of fearing and hating another person because we look or seem different from each other in any way.
Lesson: It’s a timeless lesson, but one that’s taken me a long to time to accept. Bigots of any stripe are frightened people who need our compassion. You can’t reason someone out of their fear and bigotry. Only a moment of divine intervention will let them see the world is a safe place. To understand that just because someone looks different or thinks differently from you, those differences don’t make them the enemy. That said, until such time as every bigot is bonked on the head by divine intervention, we need laws to protect us from the twisted ways bigots treat the people they’re afraid of. We must refuse to accept acts of bigotry as anything more than the pursuit of hatred.
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