Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
On Sundays I would faithfully visit my maternal mother Charles Etta Pride with my mom and two older sisters when church was done. She lived on the lower level of the two story flat my Aunt Elaine, one of my mom’s older sisters, owned. Grandma was a constant presence in our lives and the high priestess of the family. All needs were taken to her and then zealously prayed for.
She wasn’t a big talker but when she did talk, she spoke of Jesus. In fact, what stories I did know about her past were the ones involving the miraculous and her devotion to Jehovah. She never spoke of her impoverished upbringing in Jim Crow Arkansas. In some ways her generation and my parents’ generation felt like the bridge between memories of a overtly racist and segregated America.
I was born the daughter of two attorneys who lived a peaceful life in the Chicagoland suburbs. What I knew of those Jim Crow days were bound in history books or brought to life by documentaries like the docuseries “Eyes on the Prize”, which scarred my seven-year-old mind when it showed the mutilated body of Emmitt Till. It wasn’t until 2020 that I learned he was originally buried in Burr Oaks Cemetery, where my Grandma’s ex-husband (my grandfather) was buried as well as one of her adult daughters.
That’s not to say that I didn’t experience micro-aggressions in the elite private schools of my primary school education where I was a racial minority. I just thought they were mean people and uptight. That is until I reached the seventh grade in 2008.
The 2008 election was like a long-awaited miracle for my grandmother who picked cotton for a job as a teenager. As she got closer to her death in 2010, she revealed some information about her impoverished childhood, like how her mother could not afford to buy her a doll or she never tasted chocolate chip cookies ever because her adulthood saw her living in a redlined Chicago. But,those things were always overshadowed by the things God did in her life or through her life.
Meanwhile in a conservative Christian school my childhood would get a rude awakening when classmates I considered friends made me a target of belligerent debates about why Obama was a bad “non-Christian” candidate and how I was racist for wanting him to be the president. Of course, I decided to show them how many cares I gave when I took a picture of the Obamas my dad gave me and put it up in my locker. I also had a pen I lent to a classmate who took of the rubber padding in childish retaliation but gave it back to me. It did not matter; I had an Obama shirt to treasure at home.
This wasn’t as much of a revelation as the summer of 2014 when the murder of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teen set off the Black Lives Matter movement. I was a freshman in college that year and was permitted to come to campus early through a Black student ambassador program called 100 Strong. 100 Strong was our vehicle for Black community and academic networking. Most importantly, it was through them that I attended my first candle vigil, which was held in Michael Brown’s honor and then my first die-in.
A die-in is a protest where people lie down as though dead in protest for many killings. Before the die-in became an organized picketing demonstration, I was allowed to speak into the megaphone. I spoke of my paternal grandfather, John Threlkeld who served in World War II and was imprisoned in a military jail because he was blamed for a race riot that broke out. He wasn’t treated like an American citizen though his nation called upon him to defend its liberties against the Axis Powers.
It was at that die-in, four years after Grandma Pride died that I realized I walked the same road of racial persecution that she never cared to speak about but will never be forgotten in the Black community. I always pictured hardcore racists living in back woods areas decked with confederate flags in towns forgotten after the Civil War. The sundown towns had no borders on maps, but you could get a vibe from such places and knew that if you were Black, you’d best be gone by sundown.
I was from Illinois, which has Chicago, and was naïve in thinking there were fewer towns like that in the state than there were. Where I went to college, it was like the oasis of the surrounding boondocks, there were confederate flags and malicious looking people. A young man with a confederate flag flipped off Black protestors as his own single counter protest. I even saw a table near campus trying to recruit KKK members on Quad Day, the day where school clubs try to obtain members.
The KKK recruiting table off the Quad did not come until after the election of 2016. The Election night I resolved to sleep and not watch the count to prevent myself from staying up all night. Then, like a bad omen I dreamt that he won. When I woke up there wasn’t one class, I attended that wasn’t in despair and downcast. Different Black students asked me “How I was doing?” I heard international students from Britain speaking with shocked tones as I cleaned the cafeteria tables around them during my lunchtime shift as a dining hall worker.
A Black student union held a session of reflection and coping while Popeye’s chicken was offered with punch. I began to voice my disappointment with churches who could hide their feelings towards people of color like me, who despite my being the best person and Christian I could be. I knew hypocrisy hid in different places, but like an answer to a prayer it was in my college church where I was comforted by White brothers and sisters in Christ as I broke down in tears.
In that moment I knew that there was a possibility that I would have to fear for my future children because of what the rest of America raised. I was glad to know that I did not have to face it alone with the right church. My college pastors spoke out against racism and intentionally had people of different cultures pray for each other.
It leaves me hopeful that though the demons of the past manifested because they were passed down like an inheritance, the protests grow more and more diverse. Even in churches I see intentional compassion where there was apathy and my grandmother’s faith is with me.
Erin Threlkeld is a recent Columbia College Chicago Master of Fine Arts graduate. She writes about the many ways her heritage intersects with the routines and events that occurr in her daily life. As a female BIPOC writer she aspires to push the boundaries of formats presenting Black culture in creative writing.