Gary's StoryStack

A REFLECTION: Connecting Juneteenth and Father's Day

In observance of Juneteenth – commemorating the official freeing of Black slaves in Texas on June 19, 1865, thus enforcing the Emancipation Proclamation – and in observance of Father’s Day . . . this reflection:

My family is white. When I was a kid, my mother had back surgery, and for a long time she could not do household chores. So, my father hired Mrs. Florence Bass, a woman in her 70s, to help around our house and to tend to my mother’s daily needs.

Mrs. Bass was Black. Her family had migrated from the Deep South to our town in Connecticut, not long after the end of slavery. I remember her well. She remained close to my parents for years. She was a wise and gentle soul.

One day, Mrs. Bass asked my father if he would accompany her to her church, a Black congregation in the middle of a Black neighborhood. He agreed on the spot.

He despised racial discrimination. Every year he donated money to the Piney Woods boarding school for poor Black kids, in Mississippi. And even though we were Jewish, he sent money to the Catholic orphanage Boys Town, in Nebraska.

When my father arrived with Mrs. Bass at her church, he sat next to her and listened to the pastor’s sermon. Then, without warning, Mrs. Bass stood up and announced to her fellow congregants that her guest that morning was the man whose family she was working for, and she asked my father to say a few words.

People who are called upon to speak in public, especially without warning, often freeze, or stumble. Not my father.

Although he went only as far as the third grade — he was expelled as a troublemaker — he became an avid reader and a free thinker, and many years later he ran a successful business, operating bingo parlors in Connecticut and New Jersey.

After being thrown out of school, he survived by his wits in the streets: his biggest day selling newspapers was April 16, 1912, the day after the Titanic sank; he later worked the overnight shift as an orderly in a mental hospital; as a deckhand in the Merchant Marine, during World War I; and in many menial jobs until the Depression.

Desperate to survive, he began working on carnival midways around the East, playing what he called “games of no chance,” a shady occupation he eventually gave up. Customers would bet they could outsmart him. They could not. The carny’s secret: using words to get the money out of the customer’s pocket, a place to which the money would never return.

In other words, my father was never at a loss for words.

Now, in this moment, in that Black church, although he was surprised to be called upon, he stood up and spoke:

“When the Children of Israel were escaping enslavement by the Pharaoh in Egypt, God answered the prayer of Moses and miraculously parted the waters of the Red Sea, allowing the Israelites to make it to safety. When the Egyptian troops pursued them, the waters closed upon them, and a choir of angels prepared to rejoice in song. Whereupon the voice of God boomed down and scolded those angels, saying, ‘How can you rejoice? Can’t you see that my children are drowning?’”

The church congregation erupted in boisterous approval, and they showered my father with appreciation.

When he came home and told me what had happened, I couldn’t understand: If the Children of Israel had been slaves, why would Black people – who knew the agony of slavery so well – sympathize with the Egyptian oppressors?

My father said, “I believe it’s because the people in that church understood that we are all God’s children.”

Black people having compassion for oppressors? I remained mystified.

But many years later, after my father was gone, I read various interpretations of that Red Sea story, and the one that makes the most sense to me is this: God wanted the Egyptians to live, so that they could achieve redemption by repenting for their sins.

That opportunity has existed in societies throughout the ages.

As it does today.

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Cheers,

Gary