MANN TALK: About My Grandson: A Great White Hope
By Perry Mann
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – In the Twenties, my father was a member of the Klu Klux Klan, a popular fraternity then for the upward mobile. I discovered his klan clothes in the closet while a child. At the time, I didn’t know the meaning of them but I have learned their significance since. My mother, however, treated blacks like she treated whites: with respect and kindness. I am my mother’s child with regard to race. Like her, I haven’t a grain of racism in my makeup. I have my preferences with regard to the people whose company I enjoy but they are not based on race.
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided that segregation of schools was unconstitutional, I was teaching school in Virginia. Virginia’s reaction to this decision was to provide private schools for whites and give the miserable public schools to blacks. I raged in print against this injustice and as a result I was summarily unemployed as a teacher. My mother was proud of me. I was pleased with myself but was unemployed, even though further educated as to the ways of the world. Wishing to be able to exercise my First Amendment rights with impunity, I went to law school and earned a degree and, when my daughter was five, moved to West Virginia where I began the practice of law.
My daughter grew up and fell in love with Michael Mann, a black. They lived together for 18 years without benefit of clergy. My daughter could not bring herself to add to my wife’s wound the salt of an inter-racial marriage. After her mother died, Amy and Michael married. I gave her away under a huge maple tree attended by both races and a black minister, who united the two. Amy worked as my secretary for nine years, then went to law school and earned a law degree and became the junior member of Mann and Mann.
At age forty-one Amy gave birth to Michael Ferrell Mann. On Ferrell’s mother’s side there is no one living but a multitude of cousins spread over the globe and me, his grandfather, who is tied with a silken thread to the land where his ancestors date back 250 years. But on Ferrell’s father’s side the numbers of aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews, not to mention cousins, take a calculator to figure. Michael’s mother’s mother was one of nine and his mother had eleven in addition to him. Michael’s father eventually departed and Michael’s mother spent her life maintaining alone a household of 12 children, all of whom grew to adulthood and have prospered, including two daughters who are lawyers. But they have not forgotten Mama.
They have helped her to renovate into a modern house a shack, in which all were born, located up Pie Hollow, the black section of Talcott, WV, where their ancestors came in 1873 to do the sweat labor in building the great mile-long tunnel through Big Bend Mountain. It’s the tunnel John Henry helped to build and where he bested in a contest a steam drill. And I believe, from Ferrell’s reception, that Michael’s family thinks his arrival is the most exciting event in Talcott since John Henry won his race. They treat him like kings did a first-born son.
Michael’s family bonded in poverty and hardships and survived doing for each other and for Mama. Now that all of them are well and are adequately secured, wherever they are, they come home on those days family members have the need to come home---and they come in numbers. This Thanksgiving Amy and I had dinner at my place and then we went to Mama’s, where Michael Ferrrell had been since earlier in the day being worshiped and adored by all his aunts and uncles and cousins. When we arrived, there was a frenzy of preparations for the Thanksgiving meal. There were two tables set, one in the kitchen and another in the dining room. Finally, time came for standing prayer and then all took seats to feast and feel the contentment of the sedation that comes with being home with family.
One of Michael Ferrell’s aunts offered me some wine. When my glass was empty Mama wondered if I would not like to have some Jack Daniels. She ran it over. So with the talk gears greased, conversation filled the rooms. Gerald, Mama’s brother, glad-handed me when I came and often came to talk close my good ear, close to my good ear, because I cannot hear a cannon go off outside my door if my hearing aid is out. When I and my daughter decided that it was time to go, I made the rounds with my goodbyes. I patted the head of a lovely lassie with a beribboned pigtail, educing a beatific smile, enhanced with her downcast eyes. When I said goodbye to Gerald, he wished me well and then remarked that Michael Ferrell was going to be a Great White Hope.
Michael Ferrell has the physique of a slave. Whites didn’t transport weaklings all the way from Africa to work in the fields: they transported blacks with formidable frames. The boy is stout of leg, long of waist and broad of shoulder. He has grey eyes, silky hair, perky nose and a movie-star mouth. He has the color of a cup of coffee double creamed. And he is as bright as the North Star: Already at eleven months he walks everywhere, he knows yes and no and the meaning thereof and he knows the relationship between a remote and a TV set. He is a marvel of a union of white and black.
But Michael Ferrell, who at Mama’s is passed from one white person to one black person and showered by both with kisses and caresses, is in for some incomprehensible shocks. There are those out there who stew in hatred at the thought of any sexual contact between white and black and some find in their twisted mind the inspiration to protect the purity of Aryans by doing violence to those who do not worship that false purity. Michael Ferrell will run into them, if he is destined to reach maturity, and they will scorn him because he is likely to be formidable in physique and intelligence.
My son, who is gay, has had to face those same Aryans, who believe gays are an affront to God. I have told the world that I admire my son and have railed against the Fundamentalists for their homophobic ignorance. But the chances are that I will not be here to tell that world of bigots--- who will let Michael Ferrell know one way or another that he is in their estimation less equal than they are---to leave their darkness and enter the light of reason and brotherhood. So, I say now to them and anyone else that Michael Ferrell is a Great White Hope; that is, he is the hope of both blacks and whites of good will that this son of both races will help bring eventually peace and understanding between them. And that Martin Luther King’s dream will become real and commonplace: Mankind’s judgment and treatment of my grandson will be based on his character and not on his color.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”