Warning: This post is more than 300 words...
In light of the shootings in Charleston, SC, I want to share this story.
Reprinted from Inside the Light-Hope and Transformation
Freedom from Bigotry Bought For a Penny
(Prejudice)
The lowly penny. What can this modest coin buy you? When I
was three years old, it bought me my freedom from bigotry.
I grew up in the South in the Fifties. One morning, while at
the grocery story with my parents, I inched ahead to watch as customers well in
front of us paid for what they wanted to buy. I call where we were a ‘grocery
store’ because this was 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 was certainly no such thing as self-service checkout. Back
then grocery stores were intimate places. You knew your cashier, and you
chatted with the folks standing around you, even if they were total strangers.
Anything anyone said was heard by one and all.
No moving belt meant that people put what they wanted to
take home on a ledge where the cashier could take each item and ring it up.
After she finished ringing up the man I had pushed forward to watch, he reached
into a pocket to get his money. As he pulled out his folded bills a penny
dropped onto the ledge where his food had been. I wanted to help out, so I
stretched on my tiptoes and put my finger on the penny to push it closer for
him to reach.
Suddenly, a big hand grabbed mine, and from behind me I heard,
“Don’t touch that! Don’t touch anything a n***** has touched!”
I froze. I didn’t know what that word meant, but I knew the
man attached to the hand that had grabbed mine meant business. As I looked at
what I was told was an untouchable penny, the coin took on a sparkling white
glow. Then a thin shaft of golden Light shot up from the penny. It happened so
fast, and the Light was so bright, that my vision exploded and blurred. The Light
seemed to burn right through my eyes, into my brain and down into my body.
For a few seconds I stood transfixed, my tiny finger refusing to retract from
its position on the penny. Then I looked up at the face of the man the penny
belonged to. He looked back. Even a three-year-old knows what hurt looks like.
The man’s brown eyes had a deep, moist kindness in them, but
there was an even deeper look of pain and humiliation. Whatever that word meant
I knew it really hurt his feelings. I kept looking straight into his eyes
because I didn’t want to look back at the man who’d grabbed my hand. I
certainly knew better than to talk back to the stranger, but I thought, “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
hoped the man looking down at me could see how sorry I was the other man had
been so mean.
When I got older, I came to understand what happened that
day in the grocery line. I was introduced to bigotry and racism. Mercifully,
the “n-word” has become what it should have been in the first place–a word not
worthy of being spoken. Despite what some may say, there is nothing about that
word that symbolizes freedom of any kind, least of all freedom of speech. To
me, a world without that word is a far better place.
I said at the beginning my freedom from bigotry was bought
with a single penny, and that’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. It relieved me
of the burden of fearing and hating another person because of the color of
their skin or because they were in any way different from me. It was a moment
in the Light and Grace of God that allowed me to see the world differently, and
that everyone in it is swaddled inside the same Divine Light.
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