Devotional by Carter Wheelock
Robert was a black man who lived in a shabby garage room behind the house of my maternal grandmother. It was about 1930, when I was six. My grandmother was of Southern heritage; her folks had come to Texas through Tennessee. Robert earned a meager living as a day laborer, and my grandmother let him live in the garage in exchange for his doing a few chores in his spare time. Now and then she would give him a quarter for snuff. Sometimes she would take me and my sister fishing, and she would make Robert come with us, without asking whether he wanted to. In answer to almost everything she said to him, he would always say "Yas'm."
Once I asked my grandmother what she would do if I fell in the lake and Robert saved my life, and she said, "I'd give him an extra quarter." It used to worry me that my grandmother expected so much from Robert in exchange for a little snuff money, and I thought she talked to him as if she owned him.
One day Robert was riding on a truck with a whole crowd of laborers when the truck turned over. He wound up with a broken neck in the hospital - down in the basement where they put black patients. I went with my grandmother to see him, and he was very grateful for her visit; he thanked her with more words than I had ever heard him utter - about eight or ten. My grandmother told the hospital to give him the best possible treatment - that she would pay the bill - and went to see him every day until he died. As he lay there half-paralyzed and dying, he said he wished he could have a dip of snuff. My grandmother couldn't give him one, but she laid a quarter in his hand, and there were tears in her eyes.
I'm telling you about Robert only because I feel that every human being deserves to be mentioned and remembered now and then, even if he doesn't know it. But it's also because there was something special about that black man who seldom spoke and was always there, willing to do some chore when you needed him, accepting his quarter without expecting it. This is not to justify the treatment he got from white society, but to commend his reaction to that treatment. He was not an Uncle Tom; he was a Christian - a Methodist.
Knowing Robert, at the age of six, had a great effect on the development of my social ideas, which were perfectly expressed by Abraham Lincoln in a letter in 1858: "As I would not be a slave, so would I not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy." But I tell this also in praise of my grandmother. It's hard for us to conceive it now, but at a time in history when the Old South was still dying hard, when my grandmother still kept in her desk a little gourd full of lead bullets that a Tennessee relative had carried in the Civil War, she was in the vanguard of social change. Only she would have gone to the hospital to see a black man, to guarantee his good treatment by paying his bill, and to give him, in the pathetic symbolism of a coin, the little comfort he could receive on his deathbed.