Extended family

When I was a kid, my folks used to take me on long vacation car trips to see relatives. My mom was from Texas and my dad was from Mississippi, so it took forever to get there. This, of course, was before cars had much in the way of air conditioning (or at least before we had it) and these trips were almost always in the summer, so the vacation pretty much consisted of three people in a moving pressure cooker traveling across the country.

Looking back on these trips, it strikes me how much we did them on the cheap. We hardly ever stayed in a motel. Somewhat remarkably, we had enough relatives spaced just far enough apart to where we could freeload the whole way through.

Leaving from San Luis Obispo, we'd first stay with my grandparents in Los Angeles, then travel from L.A. to the Phoenix area where my mom had an aunt and uncle in the wonderfully named town of Apache Junction. From there we'd stop in Albuquerque at my aunt and uncle's house. After that there were more relatives in Texas and Louisiana before you'd finally get to Mississippi.

But when you'd hit Texas, Texas would hit back. You'd zoom across California, zoom across Arizona, zoom across New Mexico, but then you'd be in Texas. For days. And days. Texas was so big, and so flat, and so hot.

My mom grew up in Childress, which is in the southern part of the Texas panhandle, almost near Amarillo, but not near enough to where it would do any good. We stopped there one time when I was about 12 and met a bunch of cousins and such for the first (and in some cases only) time.

To say it was a culture shock is understating it. I almost wrote just now that the main drag of Childress probably wasn't all that much different from where I'd grown up. But it was. It really was. They did have stoplights, a few anyway. But only one per intersection. It was suspended from the very center of the intersection. On two sides, the red light was at the top and the green light was at the bottom, like I was used to. But on the other two sides, the green light was at the top and the red light was at the bottom, so that only three bulbs were actually needed to make it work. It makes sense, but to me just that, and the fact that the stoplights were painted yellow were enough to already make me feel like I was in a foreign country.

The stores along the main street were mostly mom-and-pop businesses, with a few bigger ones sprinkled here and there, like a J.C. Penney or a Woolworth, maybe a Sears Roebuck.

What really made my jaw drop, though, was when we actually got off the main drag and headed to my relatives' house. Very few of the residential streets in Childress were paved in those days. They were dirt roads, and it was a very, very red dirt that seemed to get everywhere. There were red ants crawling around too, something I'd never seen before. After getting the proper warning to stay away from them, I found myself looking at the ground everywhere I walked to make sure I wouldn't be attacked by a colony of red ants, which I was sure would completely envelop me and carry me off into their underground ant hill, where they would feast on my carcass for weeks.

It was hot and windy in Childress. I don't remember much about the inside of my relatives' house, other than it seemed rather dark inside. Most of the time we sat out on the wooden front porch with my cousins. Frankly, I don't recall too much about them, except for one female cousin (a second or third cousin), who was about my age and let's just say, way out of my league. I knew she was my cousin, but she was about the only thing worth looking at in Childress.

On the same trip, we visited a great aunt of mine in another Texas town. It was a pleasant enough visit. She had a very bright, air-conditioned house, a much better environment than Childress -- and while we were there, she had a baseball game showing on her TV!

For me this was great. Entertainment! Baseball! Something other than listening to family history! It was a Houston Astros game (later on this same trip, we would see a game in the Houston Astrodome, just to show you this trip wasn't all bad) and they were playing the Braves in Atlanta.

This gave me something to do while my parents and my aunt talked. I soon became quite absorbed in the game and was paying very little attention to the conversation.

However, during a lull in their talking, my aunt happened to look over toward the TV, just in time to see it showing Hank Aaron swinging a bat over his head in the on-deck circle to loosen up on a hot, sunny day in Georgia. He held the bat behind his shoulder blades to stretch his muscles.

My great aunt, who had no idea who Hank Aaron was, had no idea that he was one of the best ballplayers of all time, smirked at the picture.

"Look at that nigger, just stretching himself!" she said. "He just thinks he's sooooo great."

Now then. That word may not have been nearly as insensitive back then as it is now; it was used quite a bit in the South in those days, mostly as a denigration of the word "Negro," but it was still a racist thing to say and my aunt knew it.

Being 12 years old and meeting this woman for the first time, I didn't really know how to react. I'm sure my parents were both hoping I'd say nothing. And I didn't. But that moment has stayed with me to this day.

We don't get to choose who our relatives are. Some of them are treasures, some of them are not. Up until that moment, I had liked my great aunt and was enjoying our visit. Her remark, however, sort of knocked the wind out of me.

As I said, my dad was from Mississippi, born and raised in McComb. I remember another trip there, in my high school years, and seeing the black part of town. It was all so different from California, at least the part I'd grown up in.

I know I had a relative who was in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. I even have a badge from his regiment that was handed down to me. I used to think it was a bad thing, to be related to someone who fought for the wrong side in the Civil War. Having been to the Gettysburg battlefield a few years ago has made me realize that there were a lot of gallant men who fought for the South. But the idea that this relative, whoever he was, was in favor of slavery is still kind of hard for me to wrap my brain around.

No, we don't get to choose our relatives. People have asked me why I don't research my ancestry. Maybe it's because I'm scared of what I'd find.