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Southern Ohio Ethics:
“What my Granpa always said”
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Everyone looks the same in the dark
Granpa Hicks was a man of his time. He was a racist, a sexist, and an anti-Semite, all by comment, none by deed. He worked with and around black men his entire life. In Southern Ohio that’s the way it was. He always referred to his co-workers as black men, not even Negro, the accepted term of that time, of he commented on their skin color at all. Just the apparent fact, no critique. Southern Ohio was full of descendants of ex-slaves that had run ‘North’ across the Ohio River before and during the Civil War. I went to school with kids that were black before the Civil Rights movement fought for desegregation in all of the South. My father was struggling financially, a.k.a. we were poor, the black families in Portsmouth were poor, thus the kids, white or black were all in the same boat, a poor boat. We were all the same color, poor, which is a pale green I guess.
Still, I never heard Granpa say anything negative about the black men he worked with on the railroad. He did say negative things about ‘College Boys’ which certainly weren’t the blacks of Southern Ohio. At least, the ones my Granpa would have met. Maybe this ‘College Boy’ comment was why my Granpa and I never talked as adults, I was a ‘College Boy’ and had wanted to be one since I was six years old. Going to college was the only way I saw of me becoming a scientist. So ‘College Boy’ I became apparently over the unvoiced objections of my Granpa Hicks. His major complaint about ‘College Boys’ was that they had “no common sense at all.” Of course, I did and still have common sense, he gave it to me, but Granpa was correct, most ‘College Boys’ don’t have any common sense, no matter what university they graduated from. In my own experience; common sense, intelligence and education don’t seem to have any relationship. Some of the most educated people I have met; coming from the best institutions in the world, can’t get themselves out of a locked room. No common sense whatsoever. I have story after story to support this aphorism.
Right before his death though, I was visiting Southern Ohio. I had gotten my Ph.D. in Biology just a few months earlier. What can I say, I was proud of myself. No one in Portsmouth believed that I could do it or would want to do it. Granpa was weak and frail like I had never seen him. With oxygen tubes wrapped under his nose. He talked about the days of the railroad when he was the engineer. How my brother and I as tiny babies rode with him on the last commercially operating steam locomotive in the early 1950’s. I don’t remember it at all. I have never checked to see if that was even possible. It could have been Portsmouth always seemed to be caught in a time warp of the past.
He showed me pictures of himself as a rough young looking railroad engineer, smiling with his arm around his black and white co-workers. He tapped one picture and smiled. The oxygen tube had mucus in it and bubbles formed. His eyes were brown and clear, surprisingly clear considering how long he had been sick, they almost twinkled when he tapped the picture at a small cluster of white men standing off to the side of the massively powerful locomotive which he piloted. His smiling face poking out of its control cabin door. He tapped the cluster of white ostracized men again and growled. “College Boys!” He tapped again and smiled at me. “Didn’t have any common sense at all.” All I could do was nod and agree with him. He was right, mostly not a drop of common sense to be found. They looked it I must admitt
Except for this college boy, common sense I did learn at the firm hands of my Granpa Hicks. This is what I am writing about now. Still, I never knew if with this almost, deathbed commentary whether he was simply making a generalized comment or if it was directed at me and my achieved ambitions. Being a Hicks male, I didn’t ask for clarification and none was given. I just knew a person’s character was more important to Granpa than the color of his skin, the way they looked or the educational certificates they could hang on their walls. Appearance was just that appearance; superficial, it was not real at all.
As for the sexist aspects of ‘Everyone looks the same in the dark’? I think this comment was more directly meant for sexual relations and the definition of ugly and pretty. “All women are built with the same plumbing,” he would say. “It worked the same in the light or the dark.” Beauty wasn’t only skin deep, it was a light switch away. Turn off the lights and everyone’s beautiful. Darkness, now, was the great equalizer. Darkness was only dangerous when you were moving too fast. See “Don’t run in the woods in the dark” section.
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"History is a set of lies agreed upon."
Napoleon
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