MOTHER AND DEI [W, 1-29-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—MOTHER AND DEI [W, 1-29-25]

 

We’ve heard a lot recently about DEI, mostly from the people who are opposed to diversity, equality, and inclusion. My mother, though, a long time ago, was a DEI advocate, although she thought of it as just being a good person.

Because my mother was so inconsistent in so many discombobulating ways, I don’t think I gave her the credit she deserved for being consistent—for her time and place—in one very significant way.

We lived in the working class near east side of Indianapolis from 1941-1947. Our next-door neighbor, at 232 N. Oakland Ave, was a woman known only as Mrs. Dickerson. I think she was the only African-American in all of Englewood, certainly in the Lucretia Mott PS # 3 area. I knew the area well, up and down Washington St. [US 40 at the time] and New York St. I walked to the Tacoma Theater, East Park Methodist Church, the Blue Ribbon Ice Cream store, various Mom & Pop grocery stores, Vic’s Drug Store, Cub Scout pack. In all those forays, I never saw anybody who was not white.

Except there was a black woman right next door. Why she was there, in the midst of all those white folks, I don’t think anyone knew.

I don’t recall anyone treating her badly, or even saying rude things. Partly, I suppose, because she never left her house, even to go into her yard. Occasionally, though, she would be on her screened back porch when my mother was hanging up clothes in our yard. That was when Mother would go over and stand beside Mrs. Dickerson’s porch and chat with her. They became friends, of a sort, the sort that called each other Mrs. Dickerson and Mrs. McFarland.

Sometimes Mrs. Dickerson would ask permission of Mother to let me run an errand to a store for her. I was only eight or nine, but I ran those sorts of errands for Mother, and Indianapolis was not the gun-murder capital of the world, as it is now, so Mother always gave permission. I think I was the only white person who was ever in Mrs. Dickerson’s house, going into her porch to deliver a loaf of bread or bottle of milk, and her change, from which she gave me a nickel. I wasn’t about to be a racist!

Mother wasn’t without prejudice. Even though she was Democrat enough to be a poll worker, she refused to vote for Adlai Stevenson because he was divorced, and she was sure the divorce was his fault, for anything that went wrong in a marriage was the husband’s fault.

No, not just her marriage; everybody’s! When Helen and I were stopped dating for a short time during college, Mother wrote to her demanding to know what I had done to cause the “breakup.” [Ironically, it was because I did not think that I could both marry and take care of my parents and young siblings.]

Despite that prejudice, Mother always insisted that people should be judged on their individual merits, not according to race or religion or any of the other categories we use to discriminate. It was the one thing about which she was totally consistent.

Her inconsistencies in all of the rest of life drove me crazy to the day she died, but I will always value what she taught me about how to treat people who were denied equality and inclusion.

John Robert McFarland