American History Y

When I was young, my father was in the Klan.

Lest there be any misunderstanding about what I mean – lest I be seen as speaking out of turn or starting vicious rumors about my family – let me clarify that statement a bit:  When I was a little girl, my father was an active member of the Ku Klux Klan.  I do not mean that figuratively, nor is it a euphemism for anything less unseemly.

Yes, THAT Ku Klux Klan.

I can’t vouch for whether he is now an active member or not. After all, we have not spoken since 1993.

I found out about my father the hard way.

For our purposes, I am defining “the hard way” as my having had to attend a rally with him.

It went like this: It was the late 80’s.  Ronald Wilson Reagan was in the White House, hair bands were in half the world’s cassette players, and the world population reached 5 billion for the first time. It was a heady time. You know what I’m talking about.

In addition to all of those earth-shaking things I just mentioned, on the home front, my mother left my father for the third time.  It was sometime during the summer of 1987 when she left and took my brothers with her but she didn’t take me.

I don’t know quite why she saw fit to leave me with my father, but she did.

I remember because that was the year when Dad was having a room built onto our house. He hired a contractor to build it because my father could not identify – let alone use – a Phillips screwdriver if his life depended on it. He hired a contractor to build on a room, but would still speak as though he were personally building the room on.  “We’re building out,” he’d tell his friends.

And more about those friends later.  Even though I’ve basically already told you the general gist.

Anyway, during the week, the contractor my father hired would bring a couple workers to help out. Not non-English speaking Hispanic males of indeterminate age as would show up today, but college kids who needed a summer job and were only marginally better with a Phillips screwdriver than my father.

During the week, the contractor would bring these boys, and on the weekend, he’d come with his son. His son was my age but attended the public school, so I didn’t know him. The first night he came over with his dad, I humiliated him at basketball. Poor kid got his ass handed to him, and by a girl no less.

He came back again anyway, presumably under duress by his father.

The second time he came over, we played basketball with Houston Rocket Hakeem Olajuwon and one of Olajuwon’s friends. He lived right by us. Olajuwon, I mean. His friend might have lived right by us, too. I was never quite clear on that.

The construction contractor’s son and I, we ended up hanging out a lot. I suspect at first it might have been because he wanted to be able to tell his friends he occasionally played basketball with a professional basketball player. I doubt he mentioned he’d had his ass handed to him by a girl.

The construction contractor’s son and I became fast friends and stayed friends and as time went on, we started dating. We were more than ten by that time, of course. We started dating, and after that, we lived together for a number of years until he died from cancer in 2001.

Steve.

But back back back to where the summer of 1987 wore on and taking care of me became a chore for my father.  The chorish nature of attending to me almost made sense at the time. In retrospect, I can’t imagine what the problem was, as the nanny did a majority of the real work.

But somehow, there came a day when there was no one else around to watch me. My father had places to go and people to see, being the Very Important Man he was. And probably still is, I guess. You’d have to ask him.

Specifically, on one fine Houston summer afternoon, it was announced that he had a Freemasons’ meeting to attend.

The Freemasons are a bunch of white guys who might or might not run the world.  Their symbol is inexplicably on our money, but that’s another story for another day.  I have enough people who are after me this week without bringing in the Illuminati and a boatload of 33 degree Masons, too.

 

As it turns out, I was not being brought to a Masons meeting. Rather, it was a Klan meeting, although I would not completely figure that out until I was a bit older. In the Klan’s defense, they were much less secretive than the Masons. At the Masons’ meetings, I had to sit out in the hall and not enter the meeting room. The Klan, on the other hand, was only too willing to let dear old Dad bring his ten year old daughter right on in.

We were in Pasadena, Texas, and there were a lot of us, and no one was wearing those pointy white hoods, but they did wear armbands that looked like this:

 

I was not given an armband.

And I remember my uncle was there, and I was impressed because he got to stand up in front of the other people and speak. And they sure seemed impressed with whatever it was he was saying.  

Mostly, it seems like they were just planning other meetings, as best as I can remember it. Perhaps notably, nothing was set aflame.

My uncle was there when my father made me sit out in the hall during AA, too.  In fact, I saw my father talking to most of the same people as at the KKK and Freemasons meetings. This is interesting, I suppose, in retrospect. You can draw your own conclusions.

And that’s the long and the short of it, I guess, in the end, and the moral of this tale:

Until this very day, I can be a bit hazy at times regarding the fundamental difference between the Ku Klux Klan, the Freemasons, and Alcoholics Anonymous.