#954 Catfish and Cheese Grits (Colloquialisms)

"For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?" - Jesus Christ from Matt 5:46

Down south the wind blows warm, cradling a song fresh as the morning dew

But the summer rain is starting to fall, leaving me with nothing to do

But go inside with my friends and hang out for a while

Well it's catfish and cheese grits, they be set'n southern style

And telling me to come in, take my seat at the table

Eat all that I want or at least what I'm able

Well the talk turned to Blacks, like in a Black house it would

They started talking about Malcolm and I thought I understood

Till I opened my mouth and my X fell to 0

When I told the whole room that Uncle Tom was my hero

From the looks in the room, well I guess you could tell

Everyone staring at me saying, "Hey, what the hell?"

I said the man gave his life just as easy as they would take it

He knew, when you're already strong then you don't have to fake it

Down south the night starts to fall, leaving me looking for some place to go

Down South I like it down town, the streets filled with people I don't know

So I work a 40 in a bag as I head down the street

Till I hit Scruffy Murphy's for a long island T

Where the girl with the dreads dances all through my mind

And keeps me searching for words that I can't seem to find

So I'm on my way out and some skin hails me round

He shows me a sign, and I let him know I'm not down

So he flips another sign and what's left me to say

I remember, Uncle Tom, Oh yea, Jesus loves you anyways

And down by the St. John's at the end of the day

I see the old man and stop to say hey

Uncle Top drop a line, good Lord gonna send Mr. Catfish your way

Good Lord gonna send, Good Lord gonna send, Good Lord send Mr. catfish your way

We may rise, we may fall, might find the courage on my own

And if you don't like what I'm saying then don't pass me the microphone

But if you want me to apologize, well the check's in the mail

Just remember catfish and cheese grits; it's a southern sort of tale

And tell the good Lord I said hey

I've been fishing for answers all day

Keep'n on,tell the good Lord I said hey

Uncle Tom drop a line and tell the good Lord I said hey

Just tell the good Lord I said hey - Calvin "Cheese Grits" Yerke

I wrote the above song when I was about 19 years old, and it was in the early 1990's. At this time I was attending DBCC, and my English Literature professor asked me to do a paper on the book Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. She wanted me to focus on current colloquialisms which utilized that name. "What is a colloquialism,"I asked? "What do people mean when they use the term Uncle Tom?" Well, I thought, that's easy, my black friends say it to other black people when they think they are being weak or kissing up to "the man". It's like calling someone a wimp, a pushover, a suck up; it's derogatory. My professor also wanted me to interview someone who was esteemed in the black community, and get their take after they read the book. Easy again, I thought, I go to a black church and Pastor Adewumi is a black man from Nigeria.

This was also around the time of the release of the movie, Malcolm X, and so I started to read Uncle Tom's Cabin, and I also started talking to the many young people I would see wearing the X ball cap. I thought it would be interesting conversation, but most of the guys my age, who wore the cap, hadn't read Malcolm X, some didn't even go see the movie. We would sit and drink Old English 8, horrible, I know, but I was young and on a budget, and it was cheap. We would drink and talk, and so I asked if they had ever read the story Uncle Tom, and they hadn't, but everyone had an opinion of what an Uncle Tom was, a race traitor, a female dog, a female cat, but it was unanimously not a good thing, undesirable. Interesting, I was reading the book, and the further I got, the more tear soaked the pages became, and the more I had to comfort myself that this was a fictional character. I mean, I know the Bible tells me to love my enemy, to bless and curse not, to pray for those who would use me, but really now, what Christian, besides my mom, takes those things so literally?

A little background:

I was born in 1973, and as a small child during the 70's, I remember my grandmother and great grandmother picking us up from our apartment in Casselberry, Fl. We couldn't afford a car, so my grandmother would come pick up my mom, my little brother and myself on the weekends, and this time she had my great grandma, Hazel, with her. It was night, and I remember this particular one, as we headed through the dark to Oak Hill, because I could see two fires glowing in a field. As we got closer, I could see what looked to my young eyes like some sort of Halloween ceremony. The bonfires had tall crosses in the middle, and there were people dressed in white robes, with hoods covering their faces. "Why are those people dressed up like ghosts?" I asked. "That's the Klan,' my great grandmother replied, 'they protect us white folk." Oh, well that's nice of them I thought, kind of like the Lone Ranger or Zorro I supposed. When we got to my great grandma's house, my mom pulled me aside, and she had a very sad and serious look on her face. She said, "I want you to love your granny, and you have to respect them both as elders, but what she said about those men was wrong. The KKK is a hate group; they don't protect you, and they would never protect Sharon and Michelle." Sharon and Michelle were our neighbor Barbara's daughters, my two best friends, a black family that watched me when my brother was in the hospital, and my mom often baby sat them. We were always together, terrorizing the complex on our Big Wheels, playing make believe, if those guys in the Halloween costumes knew them, they would want to protect them too, I mean it was Sharon and Michelle after all, and you can't get much cooler then them. Racism was a new concept to me, and I was still a bit confused.

My mom explained it to me later, that we all come from Adam and Eve, that we were all made in the image of God, so there was no room for racism, some have lighter skin and some darker, but it's all human skin. There was never a matter of races to her, just the human race, and we were all fallen in Adam, but God sent His Son to redeem all those, of every ethnic background and nation, who would believe. It's funny, when I look back, she was no scientist, a single mom, yet in taking God at His word she knew then what the esteemed Darwinian community took decades to come around to.  Nowadays, everyone from Bill Nye to Richard Dawkins, thanks to the science of genetics, knows what my mom and Charles Haddon Spurgeon knew many years before, that we all share the same two parents. Unfortunately, science and human wisdom are a little slower, and even those who claim to be Christian try to justify their cultural preferences. Many slave owners didn't want their slaves to learn how to read because they feared they would read the Bible, and having read it, some might believe, and having believed they would now be brothers. The same people, who would praise Luther, Tyndale, Wycliffe and Gutenberg for making God's word available to the common man, risking their lives to wrestle it away from the dark ages and iron grasp of Roman Catholicism, setting people free from the captivity of indulgences and so many other superstitions; they would applaud that, fight for their own freedom, but many would forsake the image of God in their fellow man. The love of money is the root of all sorts of evil, and we all think too highly of ourselves and our comforts, so much so that we will let others suffer on the altar of our egos. Human beings are able to justify all sorts of things, and yet still see themselves as good.

I didn't know about this until later in my teens, but my mom married my dad after being set up with him in college. It was a trying marriage, she came with the baggage of much abuse from my grandmother and was looking to get away. He had a horrible relationship with his mother, and was raised by his grandmother. He is what some would refer to as on the autism spectrum, and he was more looking for a mother to take care of him, then a wife to love and lay down his life for. They both went to church, and he went to Moody Bible School, both professed to be Christian and thought themselves good people, but everyone is right in their own eyes. My mom met another man while they were doing chaplain's work with the merchant marines in Charleston, SC. She became pregnant with my little brother and there was no way to hide it since the man who fathered him was Filipino. This later led to their divorce, but in the interim my mom and I hopped on a train heading for Florida. This is when my mom realized she was a sinner; this is when she found that broken and contrite spirit. That was when she came in repentance, seeking that righteousness that she could not earn or find in herself. My grandmother called her a whore, and abortion had been made legal then, so my grandfather told her to do that; it was a convenient way out. She couldn't do it, she wouldn't let someone else pay for her mistake, but instead she gave birth to the little human being inside of her. She knew my little brother wasn't a lower set of tonsils, that he wasn't a bundle of cells that could potentially come out as anything other than a little boy. My mom did not apply words like viability. She loved him in her womb, and when we were young she took us to march at Pro life rallies, to stand in front of abortion clinics. It's interesting now, in the age of looking back into people's year books and tearing down statues, that New York's Planned Parenthood, the genocide farm, is now wanting to break ties with Margaret Sanger, a long time hero of Hillary Clinton and others on the left. I'm proud of my mom, she is a frail person, not confrontational by nature, but that's when you can be truly courageous.

The apartment complex we lived in decided to go condo, and so we moved from there to another apartment on Howell Branch road, where my mom took on more in-home day care for several families as a means to make money. My grandmother started showing more and more interest in our lives, and she had a good job at Kennedy Space Center, so she decided to pay tuition for us to go to a Christian prep school. She was a tough woman, and when they wouldn't give her a promotion at work for a job she was already doing, she asked why, and they said, "degree", so she went to Rollins College and earned her Bachelors. It was cool going to your grandma's graduation, and we loved the behind the scenes tours of NASA. My grandmother taught us how to fish when we were really little, and took us to the mountains at least once a year. She was an open door for things we couldn't afford on our own, but it came with a price. My grandmother was a hard worker, intelligent, a good artist, but she was also one of the meanest women I have ever known in my life. I've seen my grandmother pull a cashier over the counter at a restaurant where she didn't agree with the bill. It wasn't about the money so much as it was the woman making the mistake of answering my grandmother with a smart mouth. I learned that the hard way myself, and she never apologized for anything; she would buy you a new rod and reel instead, take you to a nice restaurant, and this started a very unhealthy cycle of materialism; she bought our affection. Sometimes it would get to the point of too much and my mom and her would part ways for a while. She would suggest us all living together, and my mom would hope that she changed, but in the end my mother wouldn't consent. We had no idea what she did to my mom when she was young, but my mom thought it best to keep some distance.  

The summer, before going into fourth grade, a military family offered us their house to rent, since their dad was getting assigned somewhere in Virginia. This was awesome! The house backed up to woods, and I was an animal nerd before the times of Animal Planet, before it was cool. Other kids asked for baseball cards or G.I. Joe action figures, but I wanted fishing lures, books on the ABC's of nature, aquariums, fish, turtles, snakes and frogs. We had rabbits, ducks and a giant garden. My mom had learned how to grow things from my great grandmother and a woman that watched her when she was young. There was a creek in the woods where we could fish, and my grandmother bought us BB guns, so we were now Winter Park pioneers. Fourth grade started and not long after, my mom told me there would be a new girl named Lynn, who I needed to introduce myself to and bring her home with us after class. I remember that day, and this was before my growth spurt, but I was still one of the taller kids in the class, until Lynn came. My mother was going to watch her after school, and so she came home with me, and we became friends right away. We did our homework together, played together, and everything was great, but my grandmother came over one day and saw us playing, and her face was red. I knew she was angry about something, her face was like watching storm clouds in a distance, you knew it was coming, but often you didn't know why. I heard her inside the house; she was mad at my mom, and I'm sure Lynn heard it too, it was embarrassing. She was telling my mom that if she kept letting me play with the colored girl that I would end up marrying one. Years later, she found out that I went out with a black girl, and she didn't talk to me for six months. I have to say, that was one of the most peaceful stretches of time in my young life.

While we were at that house, a friend of my moms, who helped women in crisis, had a woman and her son who needed a place to stay. As always, my mom opened her doors. The woman and her son were getting beat up by her boyfriend and needed a place to hide. They were a black family, so I prayed my grandmother wouldn't come over, but I was also worried about what we would feed them. I had a strong sense of justice when I was a kid, but I was also embarrassed about being poor, and this was not a time we could ask my grandma for assistance. We had the garden, we caught fish, my mom had a rule that if you killed something then you ate it, and I was surprised when she let us go get Mourning Doves. She would pop off the breast, dip them in batter and then fry them. It was good, and she liked to bake, so we would have fresh bread and cinnamon rolls. My mom always looked for ways to give, and she was satisfied with what other people would find to be very little. 

Things happened that didn't make sense till later, like why we had to eat on the back porch at my great grandmas when my uncle was alive. I thought it was because he just didn't like kids at the table, and he always bought us candy when my grandmother took him for beer, so I thought he liked us. But I also noticed the black women that worked for my great grandmother, even after my uncle died, would go in and cook the meal in the kitchen, but they ate their food on the front porch stairs. After my uncle passed, we got to eat in the dining room.

In 8th grade, we went to a new school, and my little brother was at the grade school part, so they were bused over to the main campus in the afternoon. It was a private school, but this was during the 80's when parents thought their kids could be free range, express themselves, and if they got too bad they would send them to a private school where the teachers would somehow fix them. We had most of the same subcultures that you would find in public school, but a lot more rich kids, who had watched the Breakfast Club, and now felt misunderstood and oppressed. We had preps, jocks, punks, rednecks, skinheads and dorks like me. Everyone just "trying to be themselves" by coloring their hair which got you sent home, one kid wore a Mohawk, which got shaved off, and then he was now a skin head. Everyone was just trying to be their own person by fitting in and conforming with a group of other people that looked just like them. I didn't know what skinheads believed at the time, but as the little kids bus was pulling up, I heard one of them say something about a "chink" getting off the bus. I looked over and it was my little brother, and so I said something to them, and these were guys I had been going to school with for a while with no issues, but now we were fighting between the fence and the school wall. A school dean broke it up, and I got another day of detention, which was no big deal, since I probably still hold the record there, and they were running out of days in the school year. The other boys said we were just playing around, the dean asked me, and I said yes, that's true, hoping to avoid discipline. They didn't get detention, maybe he was a respecter of persons and their parents were donors, or maybe their parents wouldn't agree to it. My mom had rules and expectations. It didn't matter if all the rest of the world was heading the other way, she wasn't following. I served my detentions, got the paddling record too, and then I got restriction when I got home. She let us know that if we ever did anything illegal, and she knew about it, then she would call the cops herself. She understood the idea of self defense, and she told us never to watch anyone suffer. I understood from her that you don't fight because you know you're going to win, you fight because it's the right thing to do. We could protect ourselves or someone else that was getting beat up, but words were not a sufficient reason to fight, and if I started it with my mouth, then that was wrong too. When I looked up what skin heads were, I thought that meant open season, but no, according to my mom, we had to pray for them, for bullies, my grumpy neighbor. My mom would pray at night for government officials that she would never vote for, for owners of abortion clinics, and a lot of other hideous people. She would pray for my grandmother's salvation, yet my grandmother said she was a Christian. My mom literally believed that a Christian cannot hate anyone, how messed up is that?

There were so many things, and maybe I'll write about it later, but back to my interview with Adewumi. I was excited to see him; he was well read, had a cool accent, and as we sat down in his office, I couldn't wait to hear his take on the book, but as he talked, my jaw dropped. He said Uncle Tom was a weak man, a man that was afraid to stand up for himself; he said basically what I had been hearing from everyone who hadn't read the book. So I asked him, "did you read the book?" He didn't, and he was honest with me about it. I know he was a busy man, with the church, and business, but I had a lot of respect for him, and he was Christian, who at the time was not afraid to preach about sin, even when members of his congregation asked him to quit touching on certain sins. So I really wanted to hear from him, someone that I respected, how the name of a hero, in a book that fueled the abolitionist push into the Civil War, a story that brought to light the plight of slaves, how did that man's name become a byword?

Is there such a thing as racism? Yes, clearly there is. I have seen it from all sides. I have been fishing in Eatonville when two young black men asked me what I was doing there. "What do you mean? I'm fishing." They told me to leave. I asked why? They said I didn't belong there, and a man who was fishing further down the bank ran to my rescue. He told them I was with him, and he was a man who I had given my apartment number to so he could fish the lake there as a guest without getting kicked off property. When my buddy arrived, he said, "you should've stayed in the car till I got here, those guys were probably going to jump you." "Why?" I asked. "You know why," he said. It was a black man who came to my rescue in Chamblee. My car had broken down there, and I lived in the mountains at the time, and there were a lot of Mexican people that worked in the factory with me. They were hard working, honest men, who looked out for each other and even me when I needed help, so I thought nothing of asking a group of Mexican guys for directions, but they flipped me off. I thought they weren't understanding me so I asked again, and apparently that was a mistake; they started crossing the street to come get me, but this man ran up and again, someone said those beautiful words, "he's with me." He was pretty lit, and I was a recovering drug addict, and he asked if I needed anything, crack, meth? He helped me find a hotel, so I asked what I could do for him. He asked if he could stay in my room, but I said, No. It had nothing to do with Melanin, it had to do with a life I didn't want to go back to, a life I barely survived. He was a stranger, and I could see the tracks on his arms. I know what my friends would do in that situation; I had about 500 dollars in my wallet that my godmother had wired me, and it would be too much temptation. If I woke up with no money in the morning, I wouldn't be able to pay the man who was fixing my car, and I would be stuck there. I gave him some money, and we parted ways. When I went to check on my car the next day, the Muslim man that owned the place said it would be ready in a few hours, but he was concerned about the wear on my tires. I told him I didn't have money for that, but when I came back he had taken the tires off of someone else's car, who wanted something cooler than the factory ones, and he put them on mine for free. I asked him why, and he said now he didn't have to worry about me getting home. He knew he sent me off well. He didn't know me; he didn't have to do that for me. I didn't look like him or believe like him, but he treated me with dignity.

Is there systemic racism? No, when you say that you aren't going back far enough; you're not digging down to the root. There is a root. It's called sin, it's called pride. It justifies hate; it allows you to feel superior by making someone else inferior. You build yourself up by tearing someone else down. Your life is more valuable in your eyes.

Is there institutional racism? Yes, when you tell someone not to hire somebody because they are Black, Hispanic, Asian, etc, that is racist. If your company holds such policies or allows others to hold that written or unwritten than that is institutional. When I am told I have to hire someone not based on merit, experience, or qualifications, but because they are black, that is racism. When I interview 5 people, one of whom is a woman, and she does not hold the qualifications, does not answer the questions as well as some of the other male candidates, but you say hire her, then I ask why? The answer comes back, because I think diversity and inclusion are important. I'm sorry, but you are hiring her because of her sex, the equality lied in staying consistent with the questions, answers, behavior, knowledge and work background. You did not judge based on performance, you excluded the others based on their sex, so you are sexist. It is a most illogical but accepted practice in our day, that you fight racism and inequality with more racism and inequality. When you show preference to where someone went to school, rather than the results that they produce, I'm sorry, but you are an elitist, a respecter of persons rather than integrity, ability and performance. When you don't want someone because they have a disability, but are able to be a profitable employee with slight modifications, you are prejudiced, and a lot times really missing out. I worked for a man who had run a factory where most of his crew were disabled, and he had to justify modifications to the work area in order to do this, but in the end they outperformed their "whole" counterparts. I want everyone to be able to have a job, support their family, be productive, so when I hire you or you come under my management, then it is my job to judge solely on behaviors and performance. I have never had to worry about diversity or inclusion, when you are on my team then you are part of my work family, and I plead with you when you are heading the wrong way, I demand that others treat you with respect and that you treat them the same. I know that I am not above you because I am just a talent scout. I can't get the job done without you, but I insist that you carry your weight because otherwise you are saying that you are more important than those who end up carrying it for you. 

Well, I have ranted enough on current topics, and I am eager to get to Isaiah. I am looking for my old friend and teacher, Adewumi, praying that I find him walking with the Lord, not beholding to the culture, but lifting up the only name that can save, the only One who could ever truly claim unfair, a name that has also been a byword to many, Jesus Christ. To my unsaved friends, I know what the culture says, but I can't take a knee with BLM or Antifa. The first is a Marxist group, who encourages rioting, violence and is very selective about which black lives matter. The other group claims to be against fascism, but dress and act like the new fascists, with their own list of virtues that suppress truth, suppress free speech and promote violence. These new groups are no different to me then the men burning crosses in that field a long time ago. To my Christian family, tell the truth, that's what sets men free, pray for your enemies, love them that hate you, don't return evil for evil, that's what our Lord commands us. I use to think my mom was weak, and my grandmother was strong, but I was wrong. I thought of her as a white Uncle Tom because she was too quick to forgive. It's a hard sell I know, but if you're a Christian than you're supposed to be a person of the Bible, so I plead with you, pray for your enemies. My name is Calvin, I am a slave of Christ, He died for me, purchased me from eternal separation from God, brought me into His family, atoned for me with His blood, not to go around hating, but to stand firm on the pure gospel, that Jesus Christ is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, no one comes to the Father but through Him. All I have to offer Him is my sin, there are no works to save me but His, no loop holes, no curves that let me squeak by because I think there are worse sinners than myself. 

…10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 11 Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets before you.… Matthew 5: 10-12

…6 Lift up your eyes to the heavens, and look at the earth below; for the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and its people will die like gnats. But My salvation will last forever, and My righteousness will never fail. 7 Listen to Me, you who know what is right, you people with My law in your hearts: Do not fear the scorn of men; do not be broken by their insults. 8 For the moth will devour them like a garment, and the worm will eat them like wool. But My righteousness will last forever, My salvation through all generations.”… Isaiah 51: 6-8

27 But to those of you who will listen, I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone strikes you on one cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone takes your cloak, do not withhold your tunic as well.… Luke 6: 27-29

…34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them, expecting nothing in return. Then your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.… Luke 6: 34-36

…26 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and every creature that crawls upon the earth.”… Genesis 1: 26-28

Our worth comes from being made in the image of God, and I use to think that was the problem, that people didn't see that, but my fear now is that they do see it, but they hate God, and they can't get Him, so they destroy His image here. Christ said:

…14 We know that we have passed from death to life, because we love our brothers. The one who does not love remains in death. 15 Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that eternal life does not reside in a murderer. 16 By this we know what love is: Jesus laid down His life for us, and we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.… 1 John 3: 14-16

When the Son of God was here with us, He healed, He spoke the truth, confronted apostasy, fed the multitudes, but here was their chance to kill God, so they nailed Him to a tree. He became a curse for me; Christ died for me.