One Last Thing about Middle School

As I told you before, I only spent one year in middle school. Talking with someone on Twitter earlier this morning brought back a memory from middle school. I grew up in the rural South where racism always bubbles just under the surface. Right down the street from my middle and high schools lived a man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan is nowhere near as powerful as it was during the civil rights movement, but to this day they still have a presence in the South. This man was a redneck of the first order. He lived in a raggedy house with lawn jockeys out front and an old boat with a sign on it. The sign said that the boat was for sending all of the niggers back to Africa.

Well this guy's daughter is the same age I am, and I actually went to middle school with her. Although her father was an ignorant bastard, I never had any problems with her. You would think that with a father like that she'd be carrying a banner for the cause, so to speak, but she seemed all right. She was actually friends with a friend of mine. In the mornings before classes started, if you got to school early, you had to sit in the lunchroom. I remember sitting near her in the lunchroom and she was relatively nice. I found out years later that she was dating a black guy. I'm sure that her daddy was really pleased about that. He actually moved out of that house years ago and the boat is no longer there, but whenever I drive by that house I see the lawn jockeys and the boat in my mind's eye.