Samuel James - The Little Pink General Lee

 

My parents used to drop me off at my grandmother's house every Friday afternoon. Grammy was a tall, regal woman. She stood 5’10” with ballerina posture even into her 70s. She kept her hair in that semi short curly style popular amongst grandmothers. [audience laughter] I'd spend the night on Fridays, and she would let me stay up late and watch our favorite show, The Dukes of Hazzard. [audience laughter] 

 

She even gave me a little car that I would drive through the air and mimic the sounds of its Dixie car horn. Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. [audience laughter] My car was not anything like the car from the show. The car from the show was called the General Lee and it was bright orange, it had 01 racing numbers on its doors and its entire roof was one confederate flag. My car, my little General Lee, was one solid color, carnation pink. [audience laughter] It was a hollow shell made from a mold that had no moving parts. But to my small child's mind, it was exactly the same. 

 

So, every Saturday morning, she would bring me back to my parents apartment and she would come in, we'd all have breakfast together and she would get up to leave and I would start to cry. She would come over, make sure I had that little pink General Lee and she'd say, “Hang on to this, take good care of it and I'll see you on the weekend, we can stay up late and watch our favorite show,” and she would leave. And then, 24 hours would go by and I would have lost that car. 

 

Come Friday, I would get to grammy’s and somehow, she would have found it and I would have it in my hand ready for when our favorite show came on. This little pink General Lee is in all of my memories of grammy, including the time that I lost it under her couch. I jammed my arm under to get it, and got my arm stuck and really freaked out. But then, along comes grammy with a smile and one arm lifting up the edge of the couch, saving the day. I grabbed that thing like it was Indiana Jones’ hat. 

 

And then there was the time that I was simulating one of the General Lee's famous jumps by throwing this car across the room [audience laughter] where it landed perfectly between grammy's left eye and her glasses. [audience laughter] Then there was the time that I was five years old, and I was laying on my stomach on the floor between my parents kitchen and living room. Grammy and my parents were having breakfast at the table. grammy liked to have a little sip of whiskey in the morning. She was having a little sip. She took a little bite of banana. She started to say something and then she fell backwards out of her chair. My father jumped up, and he caught her and he laid her on the floor. I ran over, and her glasses had fallen off and she looked so strange without her glasses. 

 

Her mouth was open and her eyes were wide, but they had rolled back, so they were entirely white. And I start screaming. My mother picks me up and she brings me to the other side of the room, and she has the phone cradled in her ear and she's talking to 911. But the ambulance did not arrive in time. 

 

Grammy willed her house to my mother. And we all moved in. This was a very old, old house. It was built by grammy's father, who had been a veteran of the Spanish-American War. Everybody who'd ever lived here was still kind of there. We open up this closet, and there'll be threadbare monogrammed uniforms. And in this drawer is old sepia toned photographs of people forgotten to time. And in this drawer see old rusted tools probably used to build this house. 

 

When my mother died, she left the house to me. But I moved away and my father stayed. I think these ghosts comforted him, because he never changed anything about the house. Every time I would come to visit, it was the same. Our visits were almost always the same. I would bring a guitar, and he would sit in front of the piano, and we'd trade songs, and we'd swap stories and we'd sing old songs, we'd swap stories and on and on until I would go home. 

 

But this one particular day, he gets up to get a glass of water, and I get nostalgic and I go up to my old room. My old room also had not changed. My very same pretentious music and movie posters were still on the exact same walls. They were painted the exact same color I painted them in high school, black. [audience laughter] The bed was still in the same place. 

 

Now, this had been grammy's room before it had been mine and the bed frame had been grammy’s. It was the same white and gold matching set from Sears as the dresser that was also still there. And opening the drawers to the dresser, inside you'll find grammy’s jewelry, and old letters, and hundreds and hundreds of photographs, at least 100 of which are of her and I. They perfectly reflect my memory of grammy. I'm taken right back to this perfect moment of grammy joy. 

 

She also has a closet. Now, I never spent very much time in this closet, because it always felt like grammy’s. But this particular day, I walk up, and it smells musty, and there's cobwebs and there's old coats hanging up and my grandfather's tuxedo and grammy's wedding gown. And then, on the floor is a walk-in closet. It's built under one of the eaves, so you have to duck down if you're going to go all the way in. There's a plastic bag. It's an old biodegrading plastic bag. But it's the only thing plastic in this room, so I walk in to look at it. As soon as I set foot in here, I feel like a kid again. But when you're a kid and you're going to get caught, like any minute, someone's got to come around the corner and be like, “Hey, what are you doing?” [audience laughter] 

 

I kneel down, and I open this bag and inside this bag is probably 150 little pink General Lee’s. Right, I'm with you. Right. It's like somebody gave me the setup for the joke and then waited 20 years to give me the punchline. [audience laughter] I'm just laughing. I thought that like she had found the one singular perfect toy for only singularly me. She was probably at a church rummage sale, and saw a bag of pink cars for a dollar and thought kids lose stuff. [audience laughter] 

 

 

So, I grab this bag in full grammy joy and I run downstairs, I'm like, “Dad, dad, do you remember the little pink General lee, because here's 150 of them.” He does remember them, but there is no grammy joy for him. He's not laughing, he's not smiling, he looks half disappointed and half confused and he begins to tell me how his relationship with grammy had been very different than my own. 

 

Grammy's family has been in New England as long as there has been in New England. She was a pillar of her community, she was a sheriff's widow and she was a very proud and protective white mother of a white daughter who had brought home, and married and had a child with a big southern black man. She was never forthright in her expression of her opinion of my father's race, but she let him know in other ways, in more passive aggressive ways. 

 

For example, she would introduce his small black child, me, to a television show that whitewashed and glorified and romanticized racist symbolism of the south. She would go a step further by encouraging that same black child to run around his house literally singing Dixie. She did this full well knowing exactly how he felt about it. And so, there I am, standing there with this nostalgic grin fading from my face holding the world's worst time capsule, thinking about how she had found the one perfect, singular toy just for only me, but it hadn't even been for me. 

 

And then, my father laughs just the smallest amount. He explains how every Saturday night he would wait until my mother was asleep and until I was asleep, and he would come into my room,- [audience laughter] [audience applause] -and he'd take the little pink General Lee into the kitchen and he would throw it into the trash. [audience laughter] So, I take this bag of little pink General Lee’s back up to grammy's closet, and I put it back where I found it and I stop and I look at those pictures of her and I again. They still reflect every grandmother's love for her grandchildren. It's still true. But I also know that digging through the house a little more will find you a Barry Goldwater campaign pin and a little personal size Confederate flag. She was a loving grandmother. There's no doubt about that. It's absolutely true. But she was also a cruel person who would manipulate her own grandchild in order to make his father suffer for their race. Both things are true. 

 

I'm standing there thinking about how it's easy to love a child while I am the exact same size and shape and color as my father, and I move through the world how he did and it reacts to me how it reacted to him. I went back downstairs and we played some more songs. But we didn't talk about grammy ever again. About 10 years after this, my father died, and I went back through the house and it was still the same. The closet still had those threadbare uniforms, and the drawers still had the sepia toned photos and the old rusty tools. And up in my old room, those photos of grammy and I were still in that dresser. Her closet still had my grandfather's tuxedo and her wedding gown, but that bag of little pink General Lee’s was nowhere to be found. [audience laughter] Thank you.