A Southern White Girl’s Upbringin’

Sometimes Love looks like turning tables over in the Temple. But that’s not how I was brought up.

Eris.  The Greek Goddess of Discord; Discordia, in Latin. The etymology of the name is uncertain, some scholars connecting it with a Greek verb whose English translation is “to raise, stir, excite.”

None of which I knew when I was attending my first Latin banquet as a freshman in high school at the tender age of 14. 

The Latin banquet took place in the spring of every year. Mrs. Barnes, our teacher, assigned each student a mythological or historical figure from ancient Rome. We were to do research and come in costumes, which would be judged. 

The school cafeteria was transformed—as much as possible—into a Roman banquet hall. Sumptuous dishes were spread out on cafeteria tables whose legs were folded so that they could lie flat on the floor. We reclined on pillows and cushions in our finery like Roman royalty.

For my first banquet I was assigned the role of Eris, Goddess of Discord. 

It was an extraordinary example of casting against type.  All the “discord” had been trained out of me by the time I reached puberty. I had been transformed into a properly brought-up Southern White girl, unfailingly polite, never disruptive. I was taught never to inconvenience others or make them feel even mildly uncomfortable. And part of my discipline was what I think of now as an almost pathological restraint in the face of insult. I learned to swallow my anger. In fact, I was never supposed to be angry in the first place.

My mother dressed me for the banquet in her black, lace-bodice negligee, with an opaque black slip underneath. In a labor of love, she spent an hour or more pinning my hair into tight pin-curls all over my head.

She snapped a photo as I was leaving for the banquet. I am barefoot on the stoop of the duplex where we lived. My hair is pulled back off my face and cascades into a mass of ringlets. My arms drape pale and long and graceful against the diaphanous black of my costume, as I smile shyly at the camera. 

Surely, the sweetest, least discordant Goddess of Discord you are ever likely to meet.  

I won first prize.

To be honest, even then I had a temperament more like my father. Passionate. Explosive when angry, although the storm passed as quickly as it blew up. These were unfortunate traits for a Southern White girl. Especially since I was also a Baptist preacher’s daughter. 

However, two years after my triumph as the rabble-rousing goddess, my family and I found ourselves at the center of violent controversy in the small seminary town where we lived. Black and White teenagers, friends and classmates, gathered in our home for a Christmas party. My parents did not yield to pressure from the deacons of my dad’s church to cancel the party. A blast of buckshot shattered the picture window and pierced the wall. We all dropped to the floor. The next day my father was fired for being “a disruptive influence in the community.”.

…Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers…. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a shouse of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of thieves!” 

…they kept looking for a way to kill him…. 

(Mark 11, NRSV)

On the local television station, a fiery editorial labeled us as “the family of a militant minister.” We were called “outside agitators,” and accused of moving into town to deliberately stir up trouble. Rumors arose and persisted that my father had staged the whole thing. One man went so far as to say, “I think he done it himself.”

Some folks argued that nothing bad would have happened if we had simply canceled the party. How could we have been so naive, they wondered aloud, as to think that an integrated party wouldn’t cause trouble.

I tried to be compassionate and forgiving, the way I was brought up. To bless those who cursed me. I wrote an article for the school newspaper: “Peace—true peace, that is—comes from a knowledge that what one has done is right. That one has stood for his beliefs…. I know this peace—it is mine.”

At the distance of more than half a century, I can smell the bitterness and fury in my words. Everything I had been taught about the goodness of people lay smoldering, burned to the ground. At age 16, I witnessed what White people could and would do to you if you broke the unwritten contract with Whiteness.

But how could I admit to myself, let alone anyone else, how enraged and terrified I was? The tools of Southern White girlhood were utterly inadequate.

Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.

Matthew 23:27, NRSV

Now I have to wonder—did any of those White church members who accused us of being trouble-makers ever pay attention to the life of the one they professed to worship? All four Gospels tell the story of Jesus charging into the Temple, driving out the money changers and turning over tables, scattering their stolen profits. The Gospel of John records that Jesus made a whip out of cords. Clearly not the actions of someone who is afraid to shake some folks up and turn their world on its ear!

And what about when Jesus called out the religious and sanctimonious people of his day? I can hear him now, addressing the people of the White church: “Woe to you, preachers and Sunday School teachers, you hypocrites! Whitewashed tombs!” No tiptoeing around delicate feelings. He sounds pretty angry to me.

It is no wonder that the people in power “kept looking for a way to kill him.”

The thing about Jesus is, when he started driving people out with a whip and flinging over tables, it was because he loved people too much to let them go on doing what they were doing. (In contrast to Eris, who appears to have enjoyed stirring up trouble just to stir up trouble.) And while it is difficult for me to understand, Jesus loved not only the people who were being cheated, but the folks who were cheating them. He could not bear to see what they were doing to each other, what they were doing to themselves, what they were doing to the Temple.

Sometimes Love looks like turning tables over in the Temple.

But that’s not how I was brought up. Everything I was taught to think or believe was intended to guarantee that I would never question, for example, White supremacy. All the tools provided to me were meant to ensure that I would never challenge racism, and ideally never even notice the central role Whiteness played in my life.

I look at the girl I was then, and the person I am now, and am becoming. I look at the country where I was born, the South where I was brought up—and the North, too, where I lived for many years. And it seems to me that we are at a time of reckoning.

For me, that reckoning means coming to terms with my own story, both the parts I’m proud of and the parts that fill me with shame. I can no longer tiptoe around the wounds, mine or others’. I cannot roll up into a ball of pain inside my Whiteness and deny what is happening in the world. I cannot avoid confrontation because it makes me and others uncomfortable.

You snakes, you brood of vipers! How can you escape being sentenced to hell?

Matthew 23:33

The Love Jesus demonstrated does not avoid confrontation. In Matthew 23, Jesus calls down damnation on the hypocrisy he sees in front of him. “You snakes, you brood of vipers!” he snarls. “How can you escape hell!”

But almost immediately his tone turns to lament: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem.” He mourns the “city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it.” He has not forgotten that these are the people he loves, the very people he has come to rescue from their failure to love. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

He sees through his grief the consequences they face for the choices they have made: “See, your house is left to you desolate….” (Matthew 23:37-38)

Jesus might well weep over America. Whiteness is a desolation that is grinding all of us into the dust; not only Black people, not only Brown and Indigenous people, but White people as well. If we fail to meet this moment with the kind of Love–tough love–that Jesus showed us, Whiteness will kill us all.

It’s time to turn over some tables.