My life

It’s hard to convey to young people today the impact the Depression had on my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, but I grew up feeling it. One of the most memorable stories of my childhood was my mother’s tale of a Depression Good Friday when my grandfather came home from work and broke down and cried as he told her he just couldn’t afford the dollar or so it would cost to buy her a new Easter dress. She never forgot it, and every year of my childhood I had a new Easter outfit whether I wanted it or not. I remember one Easter in the 1950s, when I was fat and self-conscious. I went to church in a light-colored short-sleeved shirt, white linen pants, pink and black Hush Puppies, and a matching pink suede belt. It hurt, but my mother had been faithful to her father’s Easter ritual. When I was living with him, my grandfather had two jobs that I really loved: he ran a little grocery store, and he supplemented his income by working as a night watchman at a sawmill. I loved spending the night with Papaw at the sawmill. We would take a paper bag with sandwiches for supper, and I would sleep in the backseat of the car. And on clear starlit nights, I would climb in the sawdust piles, taking in the magical smells of fresh-cut timber and sawdust. My grandfather loved working there, too. It got him out of the house and reminded him of the mill work he’d done as a young man around the time of my mother’s birth. Except for the time Papaw closed the car door on my fingers in the dark, those nights were perfect adventures.

The grocery store was a different sort of adventure. First, there was a huge jar of Jackson’s cookies on the counter, which I raided with gusto. Second, grown-ups I didn’t know came in to buy groceries, for the first time exposing me to adults who weren’t relatives. Third, a lot of my grandfather’s customers were black. Though the South was completely segregated back then, some level of racial interaction was inevitable in small towns, just as it had always been in the rural South. However, it was rare to find an uneducated rural southerner without a racist bone in his body. That’s exactly what my grandfather was. I could see that black people looked different, but because he treated them like he did everybody else, asking after their children and about their work, I thought they were just like me. Occasionally, black kids would come into the store and we would play. It took me years to learn about segregation and prejudice and the meaning of poverty, years to learn that most white people weren’t like my grandfather and grandmother, whose views on race were among the few things she had in common with her husband. In fact, Mother told me one of the worst whippings she ever got was when, at age three or four, she called a black woman “Nigger.” To put it mildly, Mammaw’s whipping her was an unusual reaction for a poor southern white woman in the 1920s.

My mother once told me that after Papaw died, she found some of his old account books from the grocery store with lots of unpaid bills from his customers, most of them black. She recalled that he had told her that good people who were doing the best they could deserved to be able to feed their families, and no matter how strapped he was, he never denied them groceries on credit. Maybe that’s why I’ve always believed in food stamps.

After I became President, I got another firsthand account of my grandfather’s store. In 1997, an AfricanAmerican woman, Ernestine Campbell, did an interview for her hometown paper in Toledo, Ohio, about her grandfather buying groceries from Papaw “on account” and bringing her with him to the store. She said that she remembered playing with me, and that I was “the only white boy in that neighborhood who played with black kids.” Thanks to my grandfather, I didn’t know I was the only white kid who did that. Besides my grandfather’s store, my neighborhood provided my only other contact with people outside my family. I experienced a lot in those narrow confines. I saw a house burn down across the street and learned I was not the only person bad things happened to. I made friends with a boy who collected strange creatures, and once he invited me over to see his snake. He said it was in the closet. Then he opened the closet door, shoved me into the darkness, slammed the door shut, and told me I was in the dark alone with the snake. I wasn’t, thank goodness, but I was sure scared to death. I learned that what seems funny to the strong can be cruel and humiliating to the weak.

Our house was just a block away from a railroad underpass, which then was made of rough tar-coated timbers. I liked to climb on the timbers, listen to the trains rattle overhead, and wonder where they were going and whether I would ever go there.