12 years old.
My grandfather, Jim Griggs, was a sharecropper on Mr. Robert Callier’s place in Talbott County, Georgia, where I visited every August of my childhood. In the summer of 1947, I got up the nerve to ask him something that concerned me. We were sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of his roadside shanty.
As we rocked the chairs to the same rhythm, I said, “Pa, I want to ask you a question.” He said, “What is it, boy?” And I said, “Pa, at 70 years old, way down here in Talbott County on Mr. Robert Callier’s place, what is it, Pa, that you want most out of life?”
And, Pa raised himself up from that old raggedy rocking chair, and he had snuff in the front of his mouth and tobacco in the black of his mouth at the same time, and he got up and spat that tobacco and snuff all the way to the highway in a straight line.
And, he leaned back, and said, “Junior, at 70 years old, way down here in Talbott County on Mr. Robert Callier’s place, all I want out of life is to be able to go to the bathroom indoors in a warm place one time before I die.”
That was my grandfather’s highest aspiration. That was his impossible dream – to be able to go to the bathroom indoors in a warm place one time before he died.
Now, what dawned on me is that my grandfather didn’t say he wanted to learn to read and write and do arithmetic so that the White man could not cheat him when he dealt with him as a sharecropper.
He didn’t say he wanted to register to vote or sit on the jury or eat at the lunch counter or go to the library, because his life was so blinded by segregation, discrimination, and dehumanization that his highest aspiration was a basic creature comfort.
The shutters of my grandfather’s life were so closed that he could foresee no future for his 12-year-old grandson or himself: No sense that Junior would finish college; come to the West Point of the Civil Rights Movement, Howard Law School; partner in a big law firm; partner in an investment bank. Pa’s shutters were closed to that.
But thanks be to God, the shutters of my life are sufficiently open, so that wherever I go, and whatever I do – personally, professionally, socially, politically – I am forever reminded, edified, sanctified, yea, even tormented by my grandfather’s experience.
What shall I render unto the Lord for all the benefits he has given me?
That is the question for you who graduate in two week. That is the question for the rest of you who will graduate in years to come.
Contemplate it. Think on it. Prepare for it. Study for it. And then live it!!!!
That, the New Talented Tenth, is your charge to keep; your calling to fulfill, your rendezvous with destiny. And to that end, may you neither stumble nor falter. Rather, may you mount up with wings like the eagles; may you run and not be weary; may you walk together, children, and not faint.
Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., a native Atlantan, is Senior Managing Director of Lazard Freres & Co., LLC, Senior Counsel of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, and a Senior Director of the Board of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.