Cupcake recently asked in a comment how we ended up in Colorado. I get that question so often from folks around here, and I don’t think I’ve ever shared that story on my blog. So, I thought I’d tell the tale…

I heard a song on the radio recently that had an interesting chorus. I wish I knew who sang it so that I could give credit, but I never got the Artist’s name. “Make sure that if you run, you are running to something and not away from. Problems don’t need an airplane to find you.” I don’t know how that applies to me, but for some reason it stuck and I think about it a lot.

I had lost most contact with my family in NC around the time Austin was born. I don’t blame them completely, I certainly played a role in that. I didn’t try very hard to be a part of it after it went awry. My grandmother and dad took turns raising me after my mom passed away. I knew I was always a burden to one or the other, they didn’t mince words and let me know all the time. So I spent my last months of high school sleeping in may car or at a friend’s house, or when I had the money, in a hotel. The last year of high school was lonely for me. Financially I was ok since I started getting a Social Security check when I turned 18 for my mother’s death. That check quit coming once I graduated. I got pregnant during the summer after high school graduation. My grandmother was pretty excited about hiding my pregnancy from her Christian friends– I wasn’t married, was pregnant, and with an bi-racial child, no less. So she sent me to a maternity home in Asheville. I think she thought I’d give Austin up for adoption and move back to Fayetteville like nothing ever happened. I instead made a life with my new baby there, just the two of us.

I met Jeremy when Austin was nearly 2 and I was nearly 21. I knew Jeremy always wanted to move back to Colorado, as he grew up here and had fond memories. When we married, we thought it would be nice to make a new beginning here together. That’s the move in a nutshell.

But, there were other factors. Jeremy’s mother wanted to move back here too, so she encouraged us. Sometimes pushing us. She had tried to move here alone and ended up going back to NC because she missed her sons and grandsons. She made this huge plan once she got back to get us ALL to move to CO together– one big, happy family. So we moved to CO in January 2000, the rest of the fam moved here by June. The interesting part? Now none of them speak to one another and haven’t for years. So they live a handful of miles away and never see Jeremy. Go figure.

We also were really getting burnt out on the racism in NC. It was intense and so ‘in your face’. Most people don’t understand that. Most people think that because an area is diverse, because there are tons of mixed marriages, or because they have never witnessed blatant racism, that it must not exist. But it does. Jeremy’s brother is married to a black woman and they had an easier time with racism than we did– me being white and married to a black man. The white men were hateful to Jeremy because they felt threatened. The black women hated me because they felt threatened. Sometimes we would walk into a restaurant in the outskirts of town and silence would fall, every head would turn. We learned there were place where we just couldn’t go. I would get nasty and sometimes threatening notes on my car at store parking lots, I would have co-workers quit talking to me once I displayed pictures of my family on my desk. I once had a friend “comfort” me through one of my miscarriages by telling me that maybe I should “stick to my own kind” and then God will bless me with a successful pregnancy. Sometimes it was blatant, sometimes people were more gentle about it. I once had an old man walk up to me at a pool hall while I was ordering drinks and say, “What’s a beautiful girl like you doing with a Nigger?” There were KKK rallies through Asheville streets annually where the men wore their hooded garb and rode horses. They were escorted by police. People would give them an audience because it was interesting that, after all these years, there were people out there that still felt so strongly about hating a race, any race, other than their own. The nastiness we saw as a family was so frequent that we wanted to run away. And there was so little at that point that made me want to stay. Jeremy never felt a connection to NC. I did, but didn’t really comprehend it until recent years. So, here we are.

Since we’ve lived in CO, we have not had a single incident with racism. Not one. The only awkward situation we had was when a teacher of Austin’s in 5th grade was teaching African American history. She kept using the word “Nigger” in class. (And you can imagine how cool all the kids thought they were using that word on the ONLY child of color in the class: Austin) We went and talked to her about it, trying to figure out why she couldn’t use another word to describe a black slave. She apologized. She told us she grasped the depth of what she was doing. She told us she didn’t want to lose her job over it. We asked her to just use another word and I offered her some of my African American Literature books so that she could become more educated and sensitive to the strength of this word. We asked her to apologize to Austin, to talk to the class about how it is innapropriate to use, etc. She never did. But that’s the only time we’ve had any racial type issues since we’ve lived here. So I guess, for that reason, our move was a wise one.

I do grow increasingly homesick. Maybe we just always want the greener grass over yonder. It wouldn’t be easy to move at this point– A house, several cars, kids, dogs, roots… So, we’ll bloom where we’ve been planted. Jeremy always tells me he’d move back if I really wanted to. And I do really want to. But I don’t want to be responsible for uprooting everyone and moving across the country again. I was more adventurous in 2000, when we moved here. Now I make all of my decisions based on what’s safe, what’s fair to everyone, what’s unselfish.

Boy, I didn’t think this would be so long. Hey! You’re snoring! Stop it!

Anyways, that’s the story. Thanks for listening! I think it helps my homesickness to talk about home from time to time. Maybe I’ll post some good memories and old pictures one of these days! Maybe I’ll even have to start a new category for this kind of stuff: “Southern Belle”.