My Friend Sam

I've been actively dreading this weekend, the trip to Cincinnati for my aunt Martha's funeral. But this morning, my friend Sam gave me a gift that will help ease the way. I can keep it in my pocket like a cool, smooth stone. It will give me comfort.

Sam Oni is a famous name in our family--he's the man who came from Ghana to attend Mercer University. His was the first dark face to be anything other than hired help on that campus, when he came as a student in September of 1963. He was also the first black person to join a white Baptist church in the state of Georgia, when he stood before my grandfather's congregation a few days later, and was voted in by a slim majority. It was, as he said to me when we sat together in his living room, a "faith-shattering experience."

I never knew Sam until I went to Georgia last month. None of us did. He continued going to Vineville Baptist Church for a year or more when he was in college, but never felt accepted. After the racial epithets were hurled towards where he stood at the front of the church the day he joined, he always felt self-conscious, looked-at. As he said, "the climate was not exactly conducive for reflection, for meditation, for just being in the presence of God." If he happened to arrive at church early and sit in an empty pew, no one else would sit there. No one in the church reached out to him, invited him for Sunday dinner, asked him about his family or his studies at school. He never experienced the legendary "southern hospitality" that he felt he so richly deserved. Where was the warm welcome for this young man who had traveled across the world, the fruit of the Baptists' own labor in the missions field? He never felt it, so he got out of Georgia as soon as he could. He landed in Berkeley, California in the late 60's. Graduate school, flower children, the Black Panthers, accepted at last. It was the beginning of a love affair with a city as far from Georgia as Sam could get.

I did finally get to meet Sam, though. I spent two amazing hours hearing his stories. What a gift!

The thing that first struck me when I walked into Sam's apartment was the picture directly across from the door. It was a picture of a stained glass window in Tattnall Square Church, the Baptist church on the edge of the Mercer Campus. I recognized the picture because it hangs on my mother's wall as well. I remembered hearing that Sam had been thrown out of that church or something, and it struck me as ironic to see it as I walked in the door. While I was there, he told me the whole story: the visit from the Tattnall Square minister the first week, who made a personal visit to Sam's dorm room to let him know that he would not be welcome at Tattnall Square. Three years later, when Sam decided to visit Tattnall Square and the ushers physically blocked him from entering the sanctuary. His visit the following week, when they actually closed and locked the front doors so that he couldn't get in. Why would this, of all things, be the picture to greet me as I entered his home?

This morning, when I finally finished transcribing the tape of our time together, I got to hear the answer in Sam's beautiful, lilting voice all over again:

Now, for me, Cindy, I don’t know about you, but forgiveness is so therapeutic. It heals the forgiver as well as the forgiven. Let me labor the obvious. Whether you realize it or not, the only time that we live is really and truly the here and now. So people can latch onto incidents of the past, and let that affect them whichever way, and in fact maybe even retard their growth and progress. Or be obsessed with the future, and be made insecure by it. But really and truly, the time one lives, is here and now.

And that is my gift from Sam, the one that will soothe my heart and spirits as I drive in a family-filled car to Cincinnati, as we sort through Martha's belongings, as we grieve together.

Really and truly, the time one lives, is here and now. That I can do.