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On silence, Berea College, and Passing the Baton.

Article Excerpt
MY FATHER seldom spoke. He was a mountain man, as thrifty with his words as with the coal for our stove and the pennies left from his paycheck each week. When he did talk, his words were carefully chosen and, like a poet's, layered with meanings that only revealed themselves over time. My father and I never talked about what was important in life. To know what mattered to him, I had to listen hard to his words and carefully watch what he did. And because he so seldom spoke, I listened to the stories, sentences, and softly uttered phrases as though they were words engraved on a precious heirloom.

From the day we got our first television, my father always watched the evening news. He would sit in his big chair, elbows resting on his knees, his hands wrapped around his thick, white coffee mug, and a cigarette squeezed between two nicotine-stained fingers. For some reason, my younger brother Tom and I liked to watch with him. So there we sat most evenings, the three of us watching together in silence. Sometimes my father would break the silence just long enough to deliver a lesson to Tom and me. One such time was in 1965 when the news reported that civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo, a Detroit mother of five, was murdered after a march from Selma to Montgomery.

"That's a shame," my father said, bending his head ever so slightly downward.

He did not use "shame" lightly--as another way of saying too bad or unfortunate or not right. He meant that the act of killing a civil rights worker was shameful. In his eyes, the men who murdered her brought shame not only upon themselves but upon our nation, upon humankind,...