My father could slay dragons. When I was a small child, of this I was certain. Daddy was a tall man with broad shoulders, a deep voice, a firm grip and a manner about him that told the world he would hunt down and slay anyone who so much as looked at me wrong.

Maya Angelou has said that the true sign of a good parent is one whose eyes light up when his child enters the room. My father's eyes beamed when he saw me. To say he doted on me would be to understate the case. I truly cannot imagine that any child ever felt more cherished or more protected than I.

This is a man who sang songs from days past, like "She was Walking through the Park one Day" to me when we drove together in the car, and we drove all over town. If he had to get the car washed or pick up the dry cleaning or go into town to have his shoes shined, he took me with him, and on our journeys he would sing to me or recite poetry like Snowbound with that deep, resonant voice.

He had grown up in this town where his family had deep roots, so people would come up to him and greet him wherever we went. Daddy was jovial with everyone and knew all their names. And always, he included me in their conversations. Sooner or later, most often sooner, he would draw attention to an accomplishment of mine. No person in Norristown was unaware of my report card grades.
The more people seemed impressed, the more he bragged.

I don't think much gave him more pleasure than surprising me with gifts, the more extravagant the better. Our yard was everyone's favorite to play in because we had the school-size, stainless steel swing set complete with monkey bars and see saw. I liked hopscotch, so he put in a concrete deck with a painted-on hopscotch form. When I showed an interest in Ginny dolls, he came home with all the Ginny furniture.

On my birthdays, Daddy bought the most extravagant Hallmark card in the store, the over-sized one that cost a whole dollar. No birthday, Valentines Day or Christmas went unmarked by the delivery of a huge bouquet from Steffen's Floral Shop. On Easter, I received more candy than I could possibly eat and the fanciest Easter outfit sold at Wanamaker's Department Store.

When I showed an interest in reading, I soon had the deluxe version of the World Book Encyclopedia with leather binding.
When I mentioned our science lesson with a microscope was fun, he bought me a real microscope in a fine wooden box.
When I told him I loved the paintings in the Encyclopedia, he took me into Philadelphia to tour the Art Museum.

Nothing, of course, showed me his devotion and protection more than his response to my mother's death at the end of second grade. He found a live-in housekeeper and made the best home he could for me in an age before Mister Mom was a concept. We became even closer friends and constant companions. Every dinner was a time for the two of us to exchange endless stories of our day's activities. The summer after Mommy died, he took off three weeks from work, something he never did, to take me on the vacation of a lifetime to California.

And so, you are probably asking, what lesson is it this heroic figure of a man taught you? What inspiring piece of wisdom did he impart while being the practically perfect father? And this is where the story takes its turn.

The lesson, which took place over several years, began the day before I started junior high. On this day, my father took me aside to explain to me how school would be different now that I was going to be bused to Norristown from our all-white suburb. He explained how I should be on the lookout for Negro children who would undoubtedly accost me in the hallways to shake me down for my lunch money.
You have to be vigilant, Daddy warned.

You may have guessed, I was not accosted. Over the next few weeks I made friends with many new kids from town, and some of them were Negroes (the term in polite use in 1963).
Nothing my father had told me about them proved true. For the first time, I saw Daddy's fallibility. That same year Richie Allen, a Negro player for the Phillies, won rookie of the year in an exciting, winning season. I rooted him on while my father only scowled at the television and muttered about him under his breath.

As I started to doubt my father's judgment about things close to home and we started to argue for the first time in my life, the television news began covering more and more of the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a name uttered in our house without a fight ensuing.
The resonant voice that sang to me and recited warm poetry to me turned venomous when he spit out remarks about King and freedom marchers.

As my teenage years progressed, Vietnam became an issue. Again, I found my judgments did not match my father's. For a while, we argued as often as we swapped friendly stories.
There were still many cherished times when political and social topics got shoved aside, and I adored Daddy in all those moments when we drove to Longwood Gardens or the Atlantic City boardwalk and left real-world issues behind.

However, my father was no longer a slayer of dragons. He could not be my hero when I heard him say vile and vulgar things about people I admired. Slowly, I came to the understanding that nobody, not even Daddy, was perfect, beyond reproach, to be counted on in all things, to be idolized in some unrealistic fashion.

Gradually, I matured into an understanding that I would never change my father's mind. I might be the captain of my high school's debating team and an editorial writer for the school paper, but I was not going to persuade him to soften his views. I would always be a protester and rebel, one who fights city hall, but arguing with him served no purpose. With him, I learned to hold my tongue, count to ten, breathe deeply, and let the moment pass.

In college I became the only white girl in Smith's Afro-American Studies department as I took a double major in that field and sociology. My experiences with my father and my experiences in life had taught me I wanted to study our society from the perspective of the outsider. I could have told him of this choice in a way that alienated him and gave way to heated fights, but I did not.

My father learned I had a double major when he came to my graduation ceremony. There, I knew, he would be so caught up in pride at my achievements, summa cum laude recognition with highest departmental honors, that he would barely notice what department that was. I had not chosen this major to throw anything in his face. It was not an act of defiance. I had chosen it because it meant something to me, something a bit deeper than it might have because I knew firsthand the horrors of racism.

I learned that even the kindest and most generous of parents can be racist or have some other less than attractive trait because human beings are complex creatures.
My father taught me that evils can seep into the best people when they are brought up in a society where everything around them reinforces a wrong belief. Daddy was born in 1909 at a time when blacks were still lynched, still excluded, still vilified at the family dinner table.
How many people had etched his racism into him? This man, a great provider, a lover of music and literature, a gentle and generous father who had the ability to make me feel like the most important person on the face of the earth, had seared within his soul a hatred of millions of people.

So from my father, in my childhood, I learned one of the most important lessons of my life. People are not one-dimensional; nobody, no matter how good, is without some flaw. To expect otherwise is to set oneself up for disillusionment. I have never in my adult life expected the perfection from anyone that I believed my father had until I was twelve. And conversely, I learned that nobody is pure evil. The kindest among us can have dark impulses, and the darkest among us will have some sparks of good.


I do not expect everyone who hears of Daddy's racism to be so quick as I to forgive, for I was not on the receiving end of his hatred. If you fault me for not continuing to argue with him, I do understand. For with this one man, I did not stand up for my principles, and you may be one of the people I was not standing up for. But this man held me in the embrace of his love and made me know until his dying day that he would take a bullet for me without one second's hesitation. He was the very best Daddy he knew how to be.
And so I can freely admit I loved a racist with all my heart, but with the rest of my life I have fought to destroy every racist belief he ever spouted. The lessons hardest learned in life are the ones that truly determine who we are.