I have been meaning to write about this experience for months, but the recent uproar over the Jena Six, including the discussion over at the MotherBlog, has moved it to the top of the pile.
Background: I am writing from the perspective of a prosperous middle class white, who grew up in an entirely white town in an almost entirely white county in a very white state indeed, who ended up as an adult in Prince George's County Maryland, the most affluent majority black county in the United States. If the American Dream has been realized by blacks anywhere in the world, it has been here in PG. What I have learned here is that white guilt fatigue over the continuing racial tension in this country is at the same time tempting and dangerous. Blacks in PG are better off than blacks anywhere else in the world. Sometimes they complain about things that make white folks' eyes roll. But to assume that – to take just one example -- just because the county council was crying racial foul because Nordstrom's won't put a store in PG, that there are no longer serious race issues in the US -- is to be very foolish and very clueless indeed.
My family are liturgical tourists. We take our obligation to assist at Sunday and Holy Day Masses very seriously. We also take our weekends very lightly. There are so many delightful day trips in this part of the country that we are seldom in our home parish, and so we have become experts at finding Catholic churches in out-of-the-way places -- the farther out of the way the better -- and we are accustomed to being strangers at Masses where everyone else has known each other for years. Even given that, our experience at St. Peter Claver Church, of Saint Inigoes MD, was eye-opening and a little unnerving.
In most of the US, Catholicism is a white religion. This is less true in large cities, of course, and there are many Asian parishes on the west coast. But it is still true that in most Catholic parishes, there will be at most a sprinkling of blacks, and they are often foreign born. This is not true in Maryland. Unlike the rest of the south, there were significant numbers of slave-owning Catholics in Maryland, and their slaves adopted their form of Christianity. After the Civil War, blacks and whites continued worshipping in the same parishes, and some parishes are remarkably diverse today as a result, and both black and white families can point to three or four generations in the cemetery. Some are not, and it's worth knowing why.
Preparing for a day at Point Lookout, we scoped out a few churches in southern St. Mary's County that had late afternoon Masses, and at random chose St. Peter Claver. We were early, and the first people in the church. As more and more people filed in, we were even more obviously strangers than usual – we were the only whites in the place. But people smiled and nodded to us, and since Mass is the same everywhere, we didn't feel out of place. Much. There were a few parish peculiarities, but we were guided through them. At the Our Father, everyone filed out of the pews, stood in the center aisle, and joined hands in a circle. So we did too, even though I'm the sort of person who can get sniffy about taking such liberties with the GIRM. Afterwards, many people came up to ask us where we were from, to thank us for stopping by their church, and I was left with the impression that it was a friendly and open, if very small, community. But I was puzzled about the marked segregation of the congregation. That is, until I chatted with the priest on the front steps.
St. Peter Claver is a very small parish, and does not get its own priest. Their priest is also the chaplain at St. Mary's College, and the pastor of St. Cecilia in St. Mary City. He is white. And he told me this story.
About 100 years ago, at the very beginning of the 20th century, there was only one Catholic church in that part of the county: St. Michael. St. Michael still exists, and it is entirely white. The ancestors of all the parishioners of St. Peter Claver belonged to St. Michael, and many of them were former slaves and their children and grandchildren – people who had been the chattel property of the white families of St. Michael's less than fifty years before.
St. Michael got a new pastor at the time this story begins, and he took an interest in the welfare of the black families. In particular, he arranged for a black choir to sing at a Christmas service. At the next service the organist, a white woman, refused to play. She did not want to touch the keyboard that had been touched by a black.
This sounds monumentally insulting to us. It was monumentally insulting. But how many insults were the blacks of southern Maryland -- the cradle of Lincoln's assassins -- accustomed to absorb in 1900? This insult too might have been shaken off, except the priest sided with the blacks. They left, en masse, and began celebrating Mass in some private place. St. Michael eventually assigned a new priest, and after some time the blacks of St. Peter Claver were able to build their own church. And so it remains to this day. There are no blacks at St. Michael. There are no whites at St. Peter Claver.
When Tom van Dyke mentioned the detail of the white barbershop in Jena that wouldn't cut blacks' hair, I thought of this story. And I'd like to stress that I have never been able to confirm from another source that it is true. But obviously both the blacks and whites of these two parishes think it is true. Something happened there that was gathered up into oral history and has now become local legend. It was the blacks of St. Peter Claver that told this story to the young white priest, and he obviously believes it to be true.
When I was told this story, I was completely and utterly flabbergasted. I had thought, living here among the successful professional African-Americans of PG, that I had overcome my childhood discomfort and my insulated, benign Midwestern bigotry and finally knew what it was to be colorblind. I was proud of myself for not being nervous when I went in a liquor store and was the only white on the premises. Hell, I thought I knew what my black neighbors' lives were really like. Now there's clueless for you.