Uncle Jack

"I sang Dixie, as he died.
The people just walked on by, as I cried."
Dwight Yoakam

Stonewall Jackson Clifton was buried today in Sylacauga. He was my daddy's last remaining brother, out of the original family of eleven brothers and sisters. While many of his friends knew him as "Stoney", he was always Uncle Jack to me.

He was thirteen years older than my dad, so I assume they weren't as close as brothers who are nearer in age. I don't remember our families spending much time together other than the requisite family reunions, weddings, funerals, and similar occasions in which extended families are obliged to congregate. But my mom tells me that he and his widow, Nell, were always very kind to them in the old days, especially when they were a newly married couple. That alone is good enough for me to hold him in high regard.

Like his namesake, Uncle Jack was in many ways a relic of days gone by. His racial views were distinctly "Old South." He once told me that unions, the government, and blacks were ruining the country. Political correctness was not a concept he practiced. Like a lot of old folks, he said what was on his mind, and didn't much care what anyone else thought about his viewpoint.

While I certainly don't condone or excuse his racial views, neither will I judge him for them. Like I said, he was from another time. It is easy to pass judgment on someone without a common experience. It is what Harper Lee described as "not judging a man before you walk a mile in his shoes" in To Kill a Mockingbird. Such judgment, a kind of generalized dismissal, is the bad seed from which the vine of racism grows.

It is also a mistake to overlook good qualities in a person based on one particularly offensive flaw.

Uncle Jack grew up in the culture of the mill village in Sylacauga. It was a hard-scrabble life of hard work and little money. It was a way of life many of us cannot fathom today, though it was only a generation ago. A life of walking everywhere you went because you had no other means of transportation (my dad, bleeding badly, was once carried across town to the hospital on one of his brother's shoulders, because there was no other way to get him there). A life of working when you were sick, because you knew there were three others to take your job if you laid out. And for this particular family, even a time when they buried their oldest brother at a young age, his throat cut in a fight that involved moonshine whiskey and a woman.

Like a lot of other southern boys, Uncle Jack did his time defending his country against the Germans and Japanese. And like most, he came back home, picked up his tools and went to work like nothing had ever happened.

His was a life that helped build the country that we enjoy and often take for granted today. He raised a family, to which he was unquestionably devoted. Worked and saved, living what used to be the "American Dream"--making life better for your children and grandchildren than it was for you.

He spent the last few months in a hospital and a veterans home in Alexander City. It was not a dignified end to a long life. His prolonged illness accentuated his negative outlook, a condition I believe Waylon Jennings described in a song as feeling "lonesome, ornery, and mean." He didn't have a lot of visitors, and those who did visit were warned that his personality could be "abrasive". Church folks, especially, were told that they might rather pray for him than visit.

I find it ironic that a man who characterized and dismissed an entire group of people based on their skin color wound up being cared for by many nurses of that race in his last days. Perhaps he was being given an opportunity to soften his heart, to smooth off the jagged edges before eternity. I don't know. But I have read of another man in the Bible who Jesus called "Stoney" who initially had similar prejudices. I think things worked out pretty well for that fellow in the end.

Rest in peace, Uncle Jack.