In that regard, Daddy was like most white liberals of his generation. His family background did, in fact, make him unusually receptive to certain aspects of the African American freedom struggle; to the redemptive rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr., for example. His independent cast of mind allowed him to defy conventional wisdoms of various kinds, and he admired, if he did not always emulate, iconoclastic Southerners like Thad Stem and Charlotte Hawkins Brown who chopped with a big ax and cut their own path. He probably had enough Christian millennialism in him to imagine a whole new social order, though his theologically conservative view of human nature made him doubt that one was on the way. Daddy was a Methodist preacher first and foremost, tending to the living and burying the dead, and he saw his civil rights duties as a matter of persuading the fearful folks in the pew to accept all human beings as children of God and equal in His eyes. But even if Daddy had not been a preacher above all else, he was not hard-edged enough to make sense to someone like Eddie McCoy.Where Eddie McCoy simply demanded respect—and back in 1970, at least, really saw little reason to talk to white people at all—Daddy wanted a new heaven and a new earth, where the lion would lie down with the lamb.
What do You think about Blood Done Sign My Name (2009)?
