Moral Courage

by Mona Shaw

“There’s more than ten thousand dollars in receipts in the cigar box, “my uncle said.

It was March, 1972, and my grandfather had died the month before. I was staying with my grandmother while I was home on spring break from the University of Iowa. She sat in a wooden rocking chair that had once been varnished dark walnut, but the only way you’d know that was by the streaks of shiny brown on the few places where life hadn't stripped the chair to a grayed, bare pine. I sat on the green sofa-bed, its worn spots covered by a tan wool blanket and matching hand towels over its arms.  One of her hands waltzed lightly over my grandfather’s pipe stand and tobacco bowl on the end table next to her as she spoke.

“Jake didn't dun folks.”  My uncle had anticipated her response and began his rehearsed counter before she finished speaking.

“I know, but you need the money, and they owe it.  And you could help Mona Lynne go back to that college.”  He knew he could tempt her more by what she could do for me than for herself.

“I can’t think of anything we can’t do without today,” she said.

“Okay,” he said, “You're right.  I won’t dun anybody.  But most of ‘em were at Daddy's  funeral and almost everyone asked me to call ‘em and tell ‘em what they owe.  And, I said I would.  Shouldn't I do that since they asked?”

“Maybe so,” she said after a long pause, “but not today.  Can’t it wait till Mon’Lynne goes back to Iowa City next week?”

“Oh, yeah, don’t know why not.  I’ll come back next week then.”

“Bamp,” as his grandchildren called him, had been a popular auto mechanic.  If he had the part or could afford to buy the part himself, he never turned anyone away who couldn't afford a car repair.  He’d tell them to write what they owed on a slip of paper and put it in a cigar box on a bench in the back of his garage.  He never looked in the box, never knew what anyone owed him, and never knew when he repaired someone’s car if there was already a slip in the cigar box or not.  When someone came to pay him, he’d direct them to the cigar box, and accept whatever cash he was handed and put it into another cigar box he kept for cash.  The person either took the slip back or edited the slip to indicate the amount still owed.  He believed it was wrong, in any way, to remind his customers of their debt.

“It’s painful to not be able to pay your bills,” he’d explain.  “I’m not gonna pile on any family’s pain by rubbin' their nose in hard luck.”  The slips weren't for his records.  They were for the convenience of his customers who’d asked him for some way to remind them what they owed.  He never looked at the slips.  Never.  Moreover, he made it very clear that he would consider it mean and wrong for anyone else to look at them either.  He was so clear, that until he died, none of us ever did. 

Some of his customers were African Americans, though no one called them that then.  This was how he met his best friend, a Black man with the same name as his, Jake Nelson.  Gram often said that if they hadn't solved the world’s problems it wasn't because they hadn't put the time into it.  A school teacher complimented Bamp once for being willing to do business with the “coloreds” to which he replied, “Don’t take offense, but I’d just as soon not get a pat on the back for not being an asshole.” 

I was surprised my grandmother relented so easily.  I guessed that if my uncle hadn't made the promise at the funeral, she might not have. 

I was secretly glad.  I looked around the tiny living room or the “front” room as she called it.  There wasn't a stick of furniture that wasn't older than I, and it was probably second-hand when it was purchased.  Besides the couch and the rocking chair, there were a tattered vinyl recliner, a coffee table pocked with innumerable and concentric white rings, a bookcase filled with 1940s encyclopedias used by mother and uncles while they were in school, and an Emerson television they’d bought in 1952.  The floor was a scuffed, flowered linoleum.  The places worn to the cement beneath it were mostly covered by rag rugs that were made by hand.  There were often more visitors in their home than the furniture could sit.  When this happened, chairs were brought in from the kitchen or the garage.  When these ran out, children would sit on laps, or folks would sit on the rugs on the floor.

There was rarely an evening when the front room wasn't filled to capacity.  Folks dropped by most often unannounced.  Gram would make strong coffee or iced tea and put out a plate of Vista Pak sandwich cookies or those almond ones shaped like windmills.  Bamp would sit in the rocking chair and tell stories while he smoked his pipe.  The evening ended when the story and his pipe tobacco ended at the same time.  He would repack the pipe if he was in the middle of a story.  If the story ended while his pipe still held any tobacco, he would begin a new story.  The ritual took hours, and few held on to the bitter end.  Those who had to get home would often come back the next night and request to hear one story or another early in the evening in order to learn how it ended.

The kitchen was far less elegant.  A tiny red and white table on rusting chrome legs and three red chairs were along the longer wall; a four-burner gas stove filled the short wall at the end of the room.  On the other long wall was a sink and a refrigerator they had bought used in 1942.  It had been manufactured sometime in the late 1930s and had the motor on the top.  The refrigerator still ran just fine, a fact that Bamp reported loudly anytime it was hinted that it might be time to replace it.

Everything in the tiny cottage attached to the large four-bay mechanic’s garage had a matte patina from the abrasion of coal dust.  The scent of burning coal was omnipresent and could be smelled even in the summer.  It is like no other scent, dry and crisp, with a warm, bitter hint.  My nostrils still stretch when I think of it, and my throat dehydrates from the memory of its swab. 

Maybe we didn't need anything today, but there were so many things I thought she had a right to have.  A new refrigerator, a new couch, maybe even a wall-to-wall carpet or a new winter coat.  Or a t-bone dinner at a restaurant or a new set of dishes.  She was living on $300/month Social Security, and she was only 58 and had a pace-maker.  Maybe it was enough now, but who knew what she might need and when?  I was secretly glad she was going to have any amount of that money my uncle could collect.

“Are you chilly, Mon’Lynne?” my grandmother asked a few hours after my uncle’s visit.

“Not really, Gram.” I said.  I was a little chilly, but not nearly enough to want to stoke up the furnace. “I can put on a sweater.  Want me to grab yours?”

“Well, I’m chilly.” She said. “Help me fix a fire.”

We trudged to the garage, and Gram pulled the wrapped wire handle to the door of the furnace, and I slid in a shovel of coal.

“I think that’s enough to take the chill off for tonight,” she said and tore strips of newspapers and tossed them on top. “Oh, we’re gonna need more kindlin' I think.”

I didn't think we did, but I reached for another newspaper just the same.

“Let’s not waste those,” she said. “What else we could we use?” 

She looked dead, straight into my eyes without blinking.  She looked beyond my eyes, in truth, to a place where she held a singular prerogative to communicate inside my core.  And, so I knew what she meant.  I started to ask, “Are you sure, Gram?” but she spoke before I could.

“Just go get ‘em.”

She’d already lit the fire before I returned with the dogged-ear cigar box, the dignified Indian on its lid burnished to near imperceptibility years ago.

“Open it,” she whispered the order.

I did, and she lifted out a handful of slips and let them fall from her open, out-stretched hand onto the blaze.

“Now it’s your turn.”

I looked into the box and felt a sense of awe and holiness as if it were the Ark of the Covenant, a metaphor that over the years has become less and less of an exaggeration.  It held more slips than were physically possible, literally hundreds of them, and their volume ballooned exponentially far, far larger than the size of the box once the lid was lifted.  The slips seemed to glow. They were all sizes and colors, some folded, some flat, some crinkled, some torn.  Neat handwriting, illegible scrawls, some with dates and amounts crossed off, some with lines and sums of columns.  Some with words or messages I didn't have time to read nor understand.

“Don’t look at them,” she said.  “Just turn the box over and let 'em land.”

We didn't speak.  We didn't touch.  We didn't weep.  We didn't laugh.  We just stood there shoulder-to-shoulder and watched them burn. 

As they curled and dissolved, I began to feel warm, but there was something strange about it, and I began to wonder about that.  Then, I realized the warmth was coming from the inside out, toward the fire and not from the fire.  I felt something I’d never felt before or at least not that way or to that extent.  I found myself looking for a word for the feeling.  I still look for that word.  The only word that came to me then is still the one that comes closest today.  I felt victorious. I felt calmly, solidly, victorious and utterly secure.

I understood things in that moment that I would forget again and again, however relentlessly life would remind me.  Each ember, each crackle, sparked a new understanding.  I understood how to have power over lack and status and greed.  I understood I simply needed to not believe in them.  I understood what Bamp meant when he told me before he died how life had given him more than anyone had ever wanted.  He had said that because it was absolutely true.  He died with all the end results of all the things everyone does to get what he had.  I understood why he said you were better off dying from starvation sharing your last crust of bread than dying with a full belly if someone else was hungry.  I understood why he was always kidding me to make sure I didn’t let all that book-learnin’ keep me from having good sense.  I understood what I really wanted to learn, what I really wanted to know.  I understood the difference between investing in what I wanted instead of ways to get what I wanted.  I understood how much we squander when we exchange our time here on Earth for the latter.  I understood that human pain decreases as sharing and decency become routine.

His cigar box was a nesting place of everything we need to end preventable human suffering.  Each slip was a testament to compassion and a willingness to sacrifice to make things better for others.  Each slip proved the senselessness of wealth and status in all that really matters.  Each slip eschewed praise or recognition for good deeds.  Each slip believed that everyone had the courage and the wit to do the right thing.  Each slip believed we could and would do it.  His cigar box was moral courage. 

My grandmother knew this too.  In some ways even more than he did, I think.  She poured me a cold glass of milk and gave me a couple of cookies once we were back inside.

“Those are the best cookies you've ever eaten, ain't they?”

“Yeah,” I said not all that surprised that she knew what I was thinking, “They really are.”

“You’ll sleep good tonight,” she smiled.

And, of course, I did.

Ending preventable human suffering is utterly possible.  It’s rather silly, if not an outright lie, to claim that it’s not.  We only need to decide we’d rather end suffering than acquire material things or feel superior and accomplished via some dim notion of success.  We simply need moral courage. 

Moral courage isn't a demonstration of sainthood by a marginalized avatar before a throng to later become martyred then canonized or bestowed some other secular equivalent.  It is the ordinary person whose name you will never know, who--past food, shelter, and treatment for illness or injury--couldn't care less about what one has; and yet is very concerned with what one can give.  The world is changed easily when a collective of such souls choose, despite the world’s contradictions, each day, no matter what, to give more, care more, speak out more, sacrifice more, and encourage others to do the same.

I've forgotten this lesson and lost my way many times.  I expect I will again.  I’m flawed.  I’ll need the rest of this life to approach understanding and grace.  But,  when I forget now and then or forget altogether,  my foolishness won't shrink its truth.  The truth of it will always remain available for those with a heart that seeks change.