Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. day is tomorrow.  Now that our little girl is nine, I am going to start sharing more stories with her about how I was reared.  I was in the fourth grade when they introduced busing, and I remember my homeroom teacher Mrs. Williams emphatically saying, “I AM BLACK!”  She did not like the term “colored” because she said it brought to her mind stripes and polka dots.  Teddy Roosevelt was far ahead of his time when he said, “There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism.”  He went on to say that “it is a matter of the spirit and of the soul.”  Hence, why I have never cared for the term “African-American.”  I had the opportunity to speak with a lovely man recently.  Our fireplace screen has always been flimsy and not closed, and after fourteen years we were able to splurge and get it replaced.  This man has been in the business of doing wonderful custom iron work for over 40 years.  We got to talking and I told him my father was bi-racial.  I saw the disbelief in his eyes.  I do not believe he had any intention of being rude … he was just looking at my strawberry blonde hair and green eyes with doubt.  This incredibly smart, talented, humble man reminded me of my father and I found myself shadowing him like a puppy.  We got around to segregation (he is black) and he mentioned that in Dallas desegregation did not happen until 1967, I believe.  My half Choctaw father was born in 1934 and as a young child he grew up in a small Texas town with a sign that prominently boasted, “The blackest land and the whitest people.”  As a little boy, he had a fishing buddy who was an elderly black man.  Daddy told me when they came home one night there were crosses burning on the old man’s lawn; he said it was the most frightening thing he’d ever seen.  My father fought for the United States in Korea, serving two terms, which is eight years.  My gently bred white mother waited for him, despite pressure to marry “well,” aided by her family’s connections.  I did not know until my father’s funeral when I was 28 and men showed up from all over the country how respected and revered he was.  They said he never lost a man on night patrol, crediting him with saving many of their lives.  My father received a full military burial, as was his right, but in the middle of his 21-gun salute, a hawk circled slowly overhead three times.  I remember the black and white pallbearers all being shocked, but our American Indian friends just stood unmoving, quietly allowing tears to stream down the sides of their cheeks.  When I was a little girl in the 1970’s I would accompany Daddy on Saturdays when he worked painting houses.  I do not exaggerate when I say we got pulled over EVERY SINGLE TIME.  I believe this was in part due to economics (our station wagon was old, had no air-conditioning, and there were paint ladders on the top) and in part due to race (my father had very dark red skin.)  Once a cop thought I might have been kidnapped and I was terrified of being taken away.  Daddy was a staunch Republican, and I am often reticent to try and speak for him when my husband asks a question about how my father might have felt about something.  If I had to liken him to someone, I would say my father was similar to the late Senator John McCain.  Both of them were captured in war, both were Republicans, and both of them clung to certain ideals of what this country should be.  America needs an immediate return to civil discourse as well as actually LISTENING to each another.  I believe our very democracy depends upon it.  We have all been influenced by how we have been viewed and by how we have been treated by others.  My father never let those things define him.  The more I think about it, the more I believe America’s complex, diverse history makes us ALL “colored.”