I am anxiously awaiting the upcoming weekend to celebrate our country’s birthday with my family. The Fourth of July has always been a day of hamburgers and hot dogs, sweet desserts, backyard water sports and a night ended with fireworks.
It has been a tradition since I was a little child. You celebrated America’s birthday with your family, embracing the customs that made you a “red-blooded American.”
I remembered that just yesterday as my family and I gathered around the television set to watch Ole Miss bring home the national championship. Just last year, we rode gravel roads listening to Mississippi State over the airwaves when they achieved that same incredible honor.
And as I paused every now and then to decide what barbecue sauce I would pick up for the Fourth of July, it occurred to me that debating on good food while screaming over a baseball game was just about as American as you could get.
Sometimes I forget that pride when I see and hear the images of our country on the television set. It’s human nature, I suppose, to have conflict and disagreement. But sometimes those divisions, ever present with the new age of social media and constant updates, can be discouraging.
I may not understand at times, but I am still very much proud to be an American. America has provided my ancestors, myself and my family with an opportunity to create a life for ourselves. And it may not always have been a yellow brick road; it may have had some bumps and valleys. But I am still walking along those upward mountains in the hopes that there are smoother paths ahead.
The earliest record of my ancestors includes tickets bought and paid for under the assumption that they would work as sharecroppers to relieve their debt.
They remained sharecroppers most of their lives, picking cotton and planting whatever row crop was in season. Yes, they were poor as dirt and even when the Great Depression hit, they almost had no idea because “they didn’t have nothing anyway.” My grandmother did not finish school because she had to work on the family farm, help raise her younger siblings and take up sewing from a few of the upper-class families who lived in town. My grandfather worked alongside his family in the fields, and his reputation of being the best hog butcher spread over three counties. It was said that he could scrape just about every usable piece of meat from a hog and what was unusable, he made it work into a slab of meat that could be eaten with a cracker. Hog Head cheese was his specialty.
My Paw Paw and Maw Maw had no titles, no awards or trophies and no vast fortune or bags of money. They would come to town once a week with no shoes on in the summer and clothes made out of scrap fabrics in the winter. Some residents in the nicer neighborhoods within town may have turned up their noses at their tattered clothes and dirty feet.
But, when Paw Paw and Maw Maw were children, they were of a proud family who worked for what little they had.
Shotgun shacks were replaced with a bigger homestead after Paw Paw and Maw Maw eventually married and began raising their own family. A newly constructed paper mill provided a job for Paw Paw, but he still worked the land and kept food on his table.
And although our family continued some of the ancestral traditions from generations past, they were always thankful for the opportunity they were provided in America.
The blood, sweat and tears from my Paw Paw and Maw Maw’s generation provided an education for my own mother. It led to my own education. And although I never worked a field in my life, I knew that cool dirt gave my family a living. Perhaps a poor existence but a life.
And because of their hard work and pride in what they did, I have accomplished my own personal goal of becoming a journalist, raising a family and owning a pile of dirt that I can call mine.
That is the story I choose to celebrate on the Fourth of July. Yes, times are uncertain and injustices should be corrected.
But I am still proud to celebrate the fact that I came from a poor, hardworking family who taught me that regardless of what is going on around you, be kind and thankful for what you do have in the midst of a dark time.
Be proud of who you are and what you came from. Eat those hamburgers. Shout at the baseball games. Work for what you own. And raise your family to head over that next mountain, explore the future and stake your claim.
And what could be more American than that?
