_ ~ I
■ 1 ‘—■ -1
The lonely phone kept ringing i
For about four months I called
them, maybe twice a month.
The phone rang, rang, rang.
There’s a bell on their house that
allows them to hear the ring when
they’re outside. I can imagine the
phone’s loll searching for them over
their meager four-acre farm.
Maybe they were in Colorado vis
iting their daughters. They’re both
retired, so a vacation was a real vaca
tion for them. And, of course, they
had no answering machine in that
bucolic place. So, I’d catch them when
I caught them.
I met her four years ago, the sub
ject of an idea for a story when I was
a reporter in Omaha. I wanted to write
about what life was like for black
residents of this state who lived out
side of Omaha, Lincoln and a few of
the other budding urban towns in
Nebraska. Were there any black farm
families in the state? If so; where and
how had they managed?
I called every sparsely populated
county in the state and found one
couple. From the first time I heard her
voice on the phone, something about
it was soothing. We set up a time to
drive out to their small town of 890
people in far-Westem Nebraska and
do the story.
She greeted me as I drove up. A tall
woman: 5 feel 10 inches, 5 feet 11
inches. Broad shoulders, big hands.
Her face was smooth like liquid choco
late.
,They were the lone black family in
town. For two days she told me her life
story. Where they came from. Why
they came. About how she and her
husband raised their children in a
cramped white house next to the rail
road tracks in town and when they
could afford it, they moved out to
their farm.
She tended chores while we talked.
A strong woman. In each hand, she
lugged 10-gallon buckets of water
and feed to her animals. She mixed
concrete to rebuild the feeble founda
tion around their house. She split
wood. And she wasn’t afraid to clob
ber a 400-pound hog if it got loo sassy.
I marvelled at her and her life.
Before then, my closest encounter
with rural life came from watching
TV. Even worse, growing up in
Omaha, I never assumed black folk
lived anywhere in Nebraska west of
the city’s instinctive class and color
dividing line — 72nd Street.
But this couple was refreshing proof
that they do and have. They wcrercal
lifeblack farmers,not city folk. Hence,
their perspective on life was not
squeezed within the narrow param
eters of urban strife. Compared to me
and so many other black folk in
America’s cities, they seemed free.
Blissful with the secret that they pos
sessed the simple meaning of what
life should and could be.
I jolted down all this information
for my story, checked out of my mo
tel, and drove back to Omaha; all the
lime though knowing I’d sec her again.
Two months later, I called them
and asked if I could come back out.
Not to do a story. Just to visit.
“Come right ahead,” she said. “I’ll
even make you a farm-cooked, farm
raised dinner. Oh, and can you bring
me some chiulins from Omaha. The
stores out here don’t sell them.”
That next morning, I packed up my
little Honda, chiulins and all, and set
out on my five-hour drive. After din
ner, the three of us sat around a wood
burning stove in the living room talk
ing about the virtues of country life
vs. the vices of city life. Eventually
the embers faded, and it was time for
bed.
Natural silence and the blackness
of night were remembered most be
fore sleep. In the morning, we ate
fresh eggs and bacon plucked from
their own chickens and hogs.
I repeated that trip about five times
since the first lime I was there, my last
trip being last March.
Last September, I planned another
trip to see them. I called. No answer.
Over semester break I was near their
town and called again. No answer.
They had to be in Denver, I thought.
Finally, two weeks ago I called and
someone picked up their phone. It was
her husband.
“Hi,” I said, subtly relieved. “I’ve
been trying to reach you for months.”
As I suspected, they had been back
and forth to Denver.
“When did you get back?”
A couple of days ago, he said. We
talked briefly about the trip.
“Where’s (your wife)?”
He hesitated.
“She passed away, Kirby. I lost her
to cancer. She got sick one day all of
a sudden. Had to take her to a hospital
in Denver. She was there for about
two months. She died in October on
her 61st birthday.”
I was silent for a moment. Eyes
wet. My heart hollow. I called for her
for months. I even wrote. She was so
resilient and alive, I never assumed
death.
In my silence — although it’s fu
tile to do so— I questioned her death,
especially. Why her? Why now? At
the same lime, I pondered my exist- -
ence.
She was life, to me, in its purest
human form. So different than mostof
us. Warm, kind. Natural like the plot
of land they farmed. Still, the empty
reality islhat death is cruelly indiffer
ent and — depending how close it
stalks near our own lives— has a stark
way of reducing thoscof us left living.
Reminding us that life is death.
Her husband’s voice reached
through the phone’s muffled silence
and said she asked about me when she
was sick. Instantly, a helpless guilt
rang in my mind like the lonely phone
in their home I called so many times.
As the phone rang, I thought, she
was dying and I never knew. 1 called
and called, even as the town mourned
at tier funeral, all the lime hoping
she’d answer.
Moss is a graduate student in anthropol
ogy and a Daily Nebraskan columnist.
Church grows silent with time
Noticeably absent from the dis
cussion of the Lincoln chap
ter of the Boston Church of
Christ, associated with Campus Ad
vance, is the voice of the orthodox
church community.
False churches arc nothing new;
they come and go like misguided
televangelists.
Interesting in the eases of both
televangelists and false churches is
that the orthodox church is usually the
last to comment, though ostensibly it
has the most at stake.
In times past, the church took care
to protect the public from false
churches. Deformed religion can de
form humans. Invoking church disci
pline, then, is more than just the au
thoritarian belligerence it is so often
caricatured as; it is serious, high-stakes
business. It is also thorny work. The
church can undoubtedly get it wrong
in some eases.
Ignoring the countless deaths at
the hands of the modern state’s de
mand for political allegiance, critics
of the church have milked the so
called Dark Ages for all the anti
church propaganda they arc worth.
The textbook view of ihc medieval
church is rarely more than a
iriumphalislic sneer at the church’s
intolerance,citing the Inquisition, the
Crusades and the religious wars.
However, in a recent essay, Ameri
can Enterprise Fellow Derek Cross
has re-examined the Catholic
Church’s historical resistance to the
modem understanding of religious
toleration. Modern philosophers
feared the church would be a major
competitor to the state’s demand for
allegiance.
In light of the virulence of their
contempt for the church, Cross ar
gucs, Rome’s resistance to simply
embrace the Enlightenment’s under
standing of tolerance, as many Protes
tant sects did, was simply a survival
tactic.
An early goal of Enlightenment
political philosophy was the sublima
tion of religious belief to the powerof
the slate. A vibrantChristianily threat
ened social cohesion; it asserted Chris
tians have a duly to God and the
church that existed prior to their po
litical duties to the slate.
The two other major modem po
litical movements, Marxism and Fas
cism, attempted to undermine reli
gious belief by expanding the stale
into the religious spheres of the cul
ture, replacing them with a quasi
religious devotion to the state, or an
opaque nationalism. In these systems,
positive force was employed to co
erce personal submission to the mate
rial and rational goals of the state.
Liberalism, however, implemented
a different strategy. Eighteenth-cen
tury philosopher Baruch Spinoza ar
gued that the state need not use force
to implement its goal of eclipsing
religion, but should simply use reli
gion itself to eliminate religion.
By emphasizing religious tolera
tion as a political virtue, Cross writes:
“Spinoza predicted that this tolera
tion of all religious beliefs will lead
eventually to the dilution of religion.
An ecumenism of indifference is the
product, and religion is effectively
defanged thereby. Freedom of reli
gion enjoined by the sovereign lends
him a greater authority over religion
than he could ever hope to gain by
attempting direct control.”
In opposition to the modem phi
losophers’ goal of diluting religious
belief, Rome’s hesitancy to promote
absolute religious toleration is not as
outrageous as it may first seem. To
adopt the modem philosophers’ un
derstanding of religious liberty would
be to deny God’s dominion over the
political sphere; each citizen would
stand defenseless, naked in the face of
the unrestrained will of the state.
Spinoza and his counterparts did
notexpcclChristianily to survive into
the so-called Agcof Reason. Remark
ably, the church resisted modernist
and is living to watch the death of its
foe.
Modernity succeeded in stripping
the church of much of the force of its
public condemnation of groups like
the Boston Church. Ironically, the
costs of their success in this one area
may far outweigh any legitimate gripes
they had with Rome.
When answered only by empty
clamors for toleration, deforming her
esies are free to run amok. For aca
demics who sneer at the the Middle
Ages, this lack of toleration may seem
a small matter. I suspect that those
with relatives in the Boston Church
— those who arc paying the costs of
their ecumenism — might beg, liter
ally, to differ.
Young Is a first-year law student and a
Daily Nebraskan columnist.
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_ 476-9466 ^ ^ Expire^s^a
s
1/14/93 - 2/14/93
GM Underwriters' Student Insurance policy for
Spring/Summer Semesters starts January 14, 1993.
Policy brochures are available by mail or at UHC Busi
ness Office. The insurance works in conjunction with
your Health Center fees, so it is important to make
sure you have paid these fees as well as your insur
ance premium.
I Premiums are- I Springs Summer
rrcimums are. I 1/14/93 - 8/24/93
I Student Only Q $238.00
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[jEachAdditiaTa^Child^__^^_Di<i_$29L00^
This is the only option open at this time. Summer
session students may take advantage of a summer
policy starting 5/24/93. All policies will expire 8/24/
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Office or mailed directly to the company. NO CASH
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'
Portrayed By Darryl Van Leer
:
In an
uncompromising
world emerges an
uncompromising
m _£
"Rated: Malcolm X"
is the
unadulterated
dramatization
of the life of the
(g^overs^ ||»-? |
Malcolm X.
tSk
January 25,1993
7:00 p.m.
Nebraska Union Centennial Room
Admission: UNL Students - Free
w/lD, Public - $3
Presented By University Program Council
For more information call 472*8146 Event Hotline- 472-8150
