ONE JOURNALIST'S BEGINNINGS : Faith, family & race

Commonweal, Dec 21, 2001 by Don Wycliff

I can as easily imagine myself not Catholic as I can imagine myself not black. Which is to say that I cannot imagine it at all.

I can't imagine not getting up on Sunday morning, going to my parish church, and sharing with my friends and neighbors there in the celebration of the Eucharist.

I can't imagine not having that mystical sense of connectedness with other Catholics all over the globe through the prayers and rituals and tradition and teaching of the church.

I can't imagine not thinking of life in terms of sin and grace and sacrifice and the cross and the resurrection.

I can't imagine not thinking of the pope as the head of my church, the vicar of Christ, the principal teacher and shepherd of the faithful.

Along with my race, my religion has always been a pillar of my identity in this life, in this society. These two facets of my identity account for the way I think about, feel about, and react to almost everything that I experience and observe.

Being Catholic and being black also account for my choice of journalism as a profession, because that dual identity has shaped the way I respond to injustice and it demands that I be involved in social action to right wrongs and redress inequities. Let me try to explain.

There is a room in my parents' house in Texas that several years ago I humorously took to calling "the colored museum." It is a veritable Wycliff family gallery. Photos cover almost every inch of wall space. The oldest picture, taken not many years after the Civil War, is of a woman ancestor three generations before my parents. The newest picture also is of a female, a member of the third generation after my parents.

It says something important about our family that, right along with the graduation photos and baby pictures and wedding and prom poses, my parents have hung the First Communion class pictures of eight of their nine children, me and my seven younger siblings. The only one missing is my older brother Francois's, and that's because, as best I can determine, it never existed. No picture was taken of him and his small class of First Communicants at Saint Joseph the Worker Church in Dayton, Texas.

The presence of those photos bespeaks the importance to my parents of their Catholic faith, and of our education and upbringing in it. But one particular aspect of those pictures makes that point with special force.

Take my picture, for example. It was shot on a sunny spring day in 1955, on the front steps of Holy Family Church in Ashland, Kentucky. There must have been at least fifty children in the class, girls and boys. But scan the faces and you'll see only one dark face among them: mine. The only other dark face in the photo is that of Francois, who, dressed in the cassock and surplice of an acolyte, stands to one side of the pastor, Monsignor Declan Carroll.

The other pictures show pretty much the same racial pattern, although there is at least a sprinkling of other African Americans in the classes of the youngest siblings. But when we washed up in Ashland, on the banks of the Ohio River east of Cincinnati, in autumn 1954, the Wycliffs were the only black family in the parish and we children were the only black kids in the school.

You'd have had a hard time convincing me of it at first, but we were blessed to be there. Holy Family, I later realized, was for us an ark, a refuge. My father, now eighty-three, related to me a few years ago how we came to be on that ark. In one respect the story was very common to black people of that time; in another respect it was utterly uncommon.

Mother and Daddy both were born and raised in Dayton, a farming community in East Texas, almost exactly halfway between Houston and Beaumont on U.S. Highway 90. Daddy was an only child; Mother was the second oldest of ten. Daddy's mother, my grandmother, was a Baptist; his father, my grandfather, was a Catholic. Daddy was raised "basically Baptist" and converted to Catholicism after he and Mother were married. Mother's parents both were Catholics, with roots in those Creole communities of southern Louisiana.

(It has always baffled me to hear and see black Catholics referred to as unusual, because in my earliest years I was surrounded by black Catholics in Dayton and the other nearby communities. One of mother's aunts was a nun in the Sisters of the Holy Family, a black order in New Orleans. We were always ambivalent when Sister Ambrose came for one of her extended visits. On one hand, it meant that Mother would kill the fatted calf and we would eat exceptionally well. On the other, it meant our already overcrowded house would be even more crowded, as we made room for Sister Ambrose and whichever other nun accompanied her.)

My parents, Wilbert and Emily, were married on June 2, 1942 in Bisbee, Arizona, where Daddy, an Army lieutenant, was stationed at the time. Francois was born ten months later in March 1943. Daddy shipped out for Italy with the all-black 92nd Division not long afterwards.

After the war Daddy came home and, using his GI benefit, went part time to the Texas State University for Negroes (now Texas Southern University) in Houston while working at various jobs to support his family. He earned his degree in industrial education in 1950. For his trouble he got a series of jobs that gave him inadequate pay and even less dignity. It would never be otherwise in the segregated South, he realized, and so he resolved to leave.