EPIPHANY OF THE DAY

BACK DOORS

It was the evening watch and I had only been sailor in the United States Navy for a few months. It was a small but important base located on a former hotel complex. The fleet admiral housed there. I served with a young Ensign on quarterdeck duty in what once been the hotel lobby. My job was to assist and run errands. That’s when it happened.

A message came in for the Admiral. The ensign took it, folded it into an envelope, wrote the proper note, and told me to take it to the admiral’s quarters.

I did. Right up to the door I went and knocked on the door respectfully. A steward answered and I delivered my assignment.

He took it, looked at me as if I had just crawled from under a kitchen cabinet and said, “In the future, you should use the back door.”

No big deal but I took my time walking back to headquarters thinking. I was a grown man, a white one from a middle-class family. In my entire life, I had never been told to go to the back door of any home.

No big deal, but it made me feel small and think of people I had known, including shipmates, whose parents and grandparents had been told this for their entire lives.

I guess that’s why I don’t hold the town of Savanah, Georgia with such religious ecstasy as my friends and colleagues do.

Oh, I think it must be quite a beautiful place in its central core. I can see why some people make their friends and families travel there for a wedding. It must contain a plethora of significant homes.

But I would always wonder, as I worshipped, if the slaves who made the bricks, produced the lumber for those homes, and built them for whatever pay their owner saw fit had ever been allowed, socially, to use the front doors.