Who I Wish My Grandfather Was

Last night I went to a beautiful wedding with dark skies. The service was held outside, and though it rained the better park of the day, the rain stopped for the ceremony and the reception. It was small and wet and green and white; I envy them, how classy the whole set up was.

Filing into the rows of white wooden chairs on the lawn of a dollhouse bed and breakfast, I saw a man wearing a white linen suit and a straw hat. He had a full beard of clipped white hairs and big, sturdy rimmed glasses. He looked like he came with the place. In fact, the people I had come with all noticed him too, and he quickly drew comparisons to John Hammond, Colonel Sanders, and a plantation owner employing sharecroppers.

The man who conducted the wedding spoke quite softly, so I didn't as much listen to him as I stared at this elegant man in the white linen suit. He did not look like either the bride or the groom. He had to be crashing the wedding - and yet, when someone who looks like him crashes your wedding, you invite him inside and give him many bronze tripods (that's what the Greeks did, anyway).

During the reception (the wedding was a success, by the way), he was the first one on the dance floor, and the only one for a few songs. He would pull a random woman from her circle of friends and spin her around, like he was teaching her how to swing without using words. Each song he would pull another girl out, and it thus it occurred to me that he was a professional party starter. He was hired to attend, simply because he looked awesome and he could show the young people a thing or two about fun.

At the end of the reception, the bride's family all produced instruments and got on stage to play a special song for her and the groom to dance to. The linen man took the stage with a steel guitar. He laid the guitar down horizontally, and picked it slowly with individual, deliberate fingers. He was the epitome of cool.

Afterwards, they introduced each band member, and he was introduced - and I am not lying - as Jim Crow. If you recall correctly, Jim Crow was the name applied to the laws restricting the rights of African Americans, the legislation that delivered the term, "separate but equal." And here was Jim Crow in the flesh, who was probably wearing one of fifteen of his white linen suits, the others he wears while he sits on his screened in porch on the family farm in Louisiana, while being served mimosas by his house servants.