Story time. Peace to Michael Harriot.

So, as it would go, Dad wanted a new car. Mom kinda didn’t, but was willing to go along with it. 

Our family history with cars is rife with great memories. My mother had a cream VW Bug, which was the earliest car I remember. Dad had a muted-tone lime green Ford Torino, which was huge, and definitely not the “muscle car” Wikipedia says it was. Mom’s Toyota Corolla got stolen twice. and Dad bought himself a midlife crisis car in the Honda Prelude.

This is not a story about cars, so let me refocus.

Fast forward to my folks living their retired life and Dad, having been through the midlife crisis with the Prelude, was now wanting to lean into his old man age. He wanted a Caddy or an Oldsmobile, Mom said. A big-ass boat to maneuver the country roads, a collection of gleaming paint and chrome and leather pulling into the church parking lot or WalMart or making the sojourn to Jackson about an hour or so away.

Mom didn’t see the need for it; their Toyota Avalon did the job in getting them around and whatnot, albeit not in the style Dad might have wanted. But he was old and felt he deserved some shit that he wanted, so Mom demurred.

So Dad went car shopping, the story goes. And he went up the interstate to the car dealerships along I-55, the major highway that connects Chicago and New Orleans. He spent a couple of days going up and down that corridor, between home and Jackson, to the dealerships that might have had his preferred chariot in stock for a fair price.

He came home one day, excited. He’d found a car! Mom doesn’t remember what it was or the specifics of it, only that he’d found his dream car at some lot. He described the car with loving adjectives: – comfortable, luxurious, stately – and she listened.  Only thing was that he wanted Mom’s okay, having learned his lesson. Because earlier in my life, Dad bought a van without telling Mom. It was a good purchase, and one we never regretted, but Mom resented Dad buying it and not telling her until he took her to the lot to pick it up.

But there was a detail in all this that he felt he had to tell my mother.

Flying above this car lot were three flags. The United States flag. The flag of the state of Mississippi. And, the Confederate flag.

It was more than enough that the state flag, at that time, featured the Confederate flag IN IT, but the owner found himself the Stars and Bars and flew THAT, too.

Dad was pretty blasé about it. It’s the way they do things, he said. The salesman was nice and treated him well enough. He got great financing.

My mother was born and raised country, and saw and experienced what every Black Mississippian would have growing up in the post-WWII/pre-Civil Rights Movement South. She’d seen her share of rebel flags and knew what they meant, and, as she told me, they didn’t mean anything different 50 years later. 

Dad never got his car; he died not too much later and Mom is still puttering the Avalon down the dusty backroads. 

But the lesson was clear. Don’t buy from people who will take your money, but don’t like you. Whowon’t hire you. Who will do what they can to make you spend your cash, but will talk about the imagined stink of your breath or the invisible stain on your clothes before you get out the door.

Who wouldn’t hire you, who doesn’t see you as an equal in any way, shape, or form.

This is also a post about Target, and any number of companies out there who are extensions of personal values, values that, oddly enough, will devalue you as people, but not as an income source.