Growing up as a Southern Baptist Missionary Kid (MK) in Japan in the 1950s and 60s had its advantages. At the top of my list was hearing every kind of music and not growing up in the U.S., which, for me, would have been the Carolinas, where my parents were from.
My musical exposure came from the Far East Network (FEN), the only English-language radio station available. After school, I mostly listened to children’s programs. But on holidays or when I was home sick, I would listen all day to The Polka Party, Honshu Hayride, Hawaii Calls, The Top Twenty, and the Jazz Hour.
I wasn’t crazy about jazz, but listening to it made me feel grown-up. The Jazz Hour was where I first heard John Coltrane, including “Blue Train” and his version of “My Favorite Things.”
He released his classic “A Love Supreme” in 1965, while I was in college in the U.S. Coltrane was always synonymous with “jazz.”
Thanks to the Department of Defense, civilian kids could attend schools on military bases when no other American schools were nearby. I also attended an international school. I never thought about my classmates’ ethnic or national origins, but my parents did.
In eighth grade, I brought a friend home after school. When she left, Mom asked, sternly, “Why did you bring her here?” I didn’t answer, but I never invited her again.
In ninth grade, after seeing me with a Black boy earlier that evening, Dad came into my room and shouted that if anyone ever found out, no one would ever touch me “with a ten-foot pole.” I knew that the “anyone” he was referring to was white boys.
I was stunned and said nothing.
That was on a Friday. On Monday, my older sister sat next to me on the school bus where my friend usually sat and that was the end of our friendship. I figured out how to have other friends without my parents knowing.
After retiring from teaching overseas, I contacted these four classmates, now of retirement age and began a sort of apology tour. They all remembered what happened and for the first time I realized I was the one who had hurt them.
They had never met my parents. I was the one who had made it clear that we could not see each other anymore.
I started work on a memoir because I needed to figure out why my parents had brought their racist views to a country seven thousand miles from the U.S. on a mission to bring Christianity to Japan.
While researching my dad’s hometown of High Point, North Carolina, I discovered a Jazz and Blues Festival celebrating the 100th anniversary of Coltrane’s birth. Ravi Coltrane performed his father’s classics, while others performed music that Coltrane had inspired.
Even though my dad was a few years older than Coltrane, he would have known about the high school band where Coltrane got his start. Dad was not a jazz aficionado either, but he played a mean harmonica. Surely he would have bragged about growing up in the same town as the international jazz icon.
Except they didn’t attend the same school. As far as I could tell, Dad never interacted with any Black people in his neighborhood, his church, or throughout his university and ministry careers. Not in High Point and not anywhere else.
Dad graduated from High Point High School in 1926. The school system was not fully integrated until 1969.
He earned degrees at Mars Hill and Furman, which were segregated until the sixties. He earned his Master’s in theology from Southern Theological Seminary in Kentucky, which first accepted Black students in 1951.
He served as a chaplain in the Navy from 1944 to 1947 and then in the reserves for the next few years, including several summers while we were in Japan. Because it was not widely publicized, Dad may not have known that by 1944 there were two Black chaplains in the Navy.
James Russell Brown served from 1944 to 1946. Thomas David Parham served until 1982 and was the first Black Navy officer promoted to captain.
My research has produced few surprises and probably neither will the history of my mother’s life in Abbeville, South Carolina. Most southern states supported segregation until lawmakers finally ran out of excuses or the energy to fight the pressure of federal agencies.
Most of those I have discussed this with respond, almost verbatim, “They were products of their times.” Those times were “Christian times,” but until the mid-sixties, the majority of white southerners and North Carolina Southern Baptists supported segregation.
At the jazz festival, I toured the city and saw the house where Coltrane grew up. On Sunday, I attended the AME church where his grandfather served as pastor.
Coltrane left this world some time ago and my parents are gone now. I do not understand his work as well as others, but I recognize something powerfully spiritual in his music, especially “A Love Supreme.” That song ends with Coltrane’s saxophone inexplicably sounding the words “Thank you, God” six times.
I believe we will all meet someday. We will sit in groups on adjoining clouds, my parents on one, my friends and I on another.
Coltrane will float between us playing his saxophone. Dad will wedge in his harmonica, and together they will play the music of the spheres.
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Retired international teacher. Angela Grant earned a Master of Arts in Religion from the Yale Divinity School and previously served as an Ernest C. Hynds Jr. intern at Good Faith Media. She lives in West Palm Beach, Florida.