Image by Darwis Alwan from Pixabay
“Is it just me, Milton, or does the food just taste better if you eat it outside at this time of day?”
“Well, it definitely looks better because this is golden hour right before sunset, but it is also called magic hour, so let's go ask my big brother Melvin.”
So nine-year-olds George Ludlow and Milton Trent took their plates and went to hang out with Milton's 21-year-old brother Melvin Trent and learn more about photography things.
All the adults who had charge of the Ludlow, Trent, and Stepforth grandchildren, of which there were a total of 14, watched them enjoying their lives together from ages 5 to 21, and their hearts were knit together in that warm, amber light of golden hour, in this golden moment.
Capt. R.E. Ludlow, raised in a home in which many of his relatives would have preferred to kill half the people there than to see Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream fulfilled, was deeply moved … for this was a day on which he realized that he too was now free, and so were his grandchildren: free from the legacy of hate that had scarred his childhood and thus his life.
Mrs. Ludlow, who was from San Francisco, CA, quietly slipped her arm around her Virginian husband … she knew that deep inside, though falling back along the way from time to time, her husband, outraged by the evil he had seen done, had been subconsciously moving away from it … he had married her, of all things, to help him. He knew that his first wife and his children, raised inside the old paradigm, had not survived – the burden of trying to be superior when you are really not, and the burden of living with the failure of not being what you were never meant to be – was a contributing factor.
But, more importantly, evil has no life-giving power … no love, no joy, no peace, no gentleness, no goodness – though it could imitate goodness to deceive – no patience such that a human heart might take refuge. Ego and hate consumed from within, and all the desires for pleasure and relief from that evil finished off the body and the mind. Capt. Ludlow himself had escaped because he had gone into the military … but people who had bought in and died before his age of 58 were legion in his family … and then his murdering uncles had lived to get old only to be arrested and surely to spend the rest of their lives either in jail waiting for trial, or convicted and in prison. One of those three had committed suicide, already.
The memory of all this was why Robert Edward “Hell to Pay” Ludlow Sr., in the amber light, was weeping … but for joy. He was free, as free as the Stepforths and Trents in all their wonderful shades from amber to cocoa to ebony, and his grandchildren Eleanor, Andrew, George, Edwina, Amanda, Grayson, and Lil' Robert were free as well.
Mrs. Ludlow knew that just right then, something deep within her husband's heart had healed … they would talk later … but he and she just held each other in that amber light, in the magic of that golden hour, prejudice and hate not allowed to mar its beauty, and just breathed it all in.
Quietly, Mr. Thomas Stepforth, grandfather to Gracie, Milton, Velma, Vanna, and Melvin Trent as well as Vertran and Tom Stepforth III, got Col. H.F. Lee's attention.
“Well, you told me he would make good,” the Black family patriarch purred. “You were right about your cousin – and I must say, you Lees-of-the-mountain and distaff-Lees in other families are quite consistent.”
“Those of us who know that God made us all equal pray a lot,” Col. Lee said, “and every time another one of us passes his random bigotry test, then we have another one, praying for the rest.”
“May y'all's tribe increase!” Mr. Stepforth said.