What I Carried From Alabama
Discover how Len Cooper found unexpected gifts provided by Jim Crow, cotton fields, and a violent family.
I left Alabama many years ago, but Alabama never quite left me. A man can move away from a place, but the place where he was formed settles deep in the bones. Roads change, years pass, and distances grow longer, yet memory remains. What Alabama instilled in me has followed me all my life.
I grew up Black in Jim Crow Alabama, and life there was never easy. Family members were jailed; some were killed. I had friends who survived the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in September 1963.
From the beginning, work and hardship were constant companions. I was 9 years old when I spent my first full day on my grandfather’s 360-acre farm, picking cotton from sunup to sundown under the searing Alabama sun. We were given an hour for lunch, and then it was back into those endless rows again. The white farmer who owned an adjacent farm sometimes borrowed us to work for him for no pay. And the work did not begin in the summer and end with the cotton harvest. It began in the spring with planting and then chopping. Chopping cotton meant walking those same rows and clearing the weeds and grass from around the fragile seedlings so the plants could grow.
Every season had its labor. In winter, when the cold cut through our coats, we dug post holes and stretched barbed wire. We slaughtered animals, prepared the meat for the freezer, and sold some of it to help the family survive. My brothers and I worked long hours when not in school because that was simply the way life was lived. Childhood was not a protected season. It was preparation for survival.
But physical endurance was only one part of what Alabama gave me.
Inside our home were other struggles. My mother was a deeply faithful woman who believed in moral clarity and spiritual discipline. She prayed often and seriously, and she taught us the difference between right and wrong with unmistakable conviction. Those lessons became the moral architecture of my life.
My father, however, was not always a gentle man. For much of my childhood, he said harsh things and treated my mother and us children with a cruelty that left deep wounds. Those years were difficult, and the pain they caused lingered long after I left Alabama.
Yet one of the most powerful moments of my life also came from him.
A Moment of Grace
I was in my early 30s with two young children of my own. One hot Alabama evening while visiting back home, my father called me over and asked me to sit down beside him. For some reason, before he even spoke, I had a deep feeling that I already knew what he was about to say.
My father had not spoken to me in 10 years.
We sat there together in the sticky Alabama night air, and after a long silence, he began to speak. He told me how sorry he was for the way he had treated us when we were children. But most of all, he said, he was sorry for the things he had said and done to me throughout my life.
I listened to him, and when he finished, I told him something that had been waiting inside me for years. I said, “I am my father’s son, and I am your son, man.” I told him that I loved him.
In that moment, something inside me broke open. The anger and weight I had carried for so long finally lifted. I was free to breathe again, free to embrace my father as the man he was trying to become.
From that night forward, he lived differently. For the rest of his life, he treated my mother well, lived honorably, and when I visited, we talked and laughed together as father and son. In the end, he lived a good life and died a good death.
Two Enduring Lessons
Alabama gave me many things I wish I could have left behind. But it also gave me two lessons that shaped the course of my life.
The first was that night with my father. Through his apology and the life he lived afterward, he taught me the possibility of forgiveness and redemption.
The other lesson came from my mother. In 1963, after a painful racial incident in Birmingham, I came home and told her that I hated white people. She grabbed my arm, pointed her finger directly in my face, and said with a force that stunned me: “Len, you can hate what they say and you can hate what they do, but you will not hate them. Do you understand?”
So when people ask me what I carried with me when I left Alabama, I do not think first of the heat in those cotton fields or the long rows we walked as boys. I think of two voices that still live inside me. One is my mother’s voice, warning me never to let hatred take root in my heart. The other is my father’s, reminding me that a man can change and that forgiveness can set us both free.
Alabama gave me many hardships, but it also gave me those two enduring lessons, and they have walked beside me every day of my life.
by Len Cooper
