Last week, we went to the hospital to ease the ending of an American life that was invisible, of course, to anyone outside our enclave. Still, the man lying in the bed was the embodiment of this nation's history and its politics and its survival.
My father-in-law, General Roscoe Conklin Sims Jr., had been mortally ill for 11 days, with a breathing tube and many other tubes keeping him alive. He had emphysema and kidney disease, but it was probably his weekly visit to the casino in San Jacinto that introduced a bacterial infection that he could not seem to recover from. He would have been 78 years old on Nov. 14, 10 days after an election he had waited for all his life.
In his hospital room were many people: his sons (my ex-husband, two of his brothers, along with an "adopted" brother), one of his two daughters, two nieces he helped raise, cousins and me, his white ex-but-forever daughter-in-law.
Nearly 100 people had been in and out of General's room in the last two weeks, the same parade of family and friends who passed in and out of the house he bought in Riverside in the 1950s and lived in all his life, until he got sick. He and my mother-in-law never locked their door. Alberta ruled the living room from a series of wing chairs by the fireplace; General held court in the driveway at folding tables loaded with domino games and transistor radios, Coors, barbecued ribs and chicken and hot links cooked on an oil drum. They taught me everything I know about generosity.
As the hours passed at the hospital, everyone told stories, the way families with inextricable bonds always do. Stories about the driveway parties, the irascibility, the hard work and the journey from poverty. General became mortally ill because he was old, but mostly because he drank, smoked since he was a teenager and raised a lot of hell.
His is the story of this country. His paternal ancestors were the descendants of a slave and her owner from around Grenada, Miss. His mother's mother was known as Fine, born of a slave mother and an itinerant Cherokee father. His mother's father was of mixed race as well, the son of a white plantation owner and a black woman.
