General's orders

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.

My father-in-law looked like the classic image of a Sioux warrior, but with curly hair that he could grow long and so many freckles his nickname was "Specks." He was one of six children, born in Tulsa, Okla. He lived on a farm. His ancestors survived not only slavery and forced migration to Oklahoma but the Tulsa Riots of 1921, when white Tulsa invaded the prosperous black community of Greenwood, leveled 35 city blocks, shot, burned and killed at least 39 African Americans but more likely hundreds, and then herded hundreds more into holding pens at a fairground.

When General was 7, his father died, his mother was hospitalized and the children were divided up among relatives. Eventually, his mother's older sister, Aunt Geneva, brought her and the teenage children to 21st and Central, in the heart of black Los Angeles. General told me again this spring what a great place L.A. was then for the family -- the jazz clubs, the dancing, the double-breasted suits. There was always work. His three brothers eventually got good jobs: deputy sheriff, letter carrier and lead field engineer for the gas company.

General couldn't stand to work for anyone, and when he settled in Riverside in the 1950s, after serving in the Marines, he was a self-employed gardener. He raised his own six children, and many others, supported his mother, fed his neighbors. He loved TV Westerns, Louis L'Amour and politics. He hated spending money. General was so cheap, my ex-husband has told our daughters, he wouldn't buy a tarp for his truck. Once the truck bed was filled with trimmed branches, palm fronds and garden debris, my ex-husband and his younger brother had to climb on the pile and anchor it down with their bodies while their father drove to the city dump. If they didn't die, they got lunch.

While some Americans say we now live in a post-racial society, our family knows better. The old history repeats itself every time someone throws a casual racial slur at my daughters, their skin tone and hair very similar to that of the Democratic presidential candidate.

My father-in-law looked at his grandchildren as a victory. Last spring, the youngest played tennis in a league that held matches at the local country club. General drove past that place for decades, worked in the yards of its members, reminded us that blacks and Jews couldn't join it or even eat there until very recently. At a league banquet at the club, my ex-husband had our daughter put her foot in the pool. She rolled her eyes. He said, "Hold still," and took her picture to show his father.

"We put a little black in the pool today, Pops," he told him.

General always voted. I will never forget one election when his eldest son forgot to vote and came home from work planning to blow it off. His father tore into him, shouting: "Boy, get back down to the polling place before I hurt you. Don't you know people died so you could vote?"

"Everyone in this house votes," he used to say. "Everyone."

Everyone voted in the house I grew up in too. But the passion and ferocity of my father-in-law's love for politics, for the history and the process, for the argument and debate and personalities, shaped me.

He had looked forward to this election. "Oh yeah, we need some change," he told me not long ago. Barack Obama, he said, "could be a Sims, with those ears." Then he laughed.

In his hospital room last week, the talk was about the Obama caricature produced by a Republican women's club in San Bernardino County, his face on "Obama Bucks" -- food stamps -- surrounded by pictures of watermelon, a bucket of fried chicken, ribs and the smiling Kool-Aid pitcher. We laughed, a little. ("KFC is gonna sue that woman," one cousin said.)

At the hospital, my ex-husband joked that he wished his father had gotten an absentee ballot. We sat by his bed. We held his hands. His knuckles were big as walnuts, from arthritis and decades of work.

On Nov. 4, the rest of us will vote here in Riverside -- General's children, his children's children. For the first time, my eldest daughter, named for both her white and black grandmothers, will vote -- but in Ohio, where she attends college. And I know I'll cry, walking home from the polling place at the church down the street from my house, walking past the yellow irises given to me 20 years ago by my father-in-law.

Susan Straight's latest novel,

"A Million Nightingales," is about a girl of mixed race surviving slavery

in Louisiana.