Memories of a Remarkable Life

My father-in-law passed away earlier this week, just shy of what would have been his 103rd Christmas. He was a quiet man, uncomfortable among those he didn’t know well—and even many that he did. His wife loved people and parties and social engagements of all sorts, but for most of the decades that I knew him, he hung around in the background and let her do the talking. Yet once in a while, he would share his memories of what truly was a remarkable life.

He was born in the Deep South in the early 1920s, during the depths of Jim Crow, to an evangelical preacher who also had an extremely long life, especially when you consider that he must have entered the world in the 1890s. At the age of eight or nine, my father-in-law was sent to live with his grandparents, who had experienced both slavery and freedom but by then needed help around the farm. That experience left scars. We never learned the details, but it was clear from his relationship with his siblings that he felt they had been privileged at his expense. He was also given to occasional outbursts of rage, mostly expressing that sense of having been taken advantage of in some unspecified way.

World War II began in September of the year he turned seventeen. Like my own father, the son of a janitor who lied about his age so he could enlist in the British Army, my father-in-law chose to defend the country that in many ways had made it clear that it didn’t value him. He attended the Tuskegee Institute and was in training as a Tuskegee Airman when the war ended in 1945. As a result, he never saw combat and, for much of his life, denigrated his own willingness to serve, despite ascending to the rank of major in the Air Force Reserve.

But although his status as a Tuskegee Airman brought him respect over the last decade or so, his most remarkable achievement, given where he started, was his acquisition of a PhD in chemistry and his long career as a chemist at a major US corporation. After his retirement, he continued to work as a consultant in Saudi Arabia for several years. My mother-in-law didn’t appreciate the restrictions placed on women there and returned to the States, not least because she then had a grandson to dote on, but she did visit. They also traveled to numerous other places they had long wanted to see.

He outlived the love of his life by eighteen years, almost to the day. They are reunited now, and that’s why, although I grieve his passing, I can’t wish that he had stayed longer, especially when it meant growing weaker and more vulnerable with every day that passed. But although he was never quite sure what to make of his white daughter-in-law, I’m glad to have been even a peripheral part of his remarkable life.

Family photograph of my father-in-law in his chemistry lab, not for public distribution.