AN UNFORGOTTEN KISS 

In his Seventy Years in Dixie, F. D. Srygley, who was an associate editor of the Gospel Advocate a century ago, tells a touching story from the life of pioneer preacher T. W. Caskey, around whom the book evolves. Caskey's "Seventy Years" began about 1820 and reached two decades beyond the Civil War. The book describes the South's incredible ordeal during the war, naming the Southern cause as lost long before the conflict ended.  The South would not  surrender until  it was devastated. Consequently there was untold suffering and agony. Caskey says that virtually every home either lost a loved one or received one back from the War injured or dismembered. The South lay prostate with its homes and farms burned, its towns and cities devastated, and its people demoralized. Freed slaves wandered aimlessly, begging for food from those who were themselves hungry. Caskey states that even though he lived through it there was no way for him to describe the horror of it all.

But the story Caskey tells that I want to pass along to you is not about the War but about the black mammy that took care of him from the time of his birth until he left home for school. The story grows out of life in Mississippi during the ante-bellum days when the mammy in a slave-owning home was like a member of the family. The mammy loved the children she cared for as if they were her own and they loved her as if she were their mother. She was often closer to them than was their mother. She was in charge of the children and their affairs, which gave her dominance over the other slaves, and even the mother would usually yield to her wishes when it came to the children. However attentive the mother might be, it was usually the mammy who was always there when the children were sick or got hurt.

Since Caskey's mother died when he was born, another common tragedy in that era, his mammy was the only mother he ever knew. He tells how she was always there to kiss away his hurts, to see him off to school, and to save back her own "sweets" so that he could have them. She magnified his successes and minimized his failures. He was confident that she loved him as much as she loved her own children who shared her slave quarters. Even after young Caskey left home for school, he would always on his return visits go to the slave quarters to see his mammy before going up to the big house. She drank in every word of his success stories as if they were her own.

Once Caskey was out of school and working as a blacksmith, he would come home about twice a month, and he always met with his mammy at church. She would put her black arms around him and kiss his cheek as only a mother would. And Caskey welcomed this, for she was his mammy.

Time passed and one day when Caskey was visiting the old home place he had his sweetheart at his side. When mammy saw him she hurried toward him and, as usual, gave him a bear hug and a kiss on the cheek. But this time, with his girl friend at his side, Caskey was embarrassed. After all, as she would likely see it, he was being embraced and kissed by a nigger. He then did something that he was to regret for the rest of his life. He spurned her embrace and turned away with proud rejection. In his autobiographical notes he describes it as one of the meanest things he ever did, a deplorable act for which he could not forgive himself. He recalls the occasion with painful memory:

 I deeply deplore it, even now, after the lapse of more than a half a century, and I would give world's of wealth, if I possessed it, could I but correct that mistake of my boyhood days. My crime was simply base ingratitude. 1 blushed for shame that I should be thus kissed by an old negress in the presence of my young lady friend. I have never yet fully recovered my self- respect, when I think how I blushed to be kissed and loved by one who had so nobly earned her right to a mother's affections and privileges, for all she had done for me during my helpless, infant orphanage. 

Years passed before Caskey again visited the old home place, and mammy had passed on to her reward. He tells how he visited her grave and poured out tears of repentance over the way he had treated the woman whose only crime was loving the boy she had raised. He recalled his mean and contemptible act as if it were but yesterday. There by her grave in the wood he solemnly vowed to cherish her memory and strive to imitate her love and labors for the motherless and homeless, and he resolved to live for the amelioration of the sufferings of his mammy's down-trodden race.

What makes this such a gripping story is Caskey's inconsolable regret over what he had done, even after half a century. Even in his old age he looked back on the foulest deed of his life and wrote with a penitent tear, "I will yet atone for it in a measure, if I am so fortunate as to meet her ransomed soul on the glory-gilded shore of eternity." He hoped that in heaven he would be able to walk right up to her and throw his arms around her and plant a kiss on her cheek, right there before all the angels.

This tender and compelling story of an unforgotten kiss tells us something important about life: it is very important how we treat people. And it is especially important how we treat people who are not in a position to benefit us, such as little children, the poor, the aged. Too, the story drives home the point that if we do not regret slighting such people, we should. We might well see ourselves weeping at the grave of someone we maltreated, even if by careless neglect. But we cannot turn back the clock an we cannot change what we did yesterday. "Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been.'" But we can live with greater love and deeper sensitivity tomorrow.

And don't you think the story of the unforgotten kiss should make us more eager to love and accept all those for whom Christ died? If we are quick to criticize and eager to draw the line we may live to regret it. If this story helps us to realize how terribly wrong it is to reject someone without a compelling reason, then it is a blessed story. And if it causes us to drop a repentant tear over the way we have treated someone and to resolve to be more sensitive toward hurting people, then it is a story that serves us well. —the Editor