If the Wingate side of my family ever falls into daddylabyrinth, this is the page they'll hate me for the most. 

While Jen and I were engaged I took her on a trip to meet my father's family because I wanted her to know the kind of mess she was getting into. Every year at Thanksgiving my aunt in rural northern Pennsylvania hosts a gathering to mark the beginning of hunting season, which draws in uncles and cousins from far and wide. My brother Tom attends regularly, and it's his favorite way of staying in touch with the family.  

As for me... well, I hadn't chosen to stay in touch with the family when I left New Jersey for Colorado. My mom had wanted a clean break, and frankly I wanted the same. The whole idea behind moving to Colorado was to get away from the bad influences of New Jersey, and frankly those bad influences were in my own family. I'm talking specifically about the hideous bigotry within it––the racial hatred and the slurs thrown around in that "I'm just joking!" manner familiar to anyone who has bigots in the family. My father, despite his many faults, was not a bigot, and because I took his side in that debate I had very low hopes for this encounter with my family. 

But they say it's important to know where your spouse comes from, right? It seemed fair for me to show this to Jen up close and personal, and I'd warned her beforehand that she was about to see a kind of America that she––as a professor's daughter from liberal-to-a-fault Boulder, Colorado––had never seen before. 

And there it was on full display. Weapons laying all around the house (I didn't check to see if they were loaded or not). More racist epithets floating around in one dinner than I'd heard in a year: nigger, spic, gook, kike, wop, chink, you name it. Once it started (with the uncle I dislike the most, as predicted) everything went to hell. They didn't care that one of their own nephews present (Tom) had Italian heritage on his mother's side, or that both of them were marrying women with "wop" blood. 

Nope, it didn't matter to those bigots. They were white, dammit, and they had a right to say whatever they wanted about people they didn't deem white. And this from people whose grandparents almost certainly came through Ellis Island and were absolutely vilified by white society less than a century before! Ugh, the ignorance. Astonishing and repulsive.

After dinner Jen and I went to a hotel with miserable heating and slept with our coats on. We had a big talk, let's just say. About how I wanted the family that she and I created to be different than this, to have absolutely nothing to do with this. It was a launching point, a moment of separation. If I was going to have any chance at the family I wanted to build, I had to stay the hell away from the bigotry within my family and be glad as hell that I left it when I did. 

My father said I had bad blood. Is the bigotry and hatred on display that freezing night in Pennsylvania exactly what he was talking about?