Remembering The Day I Learned Elsie Hotpepper Was Not An Old Lady

The young lady you are looking at here is an artist's rendering of Elsie Hotpepper, rendered years ago, before I actually met Elsie Hotpepper, with my impression of what Elsie Hotpepper looked like, and her age, derived from, if I remember right, email exchanges exchanged after I mentioned Elsie Hotpepper's doppelganger in a blog post.

Imagine my shock when I actually met Elsie Hotpepper to find that not only was she not a wrinkled old lady, but was, instead, a young lady who looked like a super model.

A super model who regularly cursed like a drunken sailor on shore leave.

A couple months ago I learned Elsie Hotpepper was being a willing collaborator of an insanely stupid racist Texan.

To say I was appalled upon learning this does not cover how difficult it was for me to try and understand how a sweet someone such as Elsie Hotpepper could condone the un-condoneable in any way.

Is this a Southern thing? Where way too many Southern women are way too used to condoning something most of the world sees as reprehensible?

But, then, to further confound me, one of Elsie Hotpepper's co-racist collaborators, Miss Mary Not Contrary, is a Yankee, from the actual Yankee land of New England.

I am from up North, but I am not a Yankee. The Pacific Northwest was not part of the Union back during the era of the War of Northern Aggression, also known as the Civil War. My relatives were still living in war torn Europe at the time the North was finally fed up enough with the South to whip the South into behaving like proper human beings.

A process which, sadly, continues to this day. A process hampered, sadly, by Southern racist collaborators inhibiting the progress towards eliminating racist idiots from the face of the planet.....