Amazing Grace: How God turned hatred into love

    They were two men, in a boat, fishing a small inlet in Lake Providence, a speck of rural north Louisiana out of sight and out of mind, forgettable except for the fact that no one who ever worked the fields picking cotton could ever forget the co-mingling of cotton and servitude.
    Larry Oney was 28 years old then, and his father, Clifton (or Bubba, as he was known), was in his 50s, and they had plenty of unfinished business.
    Mostly, it was Larry with the unfinished business.
    As the seventh of Bubba Oney’s 11 children, the number 7 long had held a fascination with Larry. When a child reached his seventh birthday, the party was over. For a sharecropping family – squeezing 13 people into a “rent-free,” 800-square-foot shack with no inside plumbing and sleeping in beds head-to-foot – life meant awakening each day before dawn and riding the truck to the fields.
    “It was dark, and you could hear the hoes – the tools you used – clanging in the back of the truck,” Larry said. “You could hear the ice in the bucket.”
    The Johnsongrass – grass so tough it could choke off a cash crop like cotton – could be attacked with a hoe, but the heat and humidity were forces altogether different.
    Working alongside his seven brothers and three sisters, Larry picked cotton for two cents a pound, and he chopped the plants down for $3 a day. This was 1963, but it could have been 1863.
    “My brother would say, ‘Larry, you didn’t pick very much cotton today,’” Larry recalled. “Well, I did the math. Even if I picked a hundred pounds of cotton, that wasn’t a lot of money.”
    So, mostly, Larry chopped.
    Larry had a facility with figures and great mental recall, but now, on the inlet of Lake Providence, he tried to break through the anger he had felt toward his father, the chains that bind.
    Over a series of years in his childhood, Larry’s mother had taken her children away from Way Way Lane of the Holly Brook Plantation to “the promised land” of Kenner because she wanted her children to have a chance for a different life.
    Larry left Holly Brook at age 10, and he rarely saw his father again. He couldn’t understand why his dad had disappeared from his life, why he had disappeared behind the cotton.
    “I really went up there to confront him in love,” Larry said. “I wanted to ask, ‘Dad, when we were in the promised land of Kenner, where were you? Why didn’t you send more to help us out?’”
    It was then that Bubba Oney pulled out a box from a desk, filled with money order receipts.
    “This was all I had,” he told his son. “I sent what I could to share with you.”
    Their moment of reconciliation was one of the “moments of grace” in Larry’s life. As the seventh child, for some reason, Larry had been skipped over when it came time for baptism. His brothers and sisters were all baptized as Baptists.
    Larry grew up hating white people. Even though he was a budding star on the East Jefferson High School basketball team, he took the arrows of racism. In the early days of desegregation, East Jefferson had about 350 black students among its 3,000-member student body.
    One day a teacher asked him to explain to the entire class why most blacks didn’t work. When he walked through a white neighborhood to catch the bus home, sheriff’s deputies regularly stopped him and made him place his hands on the police car and spread his legs. White kids drove by and threw bottles at him at the bus stop.
    The Promised Land?
    “I was angry because I thought the disposition I found myself in was not fair,” Larry said. “I tried to join the Black Panther party. I hated white people.”
    The day he decided to join the Black Panthers, he didn’t have the money to catch the bus into New Orleans for a meeting.
    “That was God’s providence again,” Larry said. “I was definitely headed to black militarism. I just thank God for that.”
    The road to racial healing for Oney started one Thanksgiving. There was a knock on the door of their home on Milan Street, usually that meant only two things: the police or a bill collector.
    It was a white woman with “red hair and manicured nails,” carrying two bags. Inside were bread, stuffing, fresh duck and smoked oysters in a can. No one knew who the woman was.
    “This knock on the door by some strange woman was the first sign that God’s amazing grace was rushing in helping me to overcome the power of race in my life,” Larry said. “I realize now, looking back, that this woman was on an assignment from God.”
    A few years later, Larry reluctantly went on a retreat, where another woman he did not know told him: “God loves you.” He immediately began to cry. “Nobody ever told me that God loves me,” he said.
    Not long after, Larry began taking instructions in the Catholic faith from a Catholic deacon and was baptized at Holy Rosary Church on Bayou Lafourche in Larose, La. His mother and a few siblings were there for the baptism. His mother asked that her son not just be sprinkled but immersed.
    “So they got this big tub at Holy Rosary,” Larry said. “The church was full, and when I came out of the water, I saw the faces of the people – they were mostly white – and their faces looked like the faces of angels. You know when St. Paul says you’re a new person, I was changed, literally. I was changed in that moment.”
    Larry eventually entered formation to become a permanent deacon. Two of his brothers are ordained ministers – one a Baptist and the other a Pentecostal – two other brothers are Protestant deacons and another is discerning a ministry.
    “My brother likes to kid me, ‘God was being merciful on the Baptists. That’s why he let you become a Catholic,’” Larry said.
    At 56, Larry – Deacon Larry Oney – now runs Hammerman & Gainer International, a project management company that employs 340 people across the country. As a deacon, he is assigned to St. Louis Cathedral, not far from Congo Square, where 100,000 men, women and children were sold as slaves.
    “I was a hater,” Deacon Oney said. “Now, God has transformed my heart. Now, I’m a lover. Only a great God can do a work like this in the heart of a person. So then, I can say, like John Newton, ‘Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost, but now I’m found, was blind but now I see.’”
    Deacon Oney has written a book about his experiences, “Amazing Grace Overcoming Race.” He can be reached at larryoney.com.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].