We picked her up at the airport and on the drive back home, my soon-to-be-mother-in-law, blurted out the question, "You have many n*iggers around here?"
I about wrecked the car when she said it but realized this woman had been raised in the South her whole life and that is how blacks were referred to when she was growing up.
My wife told her it would be wise not to use the term again in public. And she never did after that, at least not in our presence. She fell back into using the other most common way to refer to blacks when she was growing up....negroes.
At age 89, she has not changed and still uses that term to this day. It was the culture, not her prejudice, that selected the terms for her to use.
There was no such thing as politically correct speech in the her day growing up in the Deep South.
Congrats on your 45 years!
My wife and I celebrated 45 years in February.
Also, the “N” word was in common use, although polite folks (most folks that is) never used that term around blacks.
My grandfather used the same term. His grandparents apparently had no alternative term, and they apparently brought it along in the covered wagon when they emigrated from western New York to Iowa in the 1850s. Grandpa's manner of speech was a strange thing, hard for me to quantify... it was a rural, middle-america hayseed thing with a curious sort of "Missouri" overlay, and some oddities from who knows where. I have never heard it pronounced exactly the same way by anyone in real life or film, and I don't think even I could do a fair imitation.
Anyway, along with a number of other admirable traits, he was remarkably free from some prevailing prejudices, but he had no "polite" terms for a great number of things. "That word" was a word like any other he had learned, not much different to him than referring to one car as a Studebaker and another as a Buick. As you mentioned, politically correct speech was nonexistent at that time and place.