Olio: from the Spanish meaning spicy stew or a hodgepodge.
Rejected the sun rays around the yellow orb which is perhaps they do not speak to today’s wintry cold continues and anyway, they look hokey, right?
I’ve posted some of this week’s Paris Collage experiments below — more on Instagram. The visual prompt was the Tower of Pisa.
Hearts from Kathy Dorfer (top) and Dana, of Raven and Sparrow, featured in the collaborative Hearts for Charleston Quilt. I stitched the Mother Emanuel Church. (see sidebar)
Many accidental associations arise doing these double exposures, but while making this batch, I realized that the Tower of Pisa actually fits well with a story about race in America. Think about it: a flawed and crooked structure that manages to stay standing. And standing. And standing still longer.
MFA: Angel shadows Navajo piece very quilt-like Look how big those pots are!MFA
One thing I noticed about the artist in the featured film was how thick her wrists were. All that time working clay on the wheel I suppose.
Love that last statement!
I did not feel the earthquake — was driving to an acupuncture appointment at the time — but I guess some in Boston did.
Here’s an old earthquake story. I lived in San Francisco right after graduating from college. For the entirety of my brief time there, I worried about earthquakes. Because of course one does. It takes time to develop that blasé California attitude and I wasn’t there long enough.
There were no earthquakes. But guess what? Shortly after I came back east and got an apartment in Pittsfield (on the Mass/NY line), I was WOKEN OUT OF SLEEP by an earthquake.
I’m not sure what the message there was. Maybe about the futility of worry, maybe about the power of nature to undo expectation
Regarding other unusual natural phenomena: I found the eclipse glasses from a few years back! Couldn’t initially locate them but they were exactly where I remembered stowing them. I didn’t see them the first two times I looked. And here we have basic Losing Things Lesson #1: always going back to the first place you looked and look again.
I know the difference between seeing the eclipse somewhat and seeing it in full is measured in orders of magnitude, but I will not be driving to Vermont or NH or upstate NY for a better view. Traffic will be nuts.
Lastly, this week we remember.
Memphis That’s me lower left near Dexter Baptist Church in Montgomery
April 4 marked the 56th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination.
Picture this: a well-heeled white woman standing next to her shiny SUV in front of the artists’ cooperative that we were about to visit. Hear her going on and on about how great Selma is. Well worth more than a single day of your time!We have great churches. We have great synagogues… (huh? One of us is Jewish, but did SHE know that?)
I don’t doubt that Selma is a great place, one that deserved more exploration. We skimmed the surface, in and out in a few hours. We walked over the famous bridge, had lunch, quickly visited two “interpretive centers,” grabbed some ice cream, and were off.
But Selma’s obvious state of decline made me sad. Really sad. It struck me as emblematic of decades of misguided Republican “trickle down economics” and racist policies. Downtown was dead and further out wasn’t better — peppered with shacks, run down apartment complexes, boarded up gas stations.
Maybe the city gleamed before Covid, but I kind of doubt it.
We had lunch. Or tried to. I’ll give this place points for style, for friendliness, and for an earnest effort. But boy was it a miss. The food sucked, I mean really sucked. And we waited and waited for it, even though there was only one other group there.
Across the street: a faded Israeli flag and a neon sign reading: gentle human / thank you for coming.
Alabama River
There were two interpretive centers (that seems to be a new name for museums) — one on one side of the Edmund Pettus Bridge and one on the other. One was compact and polished with well-produced audio-visual presentations and a nice gift shop. The other was folksy, expansive, and more than a little worn at the edges.
The less-polished place started with an introduction by the guy at the front desk. It was elevated speech, nearly oratorical, with much mopping of the brow. Inside, we quickly appreciated the museum’s attempt to honor the “foot soldiers” of the Selma/Montgomery march. There were news clippings affording detail not found in more mainstream reporting, lots of photos, and even plaster casts of some of the protesters’ feet.
I was too tired to avail myself of the many resources at the other interpretive center, although this portrait (below) certainly caught my eye.
Sheriff Jim Clark, known for his violent temper
He looks like a monster, doesn’t he? He’s the reason Selma was chosen as a site for the march to Montgomery. His reactive, racist brutality could be depended upon to make a spectacle.
Finally, before leaving town we visited the “Candy Lady.” The place was almost deserted and the owner thanked us profusely for coming in and buying a few bowls of ice cream. That seemed revealing of two things: one, that she was possibly hurting for business and two, that in casual encounters people in the South are so much nicer than Northerners. By miles. It’s almost disorienting how much nicer Southerners are. Especially given the history.
Dated March 19, 1965. Seen at the museum at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis
I don’t know about other writers, but in the course of writing my novel (set in South Carolina, 1737 to 1744), I wrote tons of extraneous passages. Sometimes I wrote to clarify my knowledge about history. Sometimes I focused on secondary characters to get a better sense of them. For a fair amount of “side pages,” I didn’t know why I wrote them or even that they were necessarily extraneous.
SPOILERS!
Anyway, here’s a scene I wrote four years ago featuring a secondary character named Caesar. It’s November 1744 and Caesar remains on the Lucas Plantation with a dozen other slaves. Eliza Lucas has gotten married and moved and Saffron, Saffron’s daughter, Maggie, and Indian Pete have run away, trying to reach a maroon sanctuary near Cane Creek west of Charleston. The scene refers to his unrequited crush on Melody (one of the main narrators) and mentions how he was hobbled for an attempt at running away (that’s when they slash your Achilles tendon, if you don’t know).
Ashley River
Caesar and the Blue Jays
He knew to look for the flattened grass chutes where the alligators slide in and out of the creek. Kept an eye out, too, for water moccasins — particularly as he ducked under branches where the snakes on occasion liked to sun themselves. Caesar walked slowly in any case, what with the slashed tendon on his left ankle.
Today, Sunday, no task. Mo and Hercules had gone fishing, taking the cypress raft hidden in the reeds east of the cabins. Mo knew the best places, Herc along for the ride. If they were lucky, there’d be chud for dinner.
He looked west — the direction Maggie had run and then Saffron, and then weeks later, Indian Pete. He traced an imaginary line from his trapped heart to their free bodies. It calmed him somehow. He tried to picture the maroon community at Cane Creek. Did they sing? Grow okra? Make benne wafers?
Of course he knew about the place, they all did. Been hearing about it for years, in fact. But ever since Saffron, Maggie, and Indian Pete had high-tailed it in that direction, it seemed more real. The substance of dream going from flimsy osnaburg to dense pluff mud.
He had another purpose that quiet morning. It was to observe the place where two drowning victims had been pulled out of the water last week — a white boy and his tag along. One of the Archer sons and Drake. Drake was the best fiddler in the Low Country, so his absence would be felt by the enslaved up and down the Ashley River — the next hullabaloo quieter, marked by the loss of him.
Word had it that the bodies were found clutching each other, one to the other. It was easy to understand why, in terror, a white boy and a grown black man might embrace for comfort, no matter how dull and stupid the white reactions. To them, a scandal. But what was less easily understood was the cause. What had flipped the boat and sent the two to their watery graves? Had to’ve been a gator and not necessarily a big or mean one either, just a hungry one. But he’d heard the bodies were intact?
To look west toward Cane Creek, as Caesar did again now, was to bump into the substance of freedom. Not a star barely visible in the night, too far off and lonesome to matter. Not a sack of coins buried with the sketchy hopes of buying manumission. But something more like a panther crying out — a haunting screech easily heard by all. “Freedom. Freedom.”
“Caesar! Caesar!”
Hobbled near to lame, there was no possible way for him to outrun patrollers or outwit the hounds. He might be foolish in love, moony still for Melody though she’d been gone for two seasons now, but not about what his body could or could not do. He could sow rice and weed it and harvest it and polish it and he could aerate the indigo vats with the long carved paddles. But the only reason he was still alive was that he’d stopped trying to run. That, and he was overseer’s favorite cussing target. Words harsh and vile were always better than the cow hide, but over time the shaming added up — like debris during freshet, when scattered leaves and branches turned into an impromptu dam.
One day one word was gonna sink Overseer’s pettiauger. Caesar would strike so fast, Mac’d never see it coming. And what with the Lucas family gone now, who would arrange his execution?
Maybe he COULD hightail it. After all, he remembered the braids on Saffron’s crown — how the turn near her ear signaled the lightning-struck tree at the head of the Choctaw trail.
He knew hunger, so he didn’t worry about that.
He hawked a pearl of spit into the creek. Resigned. “Forget it.” It’d be better to burn down the newly built barn than strike Overseer. The loss of two consecutive barns might do MacIntyre in as good as any blow to the head.
The longing to be free pulsed almost like another heart in his ribcage. If it weren’t so very familiar, so very right and real, the other heart might feel like an intruder. But the longing to be free could never be the thing that was out of place. Ever.
Slate sky. Cool air. Six months since all was upended. White lady married and moved. Mistress sailed off to the West Indies, taking with her the one woman both hearts ever loved. Melody. Who will be there to comfort her when she acutely misses Moses? Who will be there to wink and smile at the receipt of a coded letter from Philadelphia? Her son — alive and free! Phoebe, of course. Phoebe would be there.
He stood in the reeds near the new barn. It cast a bulky shadow away from him, away from the creek. It would never seem real to him, this barn. Instead, it would stand always as an imposter, a fake structure built on the poetic wreckage of Saffron’s flaming goodbye. Good lord, that’d been a day! Mac’s face so red it was as if he’d swallowed the fire. No mere reflection of the crackling conflagration, not the heat of his Highland rage arising, but fire consumed and eaten and then combusting behind the freckled planes of his face.
Now it was November. A Sunday. No task. A blue jay squawked past his shoulder and then wheeled and landed on the dock. Funny how some things endured: the dock, the tabby path to Porch House, tripods holding stew-pots over fires on the street, the quiet of sleep. Another jay zipped past. Landed.
Caesar pointed his chest west again in a direct line to where he imagined Cane Creek and the Free Wilds to be. So many possible outcomes! Maggie could’ve made it, but not Saffron or Indian Pete. Indian Pete could’ve made it and neither Saffron nor her daughter. If only one was to succeed, it would make sense it’d be Indian Pete what with his PeeDee father, the land in his blood. Maybe all three made it but the maroons had moved on — scared up into hills or slaughtered by some feckless and determined patroller wanting the bounty of two pence per scalp (with ears attached).
Caesar knew he’d never make the attempt. Not unless he could steal a horse and these days there were only two on property and what with Overseer being so proper attached, he’d sense an absence before a single, shuddering nicker of escape was made.
No, Caesar was stuck, like so many.
Being stuck was one of the very least affronts of slavery, but it still counted, and like shame, its unbearability accrued over time.
Both jays flapped off. Caesar was abandoned yet again. He had no wings, no horse, no pair of properly operating feet. Here he was on a Sunday in November under a slate-grey sky. He could stay out of trouble so that Overseer didn’t brand his face with an “R” or castrate him. He could maybe go to his grave with both ears still attached to his head. These were not nothing.
As stunning and moving as the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice were, Montgomery offered more to see.
We visited: the Rosa Parks Museum, the Civil Rights Memorial of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dexter AME where Rev. Martin Luther King preached, plus our hotel was not far from the site of the waterfront Montgomery River Brawl.
The Rosa Parks Museum was about to close when we got there, but since it was small and the front desk clerk was gracious, we dashed in. It houses the actual bus where Rosa Parks famously sat up front and refused to move to the rear. There is also a lot of documentary and photographic ephemera associated with the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
By this hour, my brain was a little fried, but one indelible fact popped — how supporters used vehicles like hearses or commercial vans to secretly transport protestors, many of whom had 90-minute (or longer) walks to get home after a long day of menial labor.
Why? To avoid violence of course.
This strategy reminded me of the folks trying to leave Florida during the Great Migration as described by Isabel Wilkerson.* Because white “employers” would exert undue pressure or worse to keep their cheap, indentured workforce, Black Floridians had to secretly or slowly sell their belongings and then depart surreptitiously. One person had themselves nailed into a coffin to avoid detection.
Earlier that day, we went to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Civil Rights Memorial. You might have laughed at us circling the block a few times trying to locate the building. Around and around we went.
Unfortunately that famous and beautiful granite water feature out front was dry for repairs, but the inside, though small, did not disappoint.
You entered into a cavernous space papered with historic photos. Then a sound track started while lights illuminated relevant photos.
That table you see was dedicated to “the Martyrs.”
Next, in an auditorium a film about civil rights played, covering much of what we’d been seeing but also addressing George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement.
At the end, a darkened room offered memorial-goers an opportunity to add their names to a scrolling visual display of supporters. It was one of those clever interactive exhibits that pulls people in and lets them feel part of something. Or at least, it did me.
There was no place to make a donation there, which I kind of expected, but since I’ve been a card-carrying member of the SPLC since 1990, I didn’t feel too bad.
Dexter Baptist Church
Charles M. Blow: many Black people, in particular, saw it [the violent tussles] as an unfortunate but practically unavoidable response to what can feel like an unending stream of incidents in which Black people are publicly victimized, with no one willing or able to intervene or render aid.
