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Spending the week locked away in Selma writing a new TV show where two young black men discover a body that leads them down a rabbit hole of history through Jim Crow, lynching and slavery til they end with a present day truth that makes them advocates for reparations.

Soaking in the town, the history, and mostly reconnecting back to an important time of my life when I lived in Alabama for 7 years.  #Blessed.

You can’t walk straight up the hill.  You have to walk the long path, past the plaques and statues, forced to take your time, you may not make the journey too quickly. Once at the first flank of the memorial, you can’t walk straight through. You have to wind your way and turn your shoulder sideways to get past the markers, which are actually bodies, large and iron.  The names of those lynched marked on each.

When you get to the end of the first flank, you are forced to turn. You may not like what happens next.  As you walk forward the ground begins to drop from beneath you. As you continue your descent the markers/bodies begin to lift, slowly at first, but soon they hover in the air around you, by death or resurrection, you do not know.

The third flank, the bodies are now above your head, hanging from the rafters. Here the signposts for your journey begin: “Seven black people lynched near Screamer, Alabama in 1888, for drinking from a white man’s well;”  “Charlotte Harrison lynched in 1878 in Rockingham, VA after a white man’s barn burned down;” “Parks Banks lynched in Yazoo City, Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a picture of a white woman in his hat.”  There is now no ambiguity about what you see above.

Turning to the fourth flank, you pause, for a plaque of remembrance, and then you turn and meet water.  Water, a market of those not named, a further remembrance, a possible release, a cleansing, the indication of the possibility of movement.  The bodies now far above your head, ascended into the sky.

EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice was built just down from my old home in Montgomery, AL, on a street I walked most nights, talking with my neighbors, breathing the smells of trees and heat, listening to the stories of black folks on their porches. Up ‘til now I had always thought myself crazy, so did most others, a 23 year-old Harvard white boy who plopped himself down in Montgomery, AL for seven years. But now, speaking here with a fellow writer, all becomes clear. Montgomery is the crossroad of the United States, the belly of the beast, the Cradle of the Confederacy and the cauldron of the civil rights movement – it has a magnetic pull: from the bus boycotts, to freedom riders, to school desegregation, to decades of work for economic and racial justice. Standing with thousands of others pilgrims who have made the journey I see what I should have known all along: those who promote bigotry and hatred are the resistance, not us: they are the ones desperately fighting, while we are the ones journeying forward, slowly and at times in great darkness, but always moving.  We are the movement, we are love, we are heart. I weep as I call and remember those only momentarily forgotten, finally home.

 

The last time we came to Detroit we learned how to count the dead. A woman in a second hand suit explained the methodology: always go in teams, block by block going west, get a simple inventory, report back. After the explanations Jeff, Juan, and I drive through swaths of neighborhoods: burnt out and abandoned homes, survivors only here and there. Jeff and I silent, Juan offers a running commentary from the back seat, his favorite character Sherlock Holmes, a ramble of hypotheses on what the hell happened. After awhile I have to look away from the living and dead so I mostly watch the dogs, packs of them, they said 10,000 roaming the city. I watch them from the car window, always on the move, as if they await the city’s imminent collapse, at a moment’s notice ready to move in droves across the bridge into Canada.

This time, five years later. Detroit is strangely alive, or as the man in the t-shirt shop says “Detroit got high-falutin.” Money streaming into downtown, a new GM center, high tech work spaces, new york fashion in renovated factories . . . .the downtown artists? . . . .well I think they’re all gone. You break out of the downtown renovation and it’s more the Detroit we saw before. Jeff and I spend most of our days chatting in these hinterlands:

– We stop at a gas station / converted into a corner church / now a thrift store. The old man in track pants and a parka gives us a flier and I scour the junk for old Aunt Jemima cookie tins, complaining why they sold the last ones. Jeff knows me well enough to just stand back and watch.

– We wander through a neighborhood of polka-dot houses and households items made into sculptures. We talk to the artist Tyree’s sister who tells us for decades that tourists came until the neighbors got jealous and burned most of them down. She tells us how Madonna was there last week, sitting in the road meditating with her new 32 year old boyfriend, but that didn’t stop her from hollering at the brothers on the corner which made Tyree’s niece mad ‘cause one of them was her fiancée.

– We wader through an outdoor African sculpture park and bead store. “Iron teaching stone to rust” it’s a metaphor about colonialism, the artists tells us, “’cause stones don’t’ rust, those are African, but Europeans keep trying to show them, it’s a metaphor about assimilation.” Jeff ooh and ahhs, and I don’t’ get it, I query the artist at length, but I mostly get an explanation of how mirrors don’t appear in nature.

– And then, my favorite place, an old haunt from last time, worn red carpet, a roaming DJ, a smoky mirror dance floor. After a few misses, we connect with a professional lesbian hydroponic weed grower who sits on a stool by the dancefloor. She shows me pictures of all her girlfriends: one in Detroit, one in ATL, one in LA,. . . Jeff says he got a woman for her in DC, Greek, nice hips, she says good, she only likes them light skinned. I ask her where all her woman are tonight, she says she pays for her pussy, so they be thinking about her. . . . We roll joint after joint, at first Jeff and I think we should hide in the bathroom, but she doesn’t care. We close down the club. I haven’t done this since I was 20.

 

 

 

 

 

What a nice surprise . . .