Thursday, December 13, 2007

In Search of the Jellyroll in the Mississippi Delta


How else would I ever have arrived to the Mississippi Delta? I absolutely had the likes of Elmore James, Memphis Minnie, and Robert Johnson in this here little VW. The monotony of the cotton fields in Mississippi certainly lend themselves to the familiar patterns of the Delta blues. Sweet Lord, when I passed over flat land and literally drove down a mountain of highway to get into the delta, I could hear 'em calling.

I had made a pit stop in Jackson, to go to the Canton flea market with a good friend, and hear about life in Mississippi post-Katrina. Folks in the city felt somewhat despondent about recent population growth, and some attributed the rise in violent crimes to the amount of displaced hurricane victims. I had passed through many impoverished regions of the country thus far but I had not seen the likes of poverty in Mississippi. My memories of travel in this Blues homeland will always be painted with images of the men at the tire stops who sit around all day without customers, the disgraceful condition of worker's trailers outside of the chicken packing warehouse in Canton. But also, thankfully, of the white sands on the banks of the Mississippi, the richness of the conversation at Miss Sarah's Kitchen, and the smiles reflected in a slide guitar.

But, yes, I return to the little matter of the jellyroll.

Wait a cotton-pickin' minute! What's this here jellyrollin' y'all talkin about? From the Piedmont in NC to the Delta, the soul, struggle, and sensuality in the blues I play kept me on the road and my heart in the game. In so many of these songs, colorful metaphors emerge to poorly disguise the dastardly riskee flirtations of the music. One of these is the jellyroll. "Best jelly roll in town", "My man makes the best jelly roll in town." Uh-huh.

So I just had to turn the Urban Merchant (my car) north a little bit to the devil-fearin' , juke-joint town of Clarksdale. I creaked my way out of Jackson, MI and traveled along highway 49 until I reached the crossroads.

At thirty, the crossroads is a perfect beginning for my narrative. I took this journey to keep my professional soul, to realize my potential as an anti-racist worker. But I also traveled to remember who I could be when I am alone, and that hasn't been easy. When that train pulls out, will I have sold my soul to the devil? Or is it really that I have learned I can tap into both the good and evil to create something honest and meaningful? Life is, after all, about embracing the swells and the calm ocean.

But now, the jellyroll, with it's soft, flaky pastry exterior and it's sanguine ooze interior...

So down I went to Miss Sarah's Kitchen to see if she knew a thing or two about jellyrolls. One would imagine a culinary expert and elder such as herself to be appraised. I sat with a friend from town, an artist, on a bar stool and watched Miss Sarah bother around her stove to fix up the biggest plate of beans, cornbread, and potato salad with sour pickles in it. I washed this soul food down with some sweet tea and the biggest slice of lemon pound cake this apparent ex-vegan could sustain, and then we got down to business. When I asked if they still made jelly rolls in town, Miss Sarah scratched her head and offered little more than a smile. In the open parlor of the restaurant, one of her grandchildren (or great?) was jumping around and causing a scandal for her mother. A distracted Miss Sarah said she thought there was a donut shop in town, hesitated, and went back to the task at hand. Maybe Miss Sarah's days of sampling jelly rolls were long past her.

Down to Robert Johnson's grave on the old blues highway to collect pecans, do grave etchings and meditate of the existence of the jellyroll. Robert Johnson is credited with being a father of the Delta blues, and there are as many stories about his actual grave site, as there are about him. Today most people find it next to an old church, under a pecan tree, and well-kept. I didn't get any answers from the wind over the cotton fields next to the petite cemetery, but I did reflect on the long journey in my life that brought me a love of the blues that had me kneeling at Robert Johnson's graveside.

Down to the banks of the Mississippi, and out to the cotton fields, still an industrial revolution, to work off the jellyroll. I had never seen the Mississippi, and for some reason I thought I could swim in it. Yet everywhere I went, the River, busy and massive, was full of industry, adding credence to the notion that folks downriver in New Orleans would be swimming in sludge.

And I had never seen cotton in full bloom. This plant wintering is so majestic, I have to remind myself it is not snow. The cotton fields are again transformed by industrial invention. Men sit in huge machinery lifting bale after bale of cotton to be compacted into huge packages that are transported across the country. This is an enormous industry that still relies on old money, tradition, and cheap labor, as I understand it. The only sweetness here is in the plant itself. And even the plant could tell its own sad history.

So down to the Riverside Motel to ask about the jellyroll and recline on linen that reminded me of naps at Grandma's in Maine. Every guest has a bureau drawer in this establishment, maybe even the devil himself. You might just be staying in a room where your favorite blues player left his favorite hairbrush in the bottom drawer. It used to be an old hospital, the hallways narrowing and carrying on as they usually do in such places, leaving you wondering what horror film was made here. The floor creaks, the doors beckon.

The owner of this fine establishment goes by the nickname "Rat". A thin, older gentleman with engaging eyes, Rat entraps you in his parlor with stories of a Clarksdale past, a smoky room laden with memorabilia and gifts from fans around the world (it's hard not to love this feisty gentleman). Luckily, Rat is able to tell me as much about the jellyroll as I need to hear, for he is a lover of women. When I let him in on my quest for the jellyroll, he leans in, as if his answer is a secret for our ears alone, and answers that the jellyroll is something so sweet. She's my jellyroll.

Of course, Rat knows a lot about lovin', and informs his guests that Sundays and Mondays no one plays the blues in town because these days are reserved for making love. He doesn't really need to tell me this is a part of the jellyroll experience, I already know. I can feel these walls pulsing, hear the beat of their music. As I remember sinking my teeth into today's version of the jellyroll, feeling the confection coat my throat, I can taste the sweetness of his words.

And did I get my jellyroll in Clarksdale, you ask? As the song goes, ain't nobody's dirty business if I did.





Cotton---------------->




































Monday, November 19, 2007

Freedom Walking in Birmingham

(stay tuned for some truly amazing photos that I currently can't get up....)


I traveled to Birmingham, Alabama on a rainy morning to visit the Civil Rights Institute. Back in Portland, Maine, the marches of the Civil Rights era seemed confined to the pages of my textbooks (if even!), and other historical reference points.

But in Birmingham, as the rain broke into humid heat, and the churches chimed out Amazing Grace and different songs made famous by the Civil Rights Movement, events were a bit more tangible.

Once upon a time, Birmingham was hailed as the most up-and coming industrial center. Access to the city by train was created by African-American laborers, their bosses chasing slavery into a new century. Despite segregation, Birmingham became home to one of the most successful Black business districts in the South. During the Civil Rights era, an important battle was waged here, as protesters risked their lives against police and their dogs and firefighter's hoses under the command of "Bull" Connor.

I was captured by the moments spent walking through the Civil Rights Institute, a museum of history that begins with a symbol not easily forgotten: a water fountain, from an era of blatant segregationist language everywhere. I walked through this historical tour of the Civil Rights Era, which encourages the journeyer to be enraged, to march for freedom, to mourn for Martin and Malcolm and quieter heroes. The water hoses, the police dogs, the fear of that era begin to be represented here.

Why did I come here, to Birmingham? I feel so immersed in this living history tour through the South. I came because I was encouraged to make this pilgrimage by certain elders in my community back home. I came because I know that my journey to practice anti-racism in New Orleans will not be easy, and that I have so much catching up to do. I came because being part of a multi-racial immigration struggle means honoring and learning about the struggle for justice of all people. To remember Birmingham, to be grounded in what was created here.

Leaving the CRI, I crossed the street to the Park of Reconciliation and Revolution, just as the sun was setting. The meditative me transitioned into the present as I was approached time and again for donations. I chattered away with many people in that park, feeling more myself in general with human collections than historical ones. My belly was advocating for the soul food that I had promised her, but my mission was clear. I would traverse the park, taking in the monuments to the students and adults who risked so much in their civil disobedience. At one point, I was aware of what was still being risked here when a seemingly agitated, older Black man moved away from my camera. This is a park still waiting for reconciliation.

In front of the 16th Street Church, where the four little girls were killed, a single tree was planted. Footprints in the form of plaques inform and capture still-lives. Hold fast the Dream! In a little while, they will march in with the setting sun, your sons and daughters, Birmingham, into the Park of Revolution and Reconciliation, to be fed not by Revolution, but by Wild Irish Rose. March on! There is still so much dreaming to do...

How She Lived in the Forest

The other day I was reflecting on my first experience solo-camping in Maine. During this trip, righteously freaked out with images of burly men in the night and anticipation of a whole night of listening to my own breath (which, in those desperate days, was probably the more terrifying). I carried a big knife, a big backpack and walked with a big dog.

We knew we would prevail, even when it poured harder the further up the mountain we walked. Rain was my favorite to sleep in. My dog agreed, and bounded through the forest. Exhausted, soaked, and trying to keep the canine within sight, I looked for a place to set up.

It became more than an adventure when it appeared I just couldn't get through the forest without my girl leaping over drenched tree trunks, and excitedly knocking a very unbalanced-packed me over on my back. Frustrated and even wetter, yelling out commands that were going nowhere, I felt a little defeated until I found our spot: a little patch of dryer land under a grove of deciduous trees. Educating myself that very moment about how to set up camp in the pouring rain, I slept in dry comfort, feeling the precious gift of taking care of the two of us. The journey was just as important as the settling in.

My gift on this road is still setting up and taking down camp. I self-imposed this job when I traveled across the deep south with ten dollars in my pocket to New Orleans, stopping only to reflect when my friend Alana remarked, "You're sleeping in the woods in Mississippi, alone? Girl!"Often frustrated with the reality of the difference in negotiating safety as a woman, so many times either pleasantly or unpleasantly surprised by circumstances, all the while thinking...we all must do this every once in awhile. I wanted to take the time to journey into Louisiana, to reflect and prepare, to be open to more surprises. To listen to a little of the language of this land.

So there I found myself in the Talladega National Forest in eastern Alabama, listening to the sounds of birds and insects and my own tent zippers. The patterns of tall, leafy trees reminded me of adults creeping around, their arms outstretched, with bedsheets over their heads to frighten little children. The night before I barely found my campsite before I up and turned around, headed toward Birmingham to the closest available motel for the night. I had already been lost twice when I stopped at the home of a native, a nice, older man out watching the sun go down. I asked for directions, adapting to speak 'bama, which sounds soft and gentle like Tennessee, but maybe a little faster. His directions led me to a creepy old horse farm, my imagination turning me right out of there. Alone, settled in my tent, water was dripping somewhere and I feel inundated with the weight of my own decisions.

So there I found myself in Mississippi, camping outside the ranger station where I have been instructed. The ranger had scratched his head and said, "Well, there are some spots you can camp, but we do have a local drunk who likes to go in there and mess with our water supply. But you can stay there for free. " Get what you pay for, I guess. I had a brief fantasy about swimming in the river, but the idea of poisonous water moccasins did away with that. I'm not particularly afraid of snakes, but I just figured I couldn't afford that hospital bill. I was so broke during this trip I actually had half a penny in my bag, like someone had taken a bite right out of it. Of course, I had a couple of dollars besides that, but it became symbolic, made me hungry just thinking about it.

I rested in places where I was amazed that the forest had not yet disappeared. On a map, I couldn't even decipher how much woodland Alabama actually had. And really, sometimes my motel experiences held just as much wildlife as the forest. Regardless, I have been challenged to rely on my survival skills (the greatest of which is patience!) and my extra-strength Benadryl in any and all accommodations.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

My Car: A Lesson in Impermanence

Allow me to introduce you to the Urban Merchant.....

I started this trip envisioning it all by bus. Ah, the romance in the sweat and struggle of nights spent on the Greyhound station floor, waiting for that 2am bus we're all not sure is coming, that certain special customer eying you throughout the trip, his glance on the vacant seat next to you...that and your collarbone.

Besides my own safety, the main reason I decided to liberate the Urban Merchant from her grassy knoll in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was my desire to farm and camp my way across the south. I want to be connected to the land I'm loving. And after awhile, I just didn't want to give my money to Greyhound anymore. I may be in solidarity with the people I love in traveling this way, but this is the same company that keeps people waiting hours without information and doesn't usually chase la Migra away from arrival points, even after customers have paid for the ride.

Now, don't think I've sold out. My car, beautiful as she may be, is truly only a step above the Greyhound. For one, she has managed to attach herself to every insect that likes to travel and in doing so, keeps me very close to nature. (Sorry, Grandma, you're not going to appreciate this story very much...) I've been blessed that the ants my car is infested with do not actually bite, but I was not so keen to acknowledge while at a rest stop one day that I had a black widow who had taken a flat just below the engine. Much as I believe in fair housing (especially for single parents!), I had to evict her right then and there. And every once in awhile I turn off the engine to the tune of the gentle fluttering of a moth's wings from the back seat.

The Merchant likes to graze among the bounty of southbound trucks, straddling 60 mph as she plods along. So the other day, while pushing the limit to perhaps 62, I glanced over to my left and nearly turned off the road. This huge, brown spider was waving its legs, just hanging out on the window. Um, I'm not actually afraid of spiders, but I have total respect for their poisonous bites. So there I am on the highway- the wind in my hair, the ants crawling on my legs, and the spider who now lives in the vent, waving as the cars go by. If I so much as see one Palmetto, that's it. I mean, this is ridiculous!

Every time I enter my car I acknowledge that tomorrow she may not work. And honestly, I try to feel blessed with the lesson this holds for me in my life outside of her musty interior. I am a woman traveling alone across the south, navigating new boundaries about my own safety. I have to trust myself, trust that I am prepared if tomorrow my car stops working, my money runs out, I run into trouble. I cannot take myself for granted, because I am the only one I have at the end of the day. I chortle down the highway, making plans should she fail me, letting go... We are in this journey together for as far as it lets us, and then I may need to let her go.

I am blessed time and again with this message of life's impermanence, and the critical friendship I want to cultivate with myself. The road moves, warps, curves, shapes the next day. I follow with an open heart, ready for potholes.

Monday, October 1, 2007

Climbing out of the Highlands of North Carolina

(Hey, I know it's been awhile, and I have a lot for y'all. But I have been fairly unsuccessful at finding a computer. So I'm catching up.)
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There is a painful exchange I frequently have with an immigrant friend that goes like this:

Me: I call him on the telephone, worried, spittle hanging on mouthfuls of my best Mexican-accented concern and reproach. Como que no me has llamado? Why haven't you called me? Por qué te han apagado el teléfono la semana pasada? Why did they shut off your telephone last week? Quiero que me llames en seguida! I want you to call me now!

Him: Returning my call, all of which takes him two seconds, his voice masked by static, "Yeah, um, good to hear from you. Okay, take care."

Me: Of course I want to know if he is okay, safe from immigration, safe from injustice. When I do not hear from him for a long time, I worry.

Him: Of course he is not going to return my concern with his own, because he lives with the fear of being separated from his family daily.

Me: Of course it is my privilege that allows me the decision of when to freak out about this. Still, keeping in touch is one small way to count his story, and seek his safety. Ay!


I begin this entry with this little reflection, because it really represents for me the different containers we have for the fears and anger we live with in building this multi-racial struggle for immigrant justice. Living in the south.... states with some of the toughest anti-immigrant legislation, hearing about more and more ICE raids and their effects on children, learning that more and more friends are in danger at their jobs. It seemed for awhile that every month we were scraping together a few dollars to bail someone out of jail. It's easy to imagine it happening here more times, but I am always reminded that the north is like the south, only scabbed over. Conservative, racist politics may appear in more vivid color in the southland, but they spread their disease everywhere.


My own story left off with a brief trip back to Maine, where I snuggled with family, took a very deep look at the journey and walked the Freedom Trail through Underground Railroad history in Portland. The salty ocean cleaned my wounds from the road and I delighted in what I call "Maine moments", when the weather deliciously shifts and the sweatshirt comes out. I worked on a farm while on the road, biked forty miles, stayed on an island, smelled tomatoes at the Farmer's Market, and listened to the histories of radical abolitionist women from my homeland. Maine had taken me back as her own for a little bit, while I rested and ate string beans. It felt almost possible to sink back into the sands of my place of birth. Not yet, she whispered, go back to the south. Love and learn and eat okra. Play the blues.

*****

It just made sense that my journey continue where I left off: in eastern Tennessee, to celebrate 75 years of organizing at the Highlander Center in New Market! Highlander had become a place where I could charge my warrior-self batteries and be challenged in my work by activists who continue to inform my journey thus far. I was grateful to be invited to their anniversary to interpret for workshops. I love being challenged to step back and provide other organizers with the opportunity to dialogue in their own languages and ways. I heard Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon open the program by talking frankly about the inherent dangers in doing serious movement work and concluding "the universe needs you there, not as if you'd go on forever, but because you can act as you want the world to be." I heard, interpreted into Spanish, and sang Freedom Songs, such pesky little musical interludes that constantly interrupted my conversations there. The nerve! At one point, I tried to interview someone three times, but we kept getting interrupted by the likes of "We Shall Not be Moved".

In this spirit, I prepared for my journey to what a friend called the "southernmost point", New Orleans, Louisiana. (She was right, I will elaborate later on...). I read my anti-racism reader, I charted the course, I wrote and talked with volunteers. I still wasn't sure what I would do there, just that it was already becoming a part of the script of this one-woman show that had to be acted out. There was just one little thing to tie up on the way westward....

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You see....I'm doing this all by the skin of my chinny-chin-chin....


Before heading on to New Orleans, I settled into Asheville, NC for about a month to love the mountains and work again for very little money scrounging up the kinds of employment I love. There are so many places in this world where the way you say hello is a better indicator of success than a degree. Along the road, I have cultivated my ability to find work in rural America.

Alas, the beauty of this place competes with development and popularity. I find certain conversations in Asheville to be like the quarries in my home state: splendid on the surface, not too deep. I settled on its silty bottom for one month. A lot of people come to Asheville to retire, live on the streets, or have a safe place to raise a family. And why not? It's beautiful. However, I don't necessary feel like the people I love in Asheville are very safe.

Although I would eventually see some great resistance work and ally-building in this town, I also experienced Asheville's horrible, racist politics and struggles with environmental destruction. The majority of the construction workers I met there were Mexican, chopping down the forest to build houses for wealthy homeowners. Cutting down the trees to allow for a greater population has exposed the inequities that have always existed on the other side of pines and poplars . Look outside of the funky downtown, where I have felt so inclined to play my guitar from time to time, and you see so many social problems that are not being addressed.

Looking back, how fitting that while cradled in the foothills of Appalachia, I should experience some of the most intense poverty of my trip thus far. Of course, although I have been living as person out of money, I am not referring to myself.

During my time in Asheville, I fell utterly in love with a two-year old boy and his three-month sister. I lived with and was nurtured by them for one month, staying on the couch in the SRO where they lived with their mother. During the day, I often provided care while my good friend did errands or work. Among the sounds of Dora the Explorer, we developed our own little language and ways of checking in. I still feel like I have a space on my chest that has been molded to fit that little baby and whisper in her ear.

Were it not for those two little loves of our lives and great neighbors, the walls of that SRO could have swallowed us whole. Having worked with so many people to find better housing, I felt so powerless in my attempts to support my friend with hers. For a month I watched her survival as a single mother to bi-cultural children, living in poverty in a land of plenty, until it seeped into my bones and chilled me. I felt stuck, even as we finally moved her into a bigger apartment where she is now safer and the children are happier. I wanted to do the work.

If you haven't noticed, North Carolina feels like home to me now. It is a place I have come back to many times on the road and may someday come back to on a more permanent basis. However, I think the message for me about Asheville is about the lure of complacency. It would be easy to settle in Asheville and spout peace and appreciate the land and love the valley. But the people I love there are not so safe, and I am not ready to settle. So I send a lot of love out to Asheville, and get on board again. Get on board, children, children, get on board, children, children, get on board, children, children, let's fight for human rights.

On to 'Nawlins....

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Woman of the Corn

(I wrote this little journal while employed in a cornfield in Oliver Springs, Tennessee 'bout 5 weeks ago. In the name of moonshine and all things sacred, I tell my tale.)




I.



There I go again! I've discovered a little patch of land I wanna bring around with me wherever I go. Where in a cat's fiddle have I bin, you ask?



I am currently employed in the most beautiful cornfield this side of the Mississippi. When you go digging around for work, you never know who you'll find.




Unfortunately, I arrived to Tennessee with what seemed to be the biggest darn hole in my pocket. I'd been working right along, scrimping and saving but somehow it all just caught up to me and I'd been nearing the end of my savings. I'm not done with this trip yet, darn it! Being the self- advocating type, I was again able to find a farmer who needed help just about the time I needed cash. Except that if NC was an organic farmer's paradise, well Tennessee is more than a stone's throw from it.





A walk through the Oak Ridge farmer's market at first made real employment seem doubtful. All family farms, good folks, but not enough money to go 'round. They've been hit real hard this year. Except for Mister Julian. "Go see that black farmer towards the end. Ask him if he can use a hand". I navigate the narrow stalls full of produce to the last truck in the lot where a small band of men gather around a heap of corn (they sell corn out of a truck bed here), looking for an African-American man. Finally I get confused and ask for my farmer by name. Seems white folks around here don't know that a whole lot of Julian's dark skin and hair reflect his Cherokee roots. I would later learn that his great grandmother was actually sent on the Trail of Tears. Julian doesn't understand either how he is called, except to say that marriage into race has a lot to do with things around here.



And so I am hired by this farmer, on account of two boys he was seeing 'bout didn't show up, another one of his farmhands has been "pissin' blood", and the like. I like Julian immediately because he's honest and straight forward. Although the other men at the farmer's market raise eyebrows at this curious woman from Maine, Julian almost treats me as any other southerner, offering Tennessee moonshine at the end of the day, and including me in his jokes.




This is another world where I have been lucky enough to sit at the table. I decide my English is far too lengthy and explanatory, and so I shorten it to meet our orders. "Corn, ma'am?" "'Bout four a dozen." I think of my Mainer father, the way the "r" in "corn" gets strangled in his mouth, making it another word altogether.




Another farmer comes up to the stall today to talk about the harvest and offers Julian some 'baccer, and another to talk about how everyone's been sellin' their family's land these days. I feel challenged as an ally when the conversation turns to hiring "the Mexicans", and I am patient with my questions. I learn that this man with whom I am working would be grateful if he could learn to read and write, let alone travel to see the world is changing. We have a lot to teach each other.




Julian has farmed corn on this land for a long time now, only recently tending it alone. He and his father pulled corn together, and even watermelons before that, until he died of a massive heart attack. I can see his Julian Sr. sitting at the stall speaking in the same honeyed drawl as his son, "Corn, ma'am? Got'em ready for you".





Now Julian Jr. often gets up at 4:30am to harvest, and works until 8:00 pm sometimes. He barely eats and takes orders over a cell phone at all hours of the day. He has employed a man who he calls "slow" and who he has known since they were boys. Bobby (they call him "Bobby Monday" after the local slum lord) lives up the road and the two spend the shift cussing each other out in a friendly spirit. There's a great but unfortunate story about Bobby being cheated out of a whole mess of money by some young guys pretending to be Julian. As Julian tells me this story, I can see how protective he is of his friend.





The cornfield is framed by glorious mountains and we pull corn until the sun sets over them. I am at peace as I learn to count 5 dozens to the bushel in the way Julian asks. I pull back the husk to taste the first fruit of my labor; the corn is sweet and its milk drips from between my teeth.





We harvest until the sun goes down and I am invited to eat cornbread and creamed corn and squash fried in cornmeal made by Julian's mother, Miss Nanna, a really small Cherokee woman who talks about how when Julian Sr. was alive he would have had nothing of this heating up cornbread and asks me all about Maine. I drive back to Knoxville with my payment of a jar of moonshine and a bag of corn. It has been an incredible day. It takes all my will power not talk to myself all the way home in my new accent.








II.





I love being in the cornfield because there is no squatting down on the haunches, everything is standing up and pulling those corns hard off the stalk and I feel powerful. I also feel powerful giving Ally, our workmule commands. She pays me no attention but I cuss her out the best I can. If you've never pulled corn like this is works just so: Ally pulls the sled down the rows of stalks while we work yanking those ears off and chuckin' 'em in the cart. I wear long sleeves and pants no matter how hot it gets because the sharp plant leaves give you little infuriating papercuts up and down the body that itch and burn like crazy. I am even wearing my bandana around my neck like a real southern cowgirl. Ally has no qualms about releasing gas every two or three rows, and we just try to stear clear of her backside when she is so inclined.





Today I work with Marshall, whom I'll be helping pull corn every morning from now on. Marshall is a disabled Vietnam Vet who traveled all around the country after the war to find himself. Found himself a whole lot of trouble with the powder, and luckily he now finds himself in the cornfield with us. Julian and Marshall cuss each other out, as is the custom. Ally, puts on her own airs.





I continue to help Julian at the farmer's market. One kind gentleman comes up and compliments Julian, "Corn's so sweet I had to take me another sugar pill." From the back of his covered Chevrolet truck I pick up all sorts of language while I'm stuffing and counting corn. I catch myself saying, "Now, go on, what time it is?" and other such things not usually in my English vocabulary. I learn how to cut words off and refamiliarize myself with "ain't" and other great words. Otherwise, folks just don't trust me.






Julian's been working this way since he was seven years old. Now that the farm is his, he still hears customers talking about how long his Daddy's corn grew to be. Every once and awhile I sneak a peak at this man who is my boss and teacher for the rest of my stay in Tennessee. I bet a lot of women loved this man hard. Strong hands, always a clean white shirt, in his early fifties but with that cinnamon-colored skin, who can tell? Then he cracks a wicked smile at me and says, "Sair-uh, ah'm gonna buy you an ice cream." And I'm not really sure who he's treating, or how old he really is.






Tennessee is like heaven back at home this night, with its summer breeze, whining cicadas and ripe tomatoes on the vine. I pick up my guitar and write a few verses of a sappy love song before I compost the last of the corn husks in the kitchen and head off to bed.




III.

It begins at dawn. Slipping into her jeans and plaid work shirt in the dark, like an embarrassed lover. Arriving at the cornfield she is covered in a wet haze, while mist hugs at slender stalks .


Parting grasses to reach for this fruit, covered in moisture, our arms, neck and the small of our backs.
The cornfield smells of sweat and ripeness, sour and salty on the tongue and inside the nostrils. Her fragrance infects the garments worn as one struggles through her, poking and scraping at tender skin.

And soon, heaviness in breath, grunting and sighing in the heat, the grabbing and thrusting noises of corn being pulled at and forced into the sled. Sweat dribbling down the bridge of his nose and over her chin, falling on the moist earth below. Struggling, pulling on arms and legs and bodies of corn and people alike.
Slender stalks pushing up, pushing at, standing stiff and grabbing at clothes.
And then- softness, a bruised and tortured retreat.
Smelling of ripeness and a penetrating sun.
Leaving a taste of corn in her bathwater.

In a fever she can't sleep, can't stop smelling in hard breaths,
Can't understand why she grabs at the sheets.
Then,
returning again..
to work in heat.



IV.




Every day I drive out to Oliver Springs to work for Julian, feeling like I came to Tennessee to enter this new, passionate time in my life. My whole body aches, especially my thumb, doubled back in pain from the pressure of pulling the corn. Marshall spends the morning cussin' out Ally, the asthmatic mule, and me. "'Git up in der" he hollers at her while throwing me a "Git yer ass up der", "if I haf tah tell you agin' i'll ride yer ass". When I start to cussin' him out I say, "Shit, Marshall, yer just sayin' it cause you're sweet on me."

When Marshall is mad at the world, he doesn't speak to anyone, and often walks off on Julian. "I'll never leave this here field", he says, "and Julian will never let me go". Sounds like job security.

One morning I join Marshall at the field and he isn't speakin' to either Julian or me. Julian told me later that a woman had brought his little girl by with the dirtiest little feet, because her mother hadn't bathed her in a week. Thinkin' on how he had treated me, Marshall had said, "all these women are the same."


When I finally leave Julian's farm to return to Maine, Marshall spends the whole mornin' treating me like the backside of the mule. In the heat we endure hours of his silence and slammin around our equipment. Julian calls him "ignorant" about a dozen times. Then in the shade of the yard after all the corn has been loaded on the truck, and we are sittin' havin' a few sips of some white lightin' moonshine he tells me, "you're not bad to look at, once you git that boy oughtta you." Then immediately he covers himself when I smile by sayin', "now don't go thinkin' anythin', you always have somethin' to say, girl." And then, with a grin, "You know why I bin ridin' your ass, don't ya? It's 'cause I like ya. But you start messin' up and I can't say nothin' 'cause if I start....But you better not be callin' me from halfway to Maine sayin' somethin's gone on an happened to you, you hear?"

Marshall couldn't stand for another woman he actually liked to let him down. He just couldn't trust me. But that didn't mean he didn't care.

V.



Another one for the ole resume- I learned to sell corn in a farmer's market in Eastern Tennessee. The demographics of the typical market consumer circle are the following: older white women over the age of sixty and stay- at- home moms in modernized versions of southern bell flair, belled skirts and cotton blouses, debutantes at tomato stalls. This is a weekly social club. And shrewd, competitive, penny-pinching bargainers. Everyone wanting to know what kind of corn, how big the kernel, when it was picked, etc, etc. Sometimes I would notice Julian gettin' tired of them, and I would put on my sugar-coated southern speech and show them what all I had learned me in Tennessee.



Whenever someone passes by our truck of corn, it is important to say, " how 'bout it?", to entice them under the sale umbrella. Usually they bite. And when they do, it's imperative to send them off with, "I 'preciate you" and "you come back". Direct and to the point. If I don't use conjuntions in my speech they honestly look past me as if they don't trust me, or I don't exist. Then I face the mockery of Julian, which is beyond okay. Every so once in awhile Julian tells his customers, "I'll tell you somethin', this girl here sure can pick corn." Which belies all the gender struggle we inevitably go through daily in the field.



One of my favorite customers is old Miss Eula, a cousin of Julian's mother. Miss Eula is a wizened little peach of an old black woman who hangs on the arm of her son, mostly to chat with Julian. She talks often of her youth of hard laboring on the farm, with her son making faces of negation behind her back. Miss Eula makes all kind of promises of blackberry pies, but all we ever do is get to talkin' and advisin' the customers.



There are all kinds of characters on the farm. One afternoon Mr. Emmett comes up the drive spittin a big wad a 'baccer and a shotgun up over his shoulder. "Shit, Emmett, what you bin shootin' at?" Emmett's wife has the cancer and to pass time between treatments he has been shootin' at a rat around the house. I tell him I think he's on a fool's errand.

Just as Julian is divvying up some fine moonshine one afternoon a chubby young police officer circles back and forth out in front of the drive. Thinkin' we might have been caught in the act, we stuff aside the moonshine, but it's Ally he wants. "That your jack?" he asks. Well, Marshall cracks right up and says, "Shit, man don't know a jack from a mule." She's no ass and neither is he.

VI.


Up the road for okry I was sent one day to Julian's relatives. I had asked for a load of okra for Josh back home to fry up. I had learnt me how to become quite a negotiator and a regular at the farmstands. I knew just 'bout everything about where to get anything but moonshine in these parts.



When I left Julian's farm, I didn't have much more money in my pocket, but I had a jar of moonshine, blackberry jam, bags of corn, and the respect of two hard-ass farmers in Eastern Tennessee.



I ponder over a line in my book, Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, that reminds me of the farm, and keep coming back to it. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

Friday, July 6, 2007

Is the world fair in Knoxville, Tennessee?

How did I get here? All of a sudden I am sitting in 90-degree heat on a field of short astroturf-like grass field (with a drain in the middle of it) on the fourth of July watching a young man repel down from the giant disco ball they call the Sunsphere. I couldn't be anywhere more American than the site of the 1982 World Fair. Ronald Reagan is speaking on TV.... and didn't they just mean to say "former" US President? I feel like I've been transported back in time or that maybe I just dove into some X- files rerun where they have successfully cloned all these little white families. Ah, but the hillbilly fiddle is addictive, and there is fried food I've never heard of, so ah guess ah'll give 'er a try.






I came to Knoxville to follow a new friend home to his wonderful h.o.m.e. and give in to a particular feeling about returning to this beautiful state. Because it is my goal to explore healing and wisdom all over the South, I was initially mystified at the possibilities I would find here, and totally unprepared for the passion I would experience in my own journey. After all, isn't Knoxville a relic of another time? In his novel Suttree Cormac McCarthy refers to it as a "city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad." And yet, a glutton for punishment, I fall in love with it all.


My first day walking my way through Knoxville, I of course sought out the homeless community and it's advocates. It was kind of hard not to notice them. Walking down Broadway into town I passed by the Salvation Army and under a bridge where the low income community has taken up daily residence. I wanted to know where people stay when the heat in this valley town creeps up beyond recognition.

I shared a conversation with Reverend Bruce, whose organization is actually similar to Preble Street's in Portland. I was amazed to find such a kindred spirit in the Reverend, a man who understands what it means to simultaneously be doing ally work and self reflection. He spoke poignantly about his "hillbilly roots" in Appalachia, and openly shared his process of constantly questioning faith within the work.
















Knoxville is populated by an old carpet and furniture industry, factory work which still draws many Latinos to the state on the whole for employment. It was once known as the "new Atlanta", boasting one of the first African-American mayors in the south.
Today, however, the city is pretty segregated and there is a count of 1800-2000 homeless folks a month, 70% of whom are chronically homeless, according to Rev. Bruce. More and more women who have chronic major mental illness inhabit these streets and it is even more and more difficult to engage people in services. We talk about the people resting under the bridge as being a symbolic stronghold of people's resistance to treatment and development and as an assertion of their rights as a community. I hear the music to Les Mis playing in my mind.





The community center has currently purchased and begun renovating an old, elaborate boarding house called Minvilla, which continues to be attraction for the alternative tourist. Decrepit, witchy remains that will someday soon provide a transition for people on the street.




We talk about the implications of doing work with the faith community. Rev. Bruce describes Knoxville as being so "haunted by religiousity" that even atheists have a church. As I walk around the neighborhood, I believe him. Jesus is around every corner. But as I have learned in my volunteer work with the homeless community in Durham, NC, in the South sometimes the more radical folks are people of faith, as opposed to state social workers.















How do they protect their "neighbors" under the bridge when it is too warm outside? When the temperature is 89 degrees or above, they raise a white flag to alert them that they can rest inside the shelter during the day. Under the umbrella of labor relations in the South, we talk about how many homeless folks continue to be exploited for dangerous day labor in Knoxville. Every day on my way to the farm, I pass the overpopulated Labor Ready and hope that people are getting enough care in this heat.

II.

I headed to the Smoky Mountains for some of my own healing. Although the Smoky Mountains are incredibly over-commercialized, to the point of nausea, I walked far enough into their woods to let the green take over. I couldn't believe how overgrown with moss and flowers, like a wooded fairyland. Getting lost once, picking up a bear trail, sharing a moment with a deer, I walked myself into the woods alone and set up camp. I was so hoping to see a black bear. I could hear them around me as I drifted off to sleep, totally confident to have my bag hung up high in the trees above me. Although I was sleeping with the bears the whole time, I never actually saw one. I awoke to have oatmeal next to the river until rangers approached with horses and I was accompanied once again.

III.

Finally, I believe I came to Knoxville to hear the wall at the US/Mexico border being played. At a local gallery downtown I finally met another traveling musician, interested in "transforming the border from a symbol of fear and loathing into an instrument capable of promoting unity". Working with various instruments and communities on both sides of the border, Glenn from Tucson, Arizona has created a symphony of the metal, helicopters, and even air around the wall to answer the question, how can sound be a bridge between people?

As I listen I am reminded of the call and response of salsa music, meditative sufi chanting, and even the southern cicadas, undulating choruses in the Tennessee heat. One of the most poignant scenes of this musical journey is at a desert altar, where he has recorded and transformed the space surrounding loss. We had an inspiring conversation about empowering ourselves to transform our instruments of oppression into instruments of sound and healing. I really liked the idea of people having access to the wall through music and I hope to incorporate this into my work someday. (Check out sonicanta.com).


On my way out of town, I pass Carletta and Missy's Quality Furniture and Antiques, cross the railroad tracks and housing projects to arrive at the mountains. In my heavier bags are two silk flowers, tokens of my time here. They represent the sweetness and the frivolity, the capacity of people in Knoxville to create beauty out of old relics and still older stories.


Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Life, Love, and Revolution at Thirty....



In lieu of what my Dad calls my "expository weirdness", I decided to provide some thoughts and images from my six months to describe what is currently feels like to be "southbound".


Along the path to thirty, I had younger women say to me, "it doesn't really matter", "you're making such a big deal out of being thirty". After traveling for six months, I say to you all with pride, it is a really HUGE, beautiful, BIG deal to be a thirty year old woman.

While lounging at a recent 4 hour Greyslug bus layover in Charlotte, NC, I compared notes with an 18 year old from Burlington. Raging hormones? Check. Feel you need all the space in the world because you're at the height of your power? Check. Confused at what comes next? Check. Revolution comes around again at thirty.

Why is thirty so damn special? And why is my body and heart in such revolt? Why haven't I been granted the comfy couch of my young adulthood? Movies on Friday evening with the sweetie of my dreams...Hmmm, nah. All of a sudden people talk more about what "sign" you are, and start throwing terms at you like "saturn return". I feel like I crashed into thirty and am still sorting out what hit me. I wonder, could I have prepared myself for this?



(<- Your heroine, forced to sit in the middle aisle of an Atlanta-bound Greyhound)

At the latter end of my teens, I was filled with a sense of my own freedom, yet intimidated by the change my life was in for. My body and heart were in two different places. Now is no different. Out on the farm I dream of cultivating my own family, while my heart holds on to places, people, summer nights spent dreaming, two feet stretching out alone.

Except that at thirty, and alone, I am a spiritual being, and all along this journey I bare witness to evidence of this in other women. I started my own experience of this wisdom by moving to Providence, where I sought out Mary, running her own home and business. Laurie and I created living art in her kitchen in Washington, DC. I met Siyade, from Philly, confronting racism in her work and relationships, and making sense of new growth in her approach. And finally, in Tennessee, I meet a woman like myself, with a handful of songs and a few good chords on guitar, creating projects around a new identity. And me, halfway to or from home, and I've had my hands in the dirt, trying to unearth the creator, the mother in me. There's just something so special about thirty.



My grandmother recently told my mom she had heard I was in love. My mother, of course, corrected her, stating that she thought I had not met anyone. But I am so in love, Grandma! I'm in love with this new person I see in myself, the one who lets herself see the stars, nap in the heat of the afternoon, makes really good sweet potatoes. This one who speaks so many languages and dances. This one! She is just beginning to surface. I just met another woman turning thirty that came to Knoxville to get space from the end of a relationship. She described herself to me as "ridiculously happy". (<- Knoxville nightlife)


As I travel and meet people, my idea of love only expands. What are the elements of a good love story? Passion, compassion, fury and fire, release. What am I missing?

I used to think love is like the cities I visit. Places you can get lost in and be ready to investigate or be done with. They captivate, pursue and purchase your heart and interest.
Lovers leave you wandering and wanting and exhausted, tripping home up 6 flights of stairs. Intoxicated, you breathe them in and the possibilities liberate and loosen you until they convince you that you can ride on their backs for awhile until you lose yourself in their winding streets. Looking up, the world is endless. Looking down, dirty and used. Days when you feel lost in all their scraped skies. Days with hidden treasures, like coffee in a darling bookstore and you melt into yourself. People and cities are this untouchable and this beloved.




In Durham, I learned that I had more privilege to choose.
The women I met there are having children on their own, and creating wonderful relationships around their choices. Knowing I have more ability to choose gives me more freedom to fall in love. The community I discovered felt powered by women.



Knoxville, TN has rekindled so much of my passion and ability to let go. The farmland and mountains stirred my desires in ways I thought impossible in that stagnant heat. I awoke to be surprised again and again.








I looked at a job online the other day and had the courage to not even think about applying. I know I need more of the stars and the thick heat and this revolution.




My mom and I have been talking about "home" being an acronym. I have roots so thick I feel them sprouting underneath my toenails, but sometimes the lessons are little homes too. I am living in this lesson right now. You're welcome to knock on my door and visit, but don't ask me to move...not now. This house is not on the market.


My girl Alana called it right before I left. She explained my depression as a shrinking of my world, prescribing my remedy as a need to amplify my perspective. Maybe it is a privilege to think this way, but I would not have been able to heal my depression any other way. Anything else is a load in the dryer. Spin, spin, spin.






Southbound is no longer just a geographical concept to me. I left Maine that way, but I have changed my perspective. Y'all know when we refer to our body parts "going south", but what about our hearts melting into age and time until we are perfected beings? The south warms, thickens, exposes skin. I have always gone south to feel young and liberated. At thirty, I am documenting this awakening as I am documenting so many other types of revolution. It's only fair.

I welcome many more southbound nights of melting heat and lightning bugs in my lifetime.


Thursday, June 28, 2007

America's Finest



Living in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, I fell for the lush, overgrown vegetation that provided rich soil for a multitude of different crops. In the heat I sunk my hands into the organic earth, tilled and perfected into rows by the same hands that would bring it's produce weekly to the Farmer's Market. Every day I shared a meal with the farmer's family- green, earthy asparagus, ripe sungold tomatoes, a wealth of produce at my gloved

fingertips. As a farmer, I took breaks when I needed them, stopped to talk with my co-workers, and returned home to a cushiony existence in a cool house with electric fans.


The land I visited while traveling out to various migrant camps during a "Witness for Justice" program with the Farmworker Unit of Legal Aid in Raleigh, NC, spoke of a different harvest. Human beings, like produce, marketed at the lowest cost to work on monocropped land of tobacco and cotton.


Barreling down dirt pathways, barely roads, that end in uniform bunk houses in varying states of disrepair, I am reminded of my visit to the US/Mexico border in Arizona. I was there over one year ago on a rescue trip, bringing food and water to people who risked dehydration in the desert. We walked around hot land, encountering the remains of lives of survival and struggle: small, cavernous dwellings, littered by food and spoiled clothing. I wondered then at who could possibly think any human being would choose to live this way.


(picture-cotton)

Now I have the same feeling as I walk into the dark exterior of the camp houses. I see a broken pipe hanging down. The humidity traps me as I try to make space between the bed and kitchen table. The set of houses where these tobacco farmers are living is isolated and small. I am reminded of summer camp dwellings where I have stayed to "rough it" out in the woods. But this is not summer camp, and these are hardworking families. The neat rows of well-tended tobacco sit juxtaposed next to disheveled homes.



Conversing with the farmers brings the setting to life. It is dinnertime and the moment is alive with young men chiding each other, women cooking and showing off children. The family extends through each unit as a community takes form. The vibrant sounds of Mexican Spanish: words of comradery and journey. Everyone is interested in hearing how they can keep safe, greeting Omar our guide, and learning of the NC Justice Center. And then, I am reminded of how young so many of these workers are when one of the guys asks me about my nose ring. What do young people do when they must wait sometimes weeks for work?


Farmwork is the hardest sort of work to do because it requires that the human form be strong and dependable. Yet, so often migrant farmworkers are treated with little respect. Their backs bear the weight of our daily sustenance while their hearts endure our discrimination, jokes, and lack of consideration. Migration is a reality for many people all over the United States. I have met a handful of New Yorkers in North Carolina, seeking a higher quality of life. I have ventured out of Maine to touch my spirit again and improve my own living. Families change, shift and grow out of cities and towns. We cross borders, travel through mountains, carving out new paths all the time. How are some travelers beyond compassion, some borders beyond crossing?


As I farm my way across the South in the heat I feel deeply connected to the human beings whose hands touched my food. I think about how their shoulders feel at the end of a day, how the summer sun sometimes makes you feel like you can never get comfortable, how their children may have breathed in chemicals out in the filde. And I ask myself, what is the true cost of my food?








Wednesday, June 27, 2007

Southern Exposure

(The alternate topic under this title would have been about my southern skin infestations...)

Well, it's hot June in Carolina del Norte and I having been watching okra get ready for its season on the farm. Peaches will soon be here, and we have all been enjoying the beginnings of tomato season. Lightning bugs are out in full glory and somewhat humiliated by our voyeuristic needs to put them in jars to see their bums light up. I wear the humidity every day like a polyester suit coat and know I will be ready for whatever heatwave Maine will ever dish out. Farming is near impossible for me, and the chigger bites and poison ivy that were my hazing into the south are still making my skin crawl. I went out into my garden today on Arnette Ave. and marveled at all the creatures in our hammock. Then decided i would have nothing to do with them.

I have been in North Carolina one month longer than I had planned. I have fallen for the South because it pokes and provokes me. Durham has been a wonderful place from which to explore other areas in the South, and to come home to, dragging my tale between my legs as I evaluate everything I ever knew about people and organizing. What I have learned into my hands about the farm and the legacy of this land has been further planted in me as I share in stories of resistance and a deep, immediate kind of pain rooted here, a pain renewed by the reality of immigrants as slave labor in the South.

I wouldn't want anyone to think that I came here, found community, and lived out my days in peace. The south isn't about peace. Its dance is a furious one, fire and passion. We only sit on porches in between. The South is a train barreling through towns, lurching and sweating out fumes, screeching, "Are you ready to get on?" I can't tell yet, if I'm getting on, but I sure am doing some of the deepest analysis of power and privilege I have ever had to do.

So there are places on this trip that I don’t realize I need to be until I find myself speeding down the interstate in their direction. I want to tell you about a few of them.

I. The Highlander Center

I was pretty sure after one month in North Carolina that I was receiving a clear message to go to Florida. Every activist and labor organizer that I had spoken with agreed that there were rad happenings south of where we were. The Immokalee farmworkers have just won a fight against McDonalds and are the highlight of southern Florida activism for farmworkers.

But after a couple attempts at trying to arrange farm work and visits to the peninsula it was clear: if I wanted to do farm work in Florida I would have to haul watermelons, tomato season being over, and also I wasn’t really ready for Florida in the middle of the summer. Besides, the season was over and most of the organizers had scattered and were actually working on seasonal crops in the Carolinas. Finding anyone would be like stitching a quilt without a needle.

So five minutes after I had set my sights west on Tennessee, home to some 40 anti-immigrant proposals, I marched down Arnette Ave to my friend Tony’s place(a collective house where I am now living) and he immediately said, “you have to go to this conference at the Highlander Center.”

Who up North knows about the Highlander Center today anyway? When we think of labor organizing many of us think of local unions, protests at Wal-mart, our own local meat and seafood processing plants.

The Highlander Center is sacred space. Perched atop a hill in the valley of the great Smokies of Eastern Tennessee the spirit meets the struggle. The Highlander Center has been a nexus of popular education and labor organizing in the South since the 1940s, although many people identify it with the Civil Rights movement, because it was one of the first safe spaces for black and white laborers to organize together.

Still ringing in my ears are the songs of resistance from the Civil Rights Movement that initiated my days at the conference. "I woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom". This has been one of the blessings of southern organizing. Every conference maintains this tradition of song. During a music circle at Highlander, I heard Guy and Candie Carawan, two seasoned musician activists tell stories of songs from the movement, from the coast of the Carolinas to Appalachia, songs like good friends carrying the load. Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize", and "We shall Overcome" that people perpetuated in frightening moments in the dark, or happily over supper. This inherited drumbeat of revolution awakened my commitment. Oh, let us always remember to sing.

The other blessing in our organizing work is the progressive language access movement in the South. I came to the Highlander to participate in a training entitled," Interpreting in the social justice movement". I have seen some of the finest activism here around organizing interpretation and been involved in bettering my skills as a simultaneous interpreter for ally work in the immigrant justice movement. I believe that if I truly want to create change I need to step back and trust in immigrant and indigenous leadership; using my language privilege for good and assuming the role of interpreter at these events may just be the most radical way of using my voice.

So I have been volunteering to interpret at many events, sometimes getting paid, and seeing some amazing discussions take place. I went to a forum on immigration in the South, a local conference for Latinos in NC, and have offered to interpret at the US social forum in Atlanta, GA. Most of these conferences work from popular education models disseminated by Highlander. More power to our peeps.
The focus of the immigration work we are doing is to frame the movement within the larger context of racist politics and apply a popular education model to create strong communities that question our basic values around immigration. We are building a "multi-racial movement".

The immigration conference I attended was at University of North Carolina, the oldest public university and perhaps the reason for NC being the more progressive southern state. One of the participants said he felt the South was unique with a more settled population of Latinos we are changing the paradigm because the minority is organizing itself, instead of being organized by others.

One of the moments I remember most is a woman from Paraguay sharing how when she came to the United States she was in four years of darkness.

Eastern TN is an amazing place. I loved resting in the mountains at a place where MLK, Paulo Friere, and other people came together to share ideas that are still seen as so radical. I took a walk down a country road at one point and decided I would come back here in July. There must be something else I need to see.

Finally, as I was sitting down at the end of the conference, waiting for my ride and watching a perfect afternoon end in the mountains, a woman I had been trying to connect with in Immokalee, FL walked up the road with her huge backpack. I also met a group of people from New Orleans who offered me a place to stay and information. A woman who talked about dead bodies in the streets and handing out respirators to clients only to see them two seconds later be rounded up by immigration, respirators on the ground. She will need someone to cook her good meals and remind her to sleep. Sometimes the less we organize something, the more available we are to receive it in gift form.


II. Greensboro, NC

One restless night a couple of weeks ago, while tossing and turning and like a bear, scratching an itchy belly full of swelling chigger bites against the sandy texture of my bedsheets, I dreamt I lived in Greensboro in the week of February 1, 1960.

Maybe I had been thinking about how to talk about race, maybe I had been troubled by the lack of struggle for immigration reform in NC in the past few weeks. I don’t know. But all of a sudden I was transported into Greensboro and was being led by a young defiant black woman into the side door of the local Woolworth building, the site of the start of the Civil Rights movement, when black university students sat down at the lunch counter and demonstrated until they won the right to equal service.

I do not remember much of this dream, but I do recall being led by the hand and while my guide sat at those same stools, I hung back at the end of the counter, observing some books on nearby shelves. I awoke with the thought, “what kind of ally will you be?”

Somehow it just felt important to me to go to Greensboro. I learned during my life in Bolivia that places of resistance can be very sacred sites. I felt that this place might inform other areas of my trip.

Greensboro is a graceful step into the past. Old tiled buildings, streets lined with antique shops promising wonders untold to window shoppers who chance into their caves of bedframes, wagon wheels, and soda fountains. I played the part of the mosaic artist, gathering tiles for a future project, peering into alleys and looking at storefronts to imagine their story. Red velvet and lemon cakes behind glass cases and milkshakes and fountains…a quaint downtown with no idea as to why I have come.

I paid homage at the Woolsworth building, which is boarded up and awaiting restoration, along with the Civil Rights Museum next door. According to the tourist center folks, the museum has already received a lot of funding, which apparently has been mismanaged. The folks at the other historical museum up the road said there had been a lot of water damage. Hmm. So I made the hard cement sidewalk outside my museum and paid tribute to this home to courage and resistance.

We are sure going to need it in New Orleans.

III.

Most recently I was at a Barnraising for a Malcolm X Radio Station in Greenville, SC, chaperoning a group from the Youth Noise Network, a radio station in Durham powered by high school youth. The term barnraising implies building something in a short amount of time. For our project, it was building the Low Power Station, WMXP,in a weekend.

The goal of this weekend was to provide Greenville with the resources to create the station and to empower attendees in general by offering technical skills in all areas of radio as media activism. They reported that African-Americans in general only own 3.4% of US radio stations. The hope was to diversify the voices. Greenville, SC was chosen because it is a very conservative southern town. A walk downtown during the "Scottish Games" (can you imagine wearing a wool kilt in a heat wave? thou shalt not kilt!) offered a reference as to who owns the streets in some of the more wealthier area. We did stop to pay tribute to a statue commemorating the students in Greenville who were a part of the movement to end segregated public spaces. But from this moment on, the struggle we witnessed was disjointed and pretty segregated.


The event we participated in offered no collective analysis and response to privilege and power and appeared at the outset to be another attempt of folks from the North, mostly white and mostly male, coming to educate folks from South to be more "progressive". In many ways, it backfired because of this. In summary, the project exploded in the end into disorganized dialogue brought forward by a committee of well-meaning folks who unfortunately created even more problematic layers.

What I have learned from the South thus far is that there is real pain here that I may never be able to understand. It is not a carnaval ride. As a Yank with white skin privilege I cannot just buy my ticket and hope on. I need to keep challenging myself, for I am an imposer as much because of my northernness, as my white skin. There is trauma here that I have not lived, not in NC, not in New Orleans, not in anywhere I have hope for. I have struggled with questions about my role as an ally, my privilege as an ally, and my own spiritual journey. I have explored questions about my travel and the impact of my presence in communities not my own. There is a responsibility to doing work in the South, to educating myself without putting that burden on people of color, to knowing the community I travel to and why I am going there. Although I always want to support all people traveling freely, esp women, the work that I will continue to do as I travel through to the border is to look at the privilege I have in being able to make this trip, and how to use that privilege to turn around racism.




Regarding New Orleans, I am taking longer to get there because I feel it an enormous responsibility. I want to know if being another white person there can be at all helpful or even more oppressive.I've been asking myself why I'm here, how I think I can be a good ally, and what are the questions I can bring home. When I get that squirming feeling in my belly (the kind that isn't left over from Bolivian chicha) I need to sit with it,figure out what feels wrong, and meet the challenge. The impact of this place is that i am just doing that naturally. Sometimes we white folk get all stressed when we don't consider something; I'm working to challenge myself despite my need to be perfect and adored. I have also been interviewing my elders here on how they approach the role of ally in this space because whatever work we're doing, we all need community.