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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.
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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....
