Civil Roots

Lessons From a First-time Hustler

2008-03-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

There I was in my pressed black pants and suit jacket, the infinite florescence of the New Orleans Superdome ceiling draining the color from my cheeks, poised on my linoleum stage and ready for an audience of hundreds with weapon in hand: the Amazing Rubber Broom. That's right folks, step right up and watch us clean this same piece of carpet all day long. It's amazing! And not only that, I will personally spread shredded hair on a carpet all day long for this demonstration. Two for the price of one.

I never thought my first trip to the Superdome would be this glamorous. Looking above me, I can only imagine how fearful I would have been watching pieces of this endless cave collapse during Katrina. We watch a balloon travel upward and lose it in our vision before it hits the ceiling. All day families pass by and tell us how they would buy a broom, but then they are still waiting for their homes to be rebuilt. That is amazing.

And so, thank God!, I have landed this job selling brooms in the Superdome. For I have become a connoisseur of random money-making schemes and a professional hustler. In fact, my favorite occupation thus far has been to distribute fliers. I walk through the streets of the richer neighborhoods advertising whoever, whatever for a reasonable wage. The direct benefit of this work lies in the wealth of neighborhood trash out on the street, the occasional item that missed the last yard sale. I'm on the scene. The challenge is that I get lost in the similarity of the houses of suburbia, and it therefore requires reading a map.

I work with a woman called Mrs. Mama, although that's not her real name. She doubles as a housemother in a local strip club. Mama tells me that if she had enough money, she would improve on any one of her looks, buy her some breasts and straighten her face out. I challenge her on this, although it's not fair to judge someone who spends her livelihood staring at fake breasts and fake tans, telling the dancers that they are beautiful. She would probably dance, except for a limiting beauty mark on her face and the way birthing three children have stretched and strained her body through the years. She feeds the dancers, is paid by the club to keep a small store with the essentials. She sees flesh and naked humanity entertained and intertwined in a dance that is about survival; there is a story here.

It's two in the morning and my body hurts from the restaurant, from crunching toes into these shoes for too long now. I want to go home. But I know I need to make ten more dollars. In the morning, my neighbor comes by and asks if I can spare eight dollars. He'll wash my car, which I can't afford to drive anyway, and serves as my dresser on good weeks when I can keep the mold at bay. Um, okay. Can't eat money, I hear my friend John saying in my ear. And there is always a small way to make more.

This is the story I continue to hold about New Orleans: there are so many ways to survive a storm. The woman on the porch in the downpour, talkin' about how she always should have learned how to swim, the restaurant owner who gets drunk daily and tears up recounting his grandmother's stories of being the first free black woman in her family, the street artist, the shotgun house spilling its contents onto darkened streets like a doll house, a Sunday on St. Claude Street in a second line parade, a migrant worker courageous every morning he watches for work. There are many stories about others and about myself that it may never be right or safe to share. I hold them in this sacred root cellar of my being, keeping them firm and ready for soup.

I will miss this place.

Below Sea Level from the Stars...Back to New Orleans

2008-03-06T20:54:00.000-08:00

Today I went on a bikeride out to the banks of Lake Pontchartrain. On the way back, I passed a neighborhood where two trumpets playing were dueling out a tune, each from a distance of four blocks from the other. Then I went out for some coffee and heard kids from 4 to 14 be taught a free lesson by some of the best brass players in town while the rain outside our window teased out its own cacophony in competition. The music of New Orleans.

Avocados are called alligator pears in New Orleans. Their rough skin is like the roads I pedal down, covered with potholes. I pass flowers in bloom, lizards, and like, for we live on top of a swamp.

This magical, wonderland of sounds and sight I am leaving. I have come to the end of my journey with this place. The swamp- what is the hold she has had on me? I have heard it rumored that she takes her prisoners, sucking them into her skirts as they fall for this siren bayou. Musicians feel it, they just don't quite feel the same anywhere else. Even a young bible-touting fellow traveler at a hostel called it out, proclaiming that New Orleans was full of sin. Aw, but isn't that sinful inciting spoonful just delicious?

Beyond Saguero Bliss

2008-03-06T19:57:00.000-08:00

I'm standing at another crossroads, la otra encrucijada. I am alone again, but this time I have no guitar in my hands. From the Rio Grande/Bravo the multinational forest of US/Mexico borderland stretches out before me. I have arrived at the banks of decision , muddied by the struggle as hands and hearts gasp for last breaths in the chilly waters of her currents. This river is split down the middle and owned by two countries, patrolled by one. This river-receiver splits a whole land in two. I search through the half eaten elotes (corn cobs), the multicolor plastic bags hurled up into tree branches by an errant windstorm or car tires, looking for a sign of movement.

In this deserted park, residents of Nuevo Laredo are taking Sunday, parked in vehicles with little bands of people, all too aware of this psychological journey. Yet just one mile across asphalt and river the same land offers a different landscape. As I turn river rocks over in my fingers and contemplate how people who have never learned to swim ford the stream tied to car tires, I am again struck by the answer to the question...why would you cross a river you can't swim across?

I traveled through Texas to complete my trip from Maine to Mexico, and to look at programs that assist migrants across the most dangerous leg of the journey. My first stop in US borderland was Laredo, TX and it's twin, Nuevo Laredo in Mexico. As luck would have it, I met a young woman in New Orleans who invited me to stay with her family, her Mexican parents and their Mexican-American children in Laredo. My first night with the Hernandez family convinced me that I would do anything to stall my departure. They were warm, open-hearted folks with a foot on both sides of the debate. Interestingly enough, they have two daughters working as civil servants, one as a probation officer, and the other as a parole officer. They have a range of experiences with US Border Patrol. They would become my escorts into Mexico.

Fernando and his wife work in Mexico and live in Texas, as many Mexican families have done for years. Their children were all born in the US, and my friend in New Orleans grew up without learning the language of her parents. In fact, we train as interpreters together, and I often catch her inventing words in Spanish. Reflected in her language is the survival of her parents; to become more "American" meant having greater benefits in this society.

Between dinners of stuffed chiles and hot Mexican chocolate and bread, slumbers filled with dreams of cactus fields and native drumbeats, I find "New" Laredo. Traveling with Fernando I visit a social worker friend of his at a public hospital, a crowded waiting room in the middle of the city. This gentleman describes what it is like to work with a population dependent on travel to the US. He is a team of one, and I apologize to at least ten people as he ushers me into his office for an appointment. His primary responsibility is to talk to people about benefits, but he sees a lot of mothers caught in the real war at the border, the drug war.

We travel to the Casa del Migrante, a drop-in center for migrants at all stages of the journey. I speak with a young man there, himself a Mexican native who lived in Chicago for years. I feel very much at home in their kitchen, where there is an industrial-sized pot cooking for many, the smell of burnt rice warm and inviting. The Casa provides housing, food, resources.

Over the border back into her US counterpart, Laredo, we have no trouble passing through immigration. Mine is an unearned privilege, I think, as I watch the faces of my hosts turn to relief as we pass the checkpoint.And they do this everyday....

Back in town I ask a young man what you could do for fun here. He suggests I climb up to the top of the highest building in town and check out the Border Patrol checkpoints. Hmmm.....

A call from a friend in El Paso sets my next course, and I have to say goodbye to the Hernandez family. But not before the grandmother in the family, a shy, girlish woman in her seventies, presses a twenty into my hand. Get yourself something on the road, she says...I know she somehow means to keep me safer.

What's So Scary 'Bout New Orleans?: Masking Privilege and Power in the Big Easy

2008-02-07T17:54:00.000-08:00

It's one am in the morning and I've just been released from my shift at the jazz club and restaurant where I work. After serving heaping dishes of Jambalaya and Crawfish Etoufee (etoufee, Brute?) and dubbing over in private the lines to the song being sung by tonight's musician, I am off to enjoy the fanfare in a city that practically invented costumes. In fact, the competition is so intense, I have decided to type cast myself as an overworked, trying-to-fit-in- newcomer to the city of New Orleans. I have my mask draped over my shoulder, my soiled apron in my backpack, and my red dress on. I am ready for my first night as more than a waitress, that is, as a human being.

Down past the French Quarter, swerving to avoid the revelers in matching provocation, dripping in sexuality. My crew sees quite a few priests and prostitutes, greasers and French maids and god knows what else. We careen around broken glass and rivers of beer. The frat party atmosphere leaves no one out, or alone for that matter. Musicians in masks push tip jars through the masses and their ethereal swaying in the nicotine haze feels dreamlike. Weeding through the garden gnomes and politically incorrect convicts and gangsters to find the more creative Halloween attire, I am catching my first glance of New Orleans at play.

Since I arrived in the city, I have had to do what most natives of the Crescent City do to survive: sell my soul to the restaurant devil. Yes, I wait hand and foot on New Orlean's wealthiest. Food on the left, drinks to the right, can I please kill myself for you for two dollars? Did you know I've waited my whole life just to clean up after you?

Yet, this is as real as it gets. I spent a long time thinking about coming to New Orleans, a culture and place so different from my home. While in Mississippi and Alabama I searched for clues about why I wanted to be a part of this masquerade. When activists from all over the country hopped on buses and planes after Katrina to be a part of the relief (and often, a part of the relieved), I did not feel compelled to leave my work in Maine. It felt like the work I was doing was a still a swirling, churning hurricane over our heads. Katrina only added to that disaster, and New Orleans felt so far away. Besides, the skills I had were better put to use elsewhere. Or so I thought.

And now, here I am, preparing for Mardi Gras in January in a distant city, singing with a band and making decisions about my life here for the next year. My own parade through the United States has never been as difficult as it has been for me in New Orleans. And Katrina is really only part of the equation.

I'm about to get really real, y'all. When I arrived in New Orleans, I still believed I could travel this country and not get really vulnerable. I thought I could balance my own poverty, work as a farmer and god knows what else and still be analytical. I still believed I could dance through the streets with my new freedom in cowgirl boots and not trip over the grooves left by power and privilege.

And I knew that what I would encounter in New Orleans would challenge and mold me. And not just because of Katrina- because of centuries of racism. I knew that the work I came to do- understand how to use my language privilege to provide health, safety and access to a new and growing group of Central American and Mexican day laborers- would have me questioning how I practice my politics.

I also learned very quickly- and got angry!- that the story of Katrina in New Orleans is not for the outsider to tell. I am not an expert, I was not here, moreover I stand humbled by the city and the resistance of its population. I refuse to tell it, except to ask, what is the Katrina in my homeland? With that message fixed to my heart like a nametag, I cry, "Hello, my name is Sarah and I'm starting with the story of my own privilege!"

So it was that I came to work in the blessed French Quarter, often riding my bike through a river of beads, fighting the urge not to scare off the tourists. I began to realize- and internalize- my place within this mafioso world of big money and big tradition. No matter what my background, my immediate financial situation saw me absorbed into a culture of racism and oppression. I was part of an all-white crew of servers, although I mostly hung out with the Black dishwasher and prep cook. I learned the ins and outs of the "back room" and the "front room" in the restaurant and even observed the separate relationships of wealth across race. I struggled with the decision to continue, because I knew I might have more freedom to choose. And then I didn't- my rich white male boss touched me inappropriately and then promptly stopped talking to me when I confronted him (we do things differently in the South) and I overdrew my bank account, made no money and had to leave the restaurant. I quickly became another desperate person in New Orleans- definitely with more privilege- but still, desperate.

As I waded through the restaurant and other options, my anxiety coursing through my veins like a bad trip, I experienced the other side of the Big Easy. Dripping with insecurity and inexperience here, I was not hired. It was as if they could taste my impoverished fear like a fine house wine. I was advised not to tell anyone I had left the first restaurant, as I would be marked for failure. When I finally was hired at a club, it was the worst possible situation I could have imagined, and I continued to face my failure.

The reason I am explaining my own story is because I want to be honest. I joined a group called the Anti-Racist Working Group here in New Orleans, a group of people who identify with having white privilege and want to do work with other white people. When I started to participate in this group, I struggled to explain my own intimate experience within this power structure. Whenever I applied to businesses in the Quarter, my race mattered. In fact, it entered first through the door. I wanted to talk about this, but I quickly realized that my current economic reality and bad luck distinguished me from other white people who were making it in the Big Easy. Why had I become afraid to just get out there and do what I had to do to survive while working for this really great free clinic intent on practicing health care with anti-racist principles? Didn't I know that most people in New Orleans had to do this type of work to survive? What made me so special?

I am still learning that the message of being in a Big Easy, turn-your-head kind of place is about access. Who has it, who doesn't. Even the message of Carnival has been about access for religious people unto days of free-spirited wildness. Some days I feel like I understand New Orleans, some days I just feel humbled by even riding my boat to the ferry. The beads are not the only things in my way; I have years of oppression caused by racist white people to ride through. (And ride through it I will...not around it or beside it).

The music, the heat off the bayous, riding decorated bicycles through neighborhoods crowded with multi-colored shutters...this is a culture so distinct from my own. I always imagine that while my own state lay dormant in winter, tons of plants and wildlife was springing into action on every little patch of earth in New Orleans. I am still asking myself if I can be a resource for anyone in this wonderful, difficult city, as she teaches me in so many ways to put down my masks of privilege and security to hear her tell her own story.

In Search of the Jellyroll in the Mississippi Delta

2007-12-13T18:16:00.001-08:00

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---------------->

Freedom Walking in Birmingham

2007-11-19T10:26:00.001-08:00

(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

2007-11-19T09:27:00.000-08:00

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.

My Car: A Lesson in Impermanence

2007-11-04T23:25:00.000-08:00

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.

Climbing out of the Highlands of North Carolina

2007-10-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

(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....

***********

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....

Woman of the Corn

2007-07-10T19:54:00.000-07:00

(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.)

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.

Is the world fair in Knoxville, Tennessee?

2007-07-06T06:03:00.000-07:00

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.

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

2007-07-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

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.

America's Finest

2007-06-28T07:08:00.000-07:00

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?

Southern Exposure

2007-06-27T12:50:00.001-07:00

(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.

Father's Day 2007

2007-06-18T06:11:00.000-07:00

For M.A.A. and A.A.L.

The girl slips her hand into his
Imagining the words she will speak
In his own language
Papi, quiero pizza
Without sensing the words on his mind
Deportación, migra, que será de la reforma, m'ija?
Or even
"Illegal alien".

They walk the narrow sidewalks,
And from behind there is nothing alien
About the way her body hugs his.
She has the same gait,
Legs short and lagging in city traffic.
The soft down on her back is his,
And they raise the same thick wealth of eyebrows
At the line of cars.

Father's Day in a New York minute.

They continue past shops and greet,
Although the only Spanish she speaks is whispered at bed,
Among kicked-off covers in the lone room they share,
Her sticky little face molded into his arm.
Or upon leaving her school in the afternoon
Amidst a flurry of mothers pecking at their clothes
And herding children along while
He waits to take her hand,
His work uniform still pressed from the morning
And his black hair shining.

Still she listens to the señoras and understands
As if she were the one they were talking to.
She has no idea
That one day soon
She might need to use this language to ask
Her family
Why her father had to leave.

-Sarah L.

Got food? Thank a farmworker...

2007-06-07T18:14:00.000-07:00

Day 1 at the farm:

When I was living back in Maine, I knew I wanted to come to the South to farm. I also knew that I was going to be involved with migrant workers in a variety of different jobs.

Once while facilitating a weekly support group for homeless Latino men, the group chose the topic of the meanings of agricultural labor in their lives. One of my elderly Mexican clients described in detail the loss he felt at not being physically able to farm, because "farming is like having money in the bank". Being able to grow food and feed your family is the greatest security a person can have.

Thinking about how to design this part of my trip, I was clear that I didn't want to play at being an immigrant farmworker so that I could experience something. Being a farmworker and an immigrant so often means being exploited or earning too little; doing solidarity work doesn't mean studying people or in any way excepting that behavior. Moreover, I'm committed to organic farming. I'd been working to create a local food co-op in Maine and learning more about our agricultural economy. And farmwork means a lot to me at this age, touching earth to get clarity, feeling connected to my own mother, who did all kinds of migrant labor, educating myself to perhaps work once again with permaculture and farming in Maine. And yes, to be in solidarity with farmworkers.

I found Harry LeBlanc and the Beausol Farm through a friend of a friend in Durham. I called Harry just after his chosen apprentice failed to show up. At the time, I thought there would be no way I could do it : I would need to bike 60 miles daily on sketchy roads to get there. I pondered this out loud one day with my friend Tennessee, who immediately suggested I take her car. Well, I'm not afraid of much in this world, but driving a stick is right up there with death. However, I really wanted to farm. So I relearned how to drive in rush hour on the 15-501 and it all worked out.

I spend my first day weeding in the swiss chard and other beds. It looks like the farm had been needing another person for awhile. Over lunch, the other worker, Jessica, and Harry's wife called me an "angel". What I had put out there, my desire to farm, had led me to Beausol just in time. I feel blessed to once again be creating something living with my hands.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: nearly 5 out of 10 farmworker households in NC cannot afford enough food for their families.

Day 2: Heat in the flower bed

What images come to mind when we think of planting flowers? I imagine my mother, down on her hands and knees with her soft hands in the moist dirt, digging amidst squirming worms, sifting out the weeds with her trowel.

This land I'm working was not made for this garden, I think on my first day. The earth is dry, crumbling orange and red rocks and dirt. We are in a bit of a drought and both the soil and I are thirsty and hardened. I pick my hoe up over my head and swing it down to till....I reach rock and the hit reverberates into my elbows. I think of the arm muscles to be acquired in this task...that is, until midday when the sun is overhead and I think about how I've actually been standing in one place all day. Today is also different than yesterday because I am working alone and feel resentful at having to work in the same hot spot until the afternoon. I try to put good thoughts into the ground as i shovel and rake and hoe and till these plot to no avail; I have no use for planting flowers right now. I mean it's April for the love of God! As much as I love this labor of recreating the land, I look longingly over at the vegetable beds and yearn for their succulent greenery. I want to plant myself in their moister wanderings and be an artist of legumes, sculpting their rows. This land is not for my imagination.

This land is your land, this land is my land...from Native families to enslaved farmhands. It is quite amazing to find myself in a place that is such a compilation of my southern studies. Farmer Harry moved to this state from Lousiana, where he was raised to farm an even hotter, humid land. He moved to North Carolina to attend school and subsequently, to practice as a scientist until he found himself drawn back into farming and supporting a large family. With the death of his first wife, he stayed home to raise their daughter and farming became a full time occupation for Harry. No he works out in the heat until dusk, wearing a long sleeve linen shirt and jeans.

But long before Harry, this land produced other stories of grief and struggle, resistance and change. Harry showed me how he has found arrowheads, while tilling the soil. Based on his knowledge of Native Americans in the Carolinas, he claims that there could have been Cherokees on this land. At some point, the land was colonized and converted to a cotton farm. We do not speak of what we are sure is true...if this land was big enough , it was probably run on slave labor. Before Harry bought the land it was a tobacco farm, so it had been converted yet again for crops that would ultimately do damage to the land that would take years to repair. Now the land is still being converted into soil that has been finally been certified organic.

Tomatoes and peppers grow well now in this southern soil. We grow greensd such as spinach, but for some it is too hot to produce a good crop and the leaves wither and yellow in the heat. I am amazed to find we will be planting okra, and that the asparagus is already up in April. And my favorite...southern spring onions are sweet and ready to barbecue. There are also herbs, artichoke, broccoli, potatoes (some varieties from Maine), a small mushroom farm in the back woods, bushes of berries and grapes and kiwi, and out in the far field- a beehive. Everything is growing and harvesting has begun while the soil in Maine is probably still unfreezing. 600 tomato plants sit in the greenhouse waiting. Many of these plants have been raised from organic seed that was produced in Maine (Fedco, Seeds of Change). Again, my worlds collide as I think of friends who able hands are sorting those seeds.

In time, I will learn what can be planted here. But today, I am sweating in the flower bed and striking rock, trying to remember that flowers bring the bees to pollinate it all.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: Agricultural work has been ranked number three of the most dangerous occupations in the US. In NC, heat stress, dehydration, falls, and pesticides are frequent health hazards.

Day 3: A day for planting flowers

Today all of the flower seedlings that have been raised in the greenhouse need to be planted in their beds by 2:00 is the afternoon. This is to be my introduction to work on a biodynamic , organic farm.

Never again when I buy products that say biodynamic on the label, or eat at my brother's fancy raw food and often biodynamic restaurant in NYC, will I take it for granted that this food is hard work! Biodynamic farming means that all planting and harvesting is organized and conceptualized by the cosmos. That is, the position of the moon and the Earth dictates when we can plant certain groups of plants. There are flower days, fruit days, root days, etc. And for some reason I don't understand, flowers always seem to have to be planted by 2:00 in the afternoon. Humph.

The day starts out easy enough. We water all the thirsty seedlings, weed a little in the greens, and start to plant the flowers in the far beds while Harry does other projects. Then, as the heat begins to climb and it turns around 11:00 am, Harry and his wife get progressively more nervous about getting all these seedlings into the ground. The seedlings are a bit overgrown and if they are not planted today, they will have to be planted next week, which would definitely stunt their growth. About around 12:00 it is announced that we will not have lunch until 2:00 when all the planting is done. Around 1:00 my back hurts and we are almost throwing seedlings into their holes, trying to get everything planted. I feel the hot breath of my co-workers stream into my sweat-drenched face as we cover the same ground in a race to get it all done. I think that if I didn't have my new friend Jessica laughing and sweating with me, I wouldn't want to be doing this at all. My body becomes a sweat-oiled machine out in the dry, red field where there is no green, no oxygen. I am a human conveyer belt, dumping seedlings into holes, patting and moving on. I have no love for them now. They are on their own. At the end of the day I go home, and fall asleep on Tennessee's couch, dehydrated and aching.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: NC has the highest production of sweet potatoes in the nation. However, farmworkers in NC earn 35 cents a bucket. They have to pick and haul 125 buckets to make $50. Sweet potatoes are heavy!

Day 4: Labor pains

I return to the farm the next day, after having tossed and turned all night on the futon couch. I have woken several times with sharp pain in my lower back. I can't believe I can get up in this southern heat with this pain in my back and work again. Today is a fruit day and we spend most of it planting peppers in rows. Thankfully, we have all day to plant them and we take frequent breaks. What makes it bearable is that I have Jessica to converse with and that I keep shifting my body to compensate for all the aches and pains. We all agree that we do not want another day like yesterday, and this day has a much nicer pace.

The pepper seedlings look good, although the ground they go into is hot and crumbly and in the middle of a drought. By the afternoon, their leaves wilt, even after watering them immediately. There are sweet peppers and hot peppers. Harry said he always plants a different variety of spicy pepper. I think about the four pepper plants I planted at my garden in Maine last summer. They blossomed in the breeze but the bugs immediately ate their stalks.

Being at the farm makes me look at motherhood differently. On a drive back from Beausol, I was pondering the implications of leaving my community at a time when many women my age are settling into families or homes of their own. I left home with much grief that this would not be my path, that I should be thrust out into the world on my own again to re-hatch myself into yet another environment. It was close to Mother's Day and I had just told my grandmother I regretted not being able to give her any great grandbabies. But had I not just given life to an acre of green goodness? Weren't they my miracle? When I feel like the cycle of life is passing me by I need only to stick my hands into the dirt and nurture the life I am creating. This cycle of life that my own momma began when she worked with her hands on someone else's land, when she got down onto her hands and knees and envisioned her own garden, when she talked softly to her child and taught me to love the green growing by the ocean's side. These are her grandchildren I tend. For now they are what I birth.

Farmworkers in NC: Although labor laws for farmwork require children to be 12 years old at least, all ages can be found in the fields. By the way, they earn 35 cents a bucket to pick peppers.

Day 5: A day for planting 600 tomato plants

I arrive early to the farm because the cosmos have predetermined that today we will plant all of the over 600 tomato plants that sit withering in the greenhouse. It's news to me that tomatoes are actually native to this area, and NC makes a huge profit annually from the tomato, which has a pretty long season.

Because it's native to this land, the chance for blight on the crops is even more significant and we spend the first part of the morning preparing the plants for the ground by suckering them, or taking the small leaves off the bottom so they get fewer problems from the ground up.

I am amazed to hear the names of the varieties that come from this area. My favorite is the Mortgage Lifters, aptly named by a NC native that used to go around selling radiators out of his truck. He developed this tomato and was able to pay off his mortgage in one year. So goes the legend.

We plant row after row of sungolds, heirlooms, tomatillos. Jessica and I raise concerns about setting up the drip tapes because these beauties will be thirsty. But there are so many to plant! We just keep going, stopping at the end to mulch them with hay and water as much as we can. Jess, a former dairy farmer, shows me how to really handle the hay. We pray for rain. It is beautiful to plant tomatoes in their native land. Their smell tickles my nose, which is sunburned and sneezy from the hay.

Farmworkers in NC: Come to the state from other migrant jobs further south for the tomato harvest.

Day 6: An interpreter on the farm

The purpose of my finding this farm is even clearer to me now. I am not surprised to learn the painters that have been hired to paint the new farmhouse are Guatemalan. We freely converse about life on the farm and fall into a daily rhythym of laughter and friendship. We are both interested in how I am breaking the stereotype as a woman alone laboring in a field that so many Latin American men work in this state. Our jokes about the amount of work I take on alone give recognition to the struggles of this type of work. Farmer Harry, on the other hand, is challenged by their language and calls me from the fields ro interpret daily. I am happy in this role and realize as I talk with the guys about worker's rights that this is my true calling, the field in which I work most often.

Farmworkers in NC: As in other US states, more women are coming to work here. However, nearly 80% of farmworkers nationwidde are male and most are younger than 31.

Day 7: The hive.

Farmer Harry and I are on our own today. He announces to me early that he is tired from the day before and that dictates the rest of our day: constant water breaks, stories of his life and farming. We lay drip tape in all the beds and mulch and cover the eggplant crops before the bugs get to them. Today was a root day and we were to plant parsnip but I think we are both glad to not be bending down in the heat.

Harry decides to mulch part of the crops with wood chips, which we are not sure will work but it is always good to try alternatives. So I get to dig my hands into the cool, damp wood and discover Bess beetles, who hiss loudly and squirm as I pick them out to investigate their smooth black bodies. Beetles are among my favorite insects and I am in awe of how loud these creatures can talk when they want something.

Our day includes a trip to the hive. Farmer Harry is proud of his new investment. We stand for half an hour far enough out of the sisters' path to watch them fly out of and return to the hive. The work seems endless, I think as I feel my own body bend from the week's labors. He tells me they can fly out for up to more than three miles and still find their way back home, by sight. I think of my own home, where my mother uses bees to sting our friend with MS, the sisters sacrificing their own lives to help her feel parts of her body. I think about how I might be able to recognize my own home when this journey is complete.

Harry has told me how sensitive the process of moving a hive can be. If you are not careful in how you do this, then the bees may not find their way back and the queen and drones will die. You can either move the hive gradually, or across the field where the bees may still be able to find it. I think about my immigrant friends coming to this country to work. How it costs them so much learning and strife to change their home. How much they yearn to fly back home.

When the work is done and Harry says, "we have punished ourselves enough", I drive back to find my temporary hive waiting, with its promise of dogs and neighborhood kids and the man named TJ sitting as usual, on his white porch with the green trim.

Farmworkers: 7 out of 10 of farmworkers on the East Coast live in crowded conditions. This contributes to poor health conditions.

Day 8:

Today is a root day again, which means that we could plant the parsnips, but the only roots on the schedule today are the ones we see as we pull up the weeds. Because we have had to plant and plant on certain days, we now have to go back and clean up our messes before they go to seed. The heat creeps up into the 90s and the field is all dry red dirt in our noses.

Weeding is my favorite activity. I think about how I have gone about the process of choosing what in my life is sacred to me, and what needs to be pulled out. Sometimes I think these thoughts with pain because I truly have loved some of the weeds. Some of the weeds on Harry's farm yield beautiful flowers, crimson and clover and other weeds I haven't worked with. Some of the weeds in my life have been beautiful at the time, but their shade isn't so healthy for my growth. Jess reminds me that sometimes the darkest moments bring the greatest blessings.

Farmworkers in NC: Farmworkers suffer from the highest rate of toxic chemical injuries than any workers in the country.

Day 9: May Day

We spend the morning harvesting spinach for the CSA shares. The spinach is small and yellowing; this is a cold-weather crop and struggles in the south. Each tiny plant must be pulled out at the roots and its dead leaves pulled. What has survived is brittle and chewed by beetles. But farming is about counting your blessings and your losses and moving on.

The afternoon brings more mulching with hay, because the plants are so thirsty and wilting and the hay helps to contain the moisture. It pains us to see what we have planted struggling in this recordbreaking heat. I pull big weeds so they can get even more of what they need. When I am weeding alone I can meditate.

It is May Day and I am grateful to leave this heat early (92 degrees) for a rally in Raleigh. What impresses me most about this rally is that everyone is given time to speak their positive messages. One person on the platform points to a picture of slavery and proclaims that Latinos will not be treated like slave laborers because of the color of their skin, evoking images of the south and north under the seige of racism. A rock band plays a theme song. Students read what they have written, one by one, their voices cracking. Like these small heads of spinach I pick, everyone is counted.

Farmworkers in NC: 94% of migrant farmworkers in NC are native Spanish speakers.

Day 10: Picking the shares

Today is spent organizing the shares for the CSA customers. There are fifty shares in all. It is the first harvest, and Harry is worried that the lettuce is too small, and that he doesn't have enough to give his customers. I remind him that as a customer of a CSA, you buy into the uncertainty. Lovers of organic food take risks on short crops and bruised fruit. I spend the morning with a knife in my pocket, cutting heads of red leaf and romaine lettuce. I quickly learn to be careful of black widow spiders, who draw elaborate webs at the base of the red leaf. Their bright red dots give them away as they scamper through the bed. I am amazed by their beauty and saddened because Farmer Harry says we need to kill them when we find them.

These customers are lucky enough to receive flowers with their shares. As I thin out the beautiful bachelor buttons, popping the heads off wilted plants as if they were dandelion weeds, I reflect on the fact that I have always been taught to take care of the dying while caring for the living. This I have learned from my mother, who now tends to hospice clients, and from my own experience of sitting by the bed of a loved one and gently letting them rest.

Farmworkers in NC: almost 6 out of ten farmworks live apart from immediate family members.

Day 11: Will it rain?

These dry conditions are wilting everything I have planted! My rainbow chard is losing its will to live! It is so hard to see something so delicately planted need to drink so badly.

Day 13: It rained but I still missed the planting of the okra

Harry informed me when I started at the farm that Chatham County, NC where Beausol is located is the only place in the whole country where there is actually an increase in organic farms and farmers rather than a decrease, because of the financial and technical support farmers can get. In North Carolina or Carolina del Norte, the number of migrant farmworkers has nearly doubled, in large part due to NAFTA. They often live in such horrible conditions. How can farming be about survival if so many people are still enslaved?

I just learned that I will be able to go out iinto the fields and do outreach with migrant farmworkers later this month.It pains me to move on from the farm because I feel this work keeping me alive, but I am interested in further learning to support other people who learned to love the same land.

Life on Arnette Avenue...

2007-05-11T18:46:00.000-07:00

I.Hanging out

II. Harriett

III. Neighbors

IV. The Porch

When a woman sings the blues....

2007-04-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

How does North Carolina taste to me y'all?
Mmm..sweet tea and it's refined sugar-coated goodness,
double chocolate milkshakes,
my tongue buzzing from the Junebugs in the porchlight,
coleslaw and yams and the sweet,
thick waft of cigar in a club downtown.
Heat.
The salt off the back of my wrist as I swipe sweat off my upper brow.
Buttery grits and collard greens and smoky rain near the train station.
Spring onions and barbecue and the
faintest vibration of a slide guitar on a Saturday night.
It all tastes like the blues to me.

Cool John Ferguson

Because the nature of my trip thus far has been really organic and fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, I have stumbled into some pretty great scenes. I had many reasons for coming to North Carolina, including the blues, but somehow I had forgotten just what an impact the Piedmont blues and musicians from this area have had on my life. And here I am, right in the middle of it all.

North Carolina is made up of three zones: the mountains, the Piedmont, and the coast. The Piedmont is the flatter area before you hit the coast and, like Appalachia, it has it's own culture and music. It is home to the Piedmont blues, and thanks to Music Maker in Durham, a relief organization for little-known blues musicians escaping poverty, a white girl from Maine was introduced to the sounds and strains of great guitarists such as Etta Baker.

I can't predict the future, but I can say that 29 years of age was hopefully the worst it's ever gonna get. I was in such a dark cycle of events that my sadness preceded me. I would walk into a room, and people would arrange their words. On the outside, I looked like a wreck. But really, I was just emerging and one way I measured this was through the music I learned to play. The blues could handle my intensity. Because playing the blues is about recognizing the power, the joy in sadness. Sadness and joy. Birth and death. Part of the same circle. What slapped me down into despair also gave me muscles to get up. Whose knows this better than a blues musician.

So I was a little starstruck when I got to hang out with greats such as Cool John Ferguson, Captain Luke, and others. I sang with a buddy of mine, Dr. Charlie Thompson, to a song he wrote for an event at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. And because I got to sing, it earned me a better rep to be able to sit next to Captain Luke and hear his stories.

Slowhand Charlie and Captain Luke

The majority of the blues musicians that Music Maker features are older than seventy. And this is something I also love about the blues...I could be in my nineties sitting on my porch all day long and playing my electric guitar.

Men of the blues

Captain Luke is 87, a chain smoker, and has a voice that drops into the crowd like blackstrap molasses. You feel just like you're in his living room and all of a sudden he starts singing. Like being with your grandfather who just happens to be a big rock star.

Two fans

In Durham, North Carolina, I can just pop down the road to a place called the All People's Grill, a mom and pop dive serving up soul food until late on rickety tables. And almost as if it were just a legend, some nights they may be closed and completely abandoned while others, you may be just in time to hear Cool John bust one out for all of us.

Towards a new Freedom Summer: Exploring race, class and media in North Carolina's civil rights movement

2007-04-23T19:08:00.000-07:00

What a wave (literally, in some places) of intense energy passing through the East. Last month I watched reports of my home state in the throes of a Northeaster and heard stories of cars being sucked into the ocean in an environment I truly love and miss. In North Carolina we have all felt the surf of humanity at its worst: violence at Virginia Tech, the murder of an important and much loved activist in Mexico. It's always hard to be away from home while the people you love are in the middle of a bad storm, unless you are also in the middle of one.

Every time I walk into town I see the above image. It is a relic that speaks to the legacy of labor and power in Durham, North Carolina. The old tobacco warehouse was once the financial backbone of a downtown now rebuilding, a small city shaking off a bad rep and evoking an era when it was great.

I longed to come to North Carolina ever since I began to work with Mexican clients who spoke of going back to "Norte" to visit family and friends or to look for work. So many people discover North Carolina along the route to the true "Norte", back to Maine and Massachusetts. If you ask immigrants in this state why they decided to come to North Carolina, many will answer that they have an uncle, a brother, or other family settled here. This is unique from Maine, where many people settle knowing no one, forging connections in factory warehouses, immigrant-owed businesses or the local shelter.

Despite the fact that North Carolina was labeled the fastest growing Latino state in the country, communities here are facing extreme and devisive anti-immigration legislation. My first week I read in the local newspaper in Spanish that among others, there are really strong proposals to obligate employers to comply with ICE's database on "illegal"immigration, which we know is not accurate and often ends up incriminating all kinds of innocent people. I also woke up one morning and realized I was living in a death penalty state, which wouldn't come us a surprise unless you knew what it was like to live in a state all your life where that sort of news feels so far away.

Moreover, a turn in the local homeless shelter, the Urban Ministries of Durham, provided more disturbing news about the city where I am staying in general. I had no idea as I walked through it's sleepy center that there was any sort of trouble with crime, but the counselors there assured me, almost for shock value, that Durham has a state-wide reputation for violence and gangs. This occurs for two reasons. First, Durham lies in the middle of I-85, and is a convenient stopping ground between the north and south for the introduction of heroin; secondly, people come back from northern cities, such as New York, in hopes of returning to their roots in the south, bringing drugs and crime with them. I spoke with one woman who had come back who fit this description and who told me she wasn't able to receive any support up North. Although staff consider the shelter block to be a neutral zone, the staff at UMD pointed to a surrounding four block radius where gang activity occurs. At the shelter they hold the opinion that such gang violence originally began in mostly black gangs, until immigrants such as Latinos were targeted. Now the violence is also perpetuated by Latinos. They pointed to the surrounding area and proceeded to try to convince me that I could never really be safe on its streets.

My first week was very much about comtemplating my own safety in that sense of Durham's image, which is largely propagated by the local media. If I felt so happy and welcomed as I walked into town, what made others feel the need to warn me? Would I too be picked off at random by gang thugs? Or as I had also been told, would the color of my skin make me invisible to that type of violence? I read an article in the local rag that gave credit for the negative stereotypes to the media in the Triangle area, which includes Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. It described how violence in Durham has been emphasized over other events. Let us not forget that this was also a place scarred by the news of the Duke lacrosse scandal. Hmm...could racism play a role here? Durham downtown was once a great bastion of strength in the black economy in the south. If I was willing to talk about violence and race, I was in the right place. It seemed I would learn more here than learning how and where to walk down the street.

So why come to this place to find the good fight? I was asked this question my very first week when I visited a class at Duke University all about immigrants rights and labor in the South. Tennessee, the friend who is currently hosting me, works at the Center for Documentary Studies. I shared with a group of undergrads that I was asking myself the same question: what can I learn about solutions is this wild southern state?

Initially, I was interested in the connection between a new population of worker's advocates and its legacy of civil rights work. It was in Greensboro, North Carolina where four black students sat down at a "whites only" lunch counter and didn't budge. Thus began student civil disobedience. Durham itself is known for having been one the first and most prominent black financial districts in the south; Black Wall Street is one of its historical sites. And I have literally become addicted to my morning black radio show, listeners calling in to discuss race as often as Whitney Houston's new divorce. North Carolina has a history of power, pride and struggle that I need to hear more about.

I am interested in how race intersects with labor issues in the South. On my route (read as "root") through the US thus far I have been really focused on trauma and human rights, delving only marginally into labor issues in Providence. I began by speaking to academics in the ivory tower of the North, then becoming more politically active as I worked my way down south. In this state, the worker's rights movement is leading the struggle for a just immigration policy.

North Carolina is a right-to-work state. It also has the lowest rate of unionism in the country. There are a couple of theories about this: one, that the violence stemming from the civil rights movement dissuaded more potential squirmishes resulting from pickets; also, solidarity didn't occur because of the isolationism in rural communities that caused people to feel dissasociated from each other. There's a great interview I heard on NPR down here about a book just published on female unionizers in North Carolina. Most notable was Ella Mae Wiggins, singer/songwriter for the movement, who worked in the Turpentine Mill in Loray Mills and joined the union after her four children died because she couldn't stay home to care for them. The author suggests that the stories are few and far between, with fear for being turned in still a huge reality for some.

North Carolina's economy had been based on agriculture, textiles, and the furniture market. We know how free trade works. With the institution of NAFTA in the 1990's, these jobs that were primarily held by African-Americans and low-income folks left the state, let's say they went to Mexico. Then folks in those towns employed by the same companies had wages so low, they could not survive. So they moved to North Carolina, creating a population of workers earning low wages and without the ability to vote on any of this.

North Carolina is the largest contracter of migrant workers in the country. There are maybe 95-100 Latino organizations in the state. As the state economy has moved away from manufacturing and agriculture, there are many existing low-paying jobs that only Latinos will do. The whole political and economic reality of the south creates rivalry and conflict between African-Americans and immigrants as they compete for low-wage jobs. Alliances are formed when you have collective conciousness about labor and organizing.

On May 1st, many of us congregated in the courtyard in front of the state capital in Raleigh. A large portion of the population were wearing bright yellow shirts that read, Justice for Smithfield, union organizers at the largest pork packing plant in the state. A team of young people organizing stood at the pulpit and each one made a speech. One teenager pointed to a bronze plaque on a monument behind him, depicting something like the fall of slavery in the south and cried in Spanish, "we will not be slaves because of the color of our skin!"

The idea that agricultural work has "always been about slavery" (i.e. no rights, low income, etc) is what my new friend Tony in SAF (Student Action for Farmworkers) is trying to change. SAF traces its history back to the 1970s, and was started by African-Americans laborers in the rural south. Today SAF also does a lot of work with immigrants and hopes to continue to build a black/brown alliance.

I talked further about ally-building in the state during an inspiring informational interview with Marisol and Tony of El Pueblo, Inc. El Pueblo is involved in political advocacy, public health and safety, and gang prevention for Latinos in North Carolina. They are based in Raleigh. Marisol is coordinator of the legislative campaign. With her deep stare and elegant poise she reminded me of a comic-book Latina superhero. She is one of the best spoken individuals I've met here.

Marisol stated that El Pueblo's campaign focuses on educating the state of North Carolina that we have a broken immigration system. The 2000 census that measured a period of ten years, gave information that led to the proclamation that North Carolina was the current "newly emerging Latino state". According to Marisol, this information fueled the fear that led directly to the anti-immigrant legislation. Because this is a primarily non-voting community, such legislation is hard to squash and voting registration campaigns similiar to the one I wrote about in Providence are extremely important.

When Latinos across the country started to feel more empowered to speak out in last year's wave of marches, folks in NC initially jumped on board. Now they are more afraid, and have been dropping out of the rallies. One reason is that this year door to door raids increased. Nearly 18 years after the census began, Marisol wonders about Latino youth turning 18 and voting in the next elections: will they perceive voting as power?

How does violence and race play into our current lunch counter leanings? As workers nationwide are discriminated against by the color of their skin and delegitimized by the term "illegal", we are reminded in the south of a time when Black people and communities were treated similarly. Marisol talked about the possibility of these peaceful movements shifting as people become more and more marginalized. The original Civil Right's Movement didn't have the same parameters with citizenship and voting rights, but they also weren't always peaceful. People were volunteering to "step up to the violence", which is a shift we too might experience someday soon. El Pueblo hears a denial of racism over and over again when politicians hide behind the phrase "this is about the law". Duke lacrosse scandal, case in point.

In North Carolina, as in other states, they make immigrant's lives more and more illegal so they can't survive here, and will eventually deport themselves, or disappear. Marisol labelled this nasty political tool the theory of attrition, and said that it is being shared between states. First they create a law making it illegal to get driver's licences. Then they make it impossible for landlords to have immigrants as tenants without reporting them. Finally, they lobby for measures that make it obligatory to report people seeking the police or medical care. The idea is that in six years, people will stop coming. Sounds like cancer running through a family, right? She said this could happen in Maine (it's already started).

I'm only a political lobbyist out of need. I really want to support people doing social work. How does the clinical work I do with Latinos directly relate to all this? Well, if you limit public safety and health for a whole group of people, the the safety and well-being of the whole state is in jeopardy.

Tony, from El Pueblo works in the Public Safety part of El Pueblo leading a campaign to educate Spanish speakers about the dangers and legal consequences of drunk driving, the biggest social problem involving Latinos in the state. It's about education and equality of the law. If you have no legal rights and you are young and angry, why would you want to respect the law? Except for Latinos, getting caught even once may mean deportation. And experience tells us that crminalizing this behavior, such as deportins an offender, doesn't necessarily mean they won't come back and re-offend.

We conversed about what we both know from our respective communities about people and addiction. If you are isolated from your community and feel alone and have that tendency, you are more likely to drink. The number one response I would get from my clients says as much: I was lonely and starting thinking about what happened in...fill in the blank. Tony confirmed that this also a result of young people leaving home, testing boundaries.

AGAPE is a gang prevention program that works with youth. They said that every week more and more Latinos are arrested for criminal activity. Although anti-immigrant groups want us to think they begin this violence, Latino youth joining gangs is a direct result of downward mobility. There is discrimination and exclusion in public schools that makes immigrant youth feel unwelcome and less likely to join activities. (I am using "Latino" and "immigrant" interchangibly because our conversation was about Latinos, but concerns all immigrants) One of two dangers can happen: they either quit school or are successfully recruited by gangs that provide fraternity and security. The media further fuels their alienation with it's assumption of dangerous Latino youth. AGAPE works with youth to create clubs.

As you can see, I am really intrigued by life and work in this state. Labor continues to be the revolutionary buzzword. And folks are doing some amazing work to organize around labor rights. Up to this point I have studied and learned from these great conversations. But I knew that I was coming to the south to literally get my hands dirty, to insert myself into this workforce. I felt that in order to appreciate what it might be like I needed to be connected to the people and the land in this state and in my own homeland. I needed to farm.

Recreating Thirty

2007-04-11T15:19:00.000-07:00

Thirty sure is something, huh? Like a human collage, we go forth, collecting the pieces and finding where they fit.
We frantically begin the process of recycling the rest.

They put God on a billboard: tales of travel in Appalachia

2007-04-11T14:08:00.000-07:00

I.
My father is a lifer in Maine. Born, raised, and still doing it. He spent the formative years of his life in Rockland, Maine, climbing in the nearby Cambden Hills to get a glimpse of the ships in the harbor and outrunning the taunts of vacationing city girls on rocky beaches. Surviving a brief stint in the South after being drafted out of college, he returned home to Maine to settle in the cool Penobscot Bay again. So it should come as no surprise that I was born with salt water in my blood. In fact, during my life in landlocked Bolivia, I would often comb the city streets expecting to find a hidden port at the end of some cobbled street. Once I climbed the highest mountain around and when I sensed sea salt in the arrid wind around me, knew it was time to go home.

During a recent phone conversation with my father, he assured me that the only way he could ever settle outside of a land without ocean would be to live in the mountains. I completely agree. All the Buddhist devotees and native guides in the mountains would concur: we are just spiritually in touch when we reach higher ground.

I took off from Washington, D.C. right before Passover, which is almost fitting, because I was seeking refuge, but not so much because Western Virginia is staunchly Christian. I had so many romanticized visions of what this trip would be like.....me, roughing it camping in the mountains, cuddled up in my little tent by a fire of my own making, living out my love affair with the mountains. Who needs other human beings, not me! Life partner, what's that? I laugh in the face of convention, just give me my woods!

My first lesson of travel into the United South was about understanding how the bus schedule works. You may think you can judge how long it takes to get to a certain location on a southern bound Greyhound bus by more or less how long it would take in a car. But you'd be missing the point. Thanks to southern hospitality, you can add fifteen minutes a stop for bathroom breaks, ten to recheck all tickets, five so everyone can finish their cigarettes, and another five to tell the guy with the overalls that no, he cannot bring his beer on the bus. And the people from places like New York are looking around at each other and checking the time on their cellphones.

Of course I loved it. A woman at the last stop summed it up when she said, "The hardest thing about taking the bus is havin' to say goodbye to good friends at the end." I talked politics with a roadie from Nashville, business with a tradesman from Cairo, Egypt, and divorce with just about everyone. I heard so much unsolicited advice I could have filled this blog with it. But I also got to make the trip into Appalachia with some really great human beings. There was this one woman, skinny as a rail and with really sharp features, hair pulled tight into a phony tail and white as bone. She had this daughter that sat near her, who looked just like her, only without the lines of struggle across her face. And I kept listening to her life accented, thinking about the little town she was going home to, scoffing at all the men trying to catch her eye. I loved her laughter , and thought about all the stories we probably have in common and the struggles that maybe we don't share but we could.

You don't usually ride this bus all the way West unless you can't afford another way. There was one man on the bus headed to Tucson (my current final destination). He struggled audibly for a breath and asked at every stop if this was the right bus to be on. Despite the tendency I have during long periods alone to serenade myself with everything I'm doing wrong with my life, I am glad I chose this route, because this is about the people I have come to be with. This is the journey I want to share. The people I serve mostly travel this way.

Western Virginia takes my breath away. It is immediately a land for postcards. Appalachia is all about little farms with red roofed barns and water wheels, vinyards and rusty trucks. Folks talking over fences at their neighbors and little country stores just over the next hill. The dogwood and azalea trees arabesque across the landscape, daintily pointing a finger towards the mountains.

My first stop was Charlottesville. I determined back in DC that I would need to first make it to mountain country before I set down an exact route through the mountains. I searched the internet, trying to determine how to make this trek through Appalachia, but finally I just decided I needed to arrive and talk to real folks about what people do. So I found a hostel in Charlottesville, Virginia called the Alexander House and hopped on the bus.

Charlottesville is cuddled up right inside of the Shenandoah Valley, towards the Northwest part of the state. It's vinyard country and it sure is purdy. The hostel where I stayed has this little white fence surrounding it, and is run entirely by this woman named Mare. I loved walking out of my hostel on a muggy evening and watching the full moon light up the hills. Sure made me get out my guitar.

Just across from my hostel is a Mom and Pop-type car rental. For $25, I had myself a great set of wheels. It didn't even matter that I returned the car late that evening; we just called up the owner on her cell and worked it out.

I took my car high up into the mountains in the Shenandoah, immediately engulfed by bright green land and a sense of my own strength. I ended up climbing Old Rag Mountain in Madison, a five hour circuit. The mountains in this part of the country are similiar to the mountains near Maine, except the dirt is so much redder, and the flowering dogwood trees climb up with you. There are other such surprises in the middle of this wood, chives and pink trees, and, I've heard, poisonous snakes and billy goats.

I went up the mountains for perspective, knowing inner peace brings presence to my work. Climbing is an important part of the journey; there are many decisions to be made. Do I drink the water from the stream? How do I keep my body strong over the next ridge? What is the next step I make? I thought a lot about the risks I take as a woman alone, the risks we all take in loving someone.

Descending once again into the valley, I had one goal: checking out the vinyards. I drove my car up and down these winding red roads past little yellow houses and musty dark brown cows in pastures, their big cow eyes taking in the sudden distraction. I would follow all the signs would grapes on them, nearly falling off the road, only to get to a closed fence or lose the path. You promised me grapes! I thought. But it was no use; all the vinyards were pretty deserted.

So I stopped into one of the country stores for an iced tea and some chatter. I had been thinking about how incredibly beautiful the farms I had passed were, and desiring to spend some lazy afternoons on their porch swings, under a quilt made by hand and a faithful little dog. So I walked up in my hiking boots to a couple of men sitting at a shabby little picnic table and asked what it's like to be a farmer in this part of the world. "It's hard", one guy answered, ajusting his thick yellow overall straps further onto his shoulders. He explained that everyone in these parts raises cattle for meat, and that most of the actual food produced goes toward their feed. It's hard to make any money and you have to be ready to work hard. I shared some stories of what we produce in Maine and put that dream to rest. Thank you, sir. Welc'm.

Leaving Charlottesville, I hopped on another sluggish bus and headed to the tiny town of Marion, planning to climb Mt. Rogers, the highest mountain in Virginia. It was 9:00 pm when my achey body descended the stairs into an abandoned parking lot and a Greyhound station the size of someone's living room. I waited for a couple of minutes and when I was convinced no cars or buses were ever coming, I called a taxi. The kid driving the cab couldn't have been more than twenty, and i'm pretty sure he has a hunting rifle in the back trunk. He got out of the car and I noticed his fatigues and the big wad of tobacco in his cheek. "I'm in the army too, you know," he bragged. Great. I feel so much better.

Marion is up in the mountains and chilly. I had done all my organizing of this trip amid the bus squallor, with my cell phone and trusty atlas in hand. I reserved a rental car and motel room so I had a way to start out. Then I planned to camp close to Mt. Rogers. Despite the chill in the air, I was ready.

I stayed in one of those motels that remind of a place that they shoot up in the movies, where the kicking in the doors would not be too difficult. There was a can of skoal under one of the beds and a cigarette burned hole in the bathroom curtain. Still, I love the luxury of being able to stretch out on starchy white sheets and watch junky TV until late all by myself. Whenever I've missed a flight somewhere I enjoy indulging.

I awoke with those pre-hiking, pre-coffee jitters I get when I just need to be on the road. My rental car would be a whole hour late. Oh well, I'll just watch this cop show and sleep a little. Well, my car turned out to be two hours late (and i was looking at at least a seven hour hike). Finally, I was picked up and transported to the car rental facility to wait for the car I was supposed to drive. I was escorted into the office by two sweet older gentlemen who physically resembled an old pair of comedians. The car I had reserved was there except that they didn't tell me on the phone that I would need a credit card to pick it up and the guy ten years younger than me who probably took this job because it was the only one around wouldn't cut me any slack. After several attempts to work something out, I ended up taking the lesson in stride and boarding a bus for Asheville, North Carolina. I really wanted to climb that mountain, but learning how to be okay with the message that things just aren't working is also an important skill I need to learn on this trip. Sometimes the message is bigger than stubborn me.

So I went winding my way through Virginia, Tennessee and finally into North Carolina, feeling the pressure of the hard bus seats on my hiking joints, smelling the stale smoky breath of my travelling companions. We descended into parts of Appalachia that can only be honored by silence, their living still-lifes of mining and farming work lending a glimpse at that hardship folks here live. I was enthralled by the beauty and drawn in by its meaning. I am left with the words of James Agee, from his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, who struggled with documenting this culture: "Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor."

Spring is a blushing schoolgirl in Washington, DC.

2007-03-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

I.
Everything is going according to my plan. I am in Washington, DC to wait out the dregs of winter before I head on to Virginian Appalachia. And it's spring...sugar plum fairy, cotton candied, luscious blossoming pink euphoria...yum. Spring in this part of the country is the best way to experience the Earth in transition. And suddenly we're filling our pockets with it, bringing it home on bicycles, perched on porches waving to each other, sitting on sidewalk curbs admiring bright dresses. Grass is growing in between our toes in the swampland.

Quite honestly, I had planned to focus the majority of my trip away from the major cities, only passing through on my way to smaller towns. This is because of the sort of connection and community that I believe can be found in these places. Bearing this in mind, DC completely took me by surprise.

Granted, this middle ground that sits between the constipated, suit tails of the North and the southern-fried good mornings of our neighbor states makes us walk the color line to the nearest Metro and beyond. This land of the "tion"'s- gentrification, segregation, pollination, nation. The land that inspired the poet Langston Hughes to write about his neighbors and among this, "Hang yourself, poet, in your own words. Otherwise, you are dead." The land that MLK Jr. fought for, knew would be stuck in compromise. This city that says it loud, greets us in the morning after our coffee to ask if we are still doing our jobs, still paying attention? to race and class. It yells at us from construction sites and museum tours, "Who am I to you?"

In one week I have: danced merengue with a young Salvadoran man; sought and found refuge as a minority at Gallaudet University, the very politically active University of the Deaf; dined alone in a small Ethiopian restaurant where I was the only non-Ethiopian and female patron (I loved it- men in fancy hats and suits, I felt like there should have been a card game or something happening in the back); grooved to some Latin jazz I was well-equipped to place from my days singing salsa; written poetry amongst Belgians and their tasty beers; and discussed the politics of southern speech countless times. It's amazing what being female and alone brings on. Every place I have stopped I have a dozen new friends to count on. I am thoroughly addicted to community.

I have been very impressed with the communities I have found in my search here. Needing to get my hands dirty (and frankly, to stop sleeping in...every once in a while I regress to the work addiction thing) and with a suggestion from my helpful former boss, I contacted the DC Central Kitchen to do some volunteer work. My focus is Latinos blah, blah, blah, but I wanted to witness the work done with the homeless communities here.

The DC Central Kitchen is three things: a culinary arts training program, a catering business, and a street outreach program. They serve many businesses around town, in addition to providing meals for the homeless population, who unlike folks in Portland, are only guaranteed a place to sleep a couple of times a week. They are housed in the bottom basement of this really large building with shelter beds in it. Their motto is "feeding the soul of the city" which I loved immediately because this community certainly has soul.

I started by volunteering in the kitchen, gently being ordered around by Miss Dot, a wonderful older, black woman whose severity in her culinary guidance is perfectly matched with her ability to be teased and to laugh at herself. She shares my grandmother's name, a thing we both enjoyed discussing. I spent three whole hours chopping carrots and felt transformed; I needed a little Zen in my travel routine. I worked next to one of the program's students, who got in trouble quickly with Miss Dot when she clearly needed a smoke break and starting pronouncing her exhaustion by letting the knife come down hard on the cutting board. In a moment of shared sisterhood, she leaned over to me and completely caught me off guard when she asked,"You ever been with a black man?" We avoided Miss Dot's gaze as we discussed our shared "cultural experiences". My new friend talked quickly about her life in her transitional home in DC but when I asked her about home in the Virginia countryside she was all bright smiles and talking about picking berries and slaughtering chickens. Amazed, I listened while she excitedly detailed wringing a chicken's neck. Uh-huh.

I'm going to say it right now: I am not a museum person. Don't expect me to be writing about too many museums on this trip. I think they are great, don't get me wrong, but not while there are so many people to get to know. I can be totally satisfied talking to the guy at the information desk. My childhood was all about engaging as many people as possible in my neighborhood in all my schemes: making mint tea bags to market to our block, creating whole new societies in my clubhouse. Nothing has changed, except now I am at their mercy. I want to be in their club.

So when I was invited to do street outreach at some of the most marginalized parts of the city, I jumped at the chance. What a perfect way to get to know DC. And I didn't even have to beg to be included, I was there to do a job: hand out breakfast sandwiches in parking lots and occasionally pour sugar for coffee so that the outreach worker could do her job of talking to folks about their basic needs. She explained to me that more than anything we are there to be a part of their community, provide connection. So I shake some hands, pass out plenty of smiles (unlike in Portland, when you say, "Good morning", nobody says, "What's so good about it?") and notice that this community is similar in what they need and hope except for some major differences: 1. Almost all of the street folk coming to this mobile breakfast unit are black. We went into three of the most marginalized areas of the city and met with three different groups of people but they varied little with race. 2. Drugs are everywhere. The last neighborhood we went into was one of biggest suppliers of heroin in the city. Consequently, many of the folks we were serving came up to the table with vacant stares, hallowed cheekbones, the kind of physical strain that is drug addiction. And if we looked out beyond our two tables, we would have seen people shooting up, deals being made. This scene truly scares me. I think of one of the clients I have worked with in Maine during his struggle with this drug and think: please don't let this happen in my city.

This last neighborhood also had the most beautiful mosaics I have seen in DC. The symbolism is not lost on me: this is definitely a community piecing together shards of hope and survival, rearranging what has been broken.

This is a wonderful program. I have watched the street outreach worker treat us all with so much dignity.

The other program I have been fortunate to visit and check out here is the Center for Community Change. They are a Washington-based political organizing think-tank and support for grassroots orgs around the States. And as large as they are, they were great to give me a face-to-face about the organizing they are currently doing. It keeps the organizing fire within me well-kindled.

And, of course I could not help but notice the Latino presence all around me. Not help but notice each time I unwillingly had to cross the street to accommodate the construction that DC is full of and hear the Spanish following me. Or see the Virgencita encased in glass on someone's lawn. But my experience here was such a mixture of all of the many racial and economic realities at the center of our country.

II.
Something is jumping around inside of me. As I meditate I stir into craziness. I walk around in circles feeling euphoric. Could this be happiness? Why haven't I felt this way in so long? Is this the tickle in my belly? If by nothing else, can I be fertilized by this feeling? I sure hope so.

I finally got used to the noise of this big city. When I first arrived my friend Laurie suggested that I would be offended yet again by all the catcalling from the pockets of men here. I calmly reminded her that as we had both lived in Bolivia for some time, I was quite familiar with this challenge and how to handle it. I was quite wrong. Because not only was it loud and much more pervasive than I had remembered, but there is an element to this that doesn't necessarily feel safe in a big city.

So now I am headed to the mountains and back to the experience of being completely by myself again so I make sense of noisy rumblings in my head and heart.

Equinox in Providence: Balancing Revolution and Beer...

2007-03-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

I.
Every good revolution story at some point involves a wild car ride with cheap beer. This is how Alana and I found ourselves my last weekend in Providence: riding in a car in the middle of a snowstorm and drinking Heineken on our way to a dance club. A perfect scenario for a foreign country...except that this is the States, and our driver was a young Guatemalan man without papers. And he now had at least two open bottles of beer in his car. And in the back of my mind I was thinking, please don't let them find a reason to stop us. I would never have invited myself into such a situation but I don't often refuse a beer with new and trusted friends. (Don't worry...he didn't drink while driving).

And let's face it...there is really no other way to celebrate solidarity. I remember being in Bolivia in political marches and leaving late afternoon to go to a large hall and drink with friends, stained black with tear gas residue, smoke and sweat. But this is the States! And we know he could be arrested...in fact, I just lost a friend to a similar fate...deported home after years in the States.

But suddenly I am back in my therapist's office and she is asking me...Sarah, what makes you think you can control what happens if you flick the light switch on and off ten times? She is, of course, talking about my insistent anxiety spells. But I thought about it this week in Providence as I sat with the desire to race off and volunteer in New Bedford, or go try to save my friend in New York City from deportation, etc. How much does that speak to my white privilege, trying to save my friends? Of course, we all want to be careful, but these are their choices.

II.

Nearly one week ago, I rode the bus with ten other people to New Bedford, site of the immigration raids. I think we all felt strangely out of place, similar to a middle school field trip with another class, everyone kind of looking each other up and down in anticipation of introductions. I almost wanted to ask if anyone knew any songs for the bus. There were Salvadorans (one man with his young son), Hondurans, Guatemalans and two of us US-born. We were all traveling from Providence to New Bedford to show our support to the community there.

We started our pilgrimage with a blessing from the local priest and actually broke bread and passed it around the bus. I was traveling with my Honduran friend, Naún, from Portland, who had come down to go dancing with Alana and me. Naún and I decided on our way home, because we were so hungry and tired from the rally that that was the best bread we ever tasted.

We were very lucky to get a seat in the auditorium there, and later we saw that there were at least fifty people waiting in the outside lobby for other participants to leave so they could be seated. The turnout was amazing; people came from all over Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The rally was run by the primarily Guatemalan community in NB, so we were constantly motivated by the Maya-Quiche dance and prayer. I felt impassioned by the same native expressions I share with pagans in the States and Bolivians in the Andes: blessings to the four directions, consideration of the elements.

One man gave his testimony of that day. His voice broke as he spoke first to the confusion, then his grief at having lost his life partner and being faced with caring for their child alone. He asked the audience how they would feel if they had to leave their child. The Salvadoran man who had come with us held his young son close and wiped at his eyes while the boy looked up and wondered at the sudden affection.

During the rally, the vast majority of organizers, families and professionals were Latinos. Only a small handful were actually citizens, and an even smaller handful of these Caucasian citizens were eventually escorted out because they were shouting over the speakers in protest. It took every ounce of my strength not to get up and confront them, citizen to citizen. This community had seen too much grief. But I was only one voice among many who spoke together that day. So I sat on my anger and let it compost.

III.

This is what it’s like to prepare with a friend you love for the possibility of their deportation:

We sit in his room and share anger and loss equally. We talk about what it was like when he left his country for New York.
-How did you feel when you first arrived?
-A little lost, sad, it was strange, you know.
-But you made it. And how do you think you’ll feel back in your country?
-Lost, sad…weird.
-But you will make it. It will take time. I will do whatever you need.

The lawyer’s fees, the paper trail, the official stamps and envelopes…it all comes down to this moment. We talk about what will happen if they deny his application. They may arrest him, handcuff him and take him away. He is strong about this. I am not.

-You know you are not a criminal, right?
-I know.

One of my friends from Providence described deportation as a death sentence for a family…a long, slow economic death. Sometimes the only opportunity a family has is this one. I had been reading a book my friend Monica lent me, Targeted, all about the enterprise of deportation. It sort of became my Bible for the two days I had it. I heard that Halliburton now has a contract to build more detention centers. At least someone’s making money, right?

Is there no white van (people are initially deported in white vans) I can chain my body to? Is there no one to hear our story? It feels a little like we are hoping for a last-minute phone call to save his life from this long sentence. New York outside my subway train of thought is busy and self-important. I would do anything for my friend in this moment; I feel so powerless in a city so powerful. My hand is on the switch, but I can’t make anything happen.

IV.

Back in Providence, there was one more piece of the story to complete. For those of you who know me well, you know I keep the Equinox and the Solstice, etc.

I had been sitting with all these questions of myself and my trip. I wondered about this weight I was carrying…weight of the world, the sadness I felt in my home community, expectations of myself and my work. Is this what the journey is about…letting go of this big rock of dusty old debris? Or is it about the carrying…building strong muscles on the road to continue carrying it all?

Equinox is a beautiful little sister to Solstice. I usually identify with Solstice and it’s time of the year because it is about revolution- passion and heat, or dark depths of cold and ice. But I realized that Equinox was now my gift….because it is about balancing, equal time between the seasons, transition and gentle growth or passing. We can’t be in a constant state of revolution. Once in a while we need cheap beer in the backseat of someone’s car.

Alana and I purchased cheap ceramic flower pots at the Job Lot in Providence and sat with our thoughts and chalked it all down on the terra cotta inside. As I reflected on the Equinox, I realized that there was not one single thing at the moment that I wanted to get rid of. I wanted to be grateful for the lessons, the struggle, time to put two hands on my teacup and think. For the weeding I did in Mary’s garden, for the skeletal remains of its plant leaves that made delicate winter lace, for the harvest in reverse, the uncovering of a luscious spread of browned stalks and rich dirt. Alana and I chose our war cry and smashed our pots on the banks of a river there. I offered all those pieces of my year to be mosaiced into some new beginning.

And so I cut my hair…inches and inches of it. I got it cut in a little Mexican place in Yonkers, NY, where the woman was very aggrieved at having to cut such long blonde hair. But how could I hold on to this physical weight when I wanted to keep flying?

This is how I arrived to Washington DC- with very short hair and spring on my mind.

Note: If you are interested in helping the community in New Bedford to recover from the immigration raids, there is still work to do! You can contact the Catholic Relief Services at 508-997-7337, or the Community Economic Development Center at 508-979-4684. They are looking in particular for bilingual people to help accompany people or work with the relief agencies. They are also still looking for donations. All families are sacred!

¡Presente! Immigrant voices are loud and clear in Providence, Rhode Island!

2007-03-13T19:43:00.000-07:00

I.

This next part is a love story. It's packed with all of the passion, romance, and adoration we entertain. It's the story of how enamoured I feel about the community of young immigrant activists I have found in Providence, RI.

They call Providence a "minority, majority" city. The immigrant population here is mostly Central American, Bolivian, Mexican, Dominican, and West African. And yet, this minority is no majority in the eyes of Congress: there are 24 anti-immigrant proposals up for a vote, and only three pro-immigrant ones. Scary, but a good introduction for this next part.

When I last wrote, I was flouncing around in that bakery, which, according to various activists I have met, is actually a pretty fair representation of the relationship between the business and immigrant communities in Providence. So it was a good place to start.

Thanks to Julian, one of my temporary housemates at Mary's, I have been able to go a little bit further. Julian introduced me to Monica, a firecracker of a young woman who is an organizer, a student and a supportive collaborator for many of the immigrant voices you will hear. I have watched her give backup to other organizers and long for my supportive role back home.

Monica works for English for Action, Ingles en Accion. When I visited the office last week, I jotted down the following quote from Pedagogy for the Oppressed, featured on the brightly colored wall:

"Students should be allowed to negotiate learning outcomes to cooperate with teachers and other learners in a process of discovery to engage in critical thinking and relate everything they do in school to their reality outside the classroom."

-Paulo Friere

Students take English classes in the evenings and simultaneously participate in the Action Committee. An activity referring to fear and the police hangs on the wall, providing a visual for the kind of work done here. Students learn English, and how to be organizers because the program supports the idea that teaching English for survival is not where the process should end. I arrived at their office in West Providence, on my bike with a flat tire and no bikelight (and for the love of God, there are no street signs but plenty of street glass in Providence!) into a darkened, sketchy old warehouse area. The deserted parking lot betrayed the warmth to be found inside, where community leaders, students and others were gathered to participate in a discussion with a community leader from Chiapas. People were also there to talk strategy about the New Bedford raids.

Now here's a story for you all. Have you heard the one about the New Bedford raids yet? In a factory in New Bedford, Mass, hundreds of people go to work daily for less than any of us would want to be making. They work long hours (and no benefits!), leaving their families, small children included, so that they can afford to live. What are they manufacturing, you ask? Material for army gear, backpacks, equipment, etc. in camouflage....i.e. the necessary evils so our soldiers may be well equipped to go after other brown people. Does the government appreciate the work they are doing for our war efforts? Well, they send a Latino ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent to infiltrate the factory. He is employed for several weeks, becomes friendly with the workers, even going to dinner at their houses. They trust him. Then he turns them in. We are talking about a community who already lives in fear...how will they begin to repair their trust?

The big mistake they make...they take many mothers into custody, and the press grabs ahold of the drama this creates. The images of children crying for their mothers adds to our hope of conveying what a humanitarian crisis this war on immigants is. Their crime? Doing the best they could to feed their family.

The news from New Bedford turned on the pressure for Providence activists. They are scared this could happen in their community. They are not ready. So this week they got ready. Signs were made that stated, IMMIGRATION RAIDS, NOT IN OUR COMMUNITY. What has happened in many communities could happen here. When immigration comes into town, good people get scared, they hide, and families and communities are broken up. In Portland, Maine, we know what this is about. It happened to us two years ago. And we weren't ready.

I sat around the table two days later with the same activists. The question was whether or not to have a press conference at the ICE office downtown, with tons of exposure. One woman gets so excited she talks about urinating on the headquarters. (Isn't it unfortunate we don't have one in Portland?) Then one man speaks up and talks about how concerned he is because he wants to protest at the site, more than anything, because of the fear immigration provokes. He states, "The fear is greater than we are". The whole room hushes its enthusiasm and the same woman proclaims, "oh yes, we should not speak until we hear from non-citizens".

They have so much to lose. Someone recently told me that the price to pay to get a coyote to take you across the border into the States is now 5000 dollars US from Guatemala. And that doesn't guarantee that you make it, or that you won't be tortured, robbed, raped, or killed. So I was amazed and impressed when we all went around the table to voice our feelings and every person who is not yet documented voted to show their face at the immigration office. One young man had said, "If I am not here to fight with you tomorrow, keep fighting for our rights." And when he said "our" he meant OUR rights, all of us. We are all effected. We should all be asking NOW, "What are our collective civil /human rights?"

So we gathered, shouted, held signs. Sure there are definite structural problems, and bickering among community organizations. That was our story in Portland, it is their story in Providence. It happens when people who like to fight for justice also like the power that brings and people with priviledge step in and make too many decisions, further oppressing the people they want to help. Ah! But that is not the story I want to tell. I want to tell you how these immigrant bodies with their amazing minds and hearts crossed over that border and crossed over their fears to become visible. How they stood with signs over their faces and slowly, with more confidence and numbers, took the signs down. This is one great story of leaders in our country's current civil rights movement.

II.

Sometimes an unlikely hero emerges to be your guide through the story. He may not appear to be a Yoda, but he is wise and his guidance carries you through. This is how I feel about G.

When I met G, the first thing I noticed was that he hugged me. Since he is a Guatemalan man about my stature and age, I expected him to uphold tradition and kiss me formally on the cheek. But G will tell you that he admires much about this culture, incuding nice, big bearhugs.

Coincidentally, G works at the bakery I mentioned in my last entry. He works long hours, and often isn't able to get to his English classes on time. He sort of has benefits, when the owner is paying attention. Asserting himself with his supervisor means that he may be able to get off a little bit earlier than the day before.

When he lived in Guatemala, G was a truck driver. He left for Providence because he wasn't making enough money, and someone he knew through a family member was here to orientate him. It's been four years and he still remembers making that walk through the desert. We were on a windy street corner coming back from the press conference, cheeks brushed by chill, as he started talking about the delirious heat of that environment. "I remember a time when I was as tired as I am now, when I was in the desert, I was so tired I wasn't sure I was going to make it. I remember I was holding onto the man in front of me, and we were walking through the desert, each person stumbling through the cactus and rock in the darkness together, like a chain of people. And it was so dark I said to the person in front of me, I said, don't leave me."
Together those ten people made it out of the desert, even though they had previously had to leave a man behind.

G told me that you can't make it if you don't have any survival skills. He quickly learned how to talk like a Mexican, and trick his thieving guides into giving him money for food. He also talked about making tough decisions, like having to get off a hitchhiked ride and fork over most of his money to save a woman's life.

I told him about the work I am doing on this trip, looking at immigration and trauma. We looked at the map together, in amazement of how much land and work there is out there. I thought about my trip to the border and the images of altars and precious human refuge in artistic array in the desert and asked him if there was one incident or image that reminded him of this journey. Among a few, he mentioned that he remembers one night when he and two friends didn't have much space to sleep, travelling in a truck, and they huddled together, three men under one blanket. After discussing their fear that they might not make it, one of them stated that he would always remember the others. They slept in this embrace.

He asked me what I thought of his organization, and I shared some of what Portland went through in our organizing in the Latino community. I told him I thought he ought to keep making chains in Providence, working on uniting all these various groups to step out of the desert together.

People heal their trauma through many types of expressive, hands-on therapies...here we can classify community action as therapy. People that travel here by crossing the border experience such rupture with the community they are from, and create new communities where they end up. Many immigrants who don't find solid communities of the same language, traditions, or compassion live double lives in the US. They struggle with substance use, partners and employers. They leave behind children, only to father or mother others in their new home. They have such a hard time building new chains, trusting others, feeling like they don't have to be on the run. G confirmed this with his own story of his first two years here, when he had a hard time trusting people. Then he found his voice.

These are the stories I want to tell, to continue to find hope and healing in our communities. Many of us are making the trip to New Bedford this weekend. The New Bedford folks need supplies now: interpreters, financial resources and babysitters. Soon they will begin to rebuild their trust.

The thing about mending bird's wings....

2007-03-05T20:41:00.000-08:00

I.
...is that they have to learn how to fly again. And that is exactly why I have come to Providence: to learn how to pick up more than my heavy bag for the road.

So I have been flapping my wings a bit for awhile now, trying to get started. We're still in the middle of winter, and I'm still in the Northeast, and I was just released from my home a little while back. So I wasn't exactly prepared for the lifestyle shock I would experience in RI. I'm looking for healing solutions to our immigration crisis, but I'm also out here to heal my own heart. And I've called on the gods of travel to watch over me and deliver me from the rat race that life can become.

I know that when I travel for long periods of time, just as in any major life change, I am prepared to shed layers. There are the obvious changes like...I guess I didn't need to bring all those earrings with me...or being prepared for the diversity in bathrooms one can expect on the road (that's using the "strength's perspective", Sarah). But there's also a more profound, metaphysical transformation that takes place. We call it "culture shock" when we travel abroad, stuffing ourselves into an airplane, soon to be transported into a different time zone, speak a different language, eat different food. We are thrown into our secret telefone booth, to slip into our traveling superhero self with an R for road warrior upon our breast. I have done this when I've crossed over to Bolivia, France, Nicaragua and-especially- Cuba.

So how could I have known this transformation would be so potent in my own country? I arrived in RI with more questions than answers about my whole existence. I just realized I couldn't go home- not yet- and how radical the road ahead might be...if I let it. But learning to fly is a tremendously huge, wonderful and lonely process. At thirty, I am completely looking at my culture with all it's expectations of me in the face and telling it off. And still, everyone around me gets up and goes to their regular jobs, their family lives, etc. And the truth is that I long for a warm bed, two steady dogs, cups of loose leaf tea and a good CD. But I also want to fly...

It reminds me of the first month I lived in the tiny town of Villa Rivero, in Bolivia. I never slept so much, because the silence was exhausting. It was exhausting because silence that comes from the quietest corners of our world often allows for the noise in our brains to drown us. We remember all the expectations, all the sorrow we still have. Sometimes dragging around this backpack of clothes is easier than all the me-luggage I got.

So I will live here for three weeks, and learn how to love the traveller I am and the road I seek. I will ask and ask and ask, and get over my first few stumbling sentences, to speak this language.

II.

So how do my Latino brothers and sisters find community and mend their wings from the road in Providence, RI? I wondered. My first step towards documenting immigrant concerns here led me to a bakery in the downtown area, stuffing my face with hot, steaming fresh bread. I devoured this bread, and the chance to bathe in a little indoor sunlight when I set out to interview a few folks about the hiring process at the bakery. I had heard they hire a lot of Central American workers, who settle in Boston, and that they appear to be fairly happy at this job. I wanted to ask how they might have experienced the last year of immigration "reform", and whether they participated in the marches for positive legislation. I had read that on the day of the greatest march, of "a day without immigrants" fame, only 500 people turned out.

Unfortunately the bakery occupies a certain niche in the community, and an outsider strolling in to buy bread with her bike helmet and big smile was not convincing enough to earn much time or interest there. But I did sit with my bread and nourish some ideas about what it might mean to be employed here if you were Latino. As lunch meetings took place, and University students on study breaks came in for sandwiches, I noticed that the only Latinos I had seen had come from the back of the bakery, and were carrying bags of flour, or trash out to the back lot. Now this may not appear fair to discuss. Don't people like to work with people who speak their own language? How do you know they aren't interacting with other people in the back room? you might ask. But doesn't invisibility say a lot? How do we know what hiring practices are like and what opportunities people are given (i.e. access to language classes) if we can't even see the faces of the people making our food? Okay, I know, I am forming some conclusions on my own here, but this is just the beginning of my tour of Providence. All I know is that in a city where many Latino immigrants settle, I have walked and driven around the center, and still haven't seen many people. And first impressions say a lot.

Back in Boston, I again visited the St. Francis House for the homeless community and spoke with the whole "Latino team". They offer on-site access to immigration counseling, psychiatry, and substance abuse services. They work with mostly men, who make up one third of the population at the center, similar to the numbers I began to see in the homeless community in Portland. We talked about the reasons that people go back and forth between Boston and Portland. The Latino team mentioned that they see many people going to Portland to work in the seafood packing plants and returning to Boston to recuperate from the cold conditions in the factory, often seeking medical attention from their "jornadas de trabajo" (work-related journey). At the St. Francis House, they offer a on-site substance use treatment model that also prepares people for work.

I also spoke with Dr. Jose Hidalgo, who I was informed is the "expert on trauma and Latinos" in the Boston area. He said he has led support groups for victims of trafficking in the past, but stated that the city still needs work in making the connection between trauma work and immigrants. He did encourage me to explore whether I wanted to focus on trauma related to immigrants who had been trafficked versus those who are here undocumented. My feeling regarding employment and immigration is that whether someone has been smuggled or trafficked, they can both have experienced horrific amounts of violence.

III.

And now a word about my sponsors...I want to commend the women who are hosting me for being a part of my travelling community.

My friend Alana is poetry in motion. It's 9 o'clock in the morning and she's up making tea and obviously thinking about how ripe that mango in the fruit bowl is getting. The sun rises in her living room across the rug where her knitting needles lie, just as it will later on out west on the beads of red rock, where her spirit soars. She gets on her bike and is summer heat in the winter, pushing past me and shouting curses in Spanish. Amazon woman, she pulls up her long skirts and kicks up the dirt. She is the peace of the teacup in my hands or the stomping of the ocean's fury in my ears. She spills wine in ritual and just for the hell of it.

I went biking with Lady A this past weekend. We biked out of this unkind traffic for a good thirty miles on our bikes, which are really our superheromobiles just disguised as bikes. I had borrowed mine from my gracious host Mary, and when I brought it into the bike shop for air the guy simply said, "umm...you do know this bike might fall apart at any point, right?" Of course, it didn't. It was made by Mary.

Mary and her household are hosting me right now; I offered to do a workshare to help them with house renovations for a built-in health clinic. The thing I love about the house is that they live sustainably...i.e. compost, composting toilet, garden out back which supplies the household, lots of great dumpster diving going on. And there are two great dogs. The thing I love about Mary is that she is my age and about to buy her own house and start a business. She's an herbalist who is committed to sharing alternative medicine and good food with her community. I am just glad I can offer my two hands to the household while I am here.

My guitar, meanwhile, lies waiting while I explore our next venue.

Finding trauma-related services and my inner rock star in Boston, Mass

2007-02-25T14:13:00.000-08:00

I.

This is what it is like to be inside an inner city clinic that serves Latinos:

I enter the waiting room and take my seat among the older women, attired conservatively in dress pants, their hair slicked back, and the younger women in their tight jeans and long, Shakira-infuenced hair. I am wearing the only professional thing I stuffed into the backpack big enough to need its own bus ticket, and waiting for the Colombian psychologist and trauma specialist I came here to see. I can barely hear my native language as people pop in and out to schedule appointments in Spanish and low and behold! their ACTUAL doctors come to greet them at the door and bring them back. I think maybe no one has anything in common until both patients and desk staff are engaged in discussion around when to stop eating meat, i.e. the beginning of the Lent season. Calendars are passed around, everyone chimes in their opinion and it is decided: not until March. I do not tell them I stopped eating meat seven years ago.

Before I get the message that I must have actually written down the wrong time and that I need to return later in the afternoon, I am visited out in the waiting room by one of the desk staff, a lovely and friendly Salvadoran woman who is very interested in details of my trip. I ask her if she enjoys working at this clinic; she does and feels the doctors are all very friendly here. We get to know each other among the flow of doctor and patient encounters. That is, until she remembers her administrative duties.

I am left to search the walls for information about this clinic. The brochures extruding from bulletin boards inform me that this clinic serves many Latinos who are HIV+, or at risk for the virus. The information regarding men and drugs is too tempting and I grab a load of handouts to send home to Portland. I am thinking about the HIV+ Latino client whose case I just left in Portland, and his amazing capacity to navigate the health care system there with charm and grace despite the barriers of illness, immigration, and language. Sometimes immigration law in this country can make people feel and live as though they are terminal.

I am ready to return for my later appointment. I am hopeful that my discussion will feel as familiar as this waiting room. I have spent half a week in university-laden Boston to educate myself about trauma-related services for the immigrant community. In this moment, this waiting room was the education I needed.

II.

I returned later in the day to speak with the trauma specialist. Truth be told, all afternoon I was feeling like a little city woman in a big city. Nobody here knows the work I do in Portland, they have no real reason to trust me. I don't have half the degrees they all have, nor am I sure I want them. I was invigorated by the educated conversation, but wondered how I was being received on the other end. Being in a big city can make you feel estranged from yourself, a little lonely and needing solid ground. I was beginning to feel like I was auditioning for this part of my life and I wanted to know....Where are all the people who have time to talk about life at? What is the next step on this journey? Where do I experience more people than tall buildings?

As I walked into the St. Francis House, passed by the smokers squabbling about the passers-by and the gentleman with the nervous tic, into and past the metal detector to stare at about at least 200 homeless Bostoners in some sort of gymnsasium, it was the first time I felt at home in the city (that is, aside from the comforts of my second cousin's home in Fenway). The St. Francis House is like a mini-mall of services for Boston's homeless community. They have 6 floors of service, and transitional housing above that. Impressive! Coming from a life of social work on one floor that sees a ton of action, I don't know how they do it. There are whole floors dedicated to clothing, day shelter, health services, women's services, etc. A security guard sits next to the desk staff; this place is huge.

Instantly I felt the constraints of city fashion and wealth culture drip off me and I was rolling along in my puffy black coat and jeans. I stayed to chat with the metal detector guy...does he like his job? yes. does he feel safe? yes. are there ever conflicts here? yes, but he feels good about having the security guard at the desk. This place serves 700-1000 people. Mmmmm...I was hungry and I smelled food, but I wanted to check this place out. I asked the gentleman whom I'm speaking with about touring upstairs and he gave me some names to look for, they sounded like Vinnie and Frankie. But the elevator wasn't working. Perfect. I love to walk.

During this first experience at the St. Francis House, I met people on the Latino team to connect with. The immigration lawyer actually called me back while I was in the restroom. Everyone seemed to enjoy their job entirely, and the woman in the health clinic had this smile like one of those big paper fans that you can keep opening up on a hot day. Then I checked out the day shelter...I sat next to this older black man with a cane who filled me in on the kind of help one gets here and who knows what. I noticed I was the only white girl in the day shelter. Although there are maybe about thirty people in this little room, they are all black. Eventually as people move up from lunch, more Latino faces trickle in, and then a few white females in interracial relationships. Nothing paints a clearer picture of racial injustice than a visit to an inner-city shelter.

The trauma specialist and I talked later about the specifics of trauma work with Latinos. She is working through a satellite program with a grant from VOCA (Victims of Crime Act) at the clinic. She sees mostly women in the group she leads, which makes sense not only because women are more comfortable doing therapy that involves the body, but also because the clinic sees a lot of women in general. Although she never learns the cause of the survivor's trauma, she assures me that at the clinic the majority of patients they serve who have been trafficked from Latin American countries are women, many of whom have crossed the border and have often repeatedly experienced violence and rape. The model being used at this clinic is called "energetic pyschology", which hopes to find ways of creating balance in the body. I hope to learn more about this work when I visit the Trauma Center in the future.

III.

This may appear to be another story about trauma, but it gets better.

What do Anna Nicole Smith and I have in common?

Answer: we were both featured at an open mic.

Seriously, it's tough stuff to develop a music career on the road. It was my goal to play at least one open mic in each city or town, but what i've been learning about bigger cities is that sometimes they aren't as competetive as smaller ones because everybody who is good already has their own gigs.

Last Tuesday I was on my way to play with my second-cousin Tommy Rose and his lovely wife and a small handful of fans. Tommy plays the cello, or at least he does now. The truth is he hasn't touched the cello in ten years, and now we were headed to play at Club Passim, the old Club 47 where Dylan and Joan Baez once jammed. We were so excited and his lovely wife was falling in love with him all over again. Then we got hit in a Boston blind spot by Mr. Vermont.

We were on the road waiting for the police long enough to anger Mr. Vermont and arrive in Cambridge an hour later, into a surge of police cars, circling the area like buzzards. There had been a T (subway) accident, and it took us another half hour to get into the club. But the show went on- despite being sandwiched between two testosterone-driven musicians(?) on the set list, we got to play. Second to last, we rocked some folk in Cambridge.

IV.

I am off to Providence, but before I do, there is one more tourist site I need to add to all the guide books I have seen: The old Victory Gardens near Fenway. Now run by the Fenway Gardens Society, and originally created during WWII to supplement the food supply, they pose a botanical front to the view of the Prudential Building. The Gardens in winter are a urbanite's reprieve. These dormant, snow crested gardens are home to many hidden treasures: wind chimes blowing in the frigid air, a Christmas tree, decorated as if the garden were someone's living room, wooden chairs with climbing mustard-colored winter vines. They all suggested a little of piece of hidden earth to send me on my way.

Why would she....?

2007-02-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

.....leave her job, her home, her friends and future? This is what I am sure the guy next to me on the first leg of my trip from Portland, Maine to Boston, Mass was thinking (that and..."nice nose ring"). My plan was to turn thirty and ride on out of town on my very own white horse on Valentine's Day. This did not happen, folks. The most romantic storm hit our coast and my heart and froze me to my spot for another two days, as I contemplated the reality of what I was (am) about to do. I just left my job of four and a half years, doing social work with Portland's homeless community, a job I passionately loved. I also left my family, my work organizing a food co-op for the city that is developing at a pace I cannot handle, comfortable living, and the ability to purchase all manner of food for my eco-concious diet. Did I mention healthcare?

Aren't you a little bit scared? he asked. The young pastor from Mt. Desert Island to my right studied me. He wondered if it unnerved me to go where I have no plan, no prospects for work, basically no idea.

The truth is it scares me to stay in Portland, Maine right now, and I believe there must be another way to approach life than what I have been up to. Most of the people I know and tend to believe in are attached, secure and stable. At thirty, I have been stuck in the spin cycle, turning my wheels on life's icy roads. I have a definite habit of chasing my own tail. Contemplating further education several months ago, I introduced the thought of travel back into my mind. What if I just left?...stored my belongings, grabbed a map and just left? What if I got to listen to my own heart for awhile? What would I hear? My world had gotten too small and I needed to shift my perspective. My pastoral travelling companion suggested the importance of letting the other shoe drop once in a while. I responded that I believe in switching the whole pair altogether (although I must admit it was hard to leave those suede boots behind).

Moreover, for four and a half years I have shared a history with the homeless and Latino individuals I have served. I gained respect for and awareness of the events that bring so many immigrants to my community. The wonderful and tremendous responsibility of knowing this population continues to motivate me to study the culture of immigration in my country, especially at a time when it is one of the greatest political forces shaping its future. I planned to take a couple of months to do this. Once I opened my perspective, a couple of months became indefinite because the contacts and information came pouring in.

My goal is to trace the route of the Latino people I have known in Portland, ME, back to the US/Mexico Border, stopping and learning in different communities from activists, advocates, workers and families that have experienced the struggle with immigration. Professionally, I hope to gather information of trauma and resistance to further heal our community. I want to speak the language of immigration and the immigrant. I want to kick up dirt and get my hands dirty. I want to find and sing the blues and bike for peace! I am thirsty for the south!

I am not so sure how I come to identify with this struggle more than others. But it is the sweetest blessing to fight for someone you love. I also know that being on the road has been so important to me , for other reasons. For now, I am a little bird in flight. And being in flight means witnessing the whole picture, the aerial view of it all.

I arrived at Boston to stay with family and connect with East Coast contacts. My first stop. My priestly companion to my right had asked if I am spiritually lost and insinuated guidance. I told him that since I planned to travel I have not been lost. I have arrived.

2007-02-05T19:37:00.000-08:00

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