America bewilders me. I’m just a mongrel who travels through life fitting in nowhere, but sometimes I stop and think: At what point did somebody say slavery and lynching or annihilating wars against Indian people or wanton killing of the Earth were a good idea?
But I’m also inspired in America, because where the worst traumas occurred there are always passionate, unbreakable people from diverse colors, cultures and communities working to help heal what otherwise would be bottomless wells of pain and sorrow, and move the country forward.
In Montgomery, Alabama on April 26th and 27th, 2018, I attended Equal Justice Initiative’s Peace & Justice Summit that officially opened the national lynching memorial and slavery-to-mass incarceration Legacy Museum. Thousands of people came from all over.
Leaders, writers and artists like Michelle Alexander, Ava Duvernay, playwright Anna Deavere Smith, Sen. Cory Booker, Vice President Al Gore, Anthony Ray Hinton (who was exonerated after spending 30 years in prison), Dr. Rev. William Barber, Catherine Flowers, Dr. Paul Farmer, and many others spoke powerfully about not just the past but about the living present and future, and the dovetailing challenges of our current time that is being built upon decades (and centuries) of struggle, work, heartbreak and success. I even met Quakers from Pennsylvania who told me their ancestors had been subject to a law banning Quakers from buying slaves because they would do so to give them their papers and set them free. And I heard famous black speaker after famous black speaker include the fight against ecological devastation and for ecological protection in their social justice conversation on stage. It’s a falsehood that diverse people don’t care about the Earth.
Equal Justice Initiative doesn’t sugarcoat history, but still received tens of millions of dollars in funding from people who one might assume could be offended. So I realized there’s no need to gloss over history. As a quote from Maya Angelou says on the side of a building in downtown Montgomery,
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
And time and time again we heard, like rapper Common said on stage, “Acknowledge this history. We are here. I was here.” Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright, said, “…[W]e are so much a part of this soil and this Earth,” as she spoke about her great-great-uncle burying the dead at Gettysburg.
That’s what folks want, who have borne such monumental contributions to build this country. To be acknowledged and respected as fully American.
I keep thinking about the iron red rails of the railroad running along the Alabama River.
The railroad is still there and working.
Before coming to Montgomery, I didn’t know what to expect. One time back in the 90s, against my trepidation, I had to cross into northern Idaho (where Nez Perce people fought and died, and where neo-Nazis were now said to thrive) and within hours, as dusk fell, I was vomiting in a forest from both ends. (I’m animistic and can be highly sensitized. These days I’ve learned to manage my direct exposures and any ways in which my mind might get too close to horror. For example, I didn’t actually go into the lynching memorial or Legacy Museum. I already know what happened, and am extremely visual.)
The Alabama River is peaceful and reflects the blue sky, where steamboats and trains came down from the Upper South with hundreds of thousands of enslaved people to dock in Montgomery and fill the auctioneer warehouses. (Strangely, during Indian days before their conquest and removal, the Black Belt of lower Alabama was tallgrass prairie as if out west on the Great Plains. When Catherine Flowers took me on the historic Selma-to-Montgomery Road 3 years ago, my plainsman senses kept triggering: What is this open country, this green low-cover land, these white puffy clouds in this big open blue sky? I thought Alabama was all sticky forest. But it turns out that Lower Alabama was originally an open prairie wilderness and its black soil is why it was so coveted, overtaken and broken by industrial cotton plantations. After the United States banned importation of African slaves in 1808, the Domestic Slave Trade skyrocketed. It’s now often thought it’s called the Black Belt because of all the black folks residing there, descendants of those who worked the cotton plantations. It is something left to wonder what type of full-circle restoration could take place there.
The 1965 marchers to Montgomery were plainsmen and plainswomen, traveler-seekers crossing an open land that had constricted them.
As I looked down at the river from on top the bluff, I didn’t get sick.
I realized: The river is water. It had nothing to do with what happened, at least voluntarily.
The American story is particularly the story of people on the land. Those human stories – and all the great trauma and trials and turmoil, as well as triumphs – are embedded in the land like layers of sandstone.
Rivers can keep flowing, with new water. It’s not the same water that flowed down in the 1800s. So despite everything that happened on the Alabama River, it’s just the river, just being a beautiful river. Can’t hate the river.
Jarid Manos (pictured here in Montgomery) is an American writer, and founder & CEO of Great Plains Restoration Council.
JaridManos.com
