Hugs

The hugs we got from Shirley Cherry at the Dexter Parsonage Museum were not the first nor the last hugs of our trip. Almost everywhere we went, people were chatty and huggy. Maybe it was the time of year - December is not the busiest tourist season to be sure, so there's time to chat. Or maybe the post-chemo fuzz starting to fill in on my mom's head inclined them to an extra level of friendliness. Maybe people in Alabama just find strangers interesting, like people in Vietnam do. Whatever it was, we embraced the embraces we received from the locals and thoroughly enjoyed the long conversations and intimate farewells whenever they were offered.

The friendly welcome was evident on the road as well. The first gas station we stopped at was full serve with a smile... at no extra cost. And often while driving along rural roads, the pedestrians we passed would wave at us. "Maybe I'm driving too fast," I said to myself. "Is one of my lights out? Is there a dead animal stuck on my bumper?"

At one point, driving from Selma to Gee's Bend, I finally said it out loud. "You know, I think they're just saying hello."

My mom knew exactly what I was referring to. "People do seem to wave a lot, don't they?"

"I'm not driving too fast, right?"

"No," she said, "I think they're just being friendly."

"Maybe because we're strangers?"

"I was thinking that," she said, "but how would the know we're strangers if we're in the car? It's one thing at the museums where they know we're visiting, but here we're just driving by."

"True," I said. "I guess people in Alabama are just really friendly."

I started giving them a little wave back from the car. And when we arrived at the Gee's Bend Nutrition Center, home of the Gee's Bend Quilters' Collective, the little old lady whose lunch we interrupted gave us each a hug hello as if we were part of the family.

Montgomery, Alabama

By the time we were done with breakfast, the ghost town had transformed into a reasonably populated civic center. I wouldn't quite call it bustling, but we did pass other people on the sidewalk from time to time. The desk clerk had warned us that Dexter Avenue, up toward the capitol building, was in disrepair. Dilapidated. Apparently the last part of the center to benefit from the city's downtown revitalization campaign. "He's obviously never been to San Francisco," I said to my mom as we walked along it looking for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. "No," my mom said, "you wouldn't call this dilapidated in San Francisco. This seems like a normal, slightly run down city street."

We followed it until we found the church, which was closed on Mondays. Our luck. We went on instead to the Civil Rights Memorial Center around the corner. The Memorial Center is part of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a major player in the ongoing struggle for equality in the US. Lawyers, activists and administrators of the SPLC have been threatened with violence over the years, and the facility itself has been bombed by people who are unhappy about its work. We noticed an armed guard standing patrol across the street.

The Memorial Center was a perfect first stop on our Civil Rights pilgrimage and road trip. The visit provided an overview of the places we would visit over the next ten days and many of the individuals we would hear about. Most of the other museums and interpretive centers we visited presented the movement from the perspective of a specific incident or individual. Many of them were absolute gems, highly experiential interpretive centers created to memorialize things that happened where they happened, and often by people who were there. The curators of these small labors of love have put together powerful, focused displays, each one unique right down to the items in the gift shop. Every one we went to was fascinating, but it was also good to get an overview at the start to put it all into perspective.

On our second day in Montgomery we were able to explore Martin Luther King Jr.'s small church on Dexter Avenue, the tiny office where he wrote and thought with a view of the capitol building right out the window, the hall downstairs where members of the Montgomery Improvement Association met to plan the bus boycott of 1955. The lady who gave us our tour was nice enough to let us linger alone in the church for a while afterwards. Standing at the pulpit where King spoke some of his most passionate words, I tried to imagine the thoughts that must have come to his mind in that very place as he began to realize the magnitude of what was at stake and his own role in history.

After the church, we spent the rest of the afternoon at the Parsonage a few blocks away, first for a tour of the home where King and his family lived from 1954 to 1960, then for a long, informal chat with tour director Shirley Cherry. By the time we left it was hugs all around. We were running late but still managed to squeak into the Rosa Parks Museum before it closed, followed by a much-needed rest back at the hotel.

This was our second full night in Montgomery. The first night we'd gone to a holiday concert at the Montgomery Symphony, which was conveniently located across the street from our hotel. The second night I wanted to go to a Sing-Along Messiah I'd seen advertised on Dexter Avenue. My mom, not being much of a vocalist, decided to stay in. I left her at dinner having just ordered what we thought was a personal size pizza...

A Foreign Land

People would ask me where I was going over the winter break. The last few years it's been warm places like Cambodia and Vietnam, or thick snowy places like Poland and Ukraine. They know I'm a sucker for places with intriguing names like Moldova (still on the list), Bolivia (also still on the list), Luang Prabang, and Nuuk. Also, being from California, I naturally have certain prejudices when it comes to the Southern states. We all do.

So I got some confused looks when I told people I would be traveling this winter to... Alabama. That's right - and Mississippi, too. That backward and confused region of the United States we call the South, land of bigotry, economically depressed, a blot on the respectability of the nation, an embarassment really, like the third cousin twice removed who always drinks too much at weddings... you kind of wish you could say, "he's not with me... no really, the relation is quite distant."

To a native born Californian, the South is a foreign land. Strange customs. Funny accents. Everyone y'all-ing and ma'am-ing all the time. Nobody from California goes to the South for vacation.

And yet, the South was the heart of the Civil Rights movement. It was where our race problems were greatest. It was where our solutions were most difficult, and therefore most interesting. That's what my mom and I wanted to see when we proposed to do a road trip through Alabama and Mississippi, and we did. What we didn't expect was to find people so consciously continuing to engage in that same problem solving today. Race seemed to be on people's minds all the time, everywhere, openly talked about, and everyone had an opnion about it they wanted to share.

We knew we were indeed in another world before we even parked our rental car at our hotel in the Montgomery civic center. We arrived at night and the place was like a ghost town... not a person to be seen, not a shop with its lights on, not a restaurant, bar or place of business. With some hesitation, we asked the hotel desk clerk if he knew where we could get a bit to eat. "Y'all won't find anything open round here this time of night," he said. It was 11:00 pm.

"Not even a shop where we can get some crackers?" I asked.

"I might be able to find you a Lean Cuisine back in the fridge." He was a talkative guy, and very helpful. Quite generous with the Southern hospitality we'd heard about. We suspected the Lean Cuisine was probably from his own personal stash and we set out for a walk. We did eventually find some crackers in a hotel gift shop down the street. We slept well that night, stuffed with Cheez-Its and orange juice, and wondering what Montgomery would have in store for us in the morning. First on our list: the Rosa Parks bus stop.