A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Inauguration:
* I wrote this essay last year and sent it out as an email. For many reasons-chief among them the passing of my mother. I felt a calling to post it here and add the role that Eastern Market played in the story*
(my maternal grandparents-Elias Monroe Webb and Sevelia Blackmon Webb)
My grandfather was born Elias Monroe Webb. He was born in 1889 or thereabouts-back then, people were born at home. Births and deaths were written in family Bibles, not registered in government offices. His mother, my great-grandmother, had been a participant in "that peculiar institution"- that is, she was born enslaved. And as so many American history books attest, her father was also her owner. Funny ha-ha, or funny bizarre?
In this case, because of these circumstances, my grandfather was left land. He was a farmer in Humboldt, Tennessee. He had a gift for making things grow; he prospered, and later brought more land. He had six children; he built a foundation. He was not a lot of chuckles; I'm sure you know through your American history classes in high school ( or through wikipedia, Google, Youtube, or maybe Twitter) that life in the first half or the twentieth century was not fun in general. For people living under the shadow of three-quarters rule, it was worse.
My mother is (was) the baby of the family; in fact, in the confines of the family her siblings called her "bay". She was born in October, 1938. She entered college, the Tuskegee Institute, in 1955. It is in Alabama. She went to school during the sit-ins, had to walk all over the place because of the bus boycotts. Not a party. In 1963 she and my Uncle Waven came to Washington. By then, she had finished college, gotten married, and moved to New York. She was one of the 250,000.
So it was clear to me that I was going to be in Washington again on January 20, 2009. My plan was to be either near the Castle in front of a Jumbotron or near the Lincoln Memorial. But Saturday the 17Th, 2009 at Eastern Market I was given tickets. I have known Richard Michalski for 16 years. He is a customer of mine. He is also the political leader of a Labor Union. When he handed me the tickets, I did not know what to say. I wondered "what I had done right". He had made a special trip to The Market to give me the tickets. This essay was in part a thank you note to him. I gave the other ticket to Bernadette Mayo. She makes and sells soaps etc at The Market. Like so many we had talked and hoped about the election for months. She is a grandmother and I knew that she like my grandmother had built a foundation for her children and her children's children. Was it dumb luck, coincidence, or...? Okay, I said to myself, what luck, I will not be on the mall, I will be on the capitol grounds, cool! I had secured a place to stay with friends (Mr. and Mrs. Borchardt who are also customers of mine from Eastern Market-who I have known for 15 years) who live walking distance to the mall...on a normal day. I got up early and walked down towards The Capitol, and like many others, I got stuck. The tickets were color coded: orange this way, yellow that, blue the other way. I was going to the back of the line-you know, like I was told to do, good citizen, good American. But that place no longer existed. It is hard for me to explain, if you have never been in a crowd like that: but we could not move. If someone went into his or her pockets, that pushed a neighbor into another person, and another and another, and so on.
I must have been like that for over an hour, frozen, still, and waiting. I am not sure where I was-maybe near The Neweum? All of a sudden, behind me I heard people starting to talk loudly. The cameras came out, and I was afraid of being pushed over or falling. We held each other up. Behind me passed Jesse Jackson, bodyguard in tow. A young women next to me sort of sneered and asked what was he doing here. She was in her twenties; she probably missed the American history class that would have told her that he was to the right of Dr. King when the bullet rang out. Maybe she was asleep, or texting, in history class, when the teacher spoke of the Rainbow Coalition. Or again she, because of youth and arrogance, had never heard the phrase that rang out after the riots in 68': KEEP HOPE ALIVE". If you look at the demographics of who voted for whom, though, you will notice that President Obama put together a cross-section of the American voting public. He put together a RAINBOW COALITION. I bet on the back of her car or one of her friends' cars that there is a bumper sticker reading "got hope"? So, while I disagree with things that he has done and said in the recent past. I know my history, and as folks would say around my way, "I ain't mad at Reverend Jackson".
The bodyguard moved the Reverend through: the crowd shifted. People were not happy, not sure what to do; we could not move. Folks started leaving, which was not easy; again, the crowd shifted. I had determined that for me it was enough to be there. I was not going to be upset. I was and was not there for me. More than anything, I was bearing witness. The crowd shifted. I looked up and to my left and there were, my two cousins, Sharon and Joyce. One lives in Tennessee, the other in Chicago. They are sisters and, I suspect, best friends. I am my grandfather's youngest grandchild; Sharon is the oldest grandchild. There is a twenty-one year age gap between us. She is in fact only nine years younger than my mother. Yeah, funny. Was it luck, chance or...??
I have always admired them. When I was a child, I wanted to look just like my cousin Sharon: pretty, long hair, tall, charming and smart. And I thought Joyce was so cool. Through the family grapevine, I always got updates on them. Sharon was the first in the family to earn a Ph.D., always leading by example; I think now there are four PH.D's in the family. Cousin Joyce, on the other hand, is almost whispered about. She was a nurse, then hospital administrator. But wait, the last bit is the side splitter. I know by now you have heard about this Obama dude. Well, back in the day when he was running for Senator, my cousin Joyce was one of his opponents. Falling about the place with laughter, are you? To say the least, these women knew, and know, how to work through difficulties. So, when they moved, I followed, literally holding on to Sharon's very "fly" fur coat. We got through; we all had purple tickets. Didn't somebody write somethin' about The Color Purple?
I wanted my mother to come with me. But she was seventy then, and ...that walk, that crowd, I knew by Christmas that it would be just to much for her. On Christmas Day, my mother and I came to Washington for dinner at a friend's house (karin Edgett another person I met at Eastern Market over 14 years ago), and before we went there, I drove her around first the Capitol to point our the staging for the inauguration, then on to the Lincoln Memorial. I had never asked her how she and Uncle Waven got to "The March On Washington". I had always thought, she had been on one of the hundreds of buses. Nope. They took the train from Penn. to Union station. I looked at her and said, "okay, then what? at Union Station, did you take a bus or taxi?" The look I got! "No" she said. "We walked". So, on the twentieth, I entered through the purple gate, across from Union station. Yeah, just dumb luck, chance, chaos theory.
I had not seen Joyce in years. But Sharon-well, that's another story. My mother's father had an eighth grade education. He would tell my brother and I stories when we went to visit him and our grandmother during the summers. We were the youngest of the grandchildren and the only ones who had lived with them. My brother and grandfather were close. Granddaddy told us that when he was in school he was good at figuring, i.e. math. So, the last time I saw Sharon was in May '07, in Florida, when she and her brother Aaron came down from Tennessee for my brother Josef's graduation (granddaddy's youngest grandson) where he received his PH.D. in practical mathematics. Oh, I know, weird. Funny right? I just cannot stop laughing. Lest I be remiss, let me mention too that my granddaddy's two oldest grandsons, Aaron and Curtis, are engineers.
But I digress. We (Sharon, Joyce and I), were there on the Capitol grounds; we had made it. Not on time, but early. We positioned ourselves as close to a Jumbotron as we could get. Folks were already three deep in front of us. And then I turned around, I looked back, I looked behind me. Because we were on the Capitol grounds, we were slightly elevated. We had had a foundation to stand on solid: faith, family, hard work. We had not rested, we had done the best we could with what we had and were able to move through difficult situations; we too had prospered. So, when I turned around and looked down The Mall to the Washington Monument, I was blessed with perspective. And what I saw, what I saw...was the Word made flesh. My mother had heard in '63 "that one day we would not be judged by the color of our skins, but by the content of our character".
What I saw when I looked down The Mall was, the kind of Amen, a preacher would shout out in one of those old no-nonsense southern Churches. Like the one that my grandfather founded and built with his own hands, Old Grove Baptist Church, where my cousin Aaron is now one of the elders. It was an Amen that said that we had kept our hands on the plow, our eyes on the prize and our noses to the grindstone. It was validation of a deep and abiding faith in God. That Amen on January 20, 2009, rang out to the heavens.
Somebody say HALLELUJAH!
sonda
Turtle's Webb
P.S. It was not until the next day, when I-along with one of the largest crowds of Americans of African descent-toured the Capitol, that I realized... For many who came on the twentieth, it was not just an inauguration. They-WE-had been on pilgrimage.
THOUGHTS
Many believe that the struggle against slavery and for civil rights was about the rights denied to Black people. It was not. It was and is about humanity. During the inauguration, the guest poet was Elizabeth Alexander. One of Ms. Alexander's most famous poems is called The Venus Hottentot. The poem talks about an historical footnote: an African women caged like an animal and paraded all through Europe in the early 19Th century as a circus freak, because of the size of her backside. After she died and was autopsied, her genitals were kept on display at a museum for years...in one of the "civilized" countries. Is this funny, perhaps droll? In 1968, when Dr. King was killed supporting a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, the signs carried read, I AM A MAN. The signs did not read "I am a Black man". The fact that one is Black, fat, white, Asian, Native, gay, Arab, female, Jewish, tall, short etc., is not in question; one has only to look to whom one is addressing to see if these are physical characteristics and if so or if not, so what? What was being stated as fact, then and now is simple: I AM A HUMAN BEING. Treat me as you would yourself or better yet as you would like me to treat you. Not easy, not simple, not even close to being the law of this land or any other. Not yet!
P.S. again: On laughing.
It is now two days out since the 20Th and I find myself still "laughing". You know when someone tells you a good story, and it is so funny that you find yourself, bent over, ribs hurting, sides heaving, mouth open, not being able to catch your breath and tears just streaming down! Laughing.
(For my mother: Sylvia Estella Webb Allen Gilchrist)
(1938-2009)
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