I listened to Anna Deavere Smith speak this morning and flashed on a memory that jolted me and opened my world.
After living my childhood in India, we returned to the States in the mid 60’s. I had been a passionate reader and some of the books that I had obsessively absorbed were about the underground railway and the war between the states. To me this was history but now the country that I would be living in was all about positivity, brotherhood, and fun. Alarmed disbelief ran through me as photos and reports of racial violence and outrage sat and stared at me from my parents’ coffee table in Life Magazine. And then it all became personal.
My father had a good friend who was a civil rights worker. Shortly after the murder of the three men in Mississippi who were working with the Freedom Summer campaign, my father’s friend went missing. There were conversations and questions about where he could be and then his body was found in a hotel room. There was a strange collection of compromising information discovered with him that made no sense to those that knew him. I remember my mother and father speaking heatedly and quietly about this, and my father saying that it was all lies, that he was killed for the movement that he was involved in.
The funeral for this friend was in a church in the west village in NYC. My father had not thought of including me but I insisted on going with him. Riding in our black Plymouth station wagon, through the city, watching and thinking, and then entering the church, shifted my knowing of life in America into an entirely different gear.
We have moved from underground bubbling currents into explosive in your face information.
What will the next phase be?