Tuesday, February 28, 2017
Sunday, February 5, 2017
next stop: Meridian, Mississippi
This route is on purpose. This metal box containing us. Our motley crew of riders. These windows angled sideways at dusty red roads, notorious landscapes, marshes, trees, trees, trees. Running movement trailing locomotive steam and long winded howls. The trees witness everything, don't they? Is that why in these parts they tear them down and plant new ones every 20 years or so. So that even the trees have short memories.
This route is on purpose. It's the space where I meet my Grandmother and think about what it must have been like for her in the 1940's/50's/60's traveling this same route to central Alabama. How bold she must have been to move so freely and frequently, on purpose, across land borders alone or with her children. Once she had made the first trip up to Philadelphia when she was about 20, she could have just stayed there. But not her. She settled, met my Grandpop, made family, and continued her migrations. She was that kind of woman.
And Grandpop was that kind of man. Bitter from the Bloody South. The South had robbed him of unspeakable things. He would not return, even to accompany her. So she went alone and brought her children.
I don't wonder too long what it was like for her traveling this way. She was Boss. A woman in a woman-hating culture. A very dark skinned person in an anti-Black society. Apparently the gathering of her kinfolk, the first child she had left down South, and her body/blood moving highspeed through the pit of all things, was the tea for any fever that might appear.
This route is on purpose. It is a laborious journey on land. Ass hurt. This bathroom smellin real pissy already and we ain't even 6 hours in. I am breathing the same stale air with people I might never mingle with otherwise. Still. Without the convenient rush to get somewhere without delay somehow I feel more alive. More generous. More attuned. More subversive. Fetish of iron and heat. Rememory. The patience of transiting bodies in wait. A metal snake of continents curving the world with its sleepless energy. Give me the road
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