The ability to travel this Summer was a most welcome development and I was glad for the occasions when I could pack my bag and go someplace. When my nephew S came to visit, that someplace was a few days in Washington D.C. I packed my bag full of blue and white clothes.
I have wanted to visit the Smithsonian Museum of African American history since it first opened in 2015. When my nephew and his girlfriend came East for a visit and wanted to see D.C., I seized on the opportunity and it was the very first thing I saw on my visit to the city.
The museum has 7 floors —— 3 underground and 3 above ground, divided by an expansive lobby on the ground floor. Though entrance is free, tickers are required because the museum is so popular with visitors. There is something very heartening about this and as I waited in line I felt like I was surrounded by a host of fellow Americans who get it. These days, that’s no small thing.
The floors below the lobby depict the years from slavery’s arrival in North America to the election of Barack Obama and beyond. Visitors descend three levels to begin and the space is dark this far below. It took me a minute to realize that the walls are covered in a substance that looks like wood. We are in the hull of a ship making the journey of the Middle Passage.
There are some artifacts, though few relative to the fact that we are in a Smithsonian museum of history. Most of what we view are the words of people - Oloudah Equiano especially - describing the reality of enslavement. The displays are offered in a tone of matter-of-factness and it is in these descriptions and maps of the journey across the Atlantic and portrayals of the slave ships’ holds that the horror takes shape for museum visitors.
The visitor winds around, slowly ascending toward the 19th century. There is a statue of Thomas Jefferson and his words in the Declaration of Independence, plus descriptions of the enslaved population at Monticello, including the stories of the Hemmings family. The history is presented precisely in order for the visitor to draw her own conclusions about both Jefferson and the nation he helped found. As I walk through the history, of the 1800s the abolition movement comes into view. The words and actions of abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and William Lloyd Garrison take command of the narrative. At every juncture, the experiences and lives of Black Americans are at the core of the story.
Notably, there are few artifacts, a fact that underscores the reality of being enslaved and held as property. People denied the power to own their very bodies leave few possessions to be cherished. Those artifacts that are displayed - a lace handkerchief that belonged to Harriet Tubman; a copy of Frederick Douglass’ North Star newspaper - are more powerful because of the rarity.
As I continue to walk the path upward, the historical record winds from the hopes of Reconstruction to the discouragement and terror of Jim Crow. Military service by Black Americans, segregation, and the Great Migration sit alongside one another, telling the story of our nation. Now there are more pictures and artifacts to show the story, including a powerful and emotional display of the story of Emmet Till’s trip to Mississippi.
The museum tells the story of our collective past with space left open for us to make a better future, no small task in this nation. It celebrates Black lives, community, and culture without shirking the harder truths lived by those lives. The museum is a monument to our collective history. For much of my walk through this story of the United States, my emotions were at the surface, as they often are when I teach this history, which I take pains to keep alive. I want everyone in this nation to visit the museum and to spend time wrestling with the truth of our collective past. It is the only way to a better future for us all.
In the last two years, I’ve taken to making pictures of the trails and paths I have been walking on. There is something about the path forward that engages me, especially when I find a quiet patch in the woods, as I did a few weeks ago when I was at Kittatinny Valley State Park.
I expect it’s the uncertainty of the last few years that has made this project appealing to me. I know the pictures bring me happiness.
The arrival of June moves my reading habit into its highest gear and all Summer long, I consume books with a greater ferocity than usual. Since the pandemic, I’ve taken to using my generous sticker collection to make bookmarks and in the Summer, each book gets its own bookmark. I make them by the gross because they make me happy. I started a new book the other day and, as is my habit, chose a new bookmark. As it’s August, the supply has thinned.
Though it is of course possible to get tomatoes all year long, the ones that come from a garden in the Summer are the tomatoes that give the fruit its lustrous reputation. Mine have come in bit by delicious bit and we’ve enjoyed them at the supper table. But my favorite way to enjoy a Summer tomato is on a BLT, with plenty of salt and pepper and a generous spread of mayo.
Eating outside is my favorite part of the warm weather season and this year I scored some lovely blue plates to make it even nicer.
Two of the ponds in the places I go for walks have been wet enough in the heat of Summer to sustain flowers on the lily pads.
On Monday, a major water main in my corner of New Jersey broke, as 100 year old water mains will sometimes do. The water authority notified us at once and a boil water order went into effect. On Tuesday, while the boil water notice held, we were notified of places to pick up a case of bottled drinking water. I drove over to one of the 6 locations and in less than five minutes, a case of water was loaded into my car. The staff and I exchanged the standard Jersey “take care” message and I was home in 10 minutes.
New Jersey gets something of a bad rap nationally and the traffic is as bad as you’ve been led to imagine. But there are pockets of extraordinary beauty all over this state and our government is good - smart (because it’s mostly Democrats who run the show), responsive, caring, organized, and not prone to bullshit or lies.
As pandemic stupidity and anti-vaxing rages in the vast fly-over parts of this nation, I have grown to appreciate New Jersey more than ever. The people here are a community; we look after and try to do right by one another.
I’ll take it.
A few summers back, I saw a recipe for summer corn chowder on the Southern Living Instagram feed. This chowder is made in a crock pot and uses fresh corn, two things that I can always get behind. The taste is full-on amazing, so that’s a third advantage.
The blog and I have been on an extended dance mix break in the past few months and I can’t really explain why this is the case. I have a few ideas, of course, because if there is one thing I have perfected in the pandemic, it is over-thinking everything.
My best guess is that a hand-written journal took the space of the digital journal during the pandemic. In March 2020, I began a daily Covid journal that was a hand-written affair and I think that some of my writing energy went there. For months of this trial of a time, thinking about the pandemic and how to handle it at school (not to mention teach hybrid, teach remote, or, frankly, teach at all) consumed a lot of my time and energy. In my free time, I turned to books as a distraction from the near-constant worrying. In late June of 2021, when it seemed that my steadily vaccinating part of the nation was starting to re-emerge (pre-Delta variant in the U.S., of course), I converted the handwritten pandemic journal to a weekly update. That has freed up time for me to write for the blog. Why it took me another six weeks to start up postings is rather a mystery, but here we are.
If the pandemic has taught me anything valuable, it’s to go easy on myself and so for this re-start, I am not planning to back fill with postings that were begun or written while I was not posting regularly. I will just begin and hope to continue. Come to think of it, that is the keep-on-keeping-on tactic that has gotten me this far in the pandemic. As strategies go, it’s not a bad one.
Here we go.
