Back To Birmingham
The child running up to me with her complaint that she was afraid was in truth mostly a distraction to my intended purpose. Which was to take in as much information on a subject as possible within a limited period of time. That photographs of men hanging dead from trees with ropes around their necks while in the background played the haunting overlapping recorded voices of men and women espousing their ignorance and hatred frightened her was not so much a concern to me, rather an ok that's good, check, she's fine, normal in a good way, now run along and let me finish this ride.
We just came back, Bernadette and I, from Birmingham, Alabama, where we enjoyed a most outstanding version of Southern hospitality, with drinks on the lawn flowing freely (the first spying of Johnnie Walker black at an open bar is to me like being accosted on the street by a supermodel, kissed and hugged and fussed over and then slipped a couple of C-notes before a lucky delivery back into the loving arms of Bernadette), and hors d'oeuvres followed by shrimp and oysters on the balcony followed inside by tables and tables of...I can only remember the bloody red meat and biscuits and cakes and cookies but I'm told there was other food as well. Could I have another Johnnie Walker? was never met with resistance, I do remember that.
It was hard not to see and think about the stereotype of exclusively black service staffs attending to the needs of all us white people but no one I talked to about it could come up with any necessary reason a black person should not serve a white person, as long as they were fairly compensated. And as the work environment seemed like one to be envied, those of us with memories fueled by sixties era news footage and our Gone with the Wind criticisms were left, while stuffing our faces with snacks from passing trays and southern influenced cuisine spread across many tables to...well...shut up, and have another miniature crab cake or, hopefully without too much attitude suggest, perhaps a little less ice in my Johnnie Walker this time.
But to the reasoning of or the seed behind the juxtaposing of men hanging and people celebrating, it was the commenting of our hosts who on two succeeding nights, while accepting our thanks and sending us off into the night, inspired me to present this as a good Birmingham, bad Birmingham story. The man, the father of the bride, on the first night said, well I hope we have given you a better impression of Birmingham than you came with. Perhaps it was me standing next to a native New Yorker (a northern agitator?) or that we had flown to this wedding from NY that inspired his comment but in any case, it strikes me as remarkable that the man, and so I think by extension, much of the city's inhabitants, are suffering still from scars almost 50 years old. I suppose though it is these apparent scars that give hope to humanity.
It is hard to ignore that the part of Birmingham that wasn't recreated as suburbs through white flight in the sixties, that old part of downtown, and the area and neighborhoods within proximity to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, is still in need of lots of help. While the area is clean and shows evidence of some renovation it is marked also by a sense of abandonment.
We left the Sunday brunch at the second of two Country Clubs we visited this weekend, after drinking bloody marys and eating bacon and eggs and corn pones on yet another beautiful balcony overlooking a splendid golf course, and drove from the wooded winding hills outside of Birmingham back into the downtown area, past where we had the day of the wedding gone to Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which is next to the church where the four teenage girls were killed from the blast of a bomb on September 15th, 1963. The actual neighborhoods surrounding downtown Birmingham have that familiar feel of poverty and the lacking of hope that comes with it.
Inside the institute the pictures, the recreations of diner counters and a bus with a version of Rosa Parks on it and a jail cell and video and audio of humans espousing sincerely that which you wish could not come from a human soul and that small piece of charred stain glass from the church next door, sort of as a punctuation or a kick in the guts or a little piece of rope around your neck or the jaws of German Shepherd on your arm, the blast of a fireman's hose forcing water up your nose to nearly drown you while knocking you senseless, all these things do very effectively what I think they are intending to do—travel you through time and make you feel something that simply reading the facts cannot make you feel.
In the end I do not have anything new to say about any of this important stuff. Subjugation of humans by humans is not nice, that is something I think we, those of us who aren't evil bastards, mostly agree on. However, criticism without construction is meaningless and I do not know how to make people respect each other nor do I know how to fix our broken school systems or bring hope to so many inner cities that once got a lot of attention but now, with day to day problems of equal severity but less eye catching than is created by men in hoods burning crosses or heavily armed black men with berets, go largely forgotten. I do think the citizens of Birmingham should give themselves a break. I have been there several times before this trip and while I am sure that there is lurking somewhere that evil that made the news so compelling for those years in the sixties, I am equally certain that you as a city, populated mostly by good people, have paid your dues. Birmingham has I think carried the weight of racial wrongness disproportionately to that which exists in the United States and in the world. Undeniable though, you did have some pretty compelling ignorant crackers spewing unapologetically all manner of ridiculous bullshit for a number of years. My point is, less compelling racism is and was existing right alongside yours, all over this great land, but don't get me started on that. Not a moment too soon I will close by saying—ya'll do throw one hell of a party. And for that, Merci beaucoup.
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