I’ve Been Here Before
The summer after I graduated from college in 1982, I served as the coordinator for a summer project on nuclear disarmament. The main focus of our work was to participate in the mass gathering in New York City to protest what we believed might be impending nuclear annihilation. The students and I worked with Carl Wittman and Alan Troxler, two long-time activists who understood the power of art, to create large paper mâché masks of the Southern animals that could be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. The five of us who wore these masks were as blind as the animals would be as we marched through the streets of New York guided by a Cambodian gong. I can still remember the moment when I removed the mask: I had felt so alone inside that mask, yet I was in the midst of a large pulsating crowd that shared my vision of a world without nuclear war.
Fast forward just a few years to 1986, Carl Wittman would be one of the first of many to die from AIDS. He was my mentor who taught me to ask deep probing questions and to appreciate the arrival of the redbud trees. He showed up at political meetings with windows from his old house that needed glazing. He told me stories of how the English Country dance group in Oregon could organize fundraising spaghetti suppers without meeting as they knew how to dance together. He helped me appreciate the role of art in protest.
I lost many friends and fellow travelers in the decade after 1986. Funerals became a regular part of the menu of community activities. Dozens in Durham, hundreds across North Carolina, tens of thousands across the country succumbed to the ravishes of AIDS. For others like Lester it was cancer, or for Kathy an aneurysm. For my dear friend and one-time partner Linda, it was a car accident. For my grandmother, it was simply old age. People who were part of my family and my community, people who I depended on for their wisdom, for their creativity, for their humor, for their action, all gone.
Let me now take you to 1988 or perhaps 1989. I am at The Highlander Center in the mountains of Tennessee. Highlander has served as a training ground for generations of activists and organizers. I am there with a group of poultry workers and activists who are organizing a multi-faceted campaign to address the egregious actions of companies like Purdue and Tyson. Poultry workers, mostly Black women, stand all day long in several inches of bloody mucky water eviscerating the chickens that show up on grocery shelves. Their hands are so crippled from the fast pace of the assembly lines that they cannot even braid their children’s hair. Some are dealing with strange illnesses as a result of their working conditions. The meetings to plan the campaign have come to an end for the day. Out in the main room, we white people are earnestly singing civil rights songs with Guy and Candy Carawan who are credited with propagating We Shall Overcome into a movement anthem. In the kitchen, the black people are laughing uproariously and dancing joyfully to Michael Jackson.
What’s relevant about these stories in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, you ask. Here’s what I heard as I listened to the waves. We have been in the midst of similar moments of stark life and death realities. We have experienced uncertainty and grief. There are people who have walked similar paths who have the wisdom to share with us all as we face this current crisis. We need this wisdom and it’s available to us:
· Ask a gay man who is in his late fifties or older what it means to change behaviors, to find new ways of being with your tribe. Ask what it means to lose your friends and loved ones.
· Seek out the wisdom of Black women. They have been vigilant about the health and safety of their families, especially their children for generations. What do they know about the importance of joy and mutual care in good times and in bad times?
· Explore your own experiences of losing loved ones or look to the people in your circles who have lost loved ones. Learn what you can about grief and accepting death. Those that die leave a mark that lives on. If we are afraid of death, we don’t leave space for the mark to land within us. For me, Carl shows up every spring when the redbuds burst forth. Linda calls forth creativity in dark political moments. Carl, Linda, and the poultry workers remind me that we all need the joy of dance and human connection even when we fear for our lives and for our futures.
The ocean’s waves and my long-ago memories were comforting. I and others have walked these paths before, these times may not be as unprecedented as we are making them out to be.
~ Meredith