"PROCESSING HOME"

“PROCESSING HOME”

            A week ago we were in my hometown of Helena to participate in the dedication of a memorial to the 235+ victims of the Elaine Massacre lynching 100 years ago.  I didn’t write last week because I was still processing it all – I still am – but I need to start back writing.  I’m hoping to do a poem about it, but nothing has emerged so far.  There were two ceremonies involved, the first in Elaine on Saturday in the hot and humid delta of the Mississippi River.  One of the controversies of the whole process was that the memorial was placed in Helena, where there was plenty of killing, but nothing in Elaine near where the slaughter started.  I wasn’t part of the inner workings, so I don’t know the reasons for that placement, but the town of Elaine is on the verge of extinction (less than 500 people), so that was the likely reason.  Still, some art form to acknowledge Elaine as a central location for the slaughter would seem to be appropriate.

            On Sunday morning, Caroline and I attended the worship service at the Episcopal Church – the bishop of Arkansas was there to preach to the descendants of those who had perpetrated the massacre.  His sermon was disappointing, barely mentioning the massacre and then only in the context of loving as the answer.  And the loving that he stressed was not the harsh and dreadful kind of love mentioned by Dostoyevsky and Dorothy Day, but rather the sentimental feeling of everyone trying to get along.  He did not utter the word “justice” at all in his sermon.  It was what I had expected but still disappointing when he had such a potent context to talk about the need for justice, then and now. 

            The memorial is impressive – it is a three step process of granite and a map – and it is no small thing.  One piece weighs over 14,000 pounds, and it was designed and constructed by a local resident, Amoz Eckerson.  The ceremony to dedicate it was held under an open tent structure in Helena, just south of the memorial, between Walnut Street, which used to be the home of black businesses, and the main drag of Cherry Street, where the white businesses were located.  It is also right across the street from the very Phillips County courthouse where 122+ African-Americans were sentenced for defending themselves in the slaughter and where 12 African-Americans were sentenced to death because three white men had died in the slaughter, most likely killed by the “friendly” fire of those who did the slaughter.

            The venue for the dedication was filled, with likely 400 or so people there, and 85% of the attendees were Anglo, a striking contrast to me.  Where were the African-Americans?  I wish that I had taken time to find out, but that will be for a future trip.  Was this dedication seen as an easy way out for those classified as “white,” a way of salving our conscience without making any changes in the current structures?  Was it a sign of the lack of local African-American leadership in the development of the process?  Was it seen as a waste of money, money that could have been spent for education and job development in such a poor town as Helena?  I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I will be working on them.

            There were many speakers at the ceremony, but my colleague and friend Catherine Meeks was the main one, and as usual, she was right on target.  Most of the speakers had lamented the past, as well they should, but most all had implied that while this slaughter was a terrible thing, we were moving past that now.  Catherine did not go there.  She indicated that the same veins that carried the perpetrators to such a slaughter still flowed in all of our consciousness.  The idea of reconciliation was needed, she indicated, but there were many steps needed before that.  Recognition and repentance and resistance were essential.  As Minister Malcolm once put it:  Make it plain.  And she did – in times like these in 2019, we all have to make choices.  We can either stay in league with the spiritual forces that led white people to slaughter the African-Americans because they wanted equitable pay for the cotton that they had grown, or we can resist that spirit and move towards the spirit of justice and equity and difficult loving. 

            Though she did not mention him, I will:  Donald Trump and his base are harking us back to the slaughter fields of Elaine, and it is our time to resist him and that movement.  Trump’s call for civil war if he is removed from office resonate so deeply in these killing fields of the Mississippi River Delta.  Many of the issues that seem such a core for Trump were boiling over in the hot and humid Delta:  equity for workers, voting rights for those disenfranchised, seeing the “other” as enemy rather than as sibling. 

            There were many issues with this process, but yet for me, a child of white supremacy, it is still astonishing that the memorial to the Elaine Massacre was even built and its sordid history acknowledged.  In a scary and difficult and dangerous time such as ours,  I’ll sit with that for awhile and draw strength from it.