City bus tour
I imagine an alternate story told over the PA. Another kind of Waco tour. This is the neighborhood where Jesse Washington was lynched. This is where the hood used to be - hookers and drug dealers in sight. We've driven them further down the highway. Away from sight and mind. This is the VA, where service men and women come to beg for services, have their paperwork processed, where there's a suicide hotline on the gates. You see, we care enough to recruit you, but not to protect you from the invaders we sent to your brain. This is Baylor. Where we whitewash history. Ignore LGBTQIA students. Benevolent homophobia. Heterosexism. A quiet no kinder kind of cruelty. This is the river when no black man or woman could dare cross for fear of loss of life or worse. This is the community of color that keeps living, keeps fighting, keeps shaking the dust from their feet to make something new. For them, of them. We are creating something old and new, of us. This women's work of telling stories, remembering history. Healing the world we know. Putting us back together. Banishing fear every time they come back. For our friends. Neighbors. Us too. Lynching was never about rope at all. Trial without jury. Without compassion. How that we died with Jesse Washington. "May we mourn for the dead and fight like hell for the living." (Mother Jones). Amen.
