Why I Brought My Children to the Montgomery Legacy Museum

MY THROAT STARTED to feel tight a few days before I went to Montgomery this April. I had been planning this pilgrimage to Alabama with my teen children for months but, as the days grew closer, I questioned my body’s ability to walk into the grief that was awaiting us at the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

As a biracial African-American woman putting down roots in the rural South with my white husband and our four children, daily life can feel like an act of resistance. Every day we are faced with Confederate flags and memorials that celebrate an era and mindset that would have made our marriage and my equal ownership of our property a crime. But we love our home, the land, and our neighbors. We want, in the words of Gwendolyn Brooks, “to conduct [our] blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind.”

I was determined to bring my older children to the state of my birth, to take an unflinching look at our racist past and present, and to give them courage to walk the unfinished path toward justice. But still, I found it hard to breathe.

I gardened with a single-minded ferocity in the days before our trip, pulling weeds and digging up long taproots as though I could purge the evils from our land with my bare hands. Red dirt began to lodge deep beneath my nails and in the dry creases of my fingers, my forearms bore slashes from the thorny vines that whipped me as I tore them from the earth. There were flowers, thick with the hopeful scent of spring, trying to bloom beneath the tangle of weeds. I yanked and tore in every spare minute I had, stopping only when I noticed blood pouring from a deep slice on my right forefinger.

It felt right to come with dirty, bloodied hands into those sacred spaces in Montgomery. In the wake of racialized terror, millions of African-American people hastily left their beloved farms and gardens or left land that their hands were forced to work without fair compensation.

My frantic gardening became a silent prayer for all the hands that came before me. The morning before I left for Montgomery, I drank in the heady smell of blooming lilacs and freshly mulched roses in our front yard, small trophies declaring that this land could be redeemed.

I snapped a photo of the blooms and texted them to my mother, “Please show these to Grandma, tell her they smell delightful.” That morning my mother sent the text we knew was coming: Grandma, 99 years old, had been moved from her recliner to a hospital bed. She was going to die very soon. She had lived a good, long life with four children, 14 grandchildren, and 15 great-grands. Even so, it hurt to imagine her really gone from this earth. My throat tightened as I tried to swallow this singular anticipation of one peaceful death along with the massive dose of thousands of violent deaths memorialized in Montgomery.

There is a name for this anxious tightening of the throat, this heaviness on the heart that made it hard for me to take in the sweet southern air. It’s called grief. I was feeling anticipatory grief for my grandma, compounded by generational trauma lodged in my cells, triggered by every crooked oak tree along the road.

Survivors of trauma, who are “acquainted with grief,” can feel this with such regularity that it seems hard to remember what it is like to feel the smoothness of air gliding through an unrestricted throat. “I can’t breathe,” the dying words of Eric Garner, have become a common refrain of the Black Lives Matter movement not just in remembrance but as a statement of common experience. Every breath feels heavy, I am grieving too many deaths, and I wonder if this day will be the death of me or a loved one.

Long overdue mourning

In Montgomery, this sensation of ongoing racialized terror is captured in a sculpture by Hank Willis Thomas at the Memorial for Peace and Justice. In stark contrast to the freedom implied by the open sky and green grass surrounding the sculpture, a series of bronze black men are frozen in line with their arms up.

Some faces, arms, and heads are fully visible above the slab of concrete that holds them all, others are sinking: Noses and mouths are just above or below the slab’s surface, and others are almost completely submerged, with just the tops of their heads and their upraised arms showing.

Public art often shows symbolic triumph: These days are over, the chains are broken, enemies are reconciled. In contrast, the honesty and urgency of this sculpture, juxtaposed with hundreds of steel columns, each engraved with the names of African-American people and the counties in which they were lynched between 1877 and 1950, demonstrate the direct link between the past and the present.

The words of Toni Morrison etched in a stone wall at the memorial offer courage to fully love and inhabit our aching bodies: “More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.” This grip on my throat may never fully loosen, but each breath will feed a heart that will keep loving as it breaks.

Earlier that day, I had stood inside the Legacy Museum before a small sample of the more than 800 jars of earth collected from lynching sites across the country. I reached out to lay a hand on the jar marked “Turner, Brooks County, GA, May 19, 1918.” The staff person standing nearby, serving more as a guardian of the stories than guard, gently reminded me, “We ask you not to touch the jars.” It was nestled between two jars bearing the names Mary and Hayes Turner.

This young family was murdered in a weeklong killing spree of at least 13 people in their community. The baby was cut from Mary’s tortured body and uttered “two feeble cries” before being crushed by a person in the mob. This happened on a Sunday. Mother and child were buried in a shallow grave marked with a whiskey bottle; the father’s body was still hanging where he had been killed earlier that weekend so that people could gawk at him on their way home from church.

“There’s a separate jar for the baby,” I whispered, as I pulled my hand away from the cold glass. I asked him if there was any order to the dates and locations of the jars on the shelves, puzzled that the jars for the other people killed in that massacre weren’t there. He told me that they were arranged across time and geographic location to indicate the wide scope of the legacy of lynching. “But,” unlike the systems of slavery, convict leasing, and mass incarceration, “we keep families together.”

I had not realized what a privilege it is that for the past 30 years, my grandmother’s name and birthday have been etched on the tombstone that she shares with my grandfather in the simple Quaker cemetery where her parents and siblings are also buried. Her birth year, 1918, is the same year the Turner family was lynched.

“Grandma’s going to die soon,” I tell the kids as we take in the weight of the museum and memorial.

“At least she isn’t being lynched,” my son replies. And although it sounds harsh, he is right. There was no fear in her death, an encroaching silence that would be beautiful and right. Her last breath would be the culmination of a life fully lived, her funeral would be both joyous and sad, her burial plot well-tended.

The new museum and memorial in Montgomery create space for mourning the untended bodies of loved ones whose killings were covered by dreadful silence. Out of fear of further harm, families of lynching victims could not publicly mourn. Mary Turner’s lynching was a direct result of her lamenting and demanding justice for her husband’s murder. For every lynching there was a ripple effect of thousands of African-American people uprooted and forced to make a new life on different soil—or more often, concrete—and not allowed full expression of their grief.

I picture the glistening jars of sweet jelly that my grandmother would make each year and offer as gifts to friends and family, a tradition that I carry on. The jars on display in the Legacy Museum, each holding the bittersweetness of a long overdue burial, tombstone, and funeral, evoke a sense of home and can be a gift of healing for this country and to the families of the victims.

This spring has been watered with tears. The week after we got back from Montgomery we went to Ohio for Grandma’s funeral. Every family member had a chance to touch the soft black earth and shovel some into her grave. All we have now are our own hands, and there is work to be done.