Another nice day breaks. We are preparing to leave. I fumble a leash attachment. Sawyer looks at me. I look at him. At that moment he sees it in my eyes, fear, and failure. I say defiantly, “Sawyer, don’t you move.” He realizes that he is free. And when Sawyer is free, he is gone baby gone! Which is what he did. He got gone, quick as he could. With his nose to the ground away he goes. Screaming, calling his name, threatening will not get him off mission. He is a completely free canine with a nose for news and a never satisfied appetite for adventure.
I go to the treat bag, load up and start a long chase. We’re always terrified when Sawyer gets loose because he doesn’t know about cars. After all, he is a dog. But today I was lucky, and he was lucky. I cornered him in another campsite and was able to get a leash on. All good. Sawyer is very happy for thirty minutes of freedom. Not happy about being on the leash again.
We left Twin Lakes early and traveled a short distance to the Lake Hartwell dam, which happens to be in Georgia. Took a walk on top of the earthen part of the dam to the concrete structure and hydroelectric facility. Upstream Lake Hartwell, a recreation area for many. Downstream, the Savanna River, like a dog off a leash, runs wild for a short distance, soon to be recaptured by the Strom Thurmond Lake Dam. Named for Strom Thurmond, a Democratic senator from South Carolina, who served in the Senate for forty-eight years, this dam creates another “recreation area”, Lake Strom Thurmond, also a seething mass of power boats, jet skis, and frustrated old fart fishermen in the summer.
Route 29 to Hartwell, Georgia then 77 to the horrid I85 for more self-flagellation. Traffic backups. And the traffic around Atlanta? One could not ask for a more horrifying experience unless an electromagnetic pulse disables all vehicles and a zombie apocalypse ensues.
Absence a zombie apocalypse, we travel on to the southwest, around Newnan, Georgia, Auburn and Tuskegee, Alabama and finally arrive in Montgomery, where we visit our friend Cary Doss, who grew up in Staunton. Lucky for me that his dad packed up his family and moved to Staunton from Alabama in the 1950s, otherwise I would never have known Cary. That would have been a grave loss, which I would not have known had occurred. That’s the way the world goes around.
Cary went to school in Staunton from the first grade through high school and a couple of years at James Madison University, then he realized that civilized people live farther south, so he made his way back to Montgomery. He is a southern boy through and through. The Alabama Crimson Tide rules in his house!
He worked for GE for all his career and did very well for himself. Especially when he married his soul mate, Terry.
We arrived in the late afternoon and Meko, the dog greets us. Sawyer is apoplectic with joy. We met Terry, Carrie’s very laid back and gracious wife. A great reunion. I had not seen Cary for a while. A great evening with a good friend.
April 13. We visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in downtown Montgomery. There is also an associated Peace and Justice Museum not far from the Memorial where one can find walls of jars of soil, each from a specific lynching site.
The Memorial, that just opened in 2018, is a somber and compelling place. It is the Nation’s first memorial dedicated to “the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African-Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence”.
It’s about time, don’t you think?
One can find lots of historical information about this dark period in American history in Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror.
We walk through quietly. A few school’s groups, couples, and families walk with us. Mostly African-Americans.
First, a bronze rendering of enslaved people in chains, the agony of it in the faces of the figures.
Sorry for the weird effect. I had a hood on the camera. Chalk that up to incompetence.
Then a walk along a monolithic wall inscribed with historical facts about the legacy of racial terror. The walkway inclines gently and leads to the memorial proper. There one finds “eight hundred six-foot corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. Creators have engraved the names of the lynching victims on the steel columns.”
The monuments “symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.”
I had no idea.
One can walk through, among and beneath the monuments for perspective. Along the way plaques tell stories of each victim and why people lynched them.
Surrounding the memorial proper, curators have amassed a field of identical monuments, each waiting, at no cost to recipient communities, for right groups in those communities to claim and install them in the counties where those lynching’s took place, ideally on or near the spot of the lynching.
In this way, the memorial creators hope to expand awareness of this tragic period of American history. They believe that a locality that installs a memorial in its community that recognizes a lynching happened there, that community will be taking an important step in confronting the truth of the terror that occurred there in those times.
There are many injustices in many communities around the world, but this one belongs to us as a nation.
Anyone can encourage local governments and organizations to accept a Peace and Justice memorial for their community. When I get back from this trip, I’m going to visit with the Rockingham County administrator to talk about Charlotte Harris, a black woman who a white mob lynched in the county in 1878 after a white man’s barn burned down. There was never any evidence presented to suggest that she was the perpetrator of the barn burning.
Good place for a Peace and Justice Memorial I’d say.
The Memorial did not have records of lynching in Augusta County or Staunton although I believe there were some. There were certainly plenty in Virginia.
We walk on.
Outside. Into the field of duplicate memorials, laid out like coffins, ready for transport.
Then to more bronze sculptures. Lots of room for more. These folks are just getting started.
A heartbreaking place to visit. But uplifting. Confronting the truth of our past is the first step towards redemption.
We have lunch at Chris’ Famous Hotdogs. Serving hotdogs, hamburgers and other southern delicacies to hungry diners since 1917. Worth a shot.
Back to Cary’s for BBQ, tequila, lots of beer, companionship, and good night sleep.
Huayucaltia
Steve-Thanks for these photos of the museum. I read Brian Stevensons book and would like to visit this moving place. Maybe a road trip south next January. Carol
Thank you, Carol. Go. It’s great.