So much has happened since I last made an entry! I don’t know where to start…I guess the campground makes sense. It is beautiful! The grounds and sites are lovely. They have two FREE washers and dryers! However, the shower is the most disgusting one I’ve taken in a great many years. And the water temp was not consistently warm. At all. (We use the campground facilities because our camper shower is tiny and so we use it for storage instead. If needed, we will use ours. Like to avoid that gross shower again.)

In Montgomery, we have been to several museums. On the first day, Friday, we went to see the house where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. lived when he was the pastor of Dexter Street Baptist Church. It was the first house he and Coretta Scott King lived in as a married couple. And it was the house that was bombed by a white supremacist (the bomb exploded on their front porch, luckily, without harm to anyone person). The church restored the house to be as it was when the King family lived there, they have furnished it with most of the King’s belongings and filled in what they couldn’t with other pieces of that time. It was so moving, intense, to be in the rooms where Dr. King paced and worried that he was doing the right thing with the bus boycott. He was so young when he lived there and already making such an impact on his community and our country. The docent was so full of information and generous with her time giving us the tour and answering our questions. During this visit, I was so overwhelmed with emotion. It is really powerful, being where such historical events occurred. No picture taking in the museum, but we took a few pics on the front porch.

We also went to the children’s side of the Rosa Parks Museum. It was a really cool interactive time machine. Great material about the bus boycott and the civil rights movement. We will go back to see the other half of the museum on Wednesday. Also no pics inside the museum. I am looking forward to seeing the other half of the museum.

On Saturday we went to see one of the many homes of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was an amazing house, filled with their family’s belongings including furniture from Zelda’s parents’ home that was down the street, which was similar to what would have been in the house when they lived there. The docent was a font of information about the era and the Fitzgeralds, she was very engaging. She has podcast if you share her interest in Zelda Fitzgerald and feminism, Zelda’s Peaches & Biscuits. There are two upstairs apartments (created in the years after the Fitzgeralds lived there) that the museum rents out as AirBnBs. Alas, I took only one picture inside this house; I totally forgot to as I listened to the docent and gazed at all the cool things on the walls.

Then we went to the Freedom Rides Museum. It is in the original Greyhound Bus Terminal where they protested against segregation in interstate travel. The docent was so knowledgeable and answered our questions with enthusiasm. It was such a moving tribute to the men and women who fought for equality before the law and in society. I am humbled by their courage and bravery. How I wish we could take pics, but not allowed.

On Sunday we went to The Legacy Museum and the Memorial for Peace and Justice. The museum did not allow pics, though I so wish they did. Each room had panels to read and images to tell the history. There were also amazing pieces of art and many videos. The timeline started with The Transatlantic Slave Trade and followed history through to the mass incarceration that we still face today. Included in the history were the stories of our day, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd among them. They had people who survived mass incarceration tell their stories via video. It was an eerie experience, the videos are started by you sitting and picking up a prison visitor phone and proceeds with them on the other side of the partition talking to you over the phone, just like a prison visit. Their stories of injustice and inhumanity sank in through that lens, that feeling one gets when imagine sitting in those walls…my emotions sharpened their words.

From there we went to The National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The somber solemnity was penetrating and immense. Each space in this memorial was heavy with past terrors, from the steel beams, one for every county with documented racial terror lynchings, in the main structure, to the casket-like steel boxes down the path from the main structure, to then the plaques from each county. There were amazing sculptures, bringing to life the victims and those who fought to end such horrors and their hope for a better future. Pictures are allowed in this space and many of mine are here. They don’t even come close to portraying the site or the emotion of being in that space.

The work of Equal Justice Initiative, started in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, to build and maintain these sites is a powerful force. I cannot express how much these spaces impacted all of us. We haven’t yet been to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park; tomorrow when we finish Rosa Park’s museum.

We took a break from field trips on Monday. It was back to school and back to work day! The kids did math; Chris emails, conference calls. We never even got to music and I forgot our cursive (I need to ask Rosie to send me a package of a few things we forgot). Math was a big enough dip into the post holiday school tasks, our immersion in history had everyone wanting to take a break. I found that the older bathhouse building is just as inadequate as the newer one. Gah!!

I feel like I have written/said so much, but it just scratches the surface of the very emotional experiences each of these places is. Even with the levity of the Fitzgerald’s home, it has been a very heavy few days. The weight of the terror perpetrated and the weight of the horrendous acts endured by so very, very many people is hard to hold, hard to describe, hard to know, but it is imperative that we do hold that space for them, know this history, and keep telling it so it is not forgotten.

Today we went to Selma and I want to tell you about it, but not right now. Tomorrow.

Catoma Creek looking east.