The Past Walks with Us

By Michael Penn MA'97

At first, all they saw was red - the red of the flag, and the red of their anger. They weren't surprised to see it, really. As students of the American South, they were well acquainted with the red field and blue bars of the Confederate battle flag, and all too familiar with its complicated symbolism. But they hadn't walked into the little restaurant in the dusty town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, looking for symbolism. They just wanted lunch.

It was difficult, however, to see past the flag. So huge, so centrally placed on the back wall of the Delta Amusement Cafe, it seemed like more than just mere decoration, more monumental than sentimental. Tyina Steptoe, Elizabeth Keeney, and Princess Kent - three of the dozen UW-Madison students who went into the cafe that day - took in the view and wondered for a moment if it was appropriate for them to stay. People who hang Confederate flags often say that it's merely about commemorating history; it's nothing personal. But the students knew all about history, and seeing the flag didn't feel like any history they'd read in a book.

It felt personal.

The students were discovering that there is a difference between learning history and feeling it. Their visit to Clarksdale was about just that - about feeling the intimate tug of human history. They were part of a unique UW class that, for twelve days in June, traveled from Madison into the Deep South on a chartered bus, completing a nearly three-thousand-mile odyssey into the sights and sounds of the civil-rights movement. Stopping at monuments famous and forgotten, meeting people who were heroes and heroines, the class sought to create a real-life framework for the vivid history the students had learned in more traditional classes back on campus.

History is funny, though, in that it is forever happening, and forever disappearing as soon as it happens. The faculty and staff who organized the class knew that they couldn't give students actual history. That would be like catching lightning. But just as it is possible to trace where lightning struck by looking for telltale downed trees or scorched earth, we can see the scars and healing wounds of history all around us. And in that way, while we can't ever live in history, we can't ever live outside of it, either. As Danielle McGuire '97, MA'99, one of the course organizers, put it, "The past walks with us at all times."

And so it is for the South, where the flash marks of the civil-rights movement are visible from Nashville to the Mississippi Delta, and where the class of thirty-four students, three professors, and four staff (as well as myself and photographer Jeff Miller) turned a bus into a moving classroom. We were seeking to come to terms with a South that in many ways is still coming to terms with itself, a place where the struggle for civil rights rests not entirely in the past or in the present, but always treads the ground in between.

The course was called Freedom Ride 2001, an homage to the original Freedom Riders who descended on Mississippi and Alabama in the early 1960s to flout laws that prohibited racially mixed groups from riding on interstate buses. Often, their buses were blockaded and attacked by violent mobs wielding bats and chains, and the Riders could never be certain that they'd return home alive.

The parallels between our ride and theirs were striking. Here was a racially diverse group of students riding a bus into the South to see for themselves what forty years of change had done. In some ways, the changes were historic. Selma, Alabama, where in 1965 hundreds of African-Americans were beaten by police because they wanted the right to vote, recently elected an African-American mayor, something inconceivable in the tinderbox South that the original Riders witnessed. But some things in the South - indeed, anywhere - haven't changed at all. And nowhere was that dichotomy clearer than in Clarksdale, a small town smack in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, where our bus rolled in on day eight of the journey.

Clarksdale is home to the Delta Blues Museum, a small building in the center of town that tells the story of Mississippi blues music, which was born in the fields that surround the town. As an art form, blues music is a paradox. Almost by definition, it's a testimony of pain, trouble, and heartache. But the tunes are often surprisingly upbeat. Far from being dire, the music of legends like Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf, and Muddy Waters rings with an optimism that borders on joy. Craig Werner, an Afro-American studies professor and our on-bus music expert, told us that "the blues are about laughing to keep from crying." Before we arrived in Clarksdale, he had played for us one of his favorite blues songs, Muddy Waters's "Hoochie Coochie Man," in which Waters boisterously sings, "I'm here. Everybody knows I'm here" - a powerful self-assertion in a world that can be downright nasty.

That a monument to African-American self-expression exists only a few blocks away from a place like the Delta Amusement Cafe underlines the complexity of modern race relations. The majority of Clarksdale's population is African-American, yet no black people, apart from the students, were eating in the restaurant that day. The students had wandered in looking for local flavor, and they found it in buffet portions.

One of the first students to arrive there was Genella Taylor '96, an African-American student pursuing a doctorate in counseling psychology. As she stepped to the counter to order, the person behind the register asked, "That's to go, right?" Another student was approached by a customer, who, after learning about our trip, said that he had been involved in the civil-rights movement - but "on the other side."

Steptoe told us that she felt every eye in the restaurant staring as she enjoyed lunch with Keeney and Kent. We all laughed, to keep from crying.

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