The word, No, can be be more powerful in its patient education then Yes.
Oh we love, are in love, with the word Yes and all its exclamation and forward momentum.
But it is No, with its arresting power, that reveals the most about our character in our reaction to it.
American women are often extraordinary in their tenacity.
Jacqueline Smith had been protesting the location of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, TN from the corner across the street, since her eviction as the last tenant from The Lorraine in 1988. Evicted to make way for the construction of the museum. The Lorraine Motel was where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
Ms. Smith was protesting the museum’s displacement of the community MLK was fighting for, and the museum’s emphasis on the violence of MLK’s death as a sensationalist lure for tourism.
Ms. Smith was not protesting MLK himself and his legacy of leadership in the civil rights movement.
Far from it.
I met Jacqueline Smith in 2018 coming upon her corner and her then 30 year protest, and was immediately fascinated by her relentless search for refuge.
I tried to woo her and was met with immediate defeat.
This is clearest photo I have of Jacqueline Smith and i only have two.
She was not having it.
Having me.
At all.
I wooed her.
I charmed her.
I flirted with her.
I did tap dances and cartwheels.
Jacqueline Smith wanted nothing to do with me or my camera or my project.
I came back multiple times over the course of two days, repeatedly asking for an interview and I repeatedly got her prickly and decisive,
“No.”
I was being much more specific in that leg of the journey, I was wanting to widen the diversity of the women I was interviewing and as I was in the American South, I was seeking southern black women to speak with about how they navigated their fears and created a sense of safety.
That all sounded well and good on paper as far as a project’s intent in representation. It’s different though when a northern, west coast white woman walks up to a southern black woman on the street and says,
“Hey there, tell me what you’re scared of please.”
And the black woman is going to answer,
“You.”
“Move on girl.”
Before meeting the indomitable Jacqueline Smith and her stubborn protest, I had left Iowa and my immersion into my birthplace and my extended family’s legacy of strong women and silence. There was a story of what was not said, not to be spoken, that was strong as well, generation after generation. I got a glimpse and then my internal sense of timing bade me to hit the road once more. This time, a direct line south, along the Mississippi, Route 61 through the Mississippi Delta.
Following the Mississippi from Iowa, the river took me straight into the south.
Straight into our country’s legacy of ownership and owned.
And because I was an outsider and I was white and I knew nothing except what my bones told me, the cotton fields of Tennessee made me deeply uneasy.
There was the gas station I pulled into, there was the highway I came off of, there were the cotton fields in early winter bloom right where the cement ended.
The proximity of cotton and the mundane gas pump filled me with sadness.
Nothing had changed, not really.
Leaving the gas station cotton field, I drove into Memphis.
Driving around in an unfamiliar city, I found a forgotten backstreet that had poetry blooming in its cracks.
Camera in hand, I walked away from my truck, left it unlocked. Wandered further and further away, caught up in the street’s story, I looked back and I was suddenly far away from everything that i owned and left unattended.
And there was a man now on this forgotten street and he was much closer to my truck than I was and that made me feel deeply uneasy.
Quick-stepped it back, the man and I watched each other as the other got closer and my unlocked truck was the meeting place.
I slid in and he walked by my window and with a casual wave, his black face wrinkled in a kind smile, he walked on by. Sitting there, I flashed on the gas station and its cotton fields and then the images I had just taken and wondered how they’d look together, side by side.
Jacqueline Smith and her saying No to me. The education of her No. I’m just now really starting to get it and I’ll spend the rest of my life learning about it. Ms. Smith and her emphatic No, was a clear setting of boundaries between who can be trusted and who cannot. And that there wasn’t much to talk about in the matter as far as she was concerned.
It didn’t matter who I was, it was a matter of what I represented. I was no one that was trustworthy, and for Jacqueline Smith, I never would be, so why would she entertain the idea of opening herself and revealing what made her afraid and what made her feel safe. All of these power dynamics were a given and Ms. Smith was single-minded in her focus of what was worthy of her time. She had her life’s work, her mission, for the past thirty years.
Ms. Smith’s contention was with Civil Rights Museum board and Memphis’s Black community in how best that community would be served in practical hands-on help for those the most in need. That for Ms. Smith, was first and foremost. The re-imagined Lorraine and its representation as an isolated figurehead for racial equality and advocacy, second.
The Civil Rights Museum was an institution of racial education and a grave marker. An extraordinary leader had been murdered there due to his audacity, his temerity, to advocate that through peace, love, and brotherhood, the achievement of equality between the races in the United States, would provide abundance for all of its citizens. That all would prosper in diversity and equal opportunity.
For this, Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead on the second floor of The Lorraine.
So, the education of No.
What did Jacqueline Smith’s specific No teach me?
That what I want is not the most important thing. That the only person who thinks what I want is important, is me. That I am not the most important person in the room. That when I arrive to a place, to be aware there is already so much in place that is happening all around me. And though I am unaware of particulars, I am already deeply connected to the story and its legacy, whether I am aware of it or not. That the respect I give to the story I am entering upon mid-stream, is everything.
This is the nature of refuge.
