REFLECTIONS ON WHAT CAME BEFORE

Ever since my first stop & last day in Montgomery, I’ve been holding out on y’all.

And not JUST because that was the day I sobbed in public.

I’d planned to break up my visits to the Legacy Museum & National Memorial for Peace & Justice, but plans shifted and tickets sell as a pair anyway, so I casually pulled up for both with all my luggage like it was nbd.

The museum’s opening exhibit immediately foretold my woeful underestimation.

A cinematic of a tumultuous Atlantic Ocean roars through a darkened room, overlaid with the story of how that ocean became a grave for millions of Africans thrown overboard for illness or insubordination, and those who jumped in a final act of independence. And though photographs are prohibited, the subsequent exhibits vividly detail the story of the millions more who survived the journey.

It was my final stop in Montgomery. The one I made after I stood in the original Greyhound waiting room where Freedom Rides arrived, looked up the steps of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and walked the foot of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.

The last “exhibit” in the Legacy Museum is the Reflection Room, covered from floor to ceiling with portraits of brave, brilliant, defiant, creative, and monumental African-Americans in history.

And standing face to face with them, having walked these paths of what they’d overcome, and recognizing that I was the literal embodiment of so much they’d shed blood for—a free Black woman driving herself to these places, writing openly of her experiences—what else could I do but weep?

From there, it’s just a few minutes to the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, where I could take pictures to capture the scale of what I encountered, and just how shaken I was by it.

Because I arrived thinking each suspended pillar only represented a single lynching.

Instead, they represent single counties, some I knew, with lists of lynching victims so long, the font size had to be reduced to accommodate them all.

Tears repeatedly lapped up to my lashes, but I held each wave back. At least until there was nothing between me & my next stop but six hours alone with my thoughts and more roads stained with history.