From left: Ron, Ronelle and Sammy

The Red Roof Inn in Montgomery, Alabama is a U-shaped motel facing Zelda Road, a busy four-lane thoroughfare named for Montgomery-born Zelda Sayre, a rich white woman who knew how to party, married somebody famous, took his name and Fame, and wrote a lousy book; to celebrate those accomplishments, the city put her name on street signs. Montgomery was also home to Big Mama Thornton, Rosa Parks, Howard Johnson, Nat King Cole, Martin Luther King’s kids Martin III and Yolanda, and Octavia Spencer. Fast food signs light up both sides of Zelda’s road. Rooms were forty-eight dollars. I stayed two nights.

The front side of the Red Roof Inn is freshly painted and well-lighted and the parking lot is shiny black with a fresh sealcoat and crisp yellow stripes. A bright new pylon sign with the new company logo faces the street. My room had been newly remodeled and reeked of latex paint and old cigarette smoke. The sides and back of the motel were unpainted and unlit and the rooms abandoned, stacks of stained mattresses, wadded up bedding and overturned furniture visible through the windows.

Room 121 is the first-floor corner room to the right as you face the building. I canted the Hog onto its side stand on the shiny asphalt outside the door. When I went out to get some dinner, there was a guy selling product in the shadow around the corner from my door. He was sitting in a chair facing three handicap parking stalls, faded blue stripes, blue concrete wheel stops, oil-soaked and crumbly asphalt. He asked me if I needed anything, cookies, lollipops, weed. He had a joint pinched between his fingers and he saw me looking at it and handed it to me. He said his name was Iz.

Iz’s pants hung below his butt cheeks, he used one hand on his belt to hold them up when he walked. The pants were shapeless and red and tattered at the bottom, his underwear was plaid blue. On his feet he wore black socks and red rubber slides with dirty white Adidas logos on the straps, the strap on the left one was torn and made a little slap-squeak noise when he stepped on it. He had a limp on the same leg and used a cane. He had short-cropped hair just visible under his hoodie, the hoodie was black, and a curving pink scar that started under his left eye and sliced through his cheek and shade of a mustache and notched his upper lip so you could see the glisten of a silver tooth when his mouth was closed. Several of his upper teeth were silver. Under his right eye he had cross tattoo. He was thin and medium height and twenty-two.

His office, two oak chairs with motel-stained, faded-to-pink fabric and loose and squeaky glue joints set side-by-side in the dark shadow and protected from rain by the second floor balcony above, faced the handicap spots. Guys would idle into the spaces in dented pickups and rusty sedans, roll down a window and exchange cash for whatever it was they were buying. He had walk-ups, too, hookers in lipstick and spike heels, guys in sweat pants who looked like they’d slept on a cardboard box, guys in nice cars who parked under the lights in front of the motel and seemed to always leave a pressed pant leg and an expensive shoe outside the shadow while they did their business with Iz.

As we passed his weed back and forth, I asked Iz about his foot, “Concrete work. Mix truck backed over me, crushed my leg. Nine yards of mud on that truck.”

“Can’t work?” I took a hit.

“Can’t work where I gotta stand.”

“Office work?”

“What company’s going to hire a crippled n****r with crying tears sewed into his face? Nobody wants to see that every day.”

“You from Montgomery?”

“Natchez, Mississippi.”

“I’ve been there. Pretty town.”

“Slave selling capitol of America; that town got rich auctioning off black people, built some nice houses with the money. Mostly white people own them still.”

“You grow up in Mississippi?”

“I grew up in a lot of places, Greenville, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, Atlanta for a while, my mom had a bunch of boyfriends and a bunch of jobs. Went to tenth grade in Oakland, California. That’s where I got my face cut and my teeth busted out. Spent a year in JD riding a broom around in the Harry Potter books. Never did go back to school. But they got me a library card.”

We were quiet for a minute and I handed him the joint, “I’m going over to Captain D’s get something to eat.”

“Do you.”

Captain D’s is a fast food fish joint across Zelda Road from the Red Roof Inn. I ordered the Giant Fish Sandwich Combo; “two Batter Dipped Fish fillets on a toasty bun with tangy tartar sauce and shredded lettuce, served with your choice of one side and a refreshing beverage.” I had a refreshing Coke and fries. When I got back to the motel, Iz was with a customer and I went to bed, long day on the bike.

*           *           *           *

On a Friday afternoon ten years ago, Ron Davis was sitting on the curb in front of a Subway sandwich shop; he asked me for money for something to eat. I bought him a sub and chips and asked him if he was looking for work and he said yes and I gave him money for the train and the next day he came to my house. Ron had big hands with thick fingers, walnut-size knuckles and square cut nails. He had the letters RIO tattooed in blue ink on the back of his left hand in capital letters; Spanish or acronym, I never knew.

That first day, my wife Jane asked him to move hostas from the front yard to the back. He held the shovel in his hands like it was fragile, gently nudging it into the soil around a plant then lifting the hosta out of the ground as though a sudden move would damage it. He would then dig a hole in the backyard where Jane pointed and set the plant in its new home, carefully arranging the roots, patting the soil into place with those hands and brushing dirt off the leaves. Later, Jane asked him to take out a small scrub tree and he came back to tell her that he couldn’t dig it out, that it was still alive. He told her afterwards that he’d said a prayer over it before pulling it out of the ground. That fall he did work for neighbors up and down the block.

When I met Ron, he was thirty-one, schizophrenic and living in a homeless shelter down the street from my office. He’d stop by from time to time and we’d chat. I’d talk about my business and projects, he was born in Chicago and liked hearing about our projects there; he’d talk about his kids, Sammy and Ronelle, and girlfriends and problems in the shelter, drugs and alcohol and stuff getting stolen and people getting beat up. Once in a while, he’d bring a friend. Jamal, a polite, lanky kid he introduced as the next welterweight champion of the world. Jamal was training hard and his coach had promised him the title. I don’t what happened, I don’t follow boxing.

Ron and his sons spent Thanksgiving and Christmas at my house with Jane and our teenage kids and a dozen or so friends. To watch him change a diaper was no different than watching him put a plant in the dirt, those powerful hands holding and moving that baby as though a bump or jar would damage him then carefully arranging the diaper before patting the sticky tabs into place and then a tug snap zip with the pjs, Ronelle giggling and squirming the whole time, Ron laughing with him. We gave Sammy Legos and he and Ron sat on the floor and made whatever it was, those big hands carefully selecting and squeezing and snapping the plastic bricks. Sammy was Ron’s ex-wife’s child and unrelated to Ron.

In the coming years, I introduced Ron to construction companies that gave him jobs before they fired him. I sold him an old Chevy work truck to get him to job sites; he never could pay me for that truck. Eventually he crashed the truck, he was driving back to St. Paul in a blizzard, back from a weekend with the boys in St. Cloud, seventy miles northwest. The truck was wrecked. He’d been sleeping in it in the parking lot of the shelter because of the theft and violence, the truck idling all night for heat.

While we were friends, Ron spent six months in the workhouse for B&E, he and another guy broke into a Verizon store; it was more of a smash and grab then a scripted movie heist. Security cameras caught their faces and the license number of the getaway car. It took a few hours to round them up, the loot was still in the backseat. He didn’t tell me about getting arrested and his time in the big house until he was out, he just disappeared and reappeared. Mental health problems, drug problems, legal problems, ex-wife problems, girlfriend problems, child support problems, debt collector problems, job problems, lost and stolen and broken cell phone problems, un-bankable, uninsurable, fights and thefts in the homeless shelter, crashing the truck, and all the rest, and for all the time I knew him, his big break was ever just over the horizon, get through today, tomorrow’s gonna be great.

Ron had a schizophrenic episode and had a knife and a white St. Paul policeman shot him and he bled out in the street with his head lolled back on the curb and the cop cam rolling. The local TV news covered the story for two or three days, it was clear, well-focused video that followed the action and allowed the pretty newscasters to deplore the violence. The cop was a hero. There was a dozen or so people at Ron’s funeral; a couple of people who worked for the funeral home hustled the rest of us for donations, they were white. An old black man, I don’t remember his relationship to Ron, advised me, “Don’t give them motherfuckers shit.” Ron’s new wife and widow, Missladybee Davis, was there with her five kids and her mother.

That Ron and I became friends was luck, more mine than his. He showed me that the world I live in, the tidy, white-man world of trust and camaraderie and easy correlations is not the real world or to the extent it is the real world it is a very partial and insular world. In the larger world, food, warmth and safety are luxuries. That was Ron’s world and he let me see it full-frontal. What he showed me was that duress inspires humanity; that his gentleness, generosity and optimism were products of who he was born and where he came from, not from schooling, a good book, a pampered upbringing, certainly not from having more than enough. To the contrary, he taught me that privilege obscures humanity, that the smelly and poorly dressed are not our threat; our threats wear cologne and Brooks Brothers. He taught me that beneath our wardrobes, we are all smelly and naked. A lot of that he taught me after he was killed.

*           *           *           *

The Legacy Museum examines Ron’s history over the course of four centuries. It tells the story of the two million black people who died in ships crossing the Atlantic their bodies tossed overboard and continues on to connect the lynching, beating, rape, and separation and sale of families of our past with the segregation, mass incarceration, unequal law enforcement and brutality, and apathy of our day. it shows us who were and who we are, that flowery words about justice for all are just that, pretty words, fairy tales that for all of our history we’ve told ourselves to ease our sleep. It’s a terrible history and there are no words. I’m an old white man and I wandered through the long, long galleries of quotes and images and multimedia displays and shelves and shelves of thousands of canning jars filled with soil from lynching sites each with a name and a date with tears on my cheeks unable to meet the eyes of other visitors. And white visitors, tears on their cheeks, weren’t lifting their eyes to meet mine, either. They shared my shame. Black visitors had tears on their cheeks, too but it wasn’t shame in their eyes, their response seemed more nuanced, more complex, a mix of familiarity, rage and resignation that they shared in their glances amongst themselves and in their soft conversations. They didn’t look at me and I don’t blame them.

*           *           *           *

That next night when I got back from the museum, Iz was in his chair, “How’s business?” I asked him.

“Slow.” He was smoking a joint and handed it to me. He did have good weed.  “Wednesdays always slow, motherfuckers broke waiting to get paid on Friday, then come over here and sit in traffic in the parking lot waiting to buy shit for the weekend.”

“Cops fuck with you?”

“Mostly no. Long as white folks ain’t getting rolled or shot, cops in this town don’t give a shit. Except they’re looking to make their own score. Minnesota,” Iz said, pointing at the Harley. “Damn.”

“That museum’s in your face. I was there a couple hours today and had to leave, that was all I could take.”

Iz turned his head and stared straight in my face, “Motherfucker, black folks been taking that shit for hundreds of years. You spend two hours in an airconditioned house looking at pictures and you walk away because that’s all you could take? Centuries now, black people had all they could take, too. But they couldn’t walk away. And they sure as fuck didn’t have no fucking air-conditioning.

“Here’s the thing about that museum, it ain’t history. It ain’t even yesterday. That same shit you’re seeing on the walls there is going on right now, today. Same shit. You didn’t have to ride a motorcycle a thousand miles to see black people getting beat and killed by cops and scared-stupid white people; you can see that right at home in Minnesota. The thing that’s different between then and now is white folks quit doing your own lynching, ain’t charming to have your picture in the paper standing next to a dead n****r like it used to be. Now you hire cops to do your killing and send them to jail when they embarrass you.”

“You’ve done a lot of thinking about this shit.”

“You saying you’re surprised that a black man knows some history, read some shit. You thinking we don’t know what’s been done to us? I told you, I got the fucking library card.” 

“I’m just down here to learn.”

“Learn? Learn what? Learn that your people whipped and raped and killed my people for centuries, that you bought and sold my people like cattle, like our families and kids and bodies didn’t fucking matter? Learn that black people built this country, made it what it is, and never got paid? That we didn’t get jobs or schooling or a vote? That we were only a little more than half a person, you didn’t learn that? There’s nothing new at that fucking museum. Where the fuck you been?” His voice was getting loud.

“I don’t want to argue.”

“That’s because you got no fucking argument, white man. You knew it all before you got here. You’ve known it your whole fucking life. Maybe you came down here for proof, some words and pictures and numbers, the bloody hand prints of your history. Or maybe you came down here to say you’d done your bit, that you’d seen it for yourself. Shit, all you did was spend money and time to ease up on your shame and take a motorcycle ride. The proof has been in front of you motherfuckers for hundreds of years and you’re looking for more?”

“I came down here because that history is my history,” I handed him the joint.

“Hang on to it.” A blue F-150 with rattle exhaust and a crumpled passenger-side front fender, white guy in a baseball hat at the wheel, pulled into one of the ADA spots and rolled down the window. I stood up and Iz reached up his hand and I pulled him to his feet and stepped around the corner so he could do his business.

After the pickup clunked into Reverse and clunked into Drive and rattled away, I stepped back into the shadow and handed him the joint and he kept talking, “You ain’t hearing me. You and your motorcycle and your house someplace that ain’t here and me standing on the curb selling dope to crackers and risking getting killed or going to Alabama jail every fucking day just so I got something to eat. That ain’t new. You don’t need a museum to see that. You just need to open your eyes. You’re not going to see something in those pictures and words that you don’t see standing in front of you. You’re looking at me right now and you don’t see me; I am it and you don’t see me.”

“I’m going to get something to eat.”

“That’s right, walk away, bitch.”

“I ain’t walking away, bitch. ”

He looked at me, his eyes squinted into thin lines and his lips pressed together so I could see the pulse in the scar on his face, and he reached for his cane like he was going to beat me with it and struggled to get out of his chair, he was nobody’s bitch.

“I’m walking over get a Big Mac. Want one?”

He grinned through his silver teeth and slumped back in his chair, “Quarter pounder, no cheese, bitch.”

When I got back with the clown bag, we sat in the dark shadow at the side of the motel and ate burgers. The little bags of fries had dumped over in the big bag. I set it between our chairs and our hands rubbed together reaching down and rustling for potatoes. They were hot enough to burn your fingers, greasy and gritty with salt.

“Fries are fucking awesome,” that was the weed talking.

Iz ignored me, “What’s different now you seen that fucking museum?”

“What do you mean what’s different?”

“What makes your motorcycle ride to Alabama worth your time?”

“I know more. I understand black history better.”

“Two hours this afternoon taught you the history of black America? Fuck. What are you planning to do with that new learning?”

“What do you mean, what am I planning to do with it?”

“Just what I said, all this time, all this money, to come down here and get you educated. What the fuck you going to do with it? You ain’t the first white man to come down here and get slapped hard by his history. What are you going to do? Vote? White people been voting for hundreds of years and I’m still selling dope. What the fuck are you going to do?”

I didn’t say anything for a while, “I don’t know that I thought it through, Iz.”

“Then think this through, I’ll be dead in a year. There’s nothing you or I can do about that. I’ll be shot by cops or some dude high on shit, or some motherfucker’ll cut me up with a switch knife and steal my product, or I’ll peddle some bad dope and some pissed-off prick will come looking for me, or maybe I’ll put some bad junk in my own veins. That’s the business. My story is not a Harry Potter story, I don’t have a wand and nobody’s coming to save me. But it’s a human story and it’s big, bigger than me, and I want it to be remembered. You’re a writer, write my story, write my fucking legacy. You owe me. That museum taught you that.”

*           *           *           *

The conversations attributed to Iz and Ron above are an assemblage of my notes, memories, observations, learnings and imagination.

*           *           *           *

The difficulty in writing about The Legacy Museum is the writer’s complicity in the history it reveals, particularly white writers, particularly white male writers. The museum presents an American story that is unflattering and unfinished. It is who we were and who we are. Our lack of empathy in dominant culture, our lack of reason, our lack of ironic perspective, our lack of curiosity, our inability to step back and see that the opposing jaws of apathy and oppression are the vise crushing both our neighbors and ourselves; as we destroy the lives of those against whom we bring our violence and apathy, we destroy ourselves. We the oppressors are also our victims.