The rest of the trip looks like this. I spend an extra day in Chicago. I see a play - Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. It's written and performed by E. Patrick Johnson. directed by Daniel Alexander Jones. I've waited to long to talk about it in great specificity. Lights hanging from a tree in jars. Jars. Text edited from interviews with queer men growing up in south; of personal strength and dignity in alienating circumstances. Joy in holding another man's story in the body. Awkward joy.
The program timeline mentions a man - Bayard Rustin - forced to resign from SCLC (the Civil Rights organization MLK headed) because of his homosexuality. 1960. Complicates the idyllic cry for freedom of 1960s Civil Rights. The mana from the mouth of just a man after all.
Sweet tea of mason jars full of lights. Hung on a tree.
It's the next day. I wake up at dawn, or at least I get up. I think I am not fully awake because I mistake the bike path by Lake Michigan for the highway entrance and I drive for about a mile before I realize I'm not on a road. I'm on the road. Pennsylvania. The hills sprawl out endless green and the highway's scattered with dead deer.
I drive much of the day in silence.
I want at the end of all this distance, some kind of clarity.
What does the word nation mean to you, Emily?
A 3,000 mile problem that I inhabit. Maps in my own language. Crossing two time zones and never having to exchange currency. Secret trap doors in the desert that military vehicles have been seen to emerge from. Trains. Implied trust with strangers who also listen to books on tape. Arizona racism immigration laws. Fire hoses. Improvised dreams. The monotony of corn. The aqua splendor of potash distillation. Spilling oil. A key left over the lightswitch in a tight garage. The land has a story, continuously remade up and written on placards with stencil images of covered wagons. A space like the inside of my eyes.
When you are living in your country, it is alien in its refusal to be only what you know, or what you desire. Can I be at home with disappointment?
The roads become familiar. The ocean at night reminds me of red, of a rock not to walk on.
Arriving in past light. It takes light time to land across so much distance. East to the sound. To the stop sign. To make space. The clarity of waiting.
Emily, it's so odd but your post reminds me of something Andy Warhol said that I noticed in the wall text at the museum today.
ReplyDelete"Everybody has their own America, and then they have pieces of a fantasy America that they think is out there but they can’t see. When I was little, I never left Pennsylvania, and I used to have fantasies about things that I thought were happening...that I felt I was missing out on. But you can only live life in one place at a time...you live in your dream America that you’ve custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions just as much as you live in your real one."
xoV