Reckoning
Today, I’m heading to Coos Bay with three members of our CPC Board cohort of the Reckoning with Our Racist History project of the Common Table. We’ve spent the last nine months learning about Oregon’s history, digging into our conference’s land stories, and uncovering our own stories.
The pilgrimage to Coos Bay is to participate in the placing of a commemorative monument on the site of the only documented lynching of an African American man in Oregon. Taylor Stewart, the founder of the Oregon Remembrance Project, invited us to the upcoming Juneteenth weekend events around the truth-telling of the story of Alonzo Tucker in Coos Bay. Three hundred people attended the lynching, Taylor hopes many more will attend this commemoration.
I woke up this morning with another story in my head, and it turned into a poem:
It's Sunday dinner at Grandpa's house, just him and me and Grandma's ghost. As I cut into my steak, I ask, "Grandpa, did you know the last lynching in Indiana happened on Marion's Town Square?" "Yes, I remember it," he says popping a bite in to chew. He swallows. "My brothers and I hopped in the car the next day and drove over to see where it happened. It was the strangest sight. That tree was stripped bare. No bark at all from people taking souvenirs." He cuts into his potato the butter puddling on the plate adding to the juices of his steak. Later, I will learn the names, two men murdered on one tree, J. Thomas Shipp and Abraham S. Smith, their photo inspiring a song, Strange Fruit, according to Grandpa the last that desiccated tree would bear. As Grandpa swipes a piece of steak through the tasty butter, other grandfather's tell their black grandsons this same story. I feel the presence of two young men and a ghastly assembly of murderers and souvenir-takers joining my grandmother in that little Indianapolis kitchen.
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