We returned from our two weeks in New Hampshire on Wednesday – on my birthday, no less. Thanks to those who sent birthday wishes. Since our return, we’ve been basking in the visit of daughter Elana and granddaughter Dalia, who were here to celebrate with us and, secondarily of course, to attend a Noah Kahan concert. They left this morning, so there’s finally a moment to confront my self-imposed blog posting deadline of Monday morning.
The problem is that I have so many different things I want to share that I’m afraid this is going to be a bit of a jumble. Let me try to untangle the threads as best as I can. First, the New Hampshire weeks. For the last 25 years or so, we spent our NH visits in a house generously loaned to us by our dear friend Lew Feldstein, which, sadly, is in the process of being sold. The good news is that we landed instead in the home of a friend of a friend who is out of the country for a month. It’s a 1796 farmhouse which has been tastefully modernized in a way that has not erased its strong bones. The land around it was a joy to look out on. It was an effort to leave it every day to see friends.
That’s exactly what we were there for. We had a dance card that included almost twenty people. No kayaking, swimming, hiking or climbing. Just talking and eating. Some would find that an odd vacation, but it suits us just fine in this time of low mobility, though truth to tell, it’s a style that’s always suited us more than a life of physical activity. I won’t burden you with accounts of each visit, which included people in NH we’ve known for many years, as well as friends who were kind enough to drive to us from Massachusetts and Vermont, some of whom we’ve known for more than 60 years.
It’s strange to drop in and out of people’s lives annually, but collectively they represent a past that has shaped our identity. They are the throughline in our lives and we never want to let go of them.
Another link to our past arrived electronically during our time in NH in the form of an obituary some of you may have seen in the New York Times. When we arrived at Tougaloo College in Mississippi in 1965, among the first people to welcome us were the campus chaplain, Reverend Ed King and his then wife Jeanette. Ed was already a legend on campus and in the wider civil rights community. He wore his history on his face. He was a white Mississippian, born in Vicksburg, who had joined the Movement out of deep moral and religious convictions. A white Mississippian who had thrown in his lot with the Black community was even more hated by racists in the state than “outside agitators” like us. Ed was targeted and one night he was followed after an event and forced off the road, probably by the Klan. He sustained serious injuries, including disfiguring wounds to his face which required years of surgery, but which became his badge of honor for the rest of his life. In those dark days, there was an agency of Mississippi government called the State Sovereignty Commission, created to protect the state’s commitment to segregation. When it was disbanded decades later, the files that became public included evidence that the Commission had bought subscriptions in Ed’s name to Communist publication like the Daily Worker which were regularly and mysteriously delivered to his house in order to brand him with that most hated of labels to further reinforce how reviled he was by other white Mississippians
This was a period when the small minority of white Mississippians who were at odds with the prevailing virulent racism tended to relocate, rather than stay to confront the evils of their home state. Ed was a man of boundless courage, who already knew the price that would be extracted for his principles, but he was committed to stay. Later, he was active in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and was their candidate for Lieutenant Governor when they challenged the totally white state Democratic Party.
Sometimes, people who act heroically are trapped in the amber of those heroic deeds. That was the case for Ed. He was beset by historians requesting that he recreate accounts of those past events, which, in the repeating, became more and more infected by paranoid musings – and who can blame him for that paranoia. Still, it’s his acts of courage that I want to remember him by. Like the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors, Ed King was one of the last living witnesses to a time of hope, now being systematically erased, when it was possible to imagine that we were finally beginning to acknowledge and repair our country’s original sin.
To tie together the disparate parts of this entry, three of our New Hampshire reunions were with people we met and worked with in Mississippi more than sixty years ago, evidence of the mysterious ways in which the seemingly unconnected portions of our lives are part of the same intricate braiding.
More musings from these past weeks in our next posting.
