Anna Traverse
Exactly one year ago as I write this, I was standing in a crush of women queued for SmarTrip cards at the Reagan National Metro station. A smattering already had donned their knitted pink pussy hats, one day before the Women’s March that vividly distinct headwear has come to signify. Many were unfamiliar with the D.C. subway system: no shyness here, though, about asking for directions.
The flight from Memphis had been packed with Women’s Marchers; one woman at the gate handed out double-peaked pink fleece hats to anyone who’d come without. The captain muttered across the intercom’s fuzz, “Stay safe this weekend, if you’re marching.” He needn’t have worried.
On the Yellow Line train, women began to compare notes: where we had come from, and why. I was bound for the Shaw/Howard University station, near my cousin Hannah’s apartment; two Traverses would be marching side-by-side. There was a giddiness in the foggy air, a spring-like exuberance of bright cheer blooming against the deep-gray winter afternoon. But mixed with the exuberance, a mote of anxiety: We’d all seen the reports of anarchist violence that Inauguration Day morning. We’d memorized phone numbers to call for bail money; some of us would scrawl emergency-contact information on our forearms in permanent ink, lest we be knocked unconscious in a stampede.
We needn’t have worried. The Women’s March was one of the largest — if not the largest — peaceful collective demonstrations in our nation’s history. In Washington, I marched among some half a million people, by conservative estimate — people of all gender identities, ages, races, creeds. Including dozens of sister events around the world, held on the same day — one intrepid group assembled in Antarctica — more than 5 million people are estimated to have participated in January 2017, united earnestly by the belief that deep social change is possible when diverse women and their communities work together. As it turned out, I could have stayed in Memphis, where more than 9,000 marched downtown.
In an era not given to an abundance of kindness, I was struck as much by the caring consideration of those around me as by their fierce determination. I went to D.C. half-expecting to be teargassed. Instead, I was offered protein bars and apples from strangers’ clear plastic backpacks as we raised high our clever, heartbreaking, determined poster-board signs.
One hand-lettered sign we saw in D.C. announced, “You know it’s bad when introverts show up at a protest.” I smiled in recognition. I don’t much like shouting, or moving with a crowd. Call-and-response chants: against my very nature. And yet.
My friends Susan and Lisa happened to be on the same plane with me from Memphis to Washington. In the intervening months, we’ve reconnected almost exclusively at protests and demonstrations: in support of Dreamers, in opposition to Confederate statues, in hopes that millions might retain health insurance. No need to schedule coffee dates: We can simply show up the next time someone grabs a bullhorn for a cause we believe in.
On a gasping furnace of a summer day, half a year after the Women’s March, I was standing in another crowd, hoisting another sign, wearing inappropriate shoes and growing dehydrated, again. (Something to be said for consistency.) #TakeEmDown901 had assembled at Health Sciences Park in front of the since-removed statue of Memphis slave-trader and Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.
What made the news that August day were the streets closed by marchers streaming onto the steaming blacktop. The seven protesters arrested after attempting to cover the statue with a tarp. Perhaps the squad car nudging its nose into a crowd refusing to budge. What I remember just as vividly are the people who arrived early, hauling flat cases of water bottles to stack in cooling shadows cast by the statue’s pedestal. I remember those who quite literally propped each other up when the heat bent us down.
This is the South: we know how to be nice. But I’ve been watching as a heedless world propels us into kindness more than niceness, empathy more than charity. I’ve been watching as we assemble to protect and defend those who don’t look like us. We’ve been growing.
As we enter this 50th anniversary year of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I’m thinking of Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, who was with Dr. King on that April day in 1968. Rev. Kyles used to tell the story of a young Robert Louis Stevenson, who watched lamplighters illuminate the streets outside and saw them “punching holes in the darkness.” Rev. Kyles liked to describe the work of brave change like this. “Those of us who have the strength and the ability,” he said, “we should be knocking holes in the darkness.”
