HungryBlues

For Linda

By Marsha Rose Joyner

For: Linda
From: MarshaRose

“Child of pure unclouded brow
And dreaming eyes of wonder!
Though time be fleet, and I and thou
Are half a life asunder,
Thy loving smile will surely hail
The love gift of a fairy tale”.

by Lewis Carroll

Time and distance dims memories!
And we all edit our thoughts.
As the White Queen said, “What good is a memory, when it only works in one direction and that is backwards?” In this day of TV and make-believe we have become desensitized and some things are too beautiful to forget.
Thus was Linda!

“A tale begun in other days,
When summer suns were glowing--
A simple chime that served to time
The rhythm of our rowing--
When echoes live in memory yet,
Through envious years should say, “forget”

Linda lived a life of value undefined by property and prosperity.
She lived a life in pursuit of the beauty nestled in everyone and everything – a beauty that is unrecognized by most of us.

Linda led an ever-changing life exploring the unthinkable and the unknowable. Finding the magnificence that is buried deep beneath the surface.

Linda was compelled to give all that she had – a burden not generally appreciated nor understood.

I do not know the time nor the place when she came into my life – but today as I sit with the knowledge that I’ll not hear her happy voice or see her smiling face - I roam from room to room touching the material things that we shared, the precious items she willingly gave away; a set of 19th Century French classic books; a stack of Civil Rights era recordings, [“The Freedom Singers Sing of Freedom Now!” –Mercury Records –1964 – “The Freedom Movement Told by Coretta Scott King” – Caedmon –1969] and many more; her father’s sculptures and of course her love and wisdom.

Linda understood when we give away a small piece of ourselves we get an even greater reward.

And she did give –
I called her “The Modern Day Harriet Tubman”
This Jewish woman with all the gifts that upper middle class in New York can bestow – opened her household to anyone and everyone fleeing the south. Legends of the Civil Rights Movement, the people who most of us only read about and worshiped at their altar, were real to her – because they had stayed at her home.

Linda gave voice to students of other cultures where English was a second language. She opened them to the elements - a world of communications – gave them the courage to read, write and dream in English. She introduced them to poetry in French and Farsi as well as Mozart on the out of tune school piano.

“I have not seen they sunny face,
Nor heard thy silver laughter:
No thought of me shall find a place
In thy life’s hereafter-
Enough that now thou wilt not fail
To listen to my fairy-tale.”

"Love is grabbing hold of the great lion’s mane." The ancient, fiery, Persian poet Hafiz wrote. And she did!
Linda was a warrior: The struggle for equality and justice was never far from the surface. Linda was prepared to suffer for the greater goodness of the world without falling prey to the continued enticement of money and fame. Linda had to go her own way, embolden the weak, bringing light into darkness with a spirit unbroken by the heartbreak and false promises of a world that did not understand.

Playing Beethoven on her beautiful Baby Grand from her living room overlooking West Loch, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – Linda told me “the ambient noise of your daily routine is about to increase.”
“That is not possible,” I replied.
Bang! Went the piano top. She stood up. The cats scattered.
“Oh yes, they want to build an incinerator in my back yard – we must stop it!”

I walked over to the Lanai doors - It was a clear, bright Sunday. The afternoon sun, moving toward the south facing shores was just beginning to cast shadows. The gentle winds and billowing soft clouds gave an imperceptible repose to the surrounding loch. The sheer beauty of the waves gently licking the shore belied the carnage, which took place here at West Loch- the site of one of the bloodiest events of WWII.

She was right. The noise did increase. We were back on the path again. This time against the modern day Klan dressed in three-piece suits – the corporations and the City & County of Honolulu government and we did stop the incinerator.

“Come; hearken then, ere voice of dread,
With bitter tidings laden,
Shall summon to unwelcome bed
A melancholy maiden!
We are but older children, dear
Who fret to find our bedtime near.”

Last October, Linda, ScottyB, my son, Christopher and I ventured down to Lowndes County. Me, complete with all of my fears and prejudices and Linda armed only with her camera – she so loved everything about the place. The people who'd been involved in the Lowndes County Movement; the overgrown cemetery with its many secrets; the rustic homes that had provided shelter from the rage; the smell of autumn; and the chill in the air. We should all be privy to her view of Lowndes County.

“Without, the frost, the blinding snow,
The storm-wind’s moody madness—
Within, the firelight’s ruddy glow,
And childhood’s nest of gladness
The magic words shall hold thee fast:
Thou shalt not heed the waving blast.”

Linda’s father told her “even if you do not practice being Jewish – always say you are Jewish so that Hitler will not have won”.

Linda lived and loved around the world – from New York, France, Iran, London, Hawaii, California, and “The Black Belt” being devoted to justice and equality - I think when her father welcomed her into the hereafter his first words to her “thanks to you – Hitler will not have won.”

“And, through the shadow of a sigh
May tremble through the story
For “happy summer days” gone by,
It shall not touch with breath of bale,
The pleasure of our fairy-tale”

Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking-Glass
And what Alice found there”

MarshaRose

June 28, 2006

"[I]t wouldn't surprise me if we both got up to dance."

I wish I could show you one of Linda's photographs. I wrote to one of Linda's dearest friends, Marsha Joyner (who publishes on HungryBlues from time to time) that Linda had a genius for seeing the beauty in people. This was evident in many ways, but it was really striking in her photographs.

To what I wrote before, I want to add that Linda Dehnad and Scott B. Smith were married on June 26, 2002 and then moved back to Alabama where Scott B had been active in SNCC and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Linda lived in NYC and was a central cog in SNCC's New York office. At that time she was married to Danny Moses, who was also active in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. They had a home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan which was a hub for many of the activists who came north from the South. From her first marriage, Linda is survived by three children, Jay, Julia and David.

Some of what I mean by Linda's genius for seeing the beauty in people is in these excerpts from an email she sent me on April 3 of this year.

I heard Taylor Branch talking in Lowndes County yesterday at the "Mother Church" at a book-signing, the best book signing I've ever seen, because all the people there who'd been involved in the Lowndes County Movement got up to talk and told stories and it was warm and tight and it felt historical. . . .

The first woman to introduce herself was Bernice Johnson, age 91, and I was thrilled because I've come across her name in books, and the name "Bernice" always stops me because of Freedom Singer Bernice (Reagon), and finally I see Bernice Johnson in the flesh. She was two rows ahead of me . . . and I crawled up and we shook hands and I told her, not too loud as to upset the meeting cause someone was speaking, I told her how I'd waited a long time to see her and meet her, and when she shook my hand it was like a clear message. I knew for sure that it meant something like "We are sisters, no doubt about that, and I'm as thrilled as you are." Second time I talked with her, was to ask if I could come over her house and take her picture because the lighting in the church made it hard, and her face is so beautiful I want to catch that beauty in a photo. We talked briefly about how I bet she had boys and men running all around her when she was young, and was she as beautiful then as she is now, and she just laughed and grinned and her eyes shone. Her daughter had to write the last two phone number digits cause she had forgotten them, and I also found out that her hearing aid had conked out and I couldn't figure out if it was fixable or her hearing was beyond help. That didn't seem to matter to her or to me. She squeezed my hand several times and it told me that it would be so much more fun to just get up and dance together and relate in some other way than with words. What struck me first was that it was exactly how I felt, and her message was clear and strong. . . .

Now I'm going to check out the pictures I took yesterday and I hope I have one I like of Bernice Johnson. I'll go visit her whether or not I do, and it wouldn't surprise me if we both got up to dance. Or might just sit in our chairs and do our dancing without standing. Lot's of the older women I was sitting with have an easier time walking than I do, but the doctor is going to put something that's not cortisone in my knees at 7:15 a.m. tomorrow and with luck I'll be standing up without groaning which would be good, because these women had all had a hell of a more difficult life than I have, and they have the right to groan before I do. I don't know. Maybe it makes me fit in more easily as we all laugh at each other's expression of pain.

Scott B. Smith and Linda Dehnad

DSCN0184.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

I took this photo of Linda and Scott B when I was with them in Montgomery, AL last summer.

"Another SNCC warrior has died."

Those were the first words from Scott B. Smith, Jr when he reached me on the phone earlier this afternoon.

He wanted to inform me and all who knew her that Linda Dehnad, his wife, died this morning of undetermined causes at age 69.

Linda went to Jackson Hospital in Montgomery, AL last night because she was suffering from severe stomach pain. It happened to be her and Scott B's wedding anniversary. Exteremely frustrated and at her wits end after waiting for more than five hours to have her pain treated and her condition addressed, Linda asked Scott B to take her home around 9:30 PM. Scott B took care of Linda through the night; he fell asleep for a couple of hours at about 4 AM. When he woke up again at about 6 AM, Linda was dead.

Scott B said, "Linda came back to Montgomery with me to work with the people of Lowndes County. Though she was treated badly, she loved Lowndes County. Linda was a warrior. She never stopped trying to work with people. Anything she could do: she was doing it. She was concerned about the children. When she was teaching and was asked to use corporal punishment, Linda said, 'I am not a slave owner. I am a teacher.'"

In her last years, Linda had ongoing pain from fibromyalgia. Linda remained a gifted writer, teacher and photographer and a committed activist. She taught and mentored many, many people, including me (Ben).

Linda has requested that she be cremated. There will be a memorial service on Sunday, July 2, at the Unity Baptist Church in White Hall, Lowndes, County, AL. Church service begins at 11:00 a.m. Memorial service begins at 12:30 p.m.

Scott B welcomes phone calls, email and postal mail with condolences or memories of Linda. He would also welcome financial assistance to pay for Linda's autopsy. You can reach Scott B by phone at 334-262-7547. His mailing address is 2010 McKinley Avenue, Montogmery, AL 36107. His email address is scottbsmith_jr at yahoo dot com.


UPDATE#1 (6/28): I made a mistake on Scott B's phone number. Area code is 334, not what I had before. The number, above, is now correct.

UPDATE#2 (6/28): There is now a time for the memorial service, added above.

~
Read an interview/conversation with Linda Dehnad and her fellow Civil Rights Movement veterans, Jimmy Rogers and Bruce Hartford.

DSCN4546.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Across the street there is a house under construction,
abandoned to the rain. Secretly, I shall go to work on it.

(Frank O'Hara)

Beginning to See the Light

DSCN3922.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Here comes two of you,
which one will you chose?
One is black, one is blue.
Don't look just what to do.

(Velvet Underground, 1969)

VU / UV

DSCN3847.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.

 

Calling for More Youth Jobs in Boston

Since 2001, the city of Bosotn has cut its spending on youth jobs by more than half. Anyone who reads the Boston papers knows that youth violence, particularly among Blacks and Latinos in Roxbury and Dorchester, has been skyrocketing.

The graphic above is from the United Youth and Youth Workers of Boston website. Please sign their petition urging Boston city officials to allocate $5 Million from the FY07 City Operating Budget for summer and year-round youth jobs.

Youth jobs are crucial to stopping violence. In the short term, they provide a positive alternative to young people of all types -- helping those who have already made negative choices, turn their lives around; and helping other young people who are on the fence, stay positive.

In the long term, jobs build the skills and futures of young people, giving them the tools and relationships to stay positive long after a summer job has finished. Indeed, youth jobs do far more than prevent violence: they invest in young people, giving them the resources to thrive as they become adults and community leaders.

Gone to Mississippi

DSCN1170, originally uploaded by BenTG.

Dollars & Sense co-editor Chris Sturr wrote to me today to let me know that "Gone to Mississippi," the feature I wrote about my trip to the Gulf Coast, is now online. This is the opening section:

"You have to come here... you just can't understand unless you see it... please come," Gayle Tart said to me. Kermit Moore, an organizer from the Mississippi Workers' Center for Human Rights, had referred me to Tart, an African-American attorney in Gulfport, for a perspective on Hurricane Katrina's impact in Mississippi.

Her urgency was persuasive. In late January, after I had traveled around the Gulf Coast region for a week, I met Tart in a private home in Gulfport. "Now we can talk," she said. "Until you saw what I saw, I couldn't talk to you. You had no way of understanding."

Tart was right.

Two things I could not understand from where I sat in Boston were the true extent of Katrina's geographic reach in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama—wiping out an entire region of the country—and the scale of human costs, compounded by government policies, local, state, and federal.

Even before the trip, I knew something wasn't right about the media's coverage of Mississippi. I heard entire towns were wiped out, but I didn't hear anything about African American communities, even though Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans in the United States. Even along the Gulf Coast, one of the whitest parts of the state, there are many heavily African-American areas. For instance, Gulfport, the second largest city in the state, is one-third African American; parts of the city are over 90% African American. But Katrina's impact on African-American communities on the Mississippi coast was virtually absent from the news.

On October 11, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour announced the formation of his Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal. "The Coast and South Mississippi will decide their own destiny," Barbour said, "but with strong support from the Commission, our Congressional delegation, state officials and many others."

But whom, exactly, will government support? "It took some seven weeks after that commission was convened to even have a committee on housing, even though housing was the main thing the goddamn storm knocked out," noted Derrick Evans, founder and director of Turkey Creek Community Initiatives, an innovative nonprofit community development corporation in the historic African-American settlement, now part of Gulfport. "They quickly fast-tracked legislation to allow the casinos to be rebuilt on land so that the casino companies and operators wouldn't abandon the Gulf Coast. An opportunity was missed to also require those folks, when they rebuild, to pay into an affordable housing trust fund, like the hotels do in Boston."

To travel through the Gulf Coast region is to move through a twilight zone where thousands of people are in limbo, with no sense of their future. In contrast to the damage Katrina brought in New Orleans, the storm was largely color-blind in its immediate destruction of Mississippi. Like New Orleans, however, there are racial and economic dimensions to everything in the aftermath—from the availability of resources for relief and cleanup to reconstruction plans.

"On September 29, 2005, four weeks after the storm, after weeks of begging FEMA and a visit to Washington, D.C., to get congressional support, a FEMA Disaster Recovery Center finally arrived in East Biloxi," said Ward 2 City Councilor Bill Stallworth, speaking before Congress last December. "That same week, the Red Cross set up an assistance center."

"In emergency room triage, you attend to the person with their arm hanging off, not the one with the splinter," Stallworth continued. "The Red Cross and FEMA seem to have a different mindset. The areas of Biloxi that were not as hard hit received a rapid response, while a good three and half weeks past the storm, we were still awaiting assistance."

"We could see other areas with lights, and we didn't have lights," recalled an African-American accountant in Gulfport, Sam Arnold, who is currently a community organizer with International Relief and Development. "We were like two or three weeks in, and we could see the main highway [49], since our community is only two blocks off the highway. The businesses on 49 had lights, and we didn't have lights. And you know, you really can't function without electricity."

The immediate housing crisis for storm survivors is translating into land grabs in low-income neighborhoods. Most widely at risk are African-American neighborhoods, many of them of historic significance, though not widely recognized as such.

(Read the rest.)

The online version is currently no-frills, without any of the images that appear in the magazine. I've uploaded a PDF of the magazine version [2.2 MB], in case you'd like to see it.

The image, above, appears on the opening pages of my article. Go here to see it large.

It was dumbfounding to drive along the coast in Biloxi and find the Grand Casino on the north side of Highway 90. Before Katrina, the casino was on a barge, docked off the beach, south of the highway. The storm surge lifted the casino barge out of the water, over the beach and over the highway. If you stand at the western end of the barge and look east, you can see the yellow and blue neon sign, a half mile down the road, where the barge originally sat. The same thing happened to two other casino barges—the President Casino in Biloxi, which landed on top of a Holiday Inn, and the Gulfport Grand Casino.

Memorial Day, 2006

DSCN2983.jpg, originally uploaded by BenTG.