Whenever my work takes to me to our site in Eatonville, Washington, I prepare myself mentally, spiritually and physically. It is not that the drive from our headquarters in Tacoma is exceptionally long or difficult, although there are no direct routes from the west side of Pierce County to the southeast side where our Eatonville site is located. On the contrary, I look forward to the spectacular views of Mount Rainier, the Great Mother of the Puyallup Indians, to the quiet hidden lakes tucked behind massive old-growth-trees, and to the expansive dairy farms with massive iron gates set back at least a quarter-mile from the road. These natural treasures make the hour-long journey to Eatonville well worth the trouble of traffic on South Meridian.
I was grateful that the endless lights between 112th and 160th and Meridian were cooperating with me. I marveled at the complex lights and criss-crossed lanes that led in and out of expansive strip malls along the way. Forward-thinking developers had long ago gobbled up prime tracts along Meridian like my brothers gobbled up Thanksgiving turkey. There was now only the residue of the luscious and fruitful valley that lay peacefully undisturbed at the foot of Mount Rainier. Fields once teeming with daffodils and strawberries were filled to capacity with retail sprawl serving the growing residential communities nearby. It was hard for me to complain too loudly about this sprawl, for I lived in one of those residential communities myself.
My prayers for traveling grace were answered through the major intersections at 176th Street and 224th. There was only one major intersection left to cross, one that caused me to breathe deeply in and out, and in and out again. For some reason unknown to me, the intersection at South 304th Street made me incredibly nervous, even in broad daylight. Nothing bad had ever happened to me there, but in my heart I was convinced that 304th Street was the Mason-Dixon line of Pierce County.
Perhaps it was the Trump-Pence signs that dotted the landscape with larger-than-life billboards that troubled me, or the Grange Halls where the reminders of Tea Party meetings were spelled out on the reader boards. Or, maybe it was the four-wheel trucks with Confederate flags and rifles in the back window that shook me to my core, especially when their tobacco-chewing-drivers with rednecks gunned their loud engines and glared back at me as they sped off from the light. Perhaps it was because I was convinced that I was entering a no-negro-colored-black-African Americans-allowed-zone, where, no matter what I had accomplished in life, no matter what my good intentions were, I would not be welcome.
I wondered if this was how my parents felt about the real Mason-Dixon Line — the one that separated the north from the south, and the free from the unfree. They had lived on the south side of that line until 1966, when they had packed their seven children into an old Buick station wagon and set their course for Fort Lewis, Washington.
“This and my maps will get us to Washington without trouble,” my father had said, holding up a well-used copy of the Green Book. The Green Book was an essential tool for Negro travelers in the 1960’s, for it freed them from the stress of stopping at places where trouble was waiting — places that served whites only — places where my father and mother and their seven children were explicitly not welcome.
There were two reasons we were leaving Fort Benning. The first reason was intimately connected to the second. My father was being transferred to what would ultimately be his last duty station in the Army, and he had chosen Fort Lewis out of all of his options. He had chosen Fort Lewis instead of a duty station closer to home for the second reason –the main reason we were leaving Columbus, Georgia in the first place — because there were so many places below the Mason Dixon Line that we were not welcome; so many places to eat and drink and sleep and shop that had ignored federal law compelling them to comply; too many places where law gave way to long-held and stubborn vestiges of racism and separatism that wore my parents and their parents’ spirits down to the bone.
We moved because my parents were “sick and tired” of being unwelcome. They were sick and tired of segregation and Jim-Crowism; of back doors and back seats and back-woods politics. They were sick and tired of being treated as second-class citizens in a separate-but-unequal world.
My father had Nat Turner fire in his eyes the morning we left Fort Benning. He had used the Green Book and his maps to plan in advance our escape to freedom– that kind of freedom that Martin Luther King, Jr., talked and dreamed about until he was murdered April 4, 1968.
“They killed the man,” my father had said aloud with tears in his eyes when Walter Cronkite had shared the news about Dr. King’s assassination on television, “but they can’t kill the dream.”
The lure of the dream had inspired my parents to leave the familiar ways of Georgia where they had both been born and raised, and set out for the unknown and unfamiliar Pacific Northwest. It was a dream that imposed great hardship on my mother, who had never been further away from home than Alabama. She relied heavily on her own mother and the long-standing network of cousins and friends to help her during my father’s extended duty assignments to places like Germany and Korea. Not only was she leaving her support system behind, but she was leaving in the middle of a difficult pregnancy with the eighth of her nine children. It was risky on so many levels. What if she went into labor and couldn’t find a hospital that would allow her to enter?
I remember overhearing my Nana pleading with my mother not to go, for the sake of the baby. I also remember how adamantly my mother had said, “Mama, I got plenty babies, but I only got one chance to get out of Georgia, and I am taking it.”
My mother had seen a light in the door of opportunity; even her unborn child couldn’t stop her from walking through it.
Perhaps it was my parents’ deep convictions and desire for opportunity that propelled me and my siblings to achievement. Perhaps it is their courage and drive that inhabits my breath, energizes my body and inspires me to overcome my fears as I cross this new Mason Dixon line at 304th Street. Unlike my parents, I have no Green Book to tell me where I am welcome along the way; no maps that make visible the hidden attitudes and intolerance that was open and known in Georgia. Although I have little or no lived experience of separate-but-unequal, or being told explicitly that I was unwelcome because of my race, I recognize that my hesitation at 304th Street happens because I am conscious.
I am conscious of whose child I am, and the context of my birth below the Mason-Dixon line. I am conscious of my no-negro-colored-black-African Americans -allowed ancestry. I am conscious of the history of the Middle Passage, and slavery and Jim Crow. I am conscious that I was afforded the opportunities for education and jobs and experiences that led me to this great work in Eatonville, Washington. Because I choose to be conscious of my parents and grandparents’ experience in the world, because I choose to carry it in my heart and mind and spirit, I stop here at 304th Street to acknowledge that experience, and to see the line my parents saw back in 1966. I stop to show gratitude for the dream that inspired my parents to move across the Mason-Dixon line to the beautiful Pacific Northwest, and I breathe in and out, and in and out again.
Caliyah Enterprises 