ROAD TRIP!!: Introduction 1--by Daisy Bates

The first time I ever heard of her was when she won the college government presidential election.

I think I knew she was on the ballot, but the conventional wisdom was that the reigning vice-president would win handily. As a staff member on the student newspaper, which has a symbiotic relationship with student government much like that between the professional press and government, I knew the VP and figured she was a lock. This other girl had been studying in Costa Rica for several months; who even knew who she was? Lots of people, it turned out. So it came that Mijha, newly elected college government president of our New England women’s college, and I, newly minted news editor, sat down for our first power lunch in the spring of her junior year, my sophomore. We ate off trays in the dorm dining hall. We were both dressed in what passes for College Chic in cold states: jeans and fleece pullovers. She had braids, I had a ponytail; neither of us wore makeup. I don’t remember what we talked about, although I’m sure we both had an agenda. We were twenty years old.

Over the next year, I spent a lot of time hanging out in her office, sprawled in a chair, ostensibly news-gathering but more often killing time and being funny; we could make each other laugh, the first indicator that this might become a real friendship and not just a working relationship. We both had a penchant for finishing papers at 4 a.m. the day they were due, so we often emailed back and forth when we were two of the only people awake on campus. A lot of our talk was banter. But it was a year of racial tension on campus, and I was writing about it and she was dealing with it as leader of the student body, so we talked at length about the issues that arose out of that as well: what racism really looks like in its more genteel forms, how it reared its head in privileged environments like ours, how to improve race relations on campus. I had spent the previous summer as an intern at a homeless shelter where almost all of the residents were black, and had come out of it with a sense, for the first time, that it means something to be white, that it carries a privilege and a passport I had not reckoned with. Mijha became a sounding board for my questions and musings, and rapidly distinguished herself as someone I could trust to ask the hard questions and tell me I was full of shit without making me feel like she thought I was a hopeless case.

She graduated, and by a stroke of luck took a job in Austin, just three hours from my hometown of Houston. We talked constantly by phone and email. When I graduated, I moved back to Texas to work at a newspaper. We bonded over our classic lack of enthusiasm for our first jobs: I was writing stories in East Texas about how you couldn’t burn your trash outside and thinking for the first time that maybe daily journalism wasn’t for me; she was cooling her heels at an Internet start-up in the halcyon days when that paid good money for not much work. As far as I could tell, she mostly drank Shiner Bock and downloaded music off the Internet; I called her constantly on the newspaper’s dime under the auspices of seeking her legal expertise, despite the fact that she was not yet in law school (thank you, Beaumont Enterprise, for not looking too closely into that). We talked about Diana Ross’ fashion faux pas (I answered the desk phone one day to hear her drawl, “Did you see they picked your girl up for possession? If they hadn’t, the fashion police would have gotten her for wearing lilac boots. I would have turned her in myself”) and how much more we liked Britney Spears than Christina Aguilera. But it was the year of Bill and Monica and the trials of the three men who dragged James Byrd Jr. to death in Jasper, a small East Texas town in my newspaper’s circulation area. So the intense conversations continued as well. We cheered together when Cheryl Mills masterfully defended President Clinton against the impeachment charges, staying on the phone for hours while we watched the hearings and critiqued them; Mij was the person I called in hysterics after attending one of the Jasper trials. What was evolving was a friendship I think is rare for its honesty. It is based, as all good friendships are, on commonalities. We love Janet Jackson. We both think eggs and toast is a perfectly appropriate meal no matter what time of day it is. We like margaritas and mint juleps. We wish Bill Clinton could serve a third term and if Hillary ever runs, we’ll quit whatever jobs we’re working at to work for her campaign. We still like Britney more than Christina. We are committed, conflicted Christians in search of the perfect church, which we know doesn’t exist. We wish P.Diddy would stick to producing dance music and leave Broadway and politics to the people who know what they are doing. We both have intellectual crushes on Cornel West (although I was the only one sufficiently devoted to buy his spoken-word CD. Mijha is fairly fickle). We think gel bras rival air-conditioning as the great invention of the 20th century.

But we also talk openly and frequently about race, not always in long, weighty discussions, but as a reality that informs our world and worldviews and weaves itself through the fabric of our lives and our conversations about those lives. This, I believe, is rare. I find that interracial friendships tend to be predicated on the unspoken assumption that the participants will not talk about race, or if they do it will only be jokingly and in passing; they will instead insist that race doesn’t matter, that indeed they just don’t see it.

Race matters, as our boy Cornel once said. We don’t try to pretend that it doesn’t; we also don’t believe it defines or circumscribes us. We try to be authentic as we navigate lives in which race invariably muddies the water. And we are aware of the ironies: I now work at the homeless shelter I once interned at, and she finished law school and practices at a corporate firm. I live, work and worship in a historically black community; she lives in the great melting pot of New York and probably interacts with more white people than I do on any given day. We are living lives across the boundaries.

That is the context against which our trip, a sort of pilgrimage, took place. I think it was my idea; she thinks it was hers. The truth is neither of us really remembers because we bandied it around for so long before we ever did it. The timing was never right: she was working, then I was working, then she was in law school. Then we finally realized that this was something worth doing, if only as a way of honoring a past that has so shaped us both and to have a story to tell our grandchildren about a time that is already beginning to feel like moldy, dusty history. A student of the civil rights movement since childhood, the movement is what inspired Mijha to practice law. I discovered it later in life, and credit it with keeping me in the church when I was thoroughly disgusted with the church’s hypocrisy and self-aggrandizement with all the self-righteous disgust one can only muster at 18. The idea that the church was the vehicle to mobilize an oppressed people and help them articulate a vision and a way to practice that vision caught my imagination and refused to allow me to give up on the church. So we started shooting around emails just after our 25th birthdays: are we really going to do it? Can we afford it? How long would it take? When can you go? We settled on a three-week period in the fall, after the kids I cared for at the shelter went back to school and after Mijha had taken the bar but before she had to start work. Once we had a date, we built an itinerary. Then, as only obsessive-compulsive students can do, we prepared: we read biographies of movement leaders, histories of the movement, newspaper accounts from the time. We watched Eyes on the Prize. We ordered maps from AAA and pored over routes. We called friends of friends to find places to stay. What follows is an account of the trip: part travelogue, part reflection on the past and the present, part final hurrah of two girls who are, finally, growing up and growing into the legacy of race in America.