“Brave? Me? Nah.” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction, ’02)

An excerpt from “Brave? Me? Nah.” by Mary Jean Babic (fiction, ’02) published at Medium:

Brave? Me? Nah.

“So you’re traveling by yourself?” the woman asked me as we wrapped up a tour of Dexter Avenue King Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, this past April. When I answered yes, she said, “Wow, that’s brave.”

The woman — about my age, late forties — was part of a Friendship Forcegroup of about a dozen Americans and Brits that had swelled the 12 p.m. tour now wrapping up. For the past hour our exuberant docent, Wanda, had led us around Dexter Baptist, discussing its significance in the civil rights movement.

In the basement, we’d seen the paneled office where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had worked during his tenure as pastor, 1954 to 1960. We’d all had our pictures snapped at the lectern from which King had delivered his “How long? Not long” speech at the state Capitol, one block away, after the 1965 march from Selma. We learned that the organist King hired, Althea Thomas, plays at the church to this day. Upstairs in the sanctuary, Wanda had us hold hands and sing “We Shall Overcome.” (It didn’t sound remotely like this, but for mostly middle-aged-and-up white people, we weren’t half bad.) Now, as sunlight streamed in through stained-glass windows, casting colorful rectangles on the floor, we milled around the pews and altar, snapping photos, chatting, absorbing the history that seeped from the walls. […continue reading here]