What we miss

Listening to Morning Edition on my drive into work today, I caught the tail end of an obituary for Kathryn Tucker Windham, a nationally renowned storyteller who lived in Alabama. I spent some time with Kathryn Windham back in the 1980s when NCPR held a storytelling festival for a week each January (talk about optimistic–we flew artists into the North Country from across the country during the worst of winter). Kathryn came to the festival on at least two occasions. She was terrific–an authentic voice, telling stories that evoked late nights around a campfire, including the scary parts–especially the scary parts!

But that’s not really what I was thinking about when I heard her obituary. I was thinking about the conversation that I never completed with her–and the trip I never made to her home town: Selma.

I had made an earlier trip to Selma–in 1964, to be a part of the now famous march on Montgomery, led by Dr. Martin Luther King. Inevitably, this came up in a conversation with Kathryn. She put all that happened then very much in the past, she expressed some indignation about “outsiders” coming south to do what Southerners needed to do for themselves, and she rolled her eyes at people griping about Selma’s failure to change. She claimed Selma was a different place now (in the ’80s), that there was new housing for the city’s African-American population, jobs and education, too. I didn’t press her. I accepted her word at face value. Kathryn was a fair and decent person.

But some months later, talking with a public radio colleague from Alabama, the picture of contemporary Selma that Kathryn had painted for me blurred and ran off the canvas. The “new” housing she had lauded was actually shoddy public housing that entrenched de facto segregation; jobs were mostly menial; and, public education for African-Americans, in light of the continued separation of races by neighborhoods, was substandard.

What we miss when we live in and love a place is its imperfections. I believe Kathryn truly believed Selma had made enormous progress during the two decades after my trip south. Perhaps it had…but perhaps not enough.

What we miss when we put off for later what we know we should do is the opportunity to do that very thing. I missed the chance to go to Selma for a return trip and have Kathryn show me her beloved city through her eyes, to tell me her stories of the city and its people.

I’d still like to make a return trip to Selma, but I won’t have Kathryn Windham to show me around.

Learn more about Kathryn Tucker Windham  here.

Here’s a video of her talking about her life and work:

And a bit of her telling a story in a classroom…a couple of years ago when she was only 90!

Tags: Kathryn Tucker Windham