When Marie Britt-Sharpe sat down to tell her story, she said: “I will
tell my story but then you have to tell me something.” I was puzzled
but agreed. So she tells the story of the house where she grew up. In a Chicago
neighborhood where some vicious white neighbors one day spray painted a derogatory
slur onto the just-renovated front porch.
Her father not only ignores it, he lets it stand. For the entire world
to see. “It is still there,” she says sadly, almost 40 years
later. Faded but there. Then her voice turns to a triumphant whisper. “And
you know what?” She grabs my arm. “We just sold the house. To
some white people.”
We laugh. Then comes her question: How do I react when people get emotional
telling their story? Marie Britt-Sharpe is part of an extension to our Voices
of Civil Rights project. As a volunteer in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, she will
also collect stories in the next couple of months. And she has doubts, not
knowing exactly where the boundaries lie between being merely an interviewer
or becoming more like a confidant, even a therapist, for people who have
not even told their children these heartbreaking facts.
I did not have these doubts when I started with Voices. I thought as a
professional journalist I have all the tools and know all the techniques.
How wrong I was!
This “tour extraordinaire” was not only a priceless history
lesson. My first day in Jackson, Mississippi, when gospel music spilled out
into a dilapidated and neglected neighborhood, I got my first indication
of what was to come.
Not only was I reminded over and over again of the hardship, the injustice,
hatred, and violence black people had, and still have to endure, but also
how they overcome it. With resilience, with scars on their souls, but at
the end, still standing.
I listened. I tried to understand. I cried with them. And sometimes told
bits and pieces of my own story, being German, growing up in post-war Germany,
where teachers avoided our recent history as teachers in this country avoided
the history of Jim Crow.
And so we switched roles. A Holocaust survivor and activist in the Civil
Rights Movement hugged me at the end of an interview. A war bride who had
married a black soldier opened up when I addressed her in her native German,
a language she professed to have forgotten. A Japanese American who fought
in France and Italy and whose unit suffered terrible losses from the Nazi
army condoled me for the losses in my parents' families. More than once I
was stunned.
All this I did not tell Marie. She will to have to find out in her own
way how to react when quivering voices choke and tears flow. But hearing
her story, I know she has the tools, knowledge, and heart to hear the saddest
but also the most uplifting memories.
