Charlottesville, New Zealand, conversations in a trailer

So why else has my life been a little crazy recently, in addition to taking off for a weekend in Boston with Faiza?
Tomorrow, Bill and I leave for a couple of weeks in New Zealand. Which will be mainly fun and interesting. (So long as not too many Kiwis are still angry with me on account of my comments about Gallipoli last April? Rotten tomatoes as we arrive at Auckland airport? What do you think?)
Anyway, that’ll give me an opportunity to blog a bit from lands Antipodean… about Restorative Justice , which is quite widely practised there, and also about white-Maori relations, which still fascinate me.
Yesterday, after my return from Boston, I conducted back-to-back interviews for an oral-history project called StoryCorps, which has had a mobile recording studio/trailer on the downtown mall in Charlottesville for the past couple of weeks.
Yesterday late afternoon, I entered the recording booth first of all with my friend Jay Worrall, an 89-year-old Quaker who headed up the “War on Poverty” programs here in Charlottesville back in the 1960s and 1970s> As Jay explained it, dealing with poverty here in Virginia involved first and foremost tackling the problems and legacies of of racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. In the interview, he talked about getting arrested with nine other C’ville Quakers at the entrance to the White House back in those days.
Interestingly, Jay had been in the US Army before getting into the anti-poverty work. Including, he was in the Army for a long time after he became a Quaker. In the Army, he’d been a Military Police officer, and for a few years he was even head of the Army’s criminal Investigation Division units in greater DC.
He said that when he got arrested at the White House– this was after he’d left the army– one of the detectives who questioned him had been someone he’d worked with when he’d been running the Army CID… “”And he couldn’t quite figure out how I got to be where I was.”
The other interview I did was with a great couple of my acquaintance, Dr. Matthew Holden, a distinguished political scientist, and Dorothy Holden, a distinguished quilt artist.
Matthew talked about growing up in an African-American farm family in a town called Mound Bayou, Mississippi, that had been founded in the late 19th century by former slaves. His family had to leave the farm after a terrible drought in 1943, and moved to Chicago… He later became a much respected political-science professor; was President of the American Political Science Association; and testified in Congress about the inappropriateness of using an impeachment proceeding in the case of Bill Clinton’s dalliance (however sordid) with Monica Lewinsky.
In our pre-interview, he’d talked a little bit about the experience of picking cotton, which he’d done some of to help his father when he was still young. Cotton, he explained, really tears your hands up when you pick it. In addition, you have to drag a huge sack along the row behind you, on the ground, as you pick; and as it gets heavier it hurts your back really badly…
I wish I’d pressed him some more for some of those details during the recording session itself.
Dorothy talked with great passion about some of the things she’d done during desegregation years in the 1960s and 1970s, including helping write a big report for the Wisconsin library system on how to improve the portrayal of African-Americans in books for children.
She also talked a little about her quilting. Here you can see some slightly grainy images of two of her quilts.
Her work is so beautiful! You can’t really get a full picture of it there.