Slave To The Ism

Dear Rosa; As a child growing up in New Jersey I went to the farm every summer and picked a variety of fruit and vegetables, string beans, tomato’s, potato’s; blueberries, strawberries, peaches.  It was hot and it was work.  We went to earn money to live not as a fun outing for the family.  Yes, it was hot, the hot sun beating down, turning the skin a deeper shade of colored than it was the day before. The dust created by the trunks picking up bushel baskets and of vegetables and fruit covered our heads and work clothes.  But the heat of the midday sun, the kind heat that makes you day dream as you inch along the row of beans, dreaming of jumping into a swimming pool, dreaming of air conditioning or just holding a cold bottle of coke to your forehead or neck while lying under the shade of a tree and longing to hear the lunch whistle blow.  Tired and longing to sit down.

Tired, Rosa Parks was tired and must’ve longed for a seat, to sit down on the bus that day.  A seat, her mind and feet could rest in on the ride home.  A seat to carry a worker from a day of labor to her home and family.  A seat has many important meanings; a place in which administrative power is centered, the seat of the government. A part of the body considered as the place in which an emotion or function is centered; the heart is the seat of passion.  The office or authority, etc, right to sit as a member in a legislative or similar body, a right to the privileges of membership, cause to sit down, to install in a position or office of authority.

Rosa Parks did not desire any of the previous meanings from the seat she chose, it was just her right to ride seated from one destination to another and it’s denial that became the spark that lit the flame that turned into a fire that consumed segregation in America.