Pilgrim’s Progress Chapter 6
Week Six
Montgomery Musings at Legacy Museum
Whether you want it or not,
your genes have a political past,
your skin a political tone,
your eyes a political color,
What you say resounds,
What you don’t say is also
politically significant…
~ Wislawa Szymborska
As I board the orange line van to take me to the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, I mull
over what I have just experienced and felt
after leaving the Legacy Museum. Words like daunting, crushing, breathtaking,
shattering, overpowering, humbling collide in my mind. If you ask me how this is done, I would
say the museum’s design helps you see; not just to see and speculate, but to actively convey
what you see. It invited me, the viewer into hard but necessary conversations of what the stain
of slavery has been and how it continues today in ourselves and through this land.
The manacles that tie us to past horrors may have loosened, but the sins of the past still hold its
grip today. The questions that arise, Have I been socialized to expect some people to live on the
margins of society? Do we as a nation, fuel the myth of privilege that provides a justification for
those who “have” at the expense of those who “don’t have”?
Especially in this time Lent, reflection is overdue on the world’s brokenness. God calls me, calls
us to wholeness and our commitments to mend and repair.
It begins with me; it begins with us.
The Beloved Community seems very distant as I ride in the van as I reflect back on the
corrupted power, religious hypocrisy, mob mentality, stark betrayal and state violence
portrayed at the Legacy Museum.
Yet underneath all this, there is a current of bravery,
resistance, and restoration that flows throughout the Legacy’s walls. It leaves me somewhat
hopeful. I am ready to continue.
While I navigated through the Freedom Monument Sculpture Park, a wooded environment
close to the Alabama River where thousands and thousands people were enslaved, I was
renewed by the beauty that these black sculptors are telling and sharing through their work, as well as the healing of the outdoor space where
they were placed. Like the museum, I felt the hush of the holy.
At one of my stops, I was moved by a secluded bronze tree growing roots upwards as well as
down. This particular sculpture both grand and noble stretching its limbs up to the sky, as well
as to the ground captured me. And I was at rest.
All around on the ground discarded brown fallen leaves. They
beckoned me and in a small way, I concretized what this day had
been for me knowing there is more that you can’t see, can’t hear; can’t know except in moments.
Yvonne Petitmaire
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