Settled Enough to Do Things

The previous blog post ended with the beginning of the Freedom Summer 50th Conference, and that's where this one will pick up.

Except not actually. I realized that I should give a brief update update work. I know which communities I'm going to be working with this year, and when I'm going to be going to each!


View Klionsky 2014-2015 Communities in a larger map 

So. I'll be working with Dothan, AL; Shreveport, LA; Lynchburg, VA; Williamsburg, VA; San Antonio, TX; and Houston; TX. Quite a spread!. My travel dates are: 7/22-26; 8/6-9; 8/12-20--I'll be going to each of my communities, but also tagging along on some of the other fellows' visits for extra practice.


And now back to Mississippi and Freedom Summer. 

Bob Moses and Marian Edelman Wright spoke about contemporary challenges to civil rights at one of the conference's morning sessions.

SNCC co-founder Julian Bond, sitting a few rows ahead of me and probably texting someone really important. This was during the "roll-call" of Freedom Summer veterans, each of whom was given a minute (loosely defined) to say where s/he had worked doing freedom summer and what work s/he is doing now. Very cool to see that lots are still involved in civil rights, education, and equal-access work 50 years later! 

The conference was hosted at Tougaloo College, a historically black college just north of the Jackson city limits. The school is old--it was founded just after the Civil War--and I was a little surprised by how how similar the building interiors looked like the interiors of big high schools I've been too, rather than colleges. To be fair, I was only inside the large gym, where the plenary sessions were held, and what seems to be a lecture hall, there were no (built-in) chairs in the room and there was a built-in stage.
I was excited to stumble upon a fig tree on the campus! I'm pretty sure no one will mind if I check back every now and then to see if they're ripe... There's also a community garden run off the campus, and another at the park a couple blocks from my house. I've started going to the workdays and it's nice to spend some time outside getting a little dirty and eating fresh, crispy cucumbers!

When I first got to Mississippi, I noticed that there was an interesting-looking exhibit at the Mississippi Museum of Art called This Light of Ours, a collection of photographs from Freedom Summer in 1964. I also remembered noticing that the cover article of the June Princeton Alumni Weekly was something about Mississippi and Freedom Summer. So I took a look, and it turned out that the article was about Matt Herron '53....who is not just a photographer who came down to Mississippi in 1964, but in fact one of the photographers whose work is in the This Light of Ours exhibit and moreover, is the curator of the exhibit! Many of the iconic photographs from that summer are his.
If Princeton taught me anything, it was to take full advantage of the alumni network. So the first thing I did when I made the connection was send Matt and email asking if, by chance, he'd be down in Mississippi (he now lives in California) for any of the Freedom Summer Conference. Of course he was coming--and invited me to join the gallery tour he was giving for other Freedom Summer veterans. 

You can see in the background of this photo one of Matt's most iconic and shocking series from that summer. (Click here for larger images.) Five-year-old Anthony Quinn's mother had told him not to let go of his American flag, whatever he did. In his words, "I was way more scared of my mama than I was of the policeman." (I hadn't realized the powerful symbolism of the American flag; holding one meant "we want the law to protect us, as Americans. The alternative was holding a Confederate flag.) The irony of the photo is apparent: the policeman trying so hard to grab Anthony's flag that he's nearly lifting the boy off the ground--in the background is another policeman holding a sign that says "no more police brutality" that he's obviously snatched from another protester. The arm reaching out in the center photo belongs to Dr. June Finer, who volunteered during Freedom Summer with the Medical Committee for Human Rights. Although she didn't know Anthony at the time, in the next photo you can see her comforting him after the two of them were arrested (Ye, they arrested a 5-year-old child).
Flash forward 50 years: Anthony Quinn is a lawyer in Atlanta, and somehow the conference organizers got in touch with him. This gathering was the first time Quinn and Finer actually saw/met/spoke to each other since!

Next up: some ways I've been spending my time:

I forgot to mention in my last post a third frustration besides my lost package and setting up the internet: I was disenfranchised! Many of you probably know that there was a hotly-contested senatorial (?) primary in Mississippi a few weeks ago. The incumbent Thad Cochran beat Chris McDaniel, though McDaniel is challenging the count still. I was fortunate my friend Teddy, who is working for the New York Times was sent down to cover the election, which means that Teddy was officially the first friend to visit me here in Jackson!
Anyway. The point is that when I came down in May, I asked to register to vote at the same time as I got my license. I was getting nervous when I hadn't gotten any confirmation of my registration so I called to check the status. Long story short, bureaucracy sucks and the DMV never sent my application to the Circuit Clerk, so I couldn't vote. I'm not convinced that it wasn't intentional....
These are the elevator doors in the Circuit Clerk's office, where I hand-delivered my voter application so that I'll be good to go for the general election in November. (Indeed, I received my voter card in the mail last week.)

The view from the office where I did some phone-banking for Planned Parenthood. They recently re-opened their offices in Jackson and Hattiesburg, MS. We were calling people asking for updated contact information, and I'm proud to say that one of my successful calls (updated info and interested in volunteering) was to a member of the state House of Representatives!

What could be more American than going to a (AAA) baseball game on July 3? Maybe getting to see fireworks afterward?! The Mississippi Braves are Atlanta's AAA team.

The Old House Depot is my kind of place! It's basically a warehouse of house stuff from homes and businesses--doors, window frames, mason jars, wooden chests, traffic lights, these big letters... They have a big party on July 4 with freshly-picked heirloom tomatoes! (And lots of other delicious things and a brass band, but the tomatoes were the best part.) I'd like to go back with my Real Camera sometime and take some nice photos there. 

The next few shots are from around the neighborhood.

They're very very tall, in case you can't tell.

Your eyes are not tricking you, that's a miniature horse! She lives in the neighborhood and belongs to the same folks who started the Rainbow Natural Grocery Coop back in the 1980s (not the Mississippi of most people's imaginations, eh?). Usually she's in her own yard/stable, but sometimes--like after the July 4th parade (which is why her mane is braided with r/w/b bows)--she wanders around other people's yards. 

Just some vines.

This was my perfect Sunday morning: porch swing with cheerios, a nectarine, NPR, and a breezy 75-ish degrees.

On Sunday afternoon, we went blueberry picking! Yum! The sweetest part of the deal is that we didn't pay for any of it. 

The woman who owns the trees (in Mississippi, blueberries grow on trees, not shrubs) has a system worked out where anyone can come pick for free. You give half of your pickings (well, half of the ones that make it into the bucket) to her for her to sell, and you keep the other half!

Pretty berries :)

(Photo by Arielle Nissenblatt). I think I came home with close to 7 pints! Yum yum yum.

Meanwhile, the lost package saga continues. I'll spare all the details, but suffice it to say that I have spent more hours on the phone with the United States Postal Service than any human being should ever have to spend on the phone with all government agencies combined. The most recent update is that my box of books is definitely at the--I kid you not--"Dead Letter Center"--in Atlanta. The name has officially been changed to "Mail Recovery Center" for many years (decades?), but everyone still refers to it as the DLC. But here's the deal-io. USPS auctions people's stuff off. Because most people don't go through the trouble of contacting them by any means possible as I've done. So they wind up with boxes and boxes and boxes of stuff--hundreds of lost Apple products, thousands of books, boxes and boxes of ownerless Lego sets. When I heard this I 1) freaked out that all my books were being sold and 2) decided that I was going to go down to one of these auctions and write a piece about it for the New Yorker. Just my luck: they stopped doing live auctions in favor of online ones a year ago. So now you can buy other people's belongings even more easily!

Well, wouldn't you know: I walked into work on Monday and was told there was a package waiting for me! I obviously freaked out, excited that my books had finally made it to Mississippi! What a letdown when I heard it wasn't a big box, but rather a small bubbler mailer. So I walked dejectedly to my desk and found this envelope! From the Atlanta Mail Recovery Center! "Woah. They're going to send me back one book at a time? Absurd but...I'll take it!" I open the package impatiently only to find... a copy of The Help that isn't even mine! Yes, that was one of the books in my lost box--good news, it means that the MRC has received at least one copy of my list of books and plea to return them. But it also means that they were like, "This is so great, this girl will be so happy that she's getting one of her books back, even if it isn't the exact copy that belonged to her!" Let me tell you, I was not happy.
I called USPS once more and finally was able to acquire an email address (which bounced. Thanks Twitter for helping me find a correct one.) and a fax number. The email address was a whole stupid mess because it turns out you can only submit this specific form via the internal employee Outlook system. So today at lunch I went to the post office, form in hand, and waited while they emailed it in for me. We shall see what happens!

An Official Walking Tour of Prague

I lucked out--my official tour of Prague was today, in the partly-cloudy-but-increasingly-sunny 50 degree warmth; much nicer than earlier this week, when the other group went!

We started off the tour looking up at the top of Václavské náměstí (Wenceslas Square--though I'm not sure how "Václavské" turned into "Wenceslas" in English) looking at the main branch of the National Museum (apparently, this weekend all seven branches have the entrance fee waived! Hopefully I'll get to one or two of them). 

This is looking down from Wenceslas Square, which is in the heart of "New Town," built by King Charles IV (he's recurring theme) around 1348. It's called "New Town" because it was new in comparison to "Old Town," which dates back to the 10th century, I believe. At one point, the Square was a horse market. Later, it became the site of all popular uprisings and protests in Prague; in 1969, Jan Palach set himself on fire there to protest Communism a few months after the Prague Spring. In 1989, the Velvet Revolution that overthrew Communism in Prague kicked off there. About 500,000 protesters gathered in the Square then. Now it's just a commercial shopping area--complete with a Starbucks and a McDonald's. Pay attention to the horse statue of Saint Wenceslas because in the next picture...

it's upside down! This sculpture/hanging statue is in the atrium of the Lucerna Palace shopping area, that was actually built by Vaclav Havel's father (grandfather?) and is still owned by the family [I think]. It's meant to be a parody of sorts of the horse/Saint Wenceslas (which is apparently the English of Vaclav. Then why don't we call the former president Wenceslas Havel? Who knows.) statue from the top of Wenceslas Square. David Černý is the artist, and the dead/upside-down horse is generally considered to be symbolic of the end of Communism.

The Old Town City Hall (as opposed to the New Town City Hall, which is half a block from my apartment, and has since been replaced by the New City Hall in Old Town) at the heart of Staré Město (Old Town). Old Town goes back to the 9th century. That was a really, really, really long time ago. 

Among the most iconic parts of Prague--aside from the Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge--is the astronomical clock on the side of the Old Town City Hall. It rings every hour on the hour (we missed it by about 15 minutes. Good thing I'm here for 4 months!), and the little skeleton on the top right dings his bell. The clock includes a ring that tells time according to the old Czech 24-hour method, Roman numerals for the way we tell time, and then some other outdated ancient method that I can't remember right now. There's also a ring with the Zodiac signs. And then below the clock is a full calendar of "svátek," or Name Days, which are a big deal here, although lots of people are now giving their kids non-traditional names.

This is a view of the Prague Castle from right at the beginning of the Charles Bridge. The Prague Castle complex (it's not just the castle-looking thing, but also all the buildings around it) is where government operations take place even today; the president works from the castle-looking thing, even though his power is secondary to that of the Prime Minister who works from the small-ish white building all the way on the right. But, the President chooses the Prime Minister. 

Closer-up of the Prague Castle. Though the sky looked like it was threatening to rain, luckily it didn't, and the color was beautiful against the rusted-reds of the roofs.

One of the many statues on the Charles Bridge named for, you guessed it, King Charles IV! Imagine having a city where almost every prominent building/structure/institution was named after you...

Peeked in past a wrought-iron gate and saw this old mill with a funny-looking goblin dude looking over it.

(Galya and Noa, this one's for you!) A tribute to John Lennon on the Lennon Wall--yes, it's that Lennon, not the other Lenin. I'll have to go back with a Sharpie so I can leave my mark!

On the way up to the castle complex! The building on the top right of this picture is the Schwarzenberg Palace; today it houses a baroque art collection and belongs to the state. Historically, however, it belonged to the family of Karel Schwarzenberg, who just lost the presidential election, to the dismay of many liberals. 

Looking down at Prague from the top of the castle complex!

And again.

The entryway to the president's compound. The statues on top of the gate are kind of terrifying--one is a guy about to stab someone, and the other looks like it's a guy playing Quidditch and about to use the bludger bat to block a ball from smashing his face, but actually he's about to use the bludger bat to beat someone. Other than that... the guards are part of the military, and switch every hour. Like the palace guards at Buckingham Palace, they don't smile.

Entryway into the second courtyard of the Castle compound. I lost track of how many courtyards there were, but it was a lot.

Ellie wins the prize of being the first (intentionally-photographed) human to make an appearance on my blog! This is in front of the St. Vitus Cathedral, built in the 1340s, which is also in the Castle complex. It's enormous. We walked past the side of the cathedral to get to the entrance (those doors aren't actually open to the public) and the gargoyles peed/spat down collected rainwater on us!

Stained glass in the St. Vitus Cathedral painted (!) by Alfons Mucha, the Czech Art Noveau painter.

More stained glass, not painted by Mucha. Every five--which happens to fall this year--the crown jewels are put on display to the public. I just might have to brave the long lines to snag a peak!

Side exterior of the St. Vitus Cathedral. If you look closely, you'll see that there are actually two clocks--the top one tells you the hour, and the bottom one tells you the minute.

This picture is meant to illustrate the contrast between the old part of the cathedral and the new part. One the right side of the picture you can see the blackened exterior of the building, which is actually from the original struture in the 14th century. On the right the exterior is much cleaner, and was built/restored in the 19th and 20th centuries. The gold-painted mosaic, however, is original I believe.

AND NOW FOR A CHANGE OF PACE, SOME OF MY FAVORITE DOORS SO FAR:

Tucked away in the back of a garden next to a pre-school that used to be a church. 

Next to the Old Town City Hall/astronomical clock building.

I forget where I saw this.

Next to the Lennon Wall.

St. Vitus Cathedral.