We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. -T.S. Eliot Shout, day by day Hope fades away and then We know that there is pain within We cannot medicate Learn, learn to feel Learn to begin again -The Brilliance
*Author’s Note: While I’ve carried this post around in my head for months, it’s only just now that I’m sitting down to write it down. I am settled in my new home of Louisville but I chose to write this the same way that it came to me so it is written as though it just happened. I just wanted to make sure you, dear reader, knew that.
The sun has set on my time in Birmingham. For one last time, I made my way outside of the back of the house where I am staying and walked across the parking lot of Vestavia Hills Baptist Church to take in the view from Shades Mountain. It really is stunning – before you opens up a gentle tree-covered valley that rolls up into another hill, separating downtown Birmingham from the rest of the world. And the sight is something to behold at sunset – brilliant purples and pinks and oranges dancing across Homewood.
I didn’t take in that view nearly as often as I should. It was right out my back door. But I learned early on that most of the teenagers in town know about the beautiful view too. One of the little-known secrets about the parking lot at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church is that it’s a very popular hangout spot for teens to come and park in their cars and listen to loud music or maybe do a little necking. I sound like such an old person I know, but honestly, I just didn’t want to interrupt their good time.
And for all my friends from high school who took Maureen Moorhead’s Creative Writing class, Sena Jeter Naslund had it right. High above the hill that overlooks all of Birmingham standing tall and proud is Vulcan, the god of ironworks. Everywhere you go, you are under his watchful gaze.
Vulcan was commissioned by the city for the 1904 World’s Fair as a symbol of Birmingham’s promising future. I was surprised to learn that Birmingham is actually somewhat young as a city. It was founded just after the Civil War as one of the first modern industrial cities in the south. And so it focused its economy on the coal to be harvested from the surrounding mountains and the iron and steel into which it could be forged.
For the city’s business leaders, Vulcan was a natural symbol for the Birmingham. Created from the ground up as a city that embodied industrialization in the United States, Vulcan is an impressive feat of engineering and artistry. To this day, it is the largest cast iron statue in the world.
But as I walked through the exhibit at the Vulcan Museum and read about the city’s founding and its “willing labor pool” to work in the coal mines, I couldn’t help but think of another symbol of the story of Birmingham: the Civil Rights Institute at 16th Street. It sits right across the street from the 16th Street Baptist Church, where civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth preached and led many of their demonstrations, and where, in 1963, four members of the Ku Klux Klan planted explosives, killing four little girls changing into their choir robes. The youngest was 11 years old. No one was prosecuted until 1977.
While Vulcan was meant to embody the great pride and progress of Birmingham at the turn of the century, I don’t think the story is complete without remembering the Civil Rights Institute and the original sin of racism that undergirds that story. It was in the coal mines that the leftover racism from the Civil War was forged into an embedded political caste system of legalized repression and hatred. It was in the coal mines that the city’s white leaders built wealth upon the backs of black bodies and souls. It was in the mines that black people realized that in America, their lives were still dispensable in the eyes of white people.
In my time in Birmingham, I was torn. It really is a beautiful city full of beautiful people. And yet, like many cities in the U.S., it still stings with the ugly sin of racism.
At the museum, I read that in Roman mythology Vulcan was physically deformed. Part of his story is that even though he may have been considered ugly in his appearance, what he could make with his hands was incredibly beautiful. Some hypothesize that Giuseppe Moretti, the sculptor who created the statue, knew this and wanted to emphasize this in his rendering of Vulcan by making his legs short and stubby. Even though Vulcan points high into the sky with his spearpoint, standing tall and strong, he is still imperfect. From his own ugliness or imperfection or disability, he creates beauty.
Maybe Vulcan is a perfect symbol for Birmingham after all.
Me too, I think. As I look back on these last six months of my life, I think of all the beauty. I think of my mentors and friends at Passport Camps – geniuses of faith, every single one of them. I think of the beautiful, meaningful and life-changing summer of camp that I had a small part in creating. I think of my time being able to take a small respite from my career and to explore an entirely new city, a part of the country I don’t know if I ever would have had another chance to be in.
But I also think of my failings. Of the missed opportunities to take full advantage of where I was living and what I was doing. Of my still-present impatience and anger and bitterness and hurt and guilt and all the things I can’t ever seem to let go. Of the hours and sometimes days spent paralyzed by depression and anxiety.
It really is a wonderful city. I’m thankful for my time there and especially for my friends and family who have carried me over these last six months. I hope to return, someday, and hopefully to take more of it in than I did.
But for now, there is the most beautiful, smiley little four year old and the most precious, curly headed two year old in the whole world waiting for me in Louisville; my nephew and my niece, two of God’s greatest gifts to me in my life. And at first, when I see them, he will ignore me and look away (he’s moody like that sometimes). And she will smile and crinkle up her nose in the cutest way possible. Then, when enough time has passed, he will open up and say, “Uncle Chris, ummm, do you want to play Legos with me?” When I leave, I will hug them tight, but not with the same tightness as before – the tightness that comes with knowing I won’t see them for another three or four or maybe six months, when they’ll be completely different people.
And then I’ll know this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.
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