Meeting Sister Ebo (03.08.22)

At the beginning of 2015, I was working toward the completion of a book project, a labor of love in which the love part had been in the first half and the labor part seemed to drag on and on. I found an absolute stopping point in a Unitarian pilgrimage to Alabama, built around the fiftieth anniversary of the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, March 7, 1965, when civil rights activists led by the young John Lewis were attacked. It was the day that became known as Bloody Sunday. Other than a few stops in the Atlanta airport, I had never been in the South.

I have writing to do about that pilgrimage, the experiences of which addressed a long unease about what I had not done about civil rights as a teenager (I was fifteen in 1965), and has held me since through readings, committees, marches, conversations, and soulwork about racial justice.  (Not enough, never enough). I hitched a ride to a memorial at Tabernacle Baptist to hear Dr. William Barber, I heard a Selma woman at Shiloh Baptist whose mother died untimely because the local hospital had no “black blood” to give her, I made a lifetime friend of a woman who said to me in confusion ‘who ARE you people? I didn’t know there were any white people who cared about me and my family’. 

It was a week about learning to be moved and sustained by the virtue of others and as I, exhausted, boarded the plane out of Birmingham, another unexpected and lasting blessing.  I took my place, and looked over at my seatmates. The little woman by the window was the justly famous civil rights activist Sister Antona Ebo, a nun who arrived in Selma in 1965 as the only African-American sister to march with Dr. King.  She and a companion were flying home to St. Louis after crossing the bridge with President Obama, and U.S. Representative John Lewis.

Sister Ebo had just been inducted into the National Voting Rights Hall of Fame. She was nearing her 92nd birthday, radiant, serene, unmistakably saintly, full of a vigorous joy, and very funny to boot. I was able to help her a little. We both had to change planes in Chicago, and her connection was tight. I trotted ahead of the wheelchair, clearing people out of the way as we rushed to her gate. We made that wheelchair fly, laughing as we went; she called out an occasional “Have mercy!” When we parted, she said “The Lord had it on His agenda for us to meet today.” Although this is not my common parlance, all I can say to that is “Well then, thank you, Lord, thank you.” And maybe “Have mercy.”