I met Flavius Jackson at the intersection of Jeff Davis and Rosa Parks avenues in Montgomery, Alabama. The irony of the intersection was hardly lost on him.
“How do you think they would get along?” he asked, motioning up at crossed signals on top of the pole that juxtaposed the two names in the odd harmony that has become Montgomery’s Civil War-to-Civil Rights tourism strategy.
“I honestly have never thought about such a possibility,” I answered.
“I have,” he said. “I remember the late ’50s around here. Down on Dexter, out on Fairview, Oak Park and all up through there. When they put that sign up after renaming the road after Miss Rosa, I thought about it more than I should have. Lost a job because I was pondering such a thing.”
His gold teeth splintered the warm sunlight like a miniature explosion in his mouth. The oppressive humidity sucked liquid out of us and soaked our clothes. Massive clouds boiled above us like angry biscuits about to burst into a 3 p.m. thunderstorm. We talked for an hour about things we both knew about all too well and the conversation curled back around to the sign.
“I remember those times although I was young,” I said. “Actually, I was born exactly one year to the day that Rosa Parks sat on that bus.”
“She set herself down and took a stand,” he laughed and looked up at her name. “Ol’ Jeff Davis is just an empty name to me, some dude in a dusty history book nobody reads anymore.”
“I’ve read those books,” I said. “And I saw firsthand a lot of what is in the history books from the 1960s here.”
He wiped sweat from his eyes and nodded into the distance where an old man walked and an old dog followed him, the two of them limping almost in unison through the afternoon heat. A siren moaned somewhere to the south. The smell of barbeque wafted past us both.
“I lived through more of it than you,” he said. He pulled up his shirt to reveal two pinkish, jagged, ridge-lined scars across his ribs. “Got more than memories to show for it, too.”
“How’d that happen?” I asked.
“Long story,” he said. “I wasn’t always as old and wise as I am now. The years have polished off the rough edges on me. I’m not as alive as I once was, can’t feel as much, don’t hurt as bad.”
I didn’t ask more. He’d have told me if he really wanted to, so I left his pain in the past. A police car went past and the officers looked at us suspiciously. figured they’d stop but they didn’t. Just did the slow roll by an old black man talking to the middle-aged white man at the intersection of Rosa Parks and Jeff Davis.
“They be thinking you buying drugs maybe,” said Flavius. He waved at them and smiled. “They know me, though. I don’t do that stuff. I used to sell boiled peanuts, though. You like boiled peanuts?”
“I love them,” I said. “You got any?”
“Naw. I’m retired from that bidness just like every other bidness I was in.”
“So what brings you here today?” I ask.
“Miss Rosa and Mr. Davis,” he says. “I pay my respects every day.”
I pay mine to Flavius, shake his hand and drive away. I look in the rearview mirror and see him sitting on the curb, looking into the past and maybe the future.
