I watched her as she limped out of the bushes behind the building. She was a black woman stooped and ravaged by time, drugs and poverty. It appeared that she came out of a makeshift shack in the middle of a blackberry patch. She had called my name as I walked by. Her voice seemed familiar but the face and body was that of a woman I did not recognize.
"You don't really know me." She said it quickly as though she was afraid I would leave before hearing her out. "I have read a lot of your articles over the years and I have just one question, why?"
She saw my look of confusion and quickly added to her question.
"Why do you believe that black people in Martin Luther King County can be, or should be, any different from Black people anywhere else in the country," she stated. "We got just as much AIDS, poverty and Black people in jail here as we do anywhere else in the country so there is nothing special about us. So what are you talking about?"
Before I could answer she held up her hand.
"Think about that answer and let me know as soon as you got it together," she said. "I don't want any quick answer so that you can go about your business. If you are serious you will find me again."
"What's your name?" I asked.
"Mrs. Conscience is all you need to know." She briskly walked back into bushes and her makeshift home.
It was several days before I got back to that stretch of Rainier Avenue South. The bushes were still there but the makeshift home and Mrs. Conscious was gone.
It would be easy to dismiss this woman by calling her a vagrant, crack head or simply nuts. Yet every person you meet carries a special signature about them, and you instinctively know that what they are today is not what they used to be, or what they were intended to be. Her eyes had a glow and she spoke with an intelligence that suggested a well-read background.
So now I write what I will not be able to tell her in person. Maybe this article will be in the papers she used to cover herself at night or in the pocket of a warm coat given away by a stranger. Just like she found me, I hope she will find this answer in the nooks and crannies of the dark allys she roams.
We are blessed, my dear, to live in the only county in the nation named after an African American. We are blessed to be in the county with the largest philanthropic organization in the world and a county that does more for Africa than any place in America.
The city is large enough to be taken seriously but small enough and young enough that you can get things done here that would be nearly impossible in an older, more tradition bound city. We have the highest educated black community in the nation and probably one of the most skilled because so many of them are either college educated or military trained.
Our congressman is the most liberal in Washington, D.C., and our county executive and county council chair are both African Americans. Throw in that there's a woman in the governor's chair, and in both United States Senate slots, and you have a place that should be able to get things done.
Martin Luther King Junior County itself does not have power, and it only means what we make it to mean. I believe it should be a place where our children are educated and there are three times as many black men in college than in prison. I believe it should be a place where the elderly are protected, women are not abused, the hungry are fed, the naked clothed and the homeless can find shelter from real or imagined storms.
It should be a place where ideas flow like water from a mighty stream and the least and left out are not lost to hopelessness and despair. We should be the mountain top from where people can see the Promised Land, if we make this county resonate with the spiritual and moral passion of its namesake.
If we fail to do that, then the name change is useless and years from now people will not know any more about Martin than they did about vice presidential candidate Rufus King whom the county was originally named for.
So, Mrs. Conscience, your life should be better here than anywhere else in the nation because you live in a place that will not easily let you fall through the social cracks. That's why we should be better than any African American community in the nation. We directly, or indirectly, made a commitment to excellence when we asked for the name to be changed.
I pray that we get our job done before it's too late to be a service to you. It's a poor community that looses its conscience.
Central Area writer Charlie James may be reached at this link.
