And here's my take on Jo from my book "Why Bother?"
Sam Smith - One black woman with whom I worked closely, Josephine Butler, first went on a picket line in the 1930s. Only multiple heart attacks in the mid-1990s stopped her from doing so again. The last time I saw Jo Butler in the intensive care unit we discussed books. Though burdened with the cold, involuntary appendages of medical technology, Jo spoke with the same enthusiasm she applied to the latest political developments.
In fact, there was little -- from earthworms to earth-shaking -- that did not stir Jo's curiosity and, when required, her compassionate and effective concern. Though her heart might be filled with the overwhelming political and social problems of our time, her eye was always on the sparrow and she seldom wasted much time on sorrow.
I loved to run into Jo on the street -- her bag overflowing with yet to be distributed documents of truth and her hat bedizened with buttons -- campaign ribbons from the endless battlefields where she had stood on the side of the fair, the decent, and the just. She carried the spirit of the city and the spirit of hope not as a possession or a totem, but as seeds to share with anyone who would stop and talk for a moment or two.
She had worked longer for, and lost more battles on behalf of, justice than anyone I ever met, yet I never saw her fearful, impatient or exhausted. She would, from time to time, show up on my block of Connecticut Avenue like some angel on a temporal inspection tour. We would talk, and laugh, and worry together and when we parted I would always feel more directed, more responsible for what was going on around me, but happier and braver as well and willing to try the difficult one more time. She lived that life so well described by the poet Samuel Hazo, filled with "hard questions and the nights to answer them, and grace of disappointment, and the right to seem the fool for justice."
One black woman with whom I worked closely, Josephine Butler, first went on a picket line in the 1930s. Only multiple heart attacks in the mid-1990s stopped her from doing so again. The last time I saw Jo Butler in the intensive care unit we discussed books. Though burdened with the cold, involuntary appendages of medical technology, Jo spoke with the same enthusiasm she applied to the latest political developments.
In fact, there was little -- from earthworms to earth-shaking -- that did not stir Jo's curiosity and, when required, her compassionate and effective concern. Though her heart might be filled with the overwhelming political and social problems of our time, her eye was always on the sparrow and she seldom wasted much time on sorrow.
I loved to run into Jo on the street -- her bag overflowing with yet to be distributed documents of truth and her hat bedizened with buttons -- campaign ribbons from the endless battlefields where she had stood on the side of the fair, the decent, and the just. She carried the spirit of the city and the spirit of hope not as a possession or a totem, but as seeds to share with anyone who would stop and talk for a moment or two.
She had worked longer for, and lost more battles on behalf of, justice than anyone I ever met, yet I never saw her fearful, impatient or exhausted. She would, from time to time, show up on my block of Connecticut Avenue like some angel on a temporal inspection tour. We would talk, and laugh, and worry together and when we parted I would always feel more directed, more responsible for what was going on around me, but happier and braver as well and willing to try the difficult one more time. She lived that life so well described by the poet Samuel Hazo, filled with "hard questions and the nights to answer them, and grace of disappointment, and the right to seem the fool for justice."
1 comment:
you hiccup'd, Sam
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