My grandfather John was arrested in 1962 in Birmingham, Alabama, for refusing to leave a lunch counter. He was eighteen years old. He spent eleven days in jail. When he was released, he came back home to New Jersey and continued organizing voter registration drives in the Black neighborhoods of Newark for the next forty years. He was arrested seven more times before the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. After that, he kept getting arrested, just less officially, in ways that did not make the papers anymore.
My grandmother Etta was the steady one. She taught third grade for forty-one years at the same elementary school. She was the only person in our family with a regular paycheck for most of my mother's childhood. When my grandfather was traveling — Selma, Memphis, Washington — she paid the bills. When he came home exhausted, she made him eat. When he was in jail, she took my mother and my uncles to visit him. My mother says she does not remember a time before she understood what jail was, or why her father was sometimes in one.
He lived to be eighty-six. He died in 2014. The funeral was three hours long. People came from forty-one states. Three congressmen spoke. A senator sent a letter. The Mayor of Newark declared the day of his funeral 'John Carter Day,' which my grandmother thought was sweet but excessive.
I am thirty-six years old. I am a civil rights attorney in Newark. I named my son after my grandfather. My son is four. He does not yet know what his name means. He will, soon.
This hex is for John. For Etta. For the eleven days in jail in 1962 and the seven arrests that followed and the forty years of voter drives. For the funeral that ran three hours because three hours was barely enough. For my son, who carries his great-grandfather's name into a country still becoming what it promised to be. We are still doing the work. We have not finished. We will not finish until we finish.