While Corinna's mum was in town, we hooked up at the Underground Railroad Museum, which is in the basement of a defunct elementary school by the Quindaro State Park where many escaped slaves thought they'd swum to freedom.
Maybe, in a relative sense, but I wonder: did they trade being treated as property for being treated as a worthless piece of shit? Not that anyone should accept one of those options, but my impression is that the North was mainly anti-slavery because it was a way to be anti-South. The two sides in the Civil War were so fundamentally identical in culture, language, religion, and even racial ideas, that without the slavery question it would have been hard to tell shirts from skins on that incredibly blood-stained court.
The Vernon School gave me a flashback to South Park. Yes, I went to South Park, and no it wasn't the cartoon, though the names of some of my classmates would make you think so: Frank Blanc, Beaver Glenn, Jimmy Christmas and Corbett Crumpley. Sorry if any of them read this post (I hear Jimmy met an early end, sad news), but these names are less believable than the name of the school.
The school was a bellweather of desegregation. Brown versus Board of Ed? In high school, I took girls parking at a park named for that Brown.
Anyway, what gave me the flashback was the smell and the heat. Vernon School, now the Underground Railroad Museum, doesn't have anything like air conditioning, and neither did my elementary alma mater. I don't know, maybe it's the combination of blistering heat and cheaply painted cinder blocks, but the place smelled and felt like K-6 education.
After, we went down to the park for more fun and some pics. Then half of us rode bikes back to Corinna's and the other half millstoned it in my soon-to-be-stolen Accord. I read in the paper today that my car is actually the most stolen in America.
Not funny, bad touch, I want my fucking wheels back even if I do try to avoid driving them.
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