TEXANS IN D.C.:
Moved by the message and moment
WASHINGTON — Lauren Price is swaying slowly, her eyes shut tight, like the words blaring through the loudspeaker are a sermon she feels pulsing in her body.
With a half-million women packed onto the National Mall on Saturday, Sen. Kristen Gilibrand of New York announces record-breaking attendance and says it signals “the beginning of the revival of the women’s movement.”
The look on Price’s face is worth a thousand words. She is connecting with message, and moment.
A 32-year-old local school employee, Price is one of 53 women, two men and one 11-year-old boy who boarded a charter bus at Meyerland Plaza in Houston
on Thursday night for the 2,832-mile round trip to the nation’s capital one day after Donald Trump was inaugurated on these same grounds as the 45th president of the United States.
Shortly after the bus pulled into D.C. early Saturday, Price said she had to march because she was angry — particularly at white women who voted for Trump, a sellout move in her opinion. But as she grabbed her “Beyoncé voter” sign and held it overhead, she let her voice join the chorus of chants around her and her anger was gone. Becoming friends
It had been an emotional ride. Some on the bus had met before, at poster-making parties or on Facebook. Others flew solo. But as the bus chugged along, bonds began to form.
On the first 24½-hour leg of the trip, strangers became friends as they faded to sleep, arms touching as their heads drooped. They groaned together when rough patches in the road woke them in a groggy haze.
On the second day of the drive, as the bus made its way through northern Tennessee and into Virginia, Nisha Randle, the lead organizer for Houston’s contingent, grabbed a microphone and asked riders to share what brought them on the journey. No two answers were the same.
“I’m here for my daughters,” said Sharon Chapman of Galveston. And for her gay friends and victims of sexual assault, she said — and for all those who couldn’t come.
The microphone crossed the aisle, where 14-year-old Mazzy Smallwood grabbed it like a baton, to share her story. She campaigned for Hillary Clinton in 2008, though she was only 5 then and barely remembers. And now she’s happy to find herself in a group of likeminded people marching to protect their rights.
It took nearly an hour and a half for the microphone to reach everyone’s lips. And a harmony of messages flowed out. Kindness. Equal rights. Equal pay. Ending sexual assault. Bringing awareness to Black Lives Matter. The voices were different, but cohesive. More diverse voices
It was music to Randle’s ears.
“Intersectionality is the theme of the march. Because everyone’s issue may be their one thing, but we all support them together,” she said.
Intersectionality has been a growing theory within feminism for years. But in previous waves, the idea — that a person is not simply defined by one category, like gender, but a confluence of all the traits that define them, including gender, race, sexuality, geography and others — was largely ignored, as the public face of feminism re- mained largely white and middle class.
But in 2017, the breadth of voices is widening.
“So if you’re here for equal pay, that might be your one thing, but you’re also here supporting the people who are here because black lives matter,” Randle said. “You’re still supporting the people who are here for other things. I feel like everyone has their one issue, but all of our issues together are why we’re here, and why we’re stronger together.”
Price chimed in from the next seat over.
“We live lives in more than one dimension,” she said.
Price is biracial, Latina and white, and she describes herself as “passable” for white, since she’s so light-skinned. She has brown eyes with dark eyelashes and long, shiny chestnut hair.
“It’s a matrix of oppression, and we have these complicated ways that we have privilege and disprivilege.”
It’s not meant to divide, she said. Just to inform the different ways people experience the world we live in. And that, in the end, can bring people together, she hopes. ‘Feels real now’
“What are we?” feminist filmmaker Cybil Saenz called out as she boarded the bus Saturday morning in Richmond, Va., phone in front of her, ready to capture the reactions of the women she’s been traveling with.
No one knew what to say at first. Her travel partners are so diverse in ideas, family lives, hometowns, incomes, jobs — everything — that they struggle to find a label for the connective “we.”
“Stronger together” Saenz called out, finishing her own chant.
The sky in the hotel parking lot where the bus had pulled off Friday night after 24 hours on the road was still so dark there was no blue bleeding into its blackness yet. At 5:30 a.m., the business at hand for the puffy-eyed crew was mostly slow sips of coffee and storing hand-drawn signs in the overhead compartment before the final 100-mile leg to the march.
“What are we?” Saenz bellowed again. Louder, with infectious enthusiasm.
“Stronger together,” the voices boomed back.
“What are we?” she demanded. “Stronger together!” The bus began buzzing. Up in the front seat, Chapman smiled. “It feels real now,” she said. “We’re really doing this.” ‘It was energizing’
The vast Washington metro area, with its highend shopping malls and edge cities filled with government contractors, begins well south of the Capital Beltway and thickens in density as the Pentagon approaches and finally gives way to the glistening Potomac River. The Houston riders found it slow moving to the march, like human molasses. But there was no tear gas, no batonswinging riot police, no masked demonstrators in the sea of pink hats. Only camaraderie, unity, sisterhood. And the energy from the bus seemed to carry them all day. They burst out laughing when they passed a sign depicting a kiss between Donald Trump and Vladmir Putin. They smiled and cheered at a drawing of the female reproductive system that declared: “Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!”
“I was expecting to feel more despair, because that’s where I’ve been for so long,” Price said as she watched the city roll away behind her on the metro back out of town Saturday night. “But it wasn’t sad like that. It was energizing. So many like-minded people,”
She let out a deep breath and smiled.
“I feel ready to get to work,” she said. “It’s go time.”