"I'm Tired Of Giving In"

Michigan reminded me a lot of traffic-clogged Maryland in some parts, but for the most part Rt. 12 is a sweet little drive through the country. I wanted to go to The Henry Ford, in Dearborn, one of the coolest museums in the world. It’s not called The Henry Ford Museum because the museum is only part of it. It should just be called The Big Place Full Of Shit Henry Ford Thought Was Cool. It truly is amazing. In addition to the actual museum, which is a collection of EVERYTHING EVER MANUFACTURED EVER AS SHOWN THROUGH HISTORY EVER - cars, chairs, vacuum cleaners, clothes, bikes, airplanes, dishwashers, carriages, trains, signs, hotel rooms, houses, toys, computers, EVERYTHING - there is a huge patch of land called Greenfield Village, a stretch of acreage where Henry Ford had many buildings of historical importance dismantled and built again on the grounds. These include The Firestone Family Farmhouse, built in 1880, complete with a working farm on the land, the Wright Brother’s house, Thomas Edison’s entire Menlo Park workshop plaza, the boarding house where many of Edison’s workers stayed, some offices of 1800's country doctors, a handful of mills (wool, silk, cider, lumber, and clay mills), and an old theatre - and those are just the ones I saw! I think Ford moved Abraham Lincoln’s old Illinois courthouse to the grounds as well, but I couldn’t find it. The whole place is so big, there’s no way I could have covered the entire thing. There are also re-enactors walking around, putting on shows and teaching people about the ways of life during the era they are visitng. There are three main areas - the 1880's, the 1890's, and the 1930's.

In addition to those, there’s also an IMAX theatre, a Ford Factory tour, The Automobile Hall of Fame, a public high school for design and technology called The Ford Academy, and an experimental lab where Henry Ford’s team tried to invent new sorts of cars, like cars that ran on soybeans. When I was stumbling out of the place, overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of STUFF that is on display, I realized why the guides recommend making a visit to the Henry Ford a two-day affair. I managed a speed-through in roughly 5 hours, seeing just a quick cross-section.

The hands-on element of the place is marvelous. This isn’t one of those stuffy places where jacketed guards "ahem" you from getting too close. The atmosphere is much like the homey Mid-West itself - come on in, sit right down, and let’s visit. You can touch the cars, climb on the trains, and sit in to-scale models of the first airplane cabins. You can build a model car and test it on tracks, or build a paper airplane and fly it on a special runway. In the village, you can card wool, blow glass sculptures (with help), learn how to do laundry the old-fashioned way, or even play with one of those hoop-and-stick games. This applies to nearly every part of the museum, including my favorite part: the Rosa Parks bus.

Yes, the actual bus that Rosa Parks was arrested on. You can just climb on in, have a seat, touch everything, take pictures, even sit in the same seat that Parks wouldn’t budge from. A docent on the bus will answer your questions, but not give you some pre-fabricated speech on the history. You make it your own. When I got on, a grabbed a seat in the front, right next to the charming guide. She was a tiny black lady with a huge smile and a southern accent. She lounged back, legs crossed, arm draped over the window sill as she told us the story of that day, all the details the history books leave out. Each person on the bus listened like kids at a campfire, entranced.

"In the sixties, blacks would have to get on the bus in the front, put their money in, then get off the bus, walk around to the rear, and get on there, because they weren’t allowed to walk through the white section in front."
I cut in, asking, "Did the drivers ever pull away before the person had gotten back on the bus?"
"All the time," she said. "All the time, and it had happened to Rosa Parks. The same bus driver driving that day had done it to her before. And she recognized him. So she knew that chances were, he was gonna treat her bad. Y’know, she didn’t just get on the bus and sit down in the white section. What happened was, the white section was full, so the bus driver wanted to extend the white section to where Rosa was sitting. She said, ‘No, I’m tired of giving in.’ Those were her exact words, ‘I’m tired of giving in.’"

When this lady spoke, her accent made it, "Ah’m tahred of geevin eeen".

"The bus driver bullied her," she continued. "And when he called the cops, they bullied her too. But she just kept saying, ‘I’m tired of giving in.’"

We talked about the bus boycott, the racist rules, how not that much time has actually passed since then. It was intense. Before everyone left, I asked the tiny docent, "Can you please take my picture in the seat?" Sitting there, looking at how the world looked to Rosa Parks on that day, from the exact spot she was in, I could literally feel the energy of that time. My eyes welled with tears I tried to hide, but I couldn’t quell that feeling in my chest, the one that knew this was the spot of so many new beginnings and had changed the course of American history. There was an energy of defiance, of strength I could feel just by being there. It is hard to describe without sounding crazy and even harder to describe without getting misty.

I called almost everyone I thought would care, just to tell them that I SAT ON THE ACTUAL ROSA PARKS BUS IN THE SEAT AND EVERYTHING. Then it was a quick PB&J and off I was to Detroit, with no particular plan.