“Excuse me? I just wanted to thank you for…”

My throat closed as I struggled to keep my composure. Oh, give me a break, I thought. I should’ve controlled this by now.
The plan was simple: run down the hallway, catch a teacher assigned to my semester independent study committee, and thank him for his encouragement after my final presentation on American lynching memorialization. When I got there, though, I couldn’t finish my sentence.

To my relief and astonishment, his eyes welled up, too. “Do–Do you have a moment?” he asked, motioning to sit on a nearby bench. 

“I mean… to step out of yourself in that way…” he began, waiting for the words to push through a lump in his throat. He was the only African-American on the committee. “I went home to my wife that day and talked about what it must have taken to do that kind of work…” he continued. “Thank you. You have no idea what it meant for me to see that.” 

I stood in the bathroom for a long, long time afterward, cold water dripping down my hot face.

For my study, I had read fifteen books, followed the activities of local remembrance coalitions in Atlanta, and asked my father to drive me to Montgomery, Alabama, to interview visitors at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice for victims of American lynching, mostly Southern.

My young, Chinese-American face received a few double-takes. My interviewees talked about their relatives in the Civil Rights Movement; my grandparents won’t even acknowledge their past during the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s rule. "Why are you doing this, exactly?" my interviewees often asked me. 

I encountered lynching narratives through newspapers last January at Emory University as a professor's research assistant. The first time I read, "Negro Pays the Penalty for an Attempted Outrage," the headline of an 1888 story in the Augusta Chronicle, disbelief, then deep shame, cut into me. How could I have overlooked such a regime of terror that took place on the ground beneath my feet?  I couldn’t let go of such an injustice; I needed to process it further and decided to conduct my separate research. My experience in a closed environment surrounded only by archived texts and undergraduate students gave me the impression that I could hide behind a topic beyond myself. Writing attracted me because I could chisel a disembodied surrogate for myself. I showed intimacy by sharing my poems in the Writing Center and publishing work; people could interact with and understand me, or at least, a curated, coherent version of my incoherent interior life. I didn't need to open my mouth and potentially risk losing trust.

When I stepped out of myself, my field research ironically confronted my identity. At the National Lynching Memorial, I approached strangers who first discerned my trustworthiness from my appearance and words. I understood the risk in asking about their thoughts on a deeply traumatic history.

To my surprise, my interviewees gave me the privilege of experiencing their perspectives. Most, like me, felt shocked at their ignorance of such a violent history. A woman crying at the memorial told me, “The same blood that flows in my veins flows in yours.” I forgot time there; I stayed until one staff member politely told me, “The Equal Justice Initiative doesn't allow interviews.” I slinked out of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice like a petty thief, my stash hidden in my voice-recorder. Eleven interviews.

The issues of healing from historical tragedy affect people of any society and race. Regardless of background, we can still feel the human touch of those entombed in rust. If I want to retain my humanity and prevent violence, I must remember our universal capacity for inhumanity. When interviewees spoke about modern-day lynching – mass incarceration, police brutality, the flawed justice system – I felt connected by our fundamental desire for justice. 

I’ve always believed that I worked best alone, that I was an introvert, that all I needed were my thoughts and poetry and imagination. I was dead wrong. I needed people. Only when I traveled to the site of the story and strengthened my mind’s materials from primary experience did I realize the full potential of my writing. A classmate once cried from reading my memoir, but the conversation in the hallway demonstrated that respecting someone’s history through careful, compassionate research could bring us closer.

Students passing the teacher and me that day must have been confused by seeing the two of us sharing a public cry on a campus bench. In reality, he and I had just met. 

“I have to go, but oh,” he said, extending a hand to me. “I’m Mr. Bryant, by the way.”