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fishdavidson · 7 years

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Dream Journal 2017-01-19: Momma Ashley

Here’s something I just realized: most of the memorable characters that leap fully-formed from my subconscious have been female. There’s Sara Blake, Coraline, Ms. Amanda, Alberta Hannah Wolfe, and others. Now we have another character to add to the list of cool fully-formed characters:

Momma Ashley.

Momma Ashley is an older black lady, perhaps in her early fifties with curly gray hair that comes down just past her ears. She’s softspoken, but amazingly charismatic. Political activism is her life, but not the kind where you go door-to-door handing out campaign flyers or collecting signatures for some lame-ass petition. She loves the rush she gets from being in the middle of a tense protest.

She’s been on the front lines of various protests since she was in college in the 1980s. Environmental causes, wars, political appointees, and prison reform were all causes she took sides on. By the time 2017 rolls around, most of her old protest buddies from back in the day had given up protesting in exchange for a life of quiet comfort.

But Momma Ashley never stopped, and that’s part of how she came to be known as Momma Ashley. As her old protest buddies faded away, she cultivated new relationships with bright-eyed younger idealists. Momma Ashley was the oldest and wisest of the activists in her circle, and she used her knowledge to keep her young charges safe on the picket lines. She hauled everyone to and from protest sites in an old blue van (probably a 1990 Plymouth Grand Voyager SE, judging from the pictures on Wikipedia).

I’m a relatively new recruit to Momma Ashley’s activist circle, and we’re going to protest what I think was an unfair trade deal that exploited third-world labor markets. There were hundreds of protesters already out there by the time we arrived, and there was a sizable police presence in full riot gear staring the protesters down. Tensions ran high, but everyone was protesting peacefully.

Some dumbass (who is not affiliated with our group) wants to kick things up a notch about a half hour after we arrive, and he throws a molotov cocktail into the line of police. This goes over about as well as you would expect with the police, and they retaliate with rubber bullets and smoke grenades. Momma Ashley knows it’s time to leave before someone catches a bad case of killed-by-cops-itis.

Her blue van is in a parking garage two blocks away. She grabs some of the people under her care and tells them to go back to the van, but some of us have been absorbed into the crowd. So Momma Ashley pulls a bandana over her face to help deal with the smoke and wades into the crowd looking for the anyone else she needs to help evacuate. She finds the rest of us and sends us back to the van.

Only after she went back into the smoke and fire one more time to make sure that we had everybody did she crank the van into gear and head back to our base of operations. You can’t force the system to change if you’re dead, and Momma Ashley wants to make sure her babies stay alive.

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#protest #momma ashley #van #activist #dream journal #fishdavidson #dreams #hof

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