My Travels Through Texas

by Thomas Lee Joseph Smith

Episode 2: A Meeting with Rosa Parks

The next day, after the medical conference was over for the day, my wife declined my invitation to travel to a bookstore. She went to get some margaritas with some of her friends and I went to a nearby bus stop and waited for the San Antonio business district number five bus.

The bus was very crowded. I had to stand and hold onto a very loose overhead support. The bus was taking wide turns and bouncing and alternating between light-speed accelerations and non-emergency emergency stops.

I looked around. Maybe those two people would let me share their bench? No, they looked away and spread themselves out even further. Would the man near the front of the bus hold his backpack on his lap so I could sit down? No, he also looked away.

Only there actually was one seat unoccupied — unoccupied in the very strictest meaning of that word. This was a special bus. It commemorated an important event in the area of civil rights. In the middle of the bus, on the right side as I was looking towards the back there was a strange mannequin in a window seat. The mannequin wore a shabby dress and she had a very large purse and she looked to be around 40 years old.

It was Rosa Parks!

The mannequin was a tribute to Rosa Parks and she was taking up two perfectly good seats having seated herself awkwardly, like a barrier to mutual accommodation. I edged over to where she sat.

In my defense it must be stated that at first I asked her to move over, which she declined to do. I tried to get myself into the window side of her stubborn refusal. Somehow in the scuffle Rosa Parks got herself thrown to the ground.

Everyone on the bus gasped. Everyone on the bus pointed in my direction. The driver applied the brakes.

When the police arrived they didn’t want to hear my side of the story. Right away they assumed I was on drugs. One of the officers assumed I was high. “Maybe he’s on the mule droppings mentioned in the other section of this memoir.” said one of the policemen. “I suppose this is the kind of incident we should have expected when Glen Beck said white people should reclaim possession of the civil rights movement.”

The officer turned on me. “You think blacks should ride in the back of the bus, is that it?”

“I think maybe mannequins should ride in back.”

“You think you’re better than a mannequin?”

I said, “Officer, be honest: if this had been a mime mannequin I pushed around, you wouldn’t care one bit.”

He considered it. In his musing he thought about the reasons why a mime would ever be honored with a historic display and he couldn’t come up with a plausible scenario.

I was charged with a hate crime and attempted sexual assault on a manufactured person. I was also charged with shifting a mannequin without permission from the local garment-store outlet workers’ union.

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Proceed to Episode 3...

To Challenge 432...