Struck

It's so very ordinary, this evening.

I am on a bus, at the end of a long day. I have an old CD player in my handbag which shuts out the sounds of the road, and there's an open bag of M&Ms in there too. I take them out one at a time, cracking them between my teeth, trying to savour each one.

Across from me there's a boy, about eighteen or nineteen years old, nodding off to the rhythm of the bus. He has ebony skin, and I am fascinated. I'm not used to the way it glows, like polished velvet. I want to ask him if I am as exotic to him as he is to me.

The bus chatters on, a baby cries. Outside the evening has darkened to a watery blue. It's stuffy with the windows closed, so I take off my scarf, eat another M&M. I have a book open on my lap, and I start to read again. So very ordinary, this evening.

I'm reading about the bus protest in Montgomery, under the leadership of Martin Luther King. When the black people of Montgomery decided not to take the segregated buses, they organised car pools and taxis to get to work, or they walked. Someone recounts how they pulled up beside an old lady, walking with some difficulty, and offered her a lift. She refused.

I'm not walking for myself, she said. I'm walking for my children and my grandchildren.

I feel struck, stopped. It's difficult to explain what it felt like, or why. All I know is I felt like crying and singing at the same time. And that I had to put the book down.

And that I sat there, for a long time, looking out the bus window.

They used to call us the blacks of Europe. The Irish were the only country in Europe to be colonised. We were lesser. We were not quite people.

It's Easter Sunday in a few days time, and the papers are full of discussions about the commemorations of the Irish Easter Rising in 1916. A small armed group took over the centre of Dublin city, and declared us free of British rule. There had been rebellions before, there were rebellions afterwards. People died and continued to die on this island, for freedom, or something that sounded like it.

I don't agree with parts of it, or the dead that followed in our civil war. I am unsure how to feel about those men that declared us free, or the kind of country they envisioned after independence. I am uncomfortable with the legacy of violence they brought.

We talk so much in Ireland about sacrifice, about the boys and men who died for Ireland. But they killed for Ireland too. And so I feel torn. Not because I think violence is brutal, or frightening. But because violence is like a stitch dropped - it unravels things quickly, invisibly, running both deep into the past and on into the future, a fracture that never quite mends.

I wonder about the people in Montgomery, and Atlanta, and Birmingham, who had weapons and never reached for them. About what they suffered, and how many years it took, and how impossible it must have seemed. But they accepted the pain, because they wanted not just to break, but to build. That woman walked, because she didn't hate, she loved.

And there were those people in my history too. There were those that starved who went unarmed into the streets, to sing, to be counted, to walk.

When I go home, I write these words down. Because somewhere, sometime, someone walked not for themselves.

Someone walked for me.