Last Sunday, we shuttled our kayaks to the banks of the Sopchoppy River in the Apalachicola National Forest. Our intended launch site is remote and beautiful, abutting the Bradwell Bay Wilderness Area.

My husband Jeff spotted a black bear running across the dirt road in broad daylight. But we were much more startled and a bit frightened to find the familiar put-in site occupied by people who had organized their tents and fire ring around a Confederate flag. Even though no one was present, the camp had a feeling of permanence. The flag suggested entitlement.

If it made the four of us feel cautious and outraged, how would an African-American family experience that public landscape–that national forest–if they were to travel here to launch a boat or hike?

That symbol needs to come down and it will, just as dozens of stone symbols of slavery and oppression are toppling all across our country and around the world.

It’s only a start, this removal of statuary, flags and monuments. But the work to end structural racism can’t end there. I’ve been wondering specifically who or what might replace the images of Columbus and Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and tormentors of Native Americans in New Mexico?

My friend Norine Cardea has one idea. She’s begun a community project called “Art in a Time of Chaos.” During the pandemic pause, she inspired a scattering of earth shrines in our neighborhood.

This weekend, on the occasion of the summer solstice and Juneteenth, she installed her new creation, a gorgeous 6-foot likeness of the goddess Hecate, who was known to the Greeks as the goddess of the three paths.

Hecate now presides over exactly such an intersection–a triangle—in our neighborhood, not to tell us which literal asphalt road to take, but to encourage us to consider the cultural crossroads we face as we move forward.

May we all find the way.

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