Bob Zellner + Pamela Smith = Two Storied Lives, Lives Filled with Stories by Suzanne Hudson

They met in South Dakota at the 2016 Black Hills Unity Concert, where scholar and activist Lyla June was among the performers, raising awareness about the plight of Native American youth. Bob was there to direct some women in a performance piece, “Toward Right Relations with Native People,” by Paula Palmer, a Quaker woman doing research on the topic. Pamela was among the cast. Bob + Pamela = Their chemistry was immediate, electric—the passing of meaningful glances, the telling language of movement. They traced their shared stomping grounds back to Fairhope (Pamela) and Daphne (Bob), Alabama, sister cities on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay. Quite a coincidence—or was it? When audience members were instructed to hug the person next to them, Pamela (according to Bob) walked several paces over to him and kissed him dead on the mouth. “Is that significant?” Bob immediately asked.

Of course it was. It was and is meant to be, conjured in the Karmic ether, blessed by the magic of the gods, scripted in the stars. Too hyperbolic? Over the top? You haven’t heard their stories yet, and cramming them into a nutshell or two ain’t gonna be easy, but here goes . . .

Take a young woman, a self-described “army brat,” living within her “Great Santini” dad’s harsh margins but whose summers were stabilized by two strong, nurturing grandmas in Kirkwood, Missouri and Staten Island, New York, grandmas whom she credits with her ultimate well-being. In 1968, disillusioned with the government, the war in Vietnam, certainly with military life, and happy to break away via the University of Missouri, Pamela joined the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) but later became turned off by the level of violence advocated by the organization. She subsequently smoked marijuana for the first time, saw “the interconnectedness of everything,” became a spiritual seeker, a “Flower Child,” who easily dropped out of college, headed for the Pacific Northwest, then down to San Francisco, that mecca of hippie-dom. During these travels, she acquired an Econoline van from her trust-funded boyfriend after they were arrested and jailed for possessing said marijuana after a Grateful Dead concert. When it sunk in that her cell mates, all women of color, were likely trapped in the penal system while Pamela’s lily-white and privileged ass had made bail and was hitting the road again, on to more freedom and adventures, “That’s when I realized that our so-called justice system is not just.”

Fascinated by Asian culture in San Francisco, by images like the elder Chinese doing Tai Chi, “I fell in love with the Asian esthetic.” She discovered Zen Buddhism and “Monday Night Class,” a 2,000-strong group of meditators led by Steven Gaskin, the spiritual leader who later traveled the country speaking at progressive colleges and universities. Gaskin was followed along the way by hundreds of his devotees, including Pamela, who sold the van and bought a Bluebird school bus. She invited her friend Daniel to come along, and he brought a friend of his, Bruce. Long story short: Pamela and Bruce were allowed to park the school bus on the campus of a Catholic girls’ school run by a relative of Bruce’s, who also allowed them to throw a wedding there. They had a Protestant minister, incorporated elements of Buddhism and Hinduism—and plenty of Flower Child. Think antique thrift store lace wedding dress and bare feet. “My grandma Smith just sat on the front row, clutching her little straw purse.”

The couple ultimately landed as co-founders at The Farm Commune near Summertown, Tennessee, where Gaskin and his wife, Ina May, led the group in vegetarianism, midwifery, all things natural and pure, and collective living. When in Guatemala in 1976, doing earthquake relief work with The Farm, Pamela encountered such profound poverty—for example, a family with only a few black beans between them who just wanted to share them with her—that her American privilege was shaken to its core. “Who wouldn’t be changed by that?” she says.

Pamela admired Ina May Gaskin and bore three sons on The Farm. Her first born, Nathanael, came during a freezing February in the drafty bus, Ina May unable to facilitate a breakthrough in the delivery. She called for Pamela’s friend Mary, a recent new mother. “Mary stripped and got into bed with me, holding me,” Pamela recounts. “Something about the skin on skin warmth and her talking me through the pain got me out of my head—I had been fighting that pain—and into my body. Mary said, ‘It’s just like surfing, Pamela. You ride the pain to the wave’s crest, up and up, and then you relax.’ So I did. It was physically and spiritually profound, clarifying, cleansing.” It is no wonder she took up an enthusiastic study of midwifery, later becoming a doula. She and Bruce left The Farm in 1985, and had two more children before the marriage ended in 1987.

By the early 1990s she was living in Boulder, Colorado, managing a doula service, and as far as men were concerned, her first line to any would-be suitor was: “I’m a single mom of five kids.” She smiles ironically, “And then I’d watch ‘em run.” Except for one intriguing, exotic man, a Thai Buddhist and poet, Tiko, who embraced her children, was beloved by them, by her first-born Nate in particular, and who took a place in her heart until his tourist visa ran out. He returned to Thailand to fulfill the family expectation that the eldest male should join a monastery and become a monk for a period of time.

When the nightmare of 9-11 happened, the children were grown and gone and Pamela, whose identity and purpose had been grounded in motherhood, was not taking well to the empty nest. Shaken by the terrorist attack and feeling spiritually disoriented, she decided to go to Thailand and find Tiko. She ultimately did so, to his surprise. He took her to his monastery, where she stayed in a unit twenty feet above the jungle, posing as his “meditation student.” Since women were seriously off limits to monks, the two were obviously suspect and closely watched by the residents of the monastery. One day, Tiko said to Pamela, simply: “You want to get married?”

When they met in Bangkok to seal the deal, Pamela asked, “What did you tell the abbot?”

“I told him I was going into the jungle.”

Pamela was shocked, dismayed. “You lied to the abbot?”

“The jungle of your heart, my love.”

Yeah, methinks that’s a movie scene.

The marriage was only legal in Thailand, not the U.S., and the couple decided to forgo the traditional days-long wedding celebration for a simple “blessing” ceremony. Over the subsequent years, visa issues kept them in an ebb and flow as far as spending time together was concerned. Certainly there was joy in family, but also devastating loss, with Nate’s sudden death. The child whose birth had ushered her into a new and vivid self-awareness was now a profound absence in the family.

There was more travel, a return to Guatemala in 2013, where she managed a hacienda for tourists and returned to the study of midwifery, finally deciding, as she handwashed bloodied birthing sheets, “I’m too old for this,” and gave up that dream.

Tiko died of a sudden and swift cancer in 2014, on his way back to Pamela and the states.

She met Bob in 2016 and not long after she had knee replacement surgery. Bob took care of her, actively campaigned for her to live with him. Three years later they married.

Who is Bob?

Take the grandson of a Ku Klux Klansman, born to a Methodist minister, also white-robed and hooded until insight grabbed him by the sheets as he spread the Gospel in eastern Europe, travelling with a black southern gospel choir. Hate and prejudice went out the window, and Mother Zellner took to her Singer sewing machine, converting the KKK bed linens into Sunday school dress shirts. Bob grew into a young man on course to follow in his father’s footsteps, attending Methodist Huntingdon College in Alabama, until . . . a research paper done with four other students got them all expelled. The topic? Race relations. A couple of the subjects they interviewed? Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks—“Miss Rosa,” as Bob refers to her.

A cross was burned on the Huntingdon campus. And they had actually committed a crime. White folks could speak to “coloreds” while standing; it was against state law, however, to sit with them, as in, breaking bread or having coffee. As if they were having a genuine, friendly conversation rather than the master-slave/Jim Crow dynamic of giving and following orders.

Bob fought the expulsion and was allowed to stay, and ultimately the remaining four of “the Huntingdon Five” completed their college educations at various institutions. Post-graduation, Bob attended the Highlander School in Knoxville, participating in workshops and training sessions, following in the footsteps of the mothers and fathers of the movement. He then joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), becoming its first white field secretary, going to work organizing for voting rights, for human rights. Google the iconic Richard Avedon photograph of SNCC and you will see Bob’s endearing, dimply smirk at the left shoulder of Julian Bond. Ultimately there came a point that the brothers and sisters of SNCC thanked Bob for his service but said he could do more good by going to his own people and bringing whitey along in right-thinking. “Right” as in morally so.

And that is what he did. He chronicles his early life of activism in The Wrong Side of Murder Creek: A White Southerner in the Freedom Movement (which became the 2020 film Son of the South, directed by Barry Alexander Brown and produced by Spike Lee). He recounts his family’s roots, the extended family’s disowning of his father when he left the Klan, his budding activism, the beatings, the arrests, even his abduction by the KKK with a noose at his neck and a tree at the ready. Only because one of the Mississippi Klansmen recognized him (as his grandfather’s kin) was he released. And that was not the only time he cheated death. He has been shot at, pummeled, hosed, dog-attacked, and worse. It is no wonder he suffers with PTSD to this day.

Bob’s first wife Dottie (she is at the right shoulder of Bond in the Avedon photo) was an activist before Bob was, coming south from New York City, ending up in Atlanta, where they met, marrying in 1963. They had two daughters, Margaret and Katie, and did civil rights work throughout the southeast, separating in 1979. From there, Bob did work from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., landing in the Soho district of NYC in the early 80s. He established a design and cabinet shop, doing work for many of his legal connections—and other supporters of the movement, like Harry Belafonte—renovating their apartments in the city and helping with the designs of their country homes. He met his second wife Linda, who worked at Goldman-Sachs, during this period. He also worked, beginning in the 80s, with the award-winning cinematographer Judy Carol Irola (who ultimately introduced him to Barry Alexander Brown) on film locations from Cuba to Mozambique, and designed a “steady cam” to aid in the filmmaking. The man has no shortage of skills. By the time he and Linda separated, in 1994, he was living in Southampton on Eastern Long Island, where, over the next decades, he became involved with the Hampton Shinnecock Nation in protesting a housing development for the wealthy that was bulldozing through ancient burial grounds. In September, 2003, when Bob was asked to mediate between the Shinnecock grandmothers and children sitting in front of the bulldozers and the New York state troopers who were arresting them, five troopers gifted Bob with a severe beating that left him with a broken arm, a re-injured knee, and a jaw knocked out of place. He was SIXTY-FIVE years old.

Untrue to stereotype, Bob is not some single-minded, super-serious, rage-a’simmerin’, grudge-holding, robotic foot soldier of the movement. He is whimsical, full of fun and delight, easy to laugh, deep of dimples, corny with a joke. He has an almost innocent, guileless quality—not to be confused at all with being naïve or gullible. He embodies the wonder of an old soul that is circling back around to its essence.

And to its soul mate.

Bob and Pamela, as a team, are now hard at work on his memoir’s sequel (and we keep pressing Pamela for HER memoir), Freedom Road: A Chronicle of the Victory of Nonviolent Direct Action. These two are a great team, complimentary. While Bob writes down random episodes spanning decades—and not in chronological order, as his thoughts race all over the map—Pamela, with the laser focus of one who has a lifetime of meditation under her belt, brings the organizing power. The sequel takes up where the first book left off, covering his second marriage and continued work for equality and justice across the board—from minority and women’s rights to LGBTQIA+ rights, to the rights of indigenous people, to protesting environmental racism. He has certainly been no stranger to jail cells over the decades.

And it was his protests with the Hampton Shinnecock Nation and his stance against the Dakota Access Pipeline, in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, that led him to the 2016 Black Hills Unity Concert in South Dakota. And to Pamela.

And that is where this final chapter began . . .