Come Out of Her: The Revolution at Home

 

I revised this essay after the President's eulogy to Reverend Clementa Pinckney.  I reviewed my reaction and thoughts on Kiese Laymon's (Guardian) piece on the teachings of the black church.  Why?  Because I think it vital to get at the what I see as the core questions of each text; which is not possible without briefly speaking to each perspective.  The President told the truth.  Laymon told the truth.

While white America thankfully and finally begins to look inward and take some responsibility for the concomitant effects of its racism (which is not my subject), black America shakes its peanut basket in search of whole un-cracked kernels of nourishment.  How do we sustain ourselves, move our families and communities forward, knowing what we know:  that no one is more interested in our nourishment than we?

I focus on Obama and Laymon specifically because together they embody a bit of the conundrum we face as a community.  Two black men raised in polar American environs.  One, Obama, seemingly starved of his blackness growing up in a white family in Hawaii.  And Laymon, seemingly overfed his blackness growing up in Mississippi.  I, of their same integrated generation, can identify with both, having been raised partly in California and partly in Arkansas.  As I read both, I wonder how each thinks of home.  

I wonder how many Hawaiian Saturday nights Obama tried to close his eyes that refused to shut over his want of a black church to sit in and be stirred.  How many Mississippi Saturday nights Laymon grudgingly set that 8:30 am alarm?  

           
My daughter has graduated now, so I can speak of the trepidation I felt dropping her at Vassar.  I worried about Vassar's whiteness.  Would my child experience the aggressive hate my brothers and I experienced in Steinbeck country and later in Reagan country?  I worried, but consoled myself knowing my daughter knew who she was and knew her people.  You see, she had formed her black self enough to play black three truths and a lie impeccably:  She and her sister were born in Atlanta, raised in Oakland, enjoyed trips home to Pine Bluff, attended predominately black, mostly African-centered elementary schools, churches, mosques; slopped syrup with biscuits from two of their grandmothers' and grandfathers' country tables, been perched in the laps of two great-grandmothers, rode in the cars of their constantly jaw-jacking mama and daddy; watched their grandma fly back and forth to Cote d'Ivoire, played in a Bahamian steel drum band, danced at Carnival, visited old Spelman professors, finished homework at Clark Atlanta University, retold their grandfather's Panther days and grandma's days in SNCC, ate plantains at Karijamba and the Malcom X festivals, trained in capoiera, poured libations to revered and remembered and thirsty ancestors, sung the South African freedom song, donned their African dresses, studied Imotep and Egypt's Nubian middle kingdoms ... both daughters know their people enough to ward off the slickest onslaught of white supremacy.    

My daughters also know their people well enough to get tired of them.  That happens.

                    

We get tired of our people and wish everybody would just do this or just do that and all the pain and trouble would go away.  Upon the slightest infraction, we begin to lay the predominance of blame for our often trying, often frustrating, often cyclical condition, on each other instead of placing the condition ahead of the infraction.  We fall into examining surfaces instead of underlying causes. We want to qualify with too many justs.  Mona T. Phillips told me years ago to pay attention to what comes after the "just":  that's a dismissal, an oversimplification.  

I recently almost had a debate with a woman about not calling out a famous athlete over repeated domestic violence charges--a topic about which, in this particular case, I knew nothing.  I had congratulated the athlete on his victory.  The woman who wished to debate me, questioned my "respect" for his victory.  She wanted me to denounce this black man.  I refused.  I offered to sit down to talk out this complicated topic in private as I am not interested in shaming black folks, black families, not now or ever.     

I wanted to explain to her that I could not denounce him

because I have known so many male and female perpetrators of violence and other forms of abuse ... some whom after they let go of intoxicants, changed for the better.  Some, whom after a medical or psychiatric exam, diagnosis, and treatment--changed.  It's too easy to condemn, denounce, dismiss, especially the most broken among us.  But I am weak in a way.  An appreciated weakness that keeps me less at war with the people of the world.  More convinced of human possibility.  (I feel both sorry and elated for the conservative politicians who get caught in the woods with their

gay pants at their ankles).  

I have learned to recognize my own brokenness as well as that of others.   If we can't work to listen and acknowledge and mend the brokenness in each other, how can we ever get to the kind of love that doesn't run off when loving turns impossible?  I mean the kind of love that drove Ida B. Wells Barnett and Mary McLeod Bethune and Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.  The kind of love that makes one commit to inglorious, diurnal, heart-work.  And more work.  Looking for possibility and seeing all the ever-present beauty in one's own people and those peoples' memories and in their foibles. 

                    

That's what struck me most about Obama's speech.  I wanted to lean through the television and ask him to tell me about the longing I had seen and read about in him, longing I've known whenever separated from my home, my people.  What was it like to finally get home?  I saw him carrying a song ironically written by slave-trading preacher, John Newton, "Amazing Grace". 

                   

Obama sounded new.  He didn't sound apologetic.  He said what I wanted to hear.  He made me wonder if he was done making white folks comfortable at the expensive of his own voice and community.  

                   

I also wondered what he saw in the rows of pews before him.  Did he appreciate the stayed beauty there?   Season in and out.  A beauty that remains home delighted in the complicated reflection of itself in the morning mirror.  

                      

In his essay, Laymon asks why we so easily digest the church's push to forgive white folks over and again,"for they know not what they do."  A beautiful sentiment of compassion in the face of death.  A beautiful sentiment when true; but what about when they know what they do?  Do we still allow ourselves to be crucified?  We want to be like Jesus.  But how can a community build generations when full of willing martyrs?   

                    

Forgiveness is emancipatory; but silent forgiving is a mistake.  We have not quantified our grievances.  We have demanded little.  We have taken scraps in place of full garments.  We are owed billions of dollars in reparations for the generations of free labor and property beaten and bamboozled out of us while we sneaked away to feed our souls on books of Exodus and Psalms and the gospels of John and Luke.  But we stay quiet.  We have been taught not to attract too much attention to ourselves or we might be picked off next.  Those of us in positions to speak have been silenced by a conditioned old timey desire to stay hushed because we gotta eat and somebody, who don't like us in the first place, got the keys to the breadbox.  We have let them say what they like.  Portray us how they like.  Seduce our children into the most destructive behaviors possible to human beings.  They've profited while we have paid a stiff penalty.  

             

I hold both Obama and Laymon up in the quest for solutions.  They both work (with few breaks) to build humanity, period.  Between them, I believe is the shared love of their own culture and people.  This week, they both asked us to speak up for ourselves, to build with each other with compassion, humility, and unwavering conviction.  More than anything, however, they both asked us to continue to demonstrate love for ourselves by living a faith in ourselves.    

   

                                          

                     

                                                      .                   .                 . 

                                          

                     

I was eighteen when I left Southern California for Atlanta.  The first time I breathed easy since at twelve, I sat at the foot of my grandmother’s white chaise, listening intently to her tales, mundane and apoplectic (albeit, always instructive) about the people we lived among and the place we called home. 

Atlanta, hot sweaty and calm, felt to me like my home in Pine Bluff, Arkansas:  a place overflowing with black people and black peoples’ memories.  I think of these memories as alive, breathing of the same air I breathe; these memories meander quiet (though tuning toward raucous), waiting for their descendants to come sally alongside them; they have secrets to tell. 

(“I know you.  You Miss Thorns’ grandbaby.”

“Yes, Ma’am, I am.”) 

My plane landed at Hartsfield Airport and I walked down the runway, my feet planting deeper into the ground with each step.  I’d lost the burden of my integrationist spacesuit: the one that had created in me a sort of otherworldliness.  An alien, limb and trunk floating among grounded others. 

Away from home, I present in an intolerable body—one that is at once pornographically desired by powerbrokers, as well as corrupted, throttled and made to swallow the world’s refuse.  

Mules have it better.  They are not met with confusion and seduced into lapses of hemming and hawing according to the their master’s mood.  Mules do not forget yesterday’s beating.  They do not deny the memory in their bodies.  They’d remove their bindings if they could.  They’d hoof off to a remembered high lit place where they could plant their feet.   They’d search for home. 

At home, my body is welcome.  At home, my body is grounded. 

On the north side of Pine Bluff, beside what has been renamed Lake Ceracen (in honor of the native man who refused to step one toe onto the Trail of Tears), beside immodest blackberry brambles and hundred-year-old-trees secreting pecan buds; splayed out over twelve acres of rich delta soil, scan left, then scan right, close your ears to the deafening cicada roar, and discover, if you dare, the oldest black college in America, University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff (formerly AM and N, founded 1873). 

Over the years and as the college spread throughout the north side, my grandparents refused offers to sell their property because as my grandma said, “This y’alls property.  Your granddaddy built this house and when we dead and gone, ya’ll can come home.” 

Last night I dreamed lucid of horses chewing grass in a field, of cheap housing, of quiet nights, of the sweat rising off Bayou Bartholomew, of cars filled with uncles and cousins driving across country or back down the river from Chicago, Los Angeles, Oakland, Detroit, Gary, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles to drop black boys and girls off for a ferociously black, toe-rooting education.  Last night I dreamed of home.