Thursday, January 23, 2014
Back to the Suburban Grind: Learning MLK
Back to the Suburban Grind: Learning MLK: Black National Anthem Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of liberty; Let our rejoicing rise,...
Learning MLK
Black National Anthem
Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)
When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals. We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country. A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family. This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats. It was not the past. It was the ever-fluid present.
The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness. I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it). That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that." But we weren't. We aren't. That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding. That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me. That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home. This was my cross to bear. Everyone else got to have the day off.
I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive. I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was. As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed. I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed. But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized. I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted.
It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance. They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people. Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen. Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype. My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French. We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up. We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course, in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority. They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.
We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home. They have never said they wished they were not black. Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful. Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another. We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families. And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain.
As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked. If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty. That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives. That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others. They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words. It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear. Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend. This is how it hurts. As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle. For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.
Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately. I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way. But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep. They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together." The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense. I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart. I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.
I was a young person and am now a grown woman. What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally. We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing." I am working hard to keep that love in mine. I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Lift every voice and sing, till earth and Heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.
Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered
Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou Who hast brought us thus far on the way;
Thou Who hast by Thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee.
Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee.
Shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand,
True to our God, true to our native land.
Written by James Weldon Johnson (1899), music by his brother John Rosamond Johnson (1900)
When I was a little girl, though I suspect younger than my two ladybugs, to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and legacy, my family would spend the afternoon at a black church listening to people who'd lived the Civil Rights era, talking about about our history and the life of this man, and singing and clapping and dancing to some incredible church music and old Negro spirituals. We were meant to reflect, consider, uplift, and rise, rise, rise above what our people, African-American people had endured in our own country. A suffering that weighed heavily in the story of my immediate family. This was not the story of just my ancestors, but of my people, my family, my father and mother and uncles and grands and greats. It was not the past. It was the ever-fluid present.
The emotion was so visceral, so intense in those moments that I was often embarrassed and humiliated by the heaviness. I was "one of the only's," "the Cosby" at my school (calling it largely white would understate it). That my father and mother were well-educated and had good jobs and provided for us well above even the national average allowed others to define us as "past all that." But we weren't. We aren't. That our experience as middle class, educated, law abiding, good neighbors seemed beyond the norm was just the start of the misunderstanding. That Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was still being debated as a national holiday confused the young me. That I celebrated in a church full of African-Americans and very few others hit it home. This was my cross to bear. Everyone else got to have the day off.
I supposed that my white friends were spending the day shopping or watching TV, hanging out, while the weight of my people and really the future of our nation, felt like it rested on my shoulders, or ours, as we endured to keep the memory, the truth, and the history alive. I wanted everyone to be considering Martin Luther King, Jr. in the same way I was. As a man, a true person, not just an idea, who lived and breathed among us, the same air I was breathing now, and who saw severe racism and institutional injustice and wanted it changed. I felt burdened in a way different than my parents and their parents had because, according to so many who "don't see color" I was not living the outright barbaric terrorism of the times before the Civil Rights era and was living in a nearly all white community, proof to so many that things had changed. But I still felt racism's sting in the subtlest of ways and much of it was internalized. I still felt that it was mine to prove that we were equal, alike, multidimensional and multifaceted.
It has been an interesting lesson for my husband and me as we teach our children who are biracial and bicultural about this very particular man from this very particular moment and then open up the discussion to the greater topics of racism and equality, tolerance and acceptance. They are so young and still at an age where they see the differences but do not have cultural references as to what those differences mean to some people. Because I experienced that sense of other, I have been both protective of their feelings as such and have also opened the dialogue before their questions about otherness have even arisen. Since they were very small, they have seen both of our families either in person or via Skype. My husband speaks French with them and they see him speaking with his friends and family only in French. We have looked at the map and the globe to discover just "how close and how far" we are to where Papa grew up. We have visited with my parents and family full of aunts, uncles, and cousins down South in Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. When we lived in Barbados, they saw what looked to them like a thriving nation where black and white people worked along side one another, where they saw many more people of color in positions of power, where racism was, of course, in play, as it is everywhere, but where they were not isolated because of their racial make up, where they were, in fact, part of the majority. They learned there about the East Indians and Chinese in the Caribbean through the friendships they made, and though they certainly asked questions about where folks came from, it was more a curiosity of geography than fear or confusion about race.
We have made it clear through our friendships and relations and the way we speak about all people that intolerance based on color, creed, religion, or sexual orientation will not be accepted in our home. They have never said they wished they were not black. Have never said they don't believe themselves to be beautiful. Have never said that boys are smarter than girls, that white is better than black, that something is a girl game or a boy color or only for one group or another. We talk about other peoples' customs and religions, even practicing some of the holiday customs and going to services when we can to demonstrate how all people are just striving for the same goals for their families. And yet, when the specifics of the pre-Civil Rights era come up, I am taken back to that pain.
As they have begun to learn the very cursory history and stories they are shocked. If the separate water fountains and segregated schools are enough to burn their cheeks and hurt their hearts, imagine how they were brought to silence, sucking the insides of their cheeks, when I told them that Grandma and Grandpa had grown up, been little kids, just as they were now, and had lived this abject racism and in the case of my parents, poverty. That Grandma and Grandpa and their brothers and sisters and so many other families and children just like them could not look away from it, rather had to live it and breathe it every day of their lives. That their lives, in the minds of many, institutionalized in the country they called home, were not as valuable as the lives of others. They see the absolute injustice right away and struggle and fumble for words. It is not an abstraction talked about as if a bygone era, but a tangible truth for people they love and hold dear. Because they still see us all as equal, they are just unable to comprehend. This is how it hurts. As the true terror and violence of that time comes to light for them, they will need the strength to endure and to forgive and to continue the legacy of a real, live man who gave his life in that struggle. For them, a real, live man who looks like Grandpa, for whom their eyes sparkle and who is loved infinitely.
Both girls are extremely empathic and feel for others so deeply and compassionately. I feel so lucky that we are the same in that way. But they, as I long ago, cannot define how it hurts, just feel the lumps in their throats, the flush of their cheeks, the knot in their hearts and they weep. They have cried for friends that "would not be our friends if the brown and the white could not be together." The oldest has a dear girlfriend who said she'd just have to be in jail because she loved her friend so and would not put up with that nonsense. I loved this comment more than I realized because it keeps returning to me, to my heart. I love it because during those MLK celebrations of my youth, I would have loved a professing of love and commitment such as that from someone who "didn't have to," was able to choose her commitment to the rights of others when the privilege was hers.
I was a young person and am now a grown woman. What I shared is not shame but the real visceral pain of that history, of what separation, exclusion, divisiveness of any kind does not only to us on a global scale, but what it does just to our own individual selves. We miss the true evolution of ourselves--physically, emotionally, spiritually, nationally, internationally, globally. We miss transcendence if we cannot "lift every voice and sing." I am working hard to keep that love in mine. I hope as we celebrate the man and his actions, we each make a commitment to ourselves and our actions.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Back to the Suburban Grind: Winter birthday wishes
Back to the Suburban Grind: Winter birthday wishes: January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the ho...
Winter birthday wishes
January 2nd usually marked the return to normalcy or a soft landing like the movie stuntmen made onto that huge pillow at the end of the holiday circus. Rather the celebration of the Christ child and the baby new year than me. While I didn't want to be forgotten completely, I was happy to get back to life as we knew it with a tiny secret tucked behind my ear, kissed there by the aliens who, in the dead of night, have always given me promises of a good future, not just resolutions but truths to which I was completely committed. I still believe in the probability of great achievement even in the face of total chaos and seemingly impossible obstacles. Though I have never been good at the holidays, what with all the celebrating and wide opened hearts on display, the arrival of the girls brought a chance for me to live them with different eyes, a more gracious heart, and a sense of wonder and hope.
Every year since I can remember, the arrival of the "winter holidays" has brought a little bit of tension, a little bit of the blues, and an eerie calm like the dead quiet of the first inches of a massive Nor'easter falling heavily on whichever sleeping town or block I was living. It feels somewhere between a whisper and the ringing in the air after a scream. I can hear my breathing. Sometimes I can see my breath. Always I am aware that I am alive even if I can't move from the cold or the fear, and am fully aware of my surroundings even if I want to run. Always I feel awkwardly alone even when surrounded by crowds of family and friends. Alone but not quite lonely. Here, but not quite here. I can't be lonely with the two people standing on my neck, whispering in my ear, chatterbugging to my face. Maybe that's why they came to me. To connect me to place, pry open my wintered heart.
2013 was hardly different from previous years--family ups and downs, community involvement, extracurriculars, doctors' visits, health checks and scares and reassurances, travel, work, parenting, craziness. I don't think I have counted my "best or worst" years since I was a child when the best or the worst was defined by gifts I received or didn't, skills I acquired or didn't, loves found or lost. Now, every year starts off full of promise, more than 1/2 full with the days firmly on one side, ahead of me. Every year I know that I will peel back the onion to find some other truth about myself, my soul's journey, my desire, and my fulfillment. I make no promises other than to try to remain open to whatever comes, to avoid (or try not to bring it all the way to insane clown posse meltdown) the panicked shut down when the world delivers what I expected but for which I had somehow been poorly prepared. At the beginning of every year I have promised myself, "This is the year for me. This is the year I will find the path, stay on it, actualize." I say this every year. I believe it every time. I don't write the directions, don't set the map in stone and quickly wander from the path...or perhaps discover the one worn in the ground, not paved.
I followed the breadcrumbs back to a language I'd almost forgotten I spoke. Many speak it more eloquently, some with grace and agility, others flexibility, but when I speak to them too, they understand. In 2013 I returned to dance. When I was a girl who hated her voice and was sure no one cared what I might have to say, there was dance. When I needed to free myself from the torment of the bad years and celebrate the joys of the good, there was dance. When I had a secret to keep, something that I needed to protect, I could dance around it, seal it in. And then I stopped, quit moving altogether, froze, and then allowed myself to believe that another form of exercise, maybe the machines at the gym, maybe an abs class, could suffice. They couldn't. Not yoga, even with all the breath and meditating and connection to the divine, warmed my soul. It was dance that first connected me to my own life force. Reclaiming it was so helpful to everything in my life.
When I was a little girl, my mother asked for the same things for her birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day. Peace and quiet and for everyone to get along. We thought that was the craziest request on earth. "That's all she wanted?" I'd wonder. What a waste of a rub of the lamp. You can have anything three little cherubs and a workaholic husband can offer! I get it now. As I reanimate the creative back into my life, each day becomes mine to do with it what I will. I can ease myself out of the tepid pool of suburban monotony and feel passion burning me up again. I want that more than I want anything else.
I have, and have admitted, struggling with the daily expectations of raising children and running a household. I want to do them both well. Hell, I want to do everything well, but I believe that I bring more to everything in my life with the creative spirit and energy weaving throughout. At the start of every year, I remind myself of this. Somewhere along the way the priorities shift and I find myself making excuses, putting off making art, writing, dancing, and allow the minutiae of parenting and being married to be more important. I'm going to do better this year. At least I am going to try.
My husband was gone for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Years and my birthday. He has been for nearly every one of these holidays since we've been together. I have stopped allowing myself to suffer this and surely cannot let his absence during these days define the entire year. Or me. Or my life. I don't want to be defined by absence or by a "lack of." But when he returns and asks what I want for all the holidays I missed, it's not a necklace, a scarf, socks, or new boots that I am after. It is some of that quiet, some of that peace, some of the space where I can create or believe myself able again. It is solitude and my own communion with the end of the year and the start of my new one.
My birthday starts up the music, begins the lightly playing song that guides me through the year. It is wintry and quiet and moody and grey and cloudy followed by bursts of sun in a cerulean blue sky, cold as hell frozen over, that thaws into a promising spring. I've bundled up into it and survived the shortest day of the year and the longest parade of holiday celebrations. And on this day, I danced and wrote and drew a little sketch. Running head first, out the window, to the stunt man's pillow down below. To the new year. Mine.
(c) Copyright 2014. Repatriated Mama: Back to the Suburban Grind.
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