From My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem (pgs. 10-12)
“In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates exposed the longstanding and ongoing destruction of the Black body in America. That destruction will continue until Americans of all cultures and colors learn to acknowledge the inherited trauma of white-body supremacy embedded in all our bodies. We need to metabolize this trauma; work through it with our bodies (not just our thinking brains); and grow up out of it. Only in this way will we at last mend our bodies, our families, and the collective body of our nation. The process differs slightly for Black folks and white folks. But all of us need to heal—and, with the right guidance, all of us can….”
I was surprised when my son Ben told me about a dream he had about his grandfather because I had just had a very similar dream about the same man, my father, who was dying far away just before his 96th birthday. Our dreams were so emotionally syncretistic that I had to share mine with him. It opened with a long view of a family reunion at my maternal great-aunt’s and uncle’s farm in Vt. My horde of brothers and sisters, cousins, several generations of aunts and uncles, my mom, her parents, and her grandmother were enjoying a picnic on the broad front lawn shaded by two tall trees that once towered over the house. There were waves of happy noise as adults chattered catching up and children squealed playing. My father silently stood alone at the far side of the barn, wearing the suit and bow tie that we thought of as his work uniform, and more unusually, a pair of very dark sunglasses. I could sense that he was spying on us all and felt a shiver of fear, the same shiver that made me want to hide from him when I was a child. Then the scene switched to this spy father with sunglasses inside the room at the assisted living facility where my father was living in real life at the time of the dream. The anxious old man who lived in the dream room was begging the spy father to let him out because he felt claustrophobic. The spy father would not let him leave, even as the room was getting smaller. I woke up overwhelmed with compassion for this old man who had trapped himself in this ever-shrinking box of a room. I thought the dream was about my father, even though I should have known better.
A year later, after my father died and was eulogized, I felt compelled to revisit my relationship with him. When I thought of him, I tended to feel anxious, disappointed, or angry. Random thoughts swarmed through my head: playing Robin Hood as a child in our backyard; the Sherwood family genealogy which obsessed my father in his later years; bits of memory from my divinity school studies about contemporary womanist ethics and historical English radical religious movements; the calls of racial justice activists to examine our respective white or black cultural heritages as a foundational step to co-creating an anti-racist culture; ongoing healing from Post-Traumatic Stress wounds which took me right back to those reactive unprocessed feelings of anxiety, disappointment, and anger. I needed a focus to explore this chaos so I volunteered to preach one Sunday while my minister was on sabbatical. I told her I would preach about unpacking my white supremacist cultural heritage.
“White man, hear me! History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer, merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”― James Baldwin, Dark Days
Almost twenty years ago, a study group of white ministers I belonged to took up the subject of our respective family/cultural histories to better understand how they controlled us now, with the goal of becoming better racial justice allies. Reading one of the suggested texts, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity by Jill Lepore, I felt, “These are my people.” I was not sure why these English Puritan colonist Indian fighters were so familiar to me. It had something to do with the way they were compelled to fence in the land to make fields and pastures in which to plant seeds in rows and raise cows and chickens they brought with them from the old country. While I struggled with what that ‘something’ was exactly, I suspected it had to do with the cognitive dissonance between the commitments I shared with my colleagues to racist justice work and my father’s coded teachings about race. He told his 7 children that he had a large family so that “superior people like us” would not be outnumbered by ‘those other people.’ My nuclear family was something of a eugenics project in his eyes. Over the years, it became clear that he thought we were superior because we were white, of English descent, and Protestant – WASPS. I assumed ‘those other people' were code for ‘black people and were surprised to see that demonizing other people was a family trait that may have started with killing off Native people so they could fence in the land. I did not know at the time that my father’s direct paternal ancestors, whose name we bore – Sherwood - were among those early colonial ‘Indian Fighters.’
Fast forward from that study of my WASP history. I spent the last decade of my career increasingly involved in grassroots anti-racist work as an ally where I had a front-row seat on my own and other white liberals’ cultural prejudices, messing up our ability to be the effective change agents we wanted to be. My father’s death and the luxury of time given by retirement called me to revisit the topic. Why exactly did I resonate with Lepore’s book so many years ago? What did that question have to do with the chaotic mix of thoughts and feelings that I was holding instead of grief? Those thoughts and feelings were twisted into a thread like the mythic Ariadne gave Perseus to mark his escape route through the Labyrinth when he killed the Minotaur, her monstrous ½ brother chained in the depths of her family’s palace. I started to follow that thread.
I still had my ethics notes and a religious history text that haunted me, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill, among the few things I saved from classes I took at Harvard and Episcopal Divinity schools more than 30 years ago. During a Family Ethics class with womanist theologian Katie Cannon, I drew two pictures to capture what I was learning. The first was the outline of a parent holding a child in their lap. It was labeled “I learned - racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, colonialism – on my parents’ knee.” This was not a new idea to me at the time, having already read Wilhelm Reich’s The Mass Psychology of Fascism which showed how German child rearing was the key to the formation of a nation that submitted to authoritarianism. But reading feminist and womanist ethics in this class brought the idea closer to home – my home.
For the second picture, I outlined on one side of the page a person hunched in almost a fetal position surrounded by layers of scribbles. Inside the outline, I wrote ‘numbed to personal violence,’ outside ‘numbed to societal violence’, and titled the figure ‘Moral Callousness.’ Mid-page I drew people shouting ‘help!’ labeled “experience of others.” On the other side of the page, I drew a woman with an alert stance labeled ‘open ears’ – one focused outwardly on the ‘experience of others’ and the other inward on ‘experience of self.’ I drew a circle in the middle of her torso labeled ‘moved,’ which is cradled by one arm upon which is written ‘personal transformation.’ Her second arm, labeled ‘societal transformation,’ is reaching out to other people. This figure is titled “Moral Sensitivity.” When I drew this, I identified with both figures, understanding that I was raised with what Reich called ‘body armor’ – those ever-vigilant clenched muscles that turn one’s whole body in on itself in a defensive position. I knew that I could be open and moved by the experience of others and myself at times, but some hard rock-like sensation in the pit of my stomach would pull me back into a defensive position soon enough. I sometimes called that rock ‘original sin’, which I was taught to believe in and intellectually rejected – but my body held on to.
I talked to Ben about some of this. Recently, he had sung to his father and me a few songs and chants he had composed/ channeled for his shaman-inspired spiritual circles of friends. I was deeply moved by them - literally – they shook up a bit of that hard rock-like sensation in the pit of my stomach. I was not sure what was happening, but I became increasingly sure we were working on the same stuff – whatever that was! I asked if he would sing during the service I was planning and was pleasantly surprised when he said yes. It was clear to me that any words I had to say would be completed by Ben’s music which brought them from the head directly to the gut. If I really believed that exploring my white middle-class upbringing would be one small step towards cultural transformation, then I needed to change something more in this physical reality that we call our bodies. Ben knew how to do that.
One thread that brought these thoughts and feelings together in my experience was memories of playing Robin Hood as a child. I grew up in a stereotypical all-white suburban neighborhood during the baby boom years. My band of siblings and I played with dozens of children who lived within a few blocks of one another. Our lives were split between two different ethical codes, one for inside, the other for outside. Inside – in church, school, and at home – rigid structures, schedules, high walls, and closed doors were good. We needed to complete our chores and homework and show up in the right place at the correct time. We were ‘good’ if we followed the many rules that could be summed up by ‘thou must silently obey (fill in name/role of authority figure) with a smile.’ Inside, we watched. We were judged as bad and punished swiftly if we did not follow the rules. Inside, we were rewarded with affirmation and approval if we did follow the rules. That approval felt like love. I wanted desperately to be ‘good girl’.
Outside no one seemed to care what we did or when we did it as long as we came home when our moms rang their bells for dinner. There were almost no fences in the neighborhood. We were free to walk through everyone’s yards. No one watched. We played Sheba Queen of the Jungle in the swamps that bordered the neighborhood in one direction. We played Japanese atomic monsters Mothra and Rodan in the ‘forbidden’ sand pits that bordered the other direction. We named my family’s backyard with its miniature pine barrens ‘Sherwood Forest,’ and there we played Robin Hood.
We knew about Sheba, Rodan and Robin Hood from TV. In the second half of the 1950’s we watched “Adventures of Robin Hood” and knew its song by heart:
“Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen.
Robin Hood, Robin Hood and his band of men.
Feared by the bad, loved by the good,
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Robin Hood.”
The most athletic boy and girl playing on any given day got to be Robin Hood and Maid Marion. I looked a lot like Friar Tuck with my round body and bowl haircut but was happy to play any of the merry band. I also liked to be one of the poor but good villagers who lived in the forest clearing, where we camped under the trees, made mud pies, and received the treasures the merry band robbed from the rich. Taking the stories general plot line “Rob the Rich to Give to the Poor’, we understood we all needed to take turns being the bad but rightfully scared rich people whom we modeled on our teachers and parents. But no one, and I mean no one, wanted to be the Sheriff of Nottingham. I am pretty sure none of us ever played him. I never did.
Inside, the Sheriff of Nottingham was the good guy. Being merry was bad. The poor were feared, and the rich were loved. Outside, we were free to be noisy and dirty, were good even when we ignored the clock and turned the rules upside down, and were loved just as we were.
Past childhood play, I was still fascinated by anything that had to do with Robin Hood. Were Robin Hood stories inspired by history? Were they myths or legends? I am pretty sure I had saved The World Turned Upside Down because author Christopher Hill mentioned Robin Hood, but I really couldn’t remember the context. When I was in school, I only read a few pages here or there from our extensive reading lists that I needed to cite in the papers I wrote. I probably did not throw out the book during my many moves because I had a surprising response to a Sherwood genealogy my dad showed me. I don’t remember the names of the people – only that a direct descendent on the family tree was labeled “sheriff of Nottinghamshire.” I felt punched in the gut. “NO!! we can’t be related to the Sheriff of Nottingham. He’s the bad guy.”
My fantasy of myself was turned upside down. It was time for me to read the book more carefully and search for clues to this unfortunate cultural heritage.
The book detailed the religious/ethical response to enclosure in England during the mid-15th to mid- 17th centuries. Enclosure was a long slow process that started with the Norman invasion in 1066, in which the ‘common land’ was progressively fenced off for agriculture by those who had ‘holdings’ – those that held the land for the King. The pace of enclosure rose rapidly during the period covered by the book. More and more people were pushed off land they had historically grown and gathered food onto increasingly smaller areas that were difficult to cultivate called ‘wastelands’, including forests. Poverty increased as people’s resources decreased.
Ballads of Robin Hood became popular as people considered or turned to ‘theft’ of what was once common property. Increasingly, poor women pushed into the woods who survived by foraging for food and medicines were persecuted as witches. Many radical religions formed at that time including the Diggers, Ranters, Seekers, and Quakers. They were Protestant in the most literal of senses: they protested being pushed off the commons, which they argued was Eden, given to all of humanity to share. The established religions, be they the Church of England or the Puritans, responded that because of original sin, humanity was driven from Eden and private property was the best they could do in its fallen state. The radicals responded that private property was the original sin.
I told Ben that I was studying this, and he told me that the first Sherwood’s were Norman soldiers that fought for William the Conqueror and were given holdings as a reward. I turned to the most updated genealogy my dad gave us before he died. The first direct descendent to migrate to the colonies was Thomas Sherwood, Mayor of Nottinghamshire. In 1635 he sailed with his wife Alice and at least one of their 8 children to Boston, settled in Connecticut where within a year, he helped kill off a whole tribe of native people and push others onto ‘wasteland’ fighting in the Pequod War. He became a magistrate in a town in which the Colonists started enclosing as much land as fast as they could for agriculture. The one trial he is recorded as presiding over was a witch trial during which his second wife Mary and one of their sons Stephen testified. We don’t know what side they testified on or the results of the trial. Let’s just say, they brought enclosure to the colonies, along with demonizing those who were pushed off into the wasteland.
This is my culture, a people who, through enclosure, invented poverty as we know it by destroying common land, developed the concept of private property, then took enclosure ½ way across the world to violently wall people native to that land off their commons, and built a Puritan theocracy ruled by white male property owners. As I pulled out those historical threads and reflected upon this family culture, I realized that they were not history, but the still living and present culture that taught me those ‘inside ethics,’ ethics that were in constant tension with my ‘outside ethics.’
As soon as I started to think about those ‘outside ethics’, I could feel the places within my own body where that tension existed. Following the thread into my subjective experience, I could feel in my gut how I was taught to enclose my inside spaces - my intellect, language and dreams, emotions and physical feelings, spirit, and vision, off from one another. Those myriad fences and closed doors within my inner life were taught to me through my Sherwood father, reinforced by the institutions of white churches and schools, and maintained as I, good girl that I became, oppressed myself. The natural physical reactions to trauma, especially when cut off from language and story, also fenced off experiences into unconnected fragments. Those unintegrated traumas added locks on the doors and built the walls higher still. Over the years those “outside ethics” helped me dismantle quite a few of those walls and open many interior windows and doors, but there was still that stone in my gut – closed off in some inaccessible dungeon at the very foundation of my enculturation. I knew the thread was leading me closer to my sibling monster trapped there because its frantic pacing was causing the floor to shake beneath my feet, throwing me off balance. Its howls were getting loud enough to hurt my ears. But I did not stop. I didn’t feel especially courageous – mostly I was burning to discover what was at the heart of the pain I felt, maybe I even felt hope that getting to the twisted threads’ end would somehow relieve the pain.
I knew the Hellenistic Greek myth about the Athenian hero Theseus who volunteered to go to the conqueror King Minos’ palace as a spoil of war to be feed to the Minotaur, the monster child of Queen Pasiphae and a sacred bull who was imprisoned in a dungeon within a labyrinth that another prisoner, Daedalus, designed to be unescapable. Ariadne, a daughter of Minos and Pasiphae, fell in love with Theseus, begged Daedalus to help Theseus escape the Labyrinth. Daedalus gave her a red thread for Theseus to mark his path to the Minotaur whom he killed and then followed the thread back out met by Ariadne. But I also knew the power of myth, which often carries ancient meanings from cultures very different than the ones that tell it now, shifting layers of meaning that can inspire ever new meanings in the future. That power seems to be working on me here, for I am not Theseus hoping to kill a monster; I am some past or future Ariadne hoping to free it with sisterly compassion. I am not a heroic warrior who fears getting lost in an unfamiliar Labyrinth, but a possible lover who finds a red thread mysteriously marking the way through this not unfamiliar cellular structure. The once powerful king who banished the monster to the dungeon and queen who gave it birth are already dead. No longer able to hurt them, the power and the pain belong to no one else but me.
As I followed the thread deeper towards the locked up airless dungeon, the air around me became lighter and the hallways more spacious. During meditative moments of simply observing my breath, a narrow strand of that white middle class ethical equation mysteriously leaked from my intellect into the dungeon through some invisible crack; “good = control”. Then, as if the dungeon exhaled, a slightly different equation gently loosened from the knot: “love = control”. Of course, that’s why my father thought he loved us. He was taught by his Sherwood father that to control his wife and children was to love them. This knot of love and control is the heavy stone, the original sin, the monster that paced in my gut. I call this precise painful knot of ‘oppression in the name of love’ the core of the inherited trauma which Resmaa Menakem calls ‘the inherited trauma of white-body supremacy’ embedded in my body.
Now I am slowly opening that dungeon crack wider and sense that the whole foundation may fall. The knot of oppression and love is so tightly tied that I wonder if I will ever figure out what love really is. And yet, and yet, maybe that dream of my father trapped in a room was about me after all. I too am getting older, closer to death and becoming ever more aware of my limits and vulnerabilities. I certainly don’t want to let those very human experiences trap me back into the limits of the very small, claustrophobic rooms of my childhood. These very winds that blew open the doors and windows from the outside are there still. Somehow, I knew to let them open me to the experiences of the world and to myself, somehow, they moved me towards transformation and to becoming gradually more morally sensitive.
The dream about my father shows me that I have been watching those who taught me about love from a distance with sunglasses shadowing my view. But I have long trusted the winds blowing in from the outside because of my maternal great grandmothers under the tall shade trees who believed God was love, original sin was a lie and taught my mother enough about nurturing love to pass it on into my generation. I am not sure I know what that love really is, but I am going to take those sunglasses off, walk right into the middle of those waves of happy noise as adults chatter catching up and children squeal playing, open to what I feel. As that newly discovered closed off dungeon cracks open, as I continue to unravel this knot tying me down, I am going to follow those threads of love inch by inch and trust where they lead.