read me when you need reminding of who i am (part iii of iii)
jacques amans, bélizaire and the frey children, ca. 1837
“When I think of how I got to where I am, I have to think of all of the mothers that came before me.”
I think that as my mother observed her daughters become separate entities from herself, reality tapped the glass of her already fragile existence. I think that she endured her mother for so long because she’d get to be matriarch one day, but it turned out to be a lie. She bullied me and I stood up to her, which drove her to question her foundation of life. Maybe she screamed at me because she is angry that her vulnerability and softness were robbed from her from before the start so she never got to be free. Maybe she beat me because I wear the face of her worst abusers (Grandma, the man involved at my conception). Maybe she didn't have enough time to learn and dance and play, so she had me do those things for us hoping I wouldn’t be as sad as she is. I have a million maybes circling through my head constantly. It’s crude: the biological predisposition to be fond of and devoted to the vessel through which you entered this world.
When I think of how I got to where I am, I have to think of all of the mothers that came before me. It gives me this intense feeling like the one I get before I’m about to cry for the first time in months, or in the audience of a concert craning to see the artist one last time before she disappears behind the set. At the back of my mind there’s a seed that’s been planted and I have a feeling I’ll be watering it for the rest of my life. It feels like passion, purpose, and being alive. When I think of African-American history I see something clearly: the enslavement of my African ancestors in the U.S.A. led to our current perpetual mental health crises. And yet, there is beauty braided through that survival too — a kind of resilience that feels inherited, like muscle memory passed down the bloodline.
The way Black people were treated in this country was never properly assessed and I see it everywhere, in everything, in everyone, in me. The cycle of discrimination against Black people is so brutal, rooted, and recorded; it was a meticulous plot that took a lot of evil. If it had been properly addressed, we wouldn't see its echoes so prevalently. Black people. The way our mothers often treat our daughters. The way our fathers often treat our mothers. The way we often treat each other…
Some very sick, jealous, prideful, conniving systems were set up to control Black people and 400+ years later they continue to torture us. The Yankees wanted their own country and used us to make it. They came across the Atlantic scared, lonely, unsure, hurt, defeated, hungry, and worn. They used us because it worked. It is so grossly misunderstood: the way enslavement removed (violently, diabolically) the future for Black people. What that theft did to our sense of possibility... They thought like they were God, taking away Eden and delivering us shame and an entry to the world painful to the vessel that will be our mother. Then they set it in stone by teaching it to their children.
I am most heartbroken by the way the enslavement of Africans in America has led to repercussions untraceable to the naked eye, but I’m also aware that Black people are not just the wound — we’re the healing too: the art, the imagination, the refusal to vanish. While there are small corners of social media and fleeting moments of hope through connection, I see my people struggle with all the pain. Most concerning to me: the young adult Black women, one of which I am (I have yet to see a more capable and resilient yet trodden demographic). Racism is so embedded into the insulation and floorboards of the creaky old house that is this country that some truly believe that it doesn’t even exist anymore. The truth is that the culprits who started these cycles are no longer here; they escaped accountability by shrugging it off to their children and then dying. I see white people carry that accountability in a similar way to how Black people carry the physiological and deep-seated pain in the way we habitually behave.
Black and white people have all got generational trauma from enslavement, just expressed through different distortions, different avoidances, different inherited stories, different amounts of privilege… but only my people continue to be trampled incessantly with the repercussions.
Still, I think there’s a way through this: telling the truth, letting ourselves feel it, and refusing to pretend that silence ever healed anyone.
jacques amans, bélizaire and the frey children, ca. 1837, the metropolitan museum of art, new york. available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/2023.317
