The Black history I carry with me: Cole Arthur Riley
By Jeneé Osterheldt

This column is a part of A BEAUTIFUL RESISTANCE: Black joy, Black lives, as celebrated by culture columnist Jeneé Osterheldt

Cole Arthur Riley created a literary communion in Black Liturgies.

On Instagram, she’s made a space to lift her innermost thoughts as well as the holy wisdom of our writing legends like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and the Bible, too.

“When I’m most honest, I tell people that Black Liturgies was born out of anger. I began the project in the wake of the murders of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, and the resurfacing of the murders of Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain,” says Riley, the spiritual teacher in residence with Cornell University’s Office of Spirituality and Meaning Making.

“I was hungry for a spiritual space where Black grief, Black anger, my Black body was honored in a meaningful way. I had belonged to white-dominated, Christian spaces for long enough that I was desperate for a community of spiritual liberation. So I began connecting Black literature and poems, sometimes with prayers, sometimes with a breath practice. And very quickly a community much larger than I had an imagination for began to form,” she says.

Having drawn in a “congregation” of over 140,000 followers in a year and a half, Riley is releasing her debut novel, “THIS HERE FLESH,” published by Penguin Random House later this month. Get to know her.

The Black History I carry with me is:

Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Zora Neale Hurston. All the Black women who’ve understood what their words were worth, particularly in times when the world was trying to convince them otherwise.

I sometimes walk around with the first line of Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters in my head. It gets stuck in there like a song, and I’ll find myself kind of chanting, “Are you sure sweetheart, that you want to be well?” It has made a home in me. There is a magical canon of Black women authors who’ve expanded our imaginations for liberation, who’ve articulated nuanced Black characters with quirks and flaws and beauties. If I could write a sentence even a fraction as tender and complicated as theirs, I would feel proud.

Why is it so important for us to author our own stories and share them?

When I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I didn’t immediately know it would be a book of storytelling. I thought it was just going to be this serious book of philosophical contemplation or something. But when I picked up the pen, all I was capable of writing were the stories that had formed me. I couldn’t talk about dignity without talking about my father lathering cocoa butter on us in the evenings. I couldn’t speak of lament, without telling of my gramma lying, trembling, on the linoleum floor. We must tell our own stories, because so many stories have been stolen from us. So many of us have not been allowed to tell the truth of us with the passion it demands, or without being censored and rewritten. We must become our own historians.

It was Toni Morrison who said, “Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created. We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald … But try. For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.”

So there is also something really powerful in knowing that as we share our stories, it doesn’t always need to be so literal and succinct. As I wrote THIS HERE FLESH, I kept reminding myself that I was free at last to unshackle my creativity. So you’ll find a bit of magic and myth in the book. Myth sadly can have a negative connotation; I’d like to reclaim this. It’s a beautiful and worthy form for our storytelling. The ancestors have shown us that much.

What gives you joy?

I’ve always loved being alone. A few years ago I would’ve felt too much shame to answer this question with “solitude,” but I’m learning to resist this. I rest best when I’m alone– when I’m not engulfed in the emotions or experiences of others. For some of us, solitude possesses a rare path into our interior worlds. And I feel so at peace, so alive with joy when I travel into myself. To remember who I am and all that has made me. It risks sounding self absorbed, but the reality is, my solitude often takes me into memories and stories of people that have passed on. And it also makes me more attuned to the interior lives of others. It makes me a better friend, a better daughter. Solitude is, maybe in paradox, a practice of collective care.

So I write and I stare at the wall and I watch Netflix documentaries and water the plants. And I’m alone, but there’s joy there.

My life is a beautiful resistance because:

I refuse to live a disembodied life. Even as I survive the violence of white supremacy, the judgment of white intellectualism, the pain of a body that is chronically ill, the memory of a body that has endured abuse, I refuse to abandon my body. It contains more beauty, more mystery than I am able to articulate. And in befriending and honoring it, I communicate belief in my inherent dignity.

Follow @blackliturgies and learn more at colearthurriley.com. This column was originally published by the Boston Globe.

Nurturing a Narrative
By Courtney Napier

What would you do if you held a link to the humanity of a near-mythical figure in history? Through a serendipitous series of circumstances, Victoria Scott-Miller came to possess such a treasure, and it set the course for her future in an unexpected way.

Hailing from Memphis, Tennessee, the Scott family lived a life surrounded by art and beauty. Father Victor Scott was a freelance photographer, plugged in to the opulent lifestyle of famous friends like Lena Horne and Al Jarreau. These relationships were exciting, but also opened him up to the world of drugs. By 1986, he and his wife, Pamela, had just celebrated their daughter Victoria’s first birthday and were expecting their second daughter, Jessica. If they were going to survive as a family, they had to make a drastic change. They left behind the life they knew and moved to Philadelphia to begin the road to recovery.

During a rummage trip to the basement of their new home, Victor Scott found a Bible trimmed in gold. His wife noticed right away that it was special. She pleaded with her husband not to pawn the book to satisfy his addiction, but after realizing that this was a losing battle, she insisted on at least keeping the thick stack of papers tucked inside.

The years passed. Victor Scott overcame his addiction, but the couple divorced in the 1990s. Pamela Scott had the papers examined by Sotheby’s—they were indeed valuable, appraised at $50,000—but even though she was by then a single mother and needed the money more than ever, she declined their offer. Her intuition said that this possession was more significant than money. When Victor Scott passed in 2017, Pamela Scott finally gave the papers to her eldest daughter, Victoria Scott-Miller.

A detailed look at the letters belonging to Victoria Scott-Miller. Photos by Eamon Queeney

Scott-Miller immediately went to work to untangle their origin story. The handwritten notes, she soon discovered, were an exchange between legendary abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Nathanial Knight, a white bookstore owner and justice of the peace. As described in his biography, Douglass met Knight in his Baltimore bookstore, Greedy Reid’s, at just 14 years old. Defying the law, it was there that Douglass purchased his first book, the Columbian Orator, which had a major impact on the trajectory of Douglass’s life.

In January of 2019, the Miller family was contacted by a prestigious historian, who offered them $2 million for the papers. All they had to do was agree to a non-disclosure agreement concerning her family’s role in the discovery of the letters, allowing the origin story to begin with him and his institution.

The money was tempting. Scott-Miller and her husband, Duane Miller, had just relocated to Raleigh. Miller had been medically discharged from the military, and Scott-Miller had left a teaching position to care for their boys. They were on food stamps, just making ends meet.

Then she had a conversation with John Muller, a Baltimore historian and friend of the Douglass family. “It was as if he delivered a message from our past,” says Scott-Miller. “He said, ‘If you sell these papers, you will no longer be part of this story.’”

She declined the offer with a new thought: “How can we safeguard our legacy the way that my mom did for us?”

Scott-Miller’s son, Langston, had just started writing his own stories. So the Millers went to a bookstore and played a game: count the number of children’s books with Black protagonists on display, extra points if the author is also Black. After over an hour, they counted just five books. At that moment, the vision clarified.

“We thought about what it would look like to have a space that provided books with characters that looked like our children,” says Scott-Miller. “Then we thought about what it would look like if we provided that space.”

Scott-Miller had just received a gift of $250 from her mother to help make ends meet. She decided to use $225 to buy her first round of children’s books that featured Black authors and characters, and the remaining $25 fed her family for the week. Scott-Miller hosted her first pop-up bookshop on May 3 of last year, and Liberation Station was born.

Having a mobile store was a key part of the vision. The Miller family was familiar with moving around in the military, and they also understood that—due to forces like gentrification—neighborhoods of color are constantly changing. “We could set up a bookstore somewhere right now, and that would be great,” she says, “but what about the kids who are displaced and homeless across our city? Why can’t the bookstore be in their hotel room? We have to think about accessibility.”

In just a year, Liberation Station has seen astronomical success. They began a fruitful relationship with VAE Raleigh in August, when the pop-up bookstore earned their Awesome Grant for their Walk & Read program, which hosted storytime gatherings in Chavis Park and Pullen Park. They hosted storytime at SparkCon, and book readings and signings with local authors of color during VAE’s Writing On The Wall celebration. To kick off 2020, Liberation Station hosted a pop-up for the release of My N.C. from A to Z, a children’s book by Michelle Lainer, executive director of the North Carolina African American Heritage Commission, illustrated by Dare Coulter.

This year, Liberation Station will have programs across the state, including developing culturally sensitive programming for several public schools in Wake County and a creative collaboration with the African American Cultural Festival.

Although her family encouraged Scott-Miller to create Liberation Station, the bookstore is the product of Scott-Miller’s own extraordinary imagination. “I had to practice arriving in my power,” she says. “It’s one thing to know your purpose, but it’s another thing to fully arrive in it. For me, that means recognizing that this is an extension of my brilliance, my giftedness, and my genius, and fully owning that.”
In March, Scott-Miller connected with a second near-mythical figure in history, when Liberation Station received the Obama Foundation certification. Scott-Miller explains: “This certification gives us the opportunity to garner federal partnerships and gives us access to a global network of advocates and mentors.”

What started as a mission to safeguard her family’s legacy became a calling to provide access to literature in which children of color—and everyone connected to them—can see themselves. “The representation we provide through Liberation Station bookstore is necessary,” Scott-Miller says. “We are the living link to this community, and to narratives that must be shared.”

Pádraig Ó Tuama on Finding Uncommon Ground

This week we are rebroadcasting our interview with Pádraig Ó Tuama, originally aired in September of 2019. The Isle of Éire (Ireland) is rich with stories held by the land, both ancient and modern, laden with both fierce culture and colonial violence. Pádraig Ó Tuama perceives these complex layers of history with acute insights into the lingering impacts of imperialism and sectarianism that have divided Ireland. By acknowledging deeply rooted cultural pain, Pádraig calls for Irish, English, and the rest of us to heal by reckoning with the past and embracing the creative potential held within our differences. Enter a poetic journey where the land awaits us beyond the divide of borders, history, and suffering. Ayana and Pádraig explore the language of uncommon belonging; how we must learn from our shame, the life cycle of violence, and how to confront the inheritance of privilege. Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict, and religion. Pádraig presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios and in late 2019 was named Theologian in Residence for On Being, innovating in bringing art and theology into public and civic life. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community.

‘I feel what women feel’
By Southern Exposure

Donna Bazemore, a former poultry slaughterhouse worker and an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives in North Carolina, talks on the phone in the offices of the CWEA. (Photo from the Southern Exposure archives)

 In meetings, Donna Bazemore is usually silent — until someone asks her to explain what life is like for a worker in a poultry processing plant. Softly, steadily, and with growing intensity, she tells why people take the jobs, what happens to them inside, and what they can do to get out.

Bazemore should know. She is the first person ever to win a workers’ compensation claim against Perdue for carpal tunnel syndrome, the crippling hand disease. She got a little over $1200 — not much for a single mother of three children. But in the process, she learned a lot about herself, about fear and freedom, stress and self-esteem, and “serving the cause of low-income women.”

Donna Bazemore is now an organizer with the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, based in Ahoskie, North Carolina, not far from her home where this interview was conducted.

* * *

My mother was real strong, and she projected all that on us. She didn’t have a lot, and her self-esteem sometimes was really lousy. And it still is. She believes you have to work hard to survive; she expects it to be bad. She will take whatever the system dishes out and say, “Well, it was meant to be this way.”

I think I was the black sheep of the family. I was the one that got into mischief. I was loud. And I always got out of the hard work. My grandparents farmed, and tobacco used to break my skin out.

My uncles and grandparents had big farms in Bertie County, lots of land, tobacco, peanuts, corn. Later on, they got into soybeans. My grandfather died, and my uncle took over the farm. But like many Black farmers there, they had to stop because it was costing them more than they were actually bringing in.

My uncle is now working at a poultry plant. The farm went under, and now he’s on the saw, cutting chicken breasts. He was the first one I ever heard use the phrase “like a closed-in field” to describe the plant. I call it “a closed-in slave camp.”

Once you walk in Perdue, once you go through the door, everything changes. Your whole attitude. When you come out, you’re like two separate people. It has to do with the stress and pressure they put you under. The treatment. People like my mother have been working in the plant for 15, 20 years. And they bring in kids fresh out of college or high school, white kids, and they make these young white men the foremen who tell her what to do. And here she’s been in that plant, and knows everything a chicken ever had to offer you.

I didn’t see making a career out of Perdue. When I was in high school, I said, “As soon as I get out, I’m going into the Army.” And I’m going to do this, this, and this. I had all these dreams. Then I had this baby when I’m 17.

Hard balls was coming at me, one obstacle after another — things I brought upon myself by not being obedient. You feel trapped into doing what you think is best. So since I had this baby, I thought I should marry her father. And that was like jumping out of the pot into the fire.

I left my mom’s house and went to my husband’s house, and I had not yet found my identity. And I also had this total attitude that I didn’t grow up with my father, so I’m going to make damn sure that my daughter grows up in a house with her father so she can have all the things that I never, never had.

So I stayed in an abusive relationship for a lot of years, a lot of years. Mental and physical and verbal. He would come home and take out his anger on me. I always felt it was something I had done, that I was doing.

Finally, I asked myself, “Did God really put me here to be miserable?” When I was going through all this, I had no self esteem, no sense of being motivated to do anything. I was like his possession. So I sat down one day and wrote out on a paper, “How Do I Build My Self Esteem?” It was like a memo to myself. I got the idea from watching a motivator on TV.

You have to constantly tell yourself, “You are somebody.” Look in the mirror and say something positive about yourself. I’d look and say, “Gee, you got a big nose, but it’s cute!” And I began to make sure that I’d say something positive to myself and my daughters, every day, two or three times a day. I also read a lot of articles in Essence and Ebony about women who have done this or that, and it’s very motivating to me.

When I got out of that marriage, I thought I could do anything. Because it took a lot for me to leave. My mom thought I should stick it out with him. I think she was afraid I couldn’t raise the kids on my own. And neither did I, so she wasn’t far off. But she told me it was totally up to me. She taught us, “If you make a mistake and fall on your face, I’ll be there to assist you to get up, but I will not get you up.” And that makes sense to me.

My mom also left it up to me if I wanted to work at Perdue, but she never wanted me to work there to begin with.

She’s really glad that I came out.

* * *

I went to Perdue to buy a dress. I was still married then, in ’83, and I went to get one paycheck to buy this dress. My daughter had a play she was in, and I needed a new dress to go see her. After that paycheck came in, I said, “Wow, I got money! This could be real useful.” And so I stayed on. And then I just got settled back into working.
I liked the money, but I hated the job. My first job was at the rehanging table. The chickens fell on the table and I said, “OH MY GOD!” I could not believe all those chickens! My eyes went together. I got dizzy. And I got sick. I threw up.

The man told me, you pick up the chickens at the back and flip them over so the feet slap against the shackles and they catch. You use both hands, just hang them on the line. Well, the blood was gushing all over my face as I hung them up, and I was trying to wipe it off. He says, “We don’t have time to be cute, Miss Bazemore.” And I was spitting all over the table. Finally, he says, “I don’t think this job is for you.” And I said, “You got that right.”

But I stayed on that job for about six weeks. Both hands are just going constantly — it’s a rhythm you get into — 72 birds a minute. You can actually do it with your eyes closed after a couple of weeks. I actually would sleep doing it, it’s so boring and so hot. You’re right after scalding, and all that heat is coming at you. It’s at least 95 to 100 degrees.

I did everything on the eviscerating line. I began to open chickens. I had to stick my finger in that chicken butt hole and cut down the sides. And I was cutting my fingers because you have to work so fast. I got this scar from opening. And this one from cutting hearts and livers.

I kept complaining and they moved me to trimming. I did that for about a year. And I really liked that. I worked with a good inspector, a young white guy named Cliff. He’d point to the bad part of the bird, and my job was to cut it off. Tumors, bruises, skin diseases, sometimes the chicken head would still be on. He was sympathetic and basically helped me do my work.

I was depressed. I had tried to go to college at nights. But that was just too much on me, so I had to quit. I wanted to go back, so I asked personnel if I could work nights so I could go to college during the day. When I transferred to nights, my grandmother kept my baby daughter and my oldest was in school. And my mother kept them at night.
I went to school from 8 to 12 noon, some days ’til 2. And I worked nights from 10 ’til 6:30 or 7 the next morning. I’d come home, shower, and go to school. Some days, I couldn’t even shower. I had to be in school at eight o’clock. Things were tight here, with so little money, and I had not yet learned to budget. So I began to go back out to Perdue at one o’clock and work ’til 4 or 5. And then I would come back home, and go to sleep, get back up at 9, and go back to the plant.

I did that a couple of months. In the day, I was working with Cliff. At night, the inspector’s name was Harold. This was during the time when I was having serious problems with my hands. So I couldn’t keep up, and that really aggravated this man — to keep stopping the line for me. I couldn’t trim the birds fast enough, and I would have to run around the line to get them. And when he would say something to me, I would say something back.

Every time I’d say, “My hand hurts,” they’d give me three or four pills. I knew what an Advil was. But these other ones had no name on them. And it got to the point that I was happy to go to the nurse’s station to get piped up so I could do this work and totally disregard the pain. I didn’t know what I was taking.

I couldn’t squeeze my hand. I couldn’t zip up my pants. And this was before the disease had really affected me. I couldn’t work the lock on this screen door, using my two fingers. I felt like cutting through chicken bone should have made me stronger, so why am I having problems zipping up my pants?

I went to the doctor’s office and I started to read up on carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis. I learned you could actually lose the use of your hand. And if I lost the use of my hand, I’d be left to sit around waiting for a welfare check. I couldn’t see that. And I can’t raise my kids on that kind of money. I just kept thinking of that and focusing on what I had to do. I had to raise hell about my hands. I had to overtalk management, because they would try to talk you into thinking that you don’t even hurt, that you’re just imagining.

It got worse when I went to night shift. I couldn’t open my car door or turn on the ignition with my right hand. Sometimes it was so bad, I would get up, shower, and get out of here and my hands would still be asleep. I’d hold this right hand up on the steering wheel and shift the gears with my left hand.

When I got to work, I’d get my hand bandaged. You almost had to stand in line and wait to get into the nurse’s station to wrap your hands with Ace bandages. Some women would take big bundles home and wrap their hands on the way to work. Some would buy them from stores. There are very, very few people that I know on the eviscerating line that don’t have a problem with their hands.

The nurse at this time was a man. And he gave me a hard time. And I gave it right back. He told me one night, “Why don’t you just quit?” And I said, “Why don’t you just marry me and take care of me.” He said, “You think you’re so smart and cute.” And I said, “Man, you don’t know horseshit about me.”

Well, he reported that to personnel. He said I was rude and obnoxious. And they called me into Bill Copeland’s office, plant manager, and they had three or four plant supervisors there. And they told me what they were going to do, and what I had to do. It was like they thought they were the sperm that I came from. They actually feel like they own you. It just made me remember, I’m living in the days of slavery all over again. They just took me out of the field and put me in a building.

* * *

The next morning, Cindy Arnold and Beulah Sharpe came knocking at my door. I saw this white woman and Black woman, and I thought they’re selling insurance. I didn’t want to listen to them, but I wasn’t rude so I invited them in. Cindy told me about the Center for Women’s Economic Alternatives, and talked about my rights. They had heard about what I said to the nurse — it got around real fast, everybody in the plant knew about it!

Cindy said that I had the right to file for workers’ compensation and the right to go to my family doctor. So I went back to Perdue and I said, “I need a workers’ compensation claim to take to my doctor.” Bill Copeland said, “We have to make an appointment for the doctor. You don’t need to do anything but get your body over there.” I said, “Wow, this white woman must know some stuff.” He had totally changed. Later that night — at 3 a.m. — he told me I had an appointment to see a doctor in Greenville the next day. So I knew things had changed.

I went to that doctor, he checked my hands, and I went back two days later for nerve tests. He diagnosed me with carpal tunnel syndrome. He put a splint on my hand and told me to wear it for six weeks and it should strengthen my hand. I was still working on the line and the metal in the splint kept pinching my hand. Bill Copeland wouldn’t listen to me, so I went back to the doctor. He wrote a letter saying I should be put on light duty. I was put on the salvage department, and I worked there until it was time to report back to the doctor.

He referred me to another doctor, in Little Washington, and he told me I needed surgery on my hand. I thought it would help but it actually worsened. Now I suffer from a different set of problems — severe muscle cramps, bad throbbing pain in the muscle by my thumb, numbness in my fingers, pain shooting up my arm.

When I went back for my last visit, the doctor said, “You have equal strength in both hands.” I said, “But I had more strength in my right hand.” He says, “They told me you were a troublemaker.” I said, “Doctor, I can’t order parts from Sears. All of these parts came with my body, and they’re not replaceable.” He told me the strength would eventually come back even though he didn’t do any nerve tests for the deterioration or anything. He told me I was able to work.

I said he was crazy. I never went back to work after that. I knew that if I had gone back, something would have happened and I would have lost my self control and I would have hurt someone. Because I totally felt that Perdue hurt me intentionally. I felt that there was something that could have been done. The abuse that people at Perdue showed me when I went to them with my problem was unbelievable. And their definition of “light duty” was just stupid. I just think they are unsympathetic people that want to be the slave drivers. They like to feel like “this is my block of niggers and I’m going to whip them into line.” Even when Black men come into what little control or power they have at Perdue, they become oppressive. They get the whipping style, too. And I understand that. They want to keep those positions because it makes their life a little easier. And that’s bad.

Several times I stood on the line and said, “If this man says one more damn thing to me, I’m going to stick this knife in him.” That’s how bad it was. You actually felt like killing someone. Women shouldn’t have to work under those conditions, regardless of where it is.

* * *

I really want to be able to do something for Black women. To help them share their stories so they don’t have to feel all alone, all pressed and stressed out. Let them see that there are other women out here who got beat up, who got put out of their house, who were abused at work. Let them know that there’s someone out here that cares, that will offer support.

I feel what women feel. I know how hard it was — and still is — trying to overcome obstacles that seem to just block your whole path, your whole view. You feel so limited, so afraid.

There is so much fear at Perdue. We were passing out leaflets for the hand clinic, and I heard women say, “Aren’t you scared that the Klan is going to bomb your house.” Or, “Would you tell my story, but not use my name?” They don’t want to lose that job. Or face harassment from Perdue.

One way to deal with that fear is to share stories, and know that it’s okay to be afraid, frightened. It was real intimidating to go to a bunch of white men and say, “I’ve got this problem and your job caused it.” I was scared half to death to walk into this white man’s office that has what I consider to be the keys to Heaven and Hell in his hands.

I go back, because I was raised in the church, to the 23rd Psalm: “Yea though I walk through the shadow of death I will fear no evil, for Thou art with me.” I’ve tried to keep that in focus, that the Lord will be there to provide. I’ve wanted things I couldn’t get, but I’ve never been hungry.

Even if you don’t have a religious view, you can keep a positive dream in view. That’s how books I would read about other women’s stories would really motivate me. Like Sojourner Truth, her life and her sayings. And Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream.” That just stuck in my mind. I have a dream, and now I have to set my goals and objective. I don’t want to settle for what I have caused my life to deal to me. I don’t want to wallow in self-pity. I want to get up and get out and do something, and become this important member of society.

I can’t honestly say that I’m ready to die for the cause of educating and organizing Perdue workers. But I think I am willing to die for the cause of feeling free and having the sense of helping women find freedom. If I can educate this woman about carpal tunnel syndrome and workers’ compensation, and even if she goes back into the plant, at least she knows. She’s free from not knowing; that helps her be free.

I can’t just tell a woman to step out like I did. I can show her the options and get the facts and figures together. I’ll try to steer her in the right direction, but I won’t do all the work for her. She has to take the steps for herself.

That’s one thing the Center imposed on me. “You take on this leadership position. You do this, this and this for yourself.” So I was really educated about the power that anybody has, even low-income women. I found out that if you can talk, you have a lot of power. You can get your message across, open the lines of communication and use them for yourself. I can’t impose my values on someone, but I do want to help people before they get to the breaking point.

This article is republished as part of Poultry and Pandemic: Meat Industry Workers and COVID-19, a months-long investigative series about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on Southern meat industry workers. It is published in conjunction with a reported essay by Olivia Paschal on the poultry industry since 1989, and a new interview with organizer Magaly Licolli of the Arkansas workers’ justice group Venceremos.

Our hope is that these authors and their works may reveal that sliver of light, so that you can move toward a freedom from that which has been holding you captive.

Many of her poems model the courage it takes to shed expectations and worry, while concurrently accepting the reality of living in an imperfect society.

Undersong:
To be free from societal expectations for our bodies – “Black & Fat & Perfect”
To be free from worrying about our children’s safety – “Mother’s Day”

Black & Fat & Perfect
by Crystal Wilkinson

He knows there is truth in silence,
in the stillness of perfect black,
perfect balance-bliss from the kiss
of ancient chants. They are patient
as the clouds of dust in the corners-
remnants of the sloughing of old skins
reborn in the us of them. Round tree to bark back
they lie in moonlight & haze till day breaks
& the dust floats into the light above them
a magical veil to cover their faces
a balm to heal all wounds.
Light dances in the window
& the work of morning begins.
He brews the coffee. She churns the sausage.
He scoops her waist from behind,
cups the girth of her belly & she is black & fat
& perfect in his capable, warm hands.

Mother’s Day
by Crystal Wilkinson

Last night
i dreamed
my son joined a gang
A gang
one million strong

This gang
these brothers
spoke Swahili
Spanish
& street talk

& nobody was afraid

This gang walked around
in broad daylight
& after midnight
dreadlocked
cornrowed
hair kinky crazy

& nobody pointed their pistols

This gang
they wore kente durags
around their foreheads
cowries around their necks
didn’t take no shit

& nobody was afraid

This gang
one million strong
These sons
were intelligent
educable
like they always been

& nobody said they were not able

This gang
they were the future
doctors
lawyers
teachers
poets
all about the business
of being correct

& nobody was afraid

This gang
they walked the streets
in great numbers

& nobody cuddled their purses

This gang
they stood up
& spoke up
when justice showed
its true colors

& the swat team didn’t come

This gang
they went to schools
where no teachers made them feel
worth less or like criminals

& nobody cried rape

This gang
they praised god
their way
& remembered ancestors
in old as time ceremonies

& nobody was afraid

They
beat drums
They beat drums
& beat drums

& nobody was afraid

This gang
sang their
warrior songs
baritone voices
stirring all those
with ears bent

& nobody was afraid

Last night
i dreamed
by son joined a gang
a gang
one million strong

This morning
i woke up
said a prayer
& prepared him
for another day
in fayette county public schools

& was very much afraid

Really Becoming America
By North Carolina Black Alliance staff

A NATION ON THE VERGE OF BECOMING

Increased attacks on voting rights, ramped up gerrymandering, the January 6th insurrection, and the endless stream of videos of unarmed Black and Brown men and women killed in unjustified police shootings make us question who and what America is.

A common sentiment is that these assaults are merely an unmasking of the systemic racism and oppression that has always existed beneath our nation’s surface.

The North Carolina Black Alliance views these upheavals not simply as the unmasking of the real America, but as yet another cycle in the struggle that has existed since the genesis of the movement for Black freedom and equality. It is the struggle to determine whether our nation will be one that is inclusive with the same rights applied to all its people, or one that is exclusionary with a privileged group having all the rights, and others tiered below.

This battle to determine our nation’s character is evident in that historically every advance that African Americans have made in the fight towards full and equal representation in the land of our birth, has been followed by a well-orchestrated and virulent rebuke of that advance.

The current Congress’ failure to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) and the Freedom to Vote Act (FVA) is the latest iteration in that struggle.

The JLVRAA would undo the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that occurred under the 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Decision. That decision removed key voting rights protections applied to seven southern states with a history of voting rights discrimination.

As a result of the Shelby Decision, according to And Still I Vote, “As of July 22, 2021, state lawmakers have introduced more than 400 bills and enacted 30 laws that create barriers to voters’ freedom to vote in 48 states.”

The Freedom to Vote Act would legislate even further voting rights protections. It would: make Election Day a national holiday; allow all states to have early voting for two weeks before Election Day, including nights and weekends; allow ‘No Excuses needed’ voting by mail, and same day voter registration; and outlaw partisan gerrymandering.

A VICIOUS CYCLE

The protections afforded by both measures are what one would expect in a democracy. Failure to pass them reinforces the belief that our nation will never advance beyond its legacy of slavery, inequity, and discrimination. The cumulative weight of these obstructions is disheartening, but the North Carolina Black Alliance is mindful of the fact that the wave of white nationalism sweeping the country, and the efforts to dismantle voting rights, like previous discriminatory measures, can, and will be, defeated.

For before the current proposed voting rights legislations and the historic 1965 Voting Rights Act there was the 15th Amendment of 1870 that gave African American men the right to vote—though very few were able to exercise it given the racism of the times—and the Civil Rights Act of 1875 that prohibited discrimination in public places. (Women did not yet have the vote.)

These laws—passed during a brief period (1865-1877) following slavery when African Americans were afforded some measure of protection under federal law—were soon subject to a forceful pushback. For just as African Americans began to make inroads 
into American society a wave of Jim Crow laws swept the country, with the rapid implementation of practices designed to intimidate and prevent them from exercising their rights as citizens.

Laws like the October 1883 U.S. Supreme Court ruling decreed the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, while 1896’s Plessy versus Ferguson established the practice of ‘Separate but Equal.”

These Jim Crow-isms would continue their surge well into the 1960s and the birth of the Civil Rights movement. And with their growth, so too did the Civil Rights Movement become more vocal, and its use of mass protest more visible. (Jim Crow was a racial slur applied to Blacks and its laws segregated Blacks from Whites. The Jim Crow period lasted from 1877-1968.)

CIVIL RIGHTS & THE 1960s

The Sixties produced landmark civil rights legislation—namely the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964, the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968—but it is also responsible for mass agitation on a scale previously unseen, and some of the bloodiest moments in America. The assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers in 1963; the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four young African American girls; the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in New York; and the 1968 assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, some two months apart, mark this period.

The CRA outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; the VRA expanded the voting rights protections of the 15th Amendment and prohibited racially discriminatory voting practices like the poll tax and literacy tests; and the FHA made it “unlawful to refuse to sell, rent, or negotiate with any person because of that person’s background.”

These acts opened the doors of equality, but their passage was preceded by massive nonviolent social protest, including marches, sit-ins, and boycotts. The protests were in turn met by violent Jim Crow terror tactics bent on subjugating African Americans.

MASS AGITATION AND RESULTS

What has linked every civil right gain through the years, and enabled us to overcome racist practices and discrimination, has been strategic, organized movement led by African Americans and formed through collaborations of community activists, interdenominational faith leaders, and ordinary Americans of every race and background. This extends from the early Civil Rights Movement with Frederick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, and the Abolitionists, to Dr. King, Fannie Lou Hamer, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

BLACK LIVES MATTER

The most recent example of this is in the impact of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) Movement on building global awareness of police brutality against Black and Brown people and the disparate treatment accorded White Americans and People of Color.

George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rashard Brooks, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Jordan Edwards, Botham Jean, Adam Toledo, Daunte Wright.

These names form a tapestry of death and would register as anonymous individuals had it not been for the Black Lives Matter Movement creating massive social protests demanding police accountability.

BLM engaged individuals of all races, genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds. As television had broadcast the attack dogs, fire hoses, and baton wielding police to the world during the Civil Rights Movement of the Sixties, so BLM used social media and images from cell phone videos and police cams to highlight the reality of Black lives.

The result? More police officers have been held accountable for the shooting and killing of unarmed individuals of color

THE NORTH CAROLINA BLACK ALLIANCE

The North Carolina Black Alliance is grounded in this history. We recognize that the cycle of progress and regress has been here for as long as the fight for African American equality has existed. We know, too, that the barriers to justice can be overcome with the strategic organization of resources, partnerships, and community.

Our Alliance was formed 22 years ago by a coalition of Black state legislators, county commissioners, school board members, and municipal elected officials working to address inequity and injustice and empower communities of color. Our mission is to create systemic change by strengthening the network of elected officials representing communities of color throughout the state and collaborating with progressive, grassroot networks on intersecting issues. These issues include voting rights, gerrymandering, criminal justice reform, environmental justice, health and wellness, economic development, and education.

Led by Executive Director Courtney Crowder, NCBA exists to combat systemic violence against communities of color, whether that violence takes the form of police brutality, the suppression of voting rights, or the disproportionate location of environmentally hazardous facilities in low-income areas and communities of color. Advance North Carolina, led by Executive Director Marcus Bass, is our voter education and mobilization arm.

OUR PRIORITIES RIGHT NOW

COVID-19 – A PERFECT STORM OF OPPRESSION:

COVID-19 laid bare the deep inequities in our nation. Early on the pandemic revealed the glaring disparities in healthcare, education, wages, and access to technology. Black and Brown people got sicker and died at higher rates than our White neighbors. More children of color lacked access to the internet, high speed connections, and other educational supports; and individuals of color were over-represented in high-exposure service industry jobs, more prone to getting ill, and more likely to suffer income and employment losses. It is what we refer to as a perfect storm of oppression.

Gen Z:

Young Advance North Carolina members staying safe with COVID-19 masks while getting our the vote in 2020.
Since March 2020, NCBA has taken proactive steps to educate our community about vaccine safety, testing locations, and overall safety measures aimed at stopping the spread of the virus.
COVID-19 has shown that we cannot afford any more losses of our political power. In real world terms, lack of representation leaves us defenseless, making us the last to get access to vaccinations, proper healthcare, sufficient doctors, and hospital beds.

RACIAL GERRYMANDERING AND THE ELIMINATION OF BLACK DISTRICTS

Earlier this month, the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled the latest congressional maps unconstitutional. The ruling required the state legislature to redraw and submit new maps by February 18th, 2022. NCBA has been active in calling for a redrawing and will continue to work with our partners to ensure that the final maps are truly representative of North Carolina’s Black and Brown communities.

Analysis has shown that the maps were racially gerrymandered to eliminate retiring Rep. G.K. Butterfield’s district and dilute the voting power of North Carolina’s Black and Brown communities. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, using the discredited map Republicans could have captured 11 of the 14 existing seats, leaving Democrats with only three. Republicans currently have 8 seats to Democrats 5.

A January 2022 report by the Center, titled Redistricting: A Mid-Cycle Assessment, found that “The map, moreover, achieves its partisan skew with a shocking targeting of Black political power, making the seat of one of the two Black members of the state’s congressional delegation much less likely to elect a minority-preferred candidate. As a result, a state that is one-fifth Black could have only a single Black member of the U.S. House come next January.”

With the approaching mid-term election the stakes are extraordinarily high. An additional congressional district would create an opportunity to expand representation and combat the increasing threat posed by a Republican party that is ultra-conservative, racially motivated and committed to manipulating voting maps to obstruct the electoral power of a growing Black and Brown populous.

THE URGENCY OF THIS MOMENT

NCBA recognizes the urgent need in this moment to prevent the dismantling of Representative Butterfield’s district and protect Black and Brown political power.
We have answered this challenge. Through our Code Red Redistricting program, in addition to voter education, we are employing our resources to attack this threat from multiple angles, including providing our communities with PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) for voting, encouraging absentee balloting, and assisting students at North Carolina’s ten Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to register and vote.

INJUSTICE IN OUR WATER

Environmental Justice is a priority issue for NCBA and earlier this month, joining with five other organizations, we resumed a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requiring that more testing be done on the health effects of PFAs (Per -and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) that have been dumped in the Cape Fear River for decades. The river provides drinking water to the homes of two hundred fifty thousand North Carolinians, many of them Black, Brown, and low-income, and there is concern about how they may have been affected. Environmental justice is fundamental to good health, the ability to work, and the capacity to learn and grow. Despite this we know that often our communities are exhausted from fighting too many battles individually. The cumulative weight of oppression is one of its most effective tools for preventing change. NCBA understands this. And it is why we know that the collective strength of our collaborations is where our community’s power lies. Working together with our partner networks we will continue the fight to protect our community and ensure it has clean water.

NCBA is on the ground in our communities 365 days a year. We know how they are being impacted. It is because of this that we utilize policy and activism to ensure the protection of fundamental rights, but we also help individuals access resources through our network of attorneys, elected officials, and community and faith leaders.

‘OTHERING’ – ‘AND AIN’T I AMERICAN?’

 “The concern is misplaced, because if you look at the statistics, African American 
voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.”
 — Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.)

Alleged lapses in speech and other attempts at ‘othering’ African Americans cannot separate us from our citizenship. Stigmatizing Mexican immigrants as rapists and Black and Brown skin as innately threatening does not erase the history of our contribution to building this country. Our blood, sweat and tears have been laid in the foundation of this nation. It traverses its railroads, highways, and interstates. Our labor created the industries that power this land. It is the price we have paid for full citizenship and inclusion

A WIN FOR ONE, A WIN FOR ALL

The advancement of equality and justice for Black and Brown people is not a zero-sum game. When communities of color advance, it does not mean that someone else loses. Throughout the history of the Civil Rights movement, legislation that has strengthened equal rights and fought discrimination in education, housing, employment, criminal justice, and healthcare, has benefitted all Americans.

Many of the issues confronting African Americans and other People of Color are economic and affect low-income White Americans as well. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to this commonality of interest shortly before his death during his planning for the Poor People’s Campaign. During sessions with the SCLC, he spoke of “the beginning of a new cooperation, understanding, and a determination by poor people of all colors and backgrounds to assert and win their right to a decent life and respect for their culture and dignity.” 

The efforts aimed at cementing racial animus and furthering divisions among Black, Brown, and White Americans are calculated to prevent the recognition of our common interests and the collective power that could result from joining forces.

It is why the North Carolina Black Alliance remains committed to doing the work necessary to move our community and our nation forward. The tumult of the past several years is about really becoming America. It is about the struggle to create America in the image of all its citizens, one that is inclusive, and guarantees equal rights for all, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief.

This article was originally published by Philanthropy Journal.

A Little More Than Kin
by Richard Powers

Richard Powers reaches beyond the cold calculus of kin selection to look at how human beings find kinship with nonhuman relatives and how stories can reveal our shared fate.

REFLECTING ON A possible genetic basis for altruism, the evolutionary biologist W. D. Hamilton once wrote that “in the world of our model organisms … everyone would sacrifice [his own life] when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half brothers or eight first cousins.” (A similar quip is often attributed to J. B. S. Haldane, one of history’s most quotable scientists, although Haldane never wrote it down.) The arithmetical precision of Hamilton’s formula gives it an almost comical ring, and the line sounds at least a little tongue-in-cheek. But Hamilton, one of the progenitors of the theory of kin selection, took the meme seriously enough to use it in developing what is now called Hamilton’s rule:

rB > C

According to the rule, genes tend to increase in frequency when the degree of genetic relatedness between a giver and a receiver of an altruistic act, multiplied by the benefit to the receiver, is greater than the reproductive cost to the giver.

The adaptive advantage of taking care of other organisms with whom we share a close genetic relationship makes intuitive sense. After all, many different branches of life have repeatedly converged on the strategy of parental commitment and sacrifice. Still, I’d bet that most people who aren’t geneticists would assume that Hamilton’s “world of model organisms” is exactly that: an abstract template that real living things will ignore, challenge, or modify in countless creative and surprising ways.

No matter how valid the still-controversial ideas of kin selection might turn out to be, they possess a strange beauty that I find irresistible. In particular, I confess that Hamilton’s rule—with its ingenuity, urgency, and rigor—brings out in me an entirely useless feeling of love for a species that is compelled to discover a mathematical underpinning for the uses of that feeling.

Human beings are recent upstarts in the game of life, and only a few generations separate any two of us from a common ancestor. In fact, given that life on Earth preserves at least a couple of hundred legacy genes across all of creation, the genetic relatedness between any two living organisms is narrower than most of us suspect. Any enterprising geneticist should be able to calculate the degree of genetic kinship between me and a band of endangered eastern gorillas. That number, run through Hamilton’s formula for sacrifice, would then compute how many gorillas (if there are enough of them remaining) a model organism like myself should feel compelled to lay down my life for, on genetic logic alone. Exact numbers for other genetically sensible sacrifices might be calculated for lemurs, leopards, lichens, or linden trees. Or, for that matter, vipers, viburnums, and violet ground beetles. Given the high percentage of genes that all eukaryotic cells share, the sacrificial thresholds might be surprisingly, uncomfortably low.

Of course, simple genetic kinship will never provide anyone’s ultimate math for tying his or her fate to another’s. No one ever got Hutus and Tutsis to lay down their arms and broaden their group loyalty by appealing to their shared genes—let alone all of humanity and the countless species we are exterminating. But the scope of perceived kinship does seem to grow in proportion to the threats from outside. Enemies thrown together in a hostile place, depending on each other to survive: it’s a perennially popular story. If bizarre, predatory creatures erupted from underneath the miles-thick crust of ice on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and headed toward Earth’s storehouses of usable energy, the same species that has precipitated the loss of half of Earth’s large animals since 1970 would surely sacrifice almost anything to save the last of carbon-based life.

I myself have four siblings, whom I really should call more often. But God help me, when I first came across Hamilton’s rule, I could not help myself thinking, by another terrible calculus that I can’t blame on natural selection, Well, yes, lay down my life, perhaps … but for which two? My knee-jerk fecklessness, though, contrasts with those countless people who, under fire, have given their lives without a moment’s hesitation to save others with whom they share no close blood ties. People die willingly for spouses and brothers- and sisters-in-law, for people in their town, for their country, for strangers in an improvised clan that exists nowhere else but the mind.

Here’s the astonishing thing about humans: people are always willing to lay down their lives on behalf of far fewer shared genes than any mathematics dictates. When a person scrambles up an ancient redwood that is about to be cut down, she is effectively declaring, “If you want to kill it, you’ll have to kill me, too.” Certainly there’s a game of cultural chicken out there, a reliance on the sanctity of human life that almost every human shares. But such an action also stands ready to assert the remarkable equation: my life for this tree’s. There are humans who can see cousins in creatures where other people see only otherness.

The Gospel of John puts forward a very different take on Hamilton’s rule for meaningful sacrifice: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Perhaps most of the kinship we ever feel is more intuited than inherited. Perhaps genes aren’t the only thing that we’ve been shaped to try and save. Maybe altruism evolves to recognize affinity, joint purpose, shared values. Maybe nothing elicits a sense of relatedness more deeply than feeling our dependence on other living things. A predator depends entirely on its prey; that, too, is a kind of blood bond.

Conscious creatures have an extraordinary capacity to form attachments without regard to the cost to their own individual fitness. Kinship is the ability to see my fate in theirs, even when the family resemblance is largely a leap of faith. This impulse toward expensive, even disastrous acts of identification—call it love—may be merely an epiphenomenon, a fluke spin-off of runaway kin selection misdirected into bonds with no apparent adaptive advantage, or perhaps even a net loss.

Or it may be that our capacity to will ourselves into kinship with seemingly remote creatures is in fact an exaptation: something that natural processes could never have selected for but that now (as with so many other co-opted genetic processes) presents altogether new opportunities for thriving. It seems to me that this ability to see our fortune contained in the fortune of others, a kinship based not on relatedness but on common cause, may be the one feature of self-awareness capable of saving our species from all the other potent (and potentially fatal) adaptations that evolution has endowed us with.

The ability to sacrifice self on behalf of the stability of an entire ecosystem would surely have adaptive advantage; few geneticists would disagree. But fewer would believe that natural selection alone has any possible mechanism by which to shape such a trait. That’s where consciousness and fiction come in. To move from genetic kin selection to cultural selection, and from cultural selection to compassion for the more-than-human, a person must be driven by a calculus beyond “fitness.” Hamilton’s rule, applied to the messy domain of human social relations, gives way to the idea of nurture kinship, in which community tends to be strengthened and sustained when the perceived kinship between nurturer and nurtured yields more to the community than it costs the nurturer to give. Blood ties give way to proxy relations and fictive kinship—kinship grounded in shared place, shared practices, and shared narratives, both measurable and imaginary.

Can love, in its unaccountable weirdness, hope to overcome a culture of individualism built on denying all our millions of kinships and dependencies? That is our central drama now.

I am a novelist. All day long, I try to inhabit the hearts and souls of people who have never existed in the hopes that existing people might find, in these made-up lives, fictive kin who resemble their friends and provisional families in that realm of consensual fiction that we call the real world. In my fiction, kinship forms through conflict. Through the play of dramatic tension between seemingly inimical values, my characters come to recognize the keys to themselves that others hold.

Secret kinship with the Other—even with the ultimate enemy—is the lifeblood of fiction. (Surely you had to suspect, with a name like Darth Vader, a coefficient of genetic relationship hiding somewhere in the closet?) Leslie Fiedler once made the case that a great number of the canonical works of American literature have involved a plot in which a white person and a nonwhite person, thrown together in emergency, develop mutual dependence. Fiction challenges the barrier between “us” and “them.” It puts relations through the wringer, mangles them, and leaves the idea of family flattened but so much larger.

We’re now in the middle of a family emergency that will test all family ties. Only kin, and lots of it, from every corner of creation will help us much in the terrible years to come. We will need tales of forgiveness and surprise recollection, tales in which the humans and the nonhumans each hold half a locket. Only stories will help us to rejoin human to humility to humus, through their shared root. (The root that we’re looking for here is dhghem: Earth.) Kinship is the recognition of shared fate and intersecting purposes. It is the discovery that the more I give to you, the more I have. Natural selection has launched all separate organisms on a single, vast experiment, and kinship glimpses the multitudes contained in every individual organism. It knows how everything that gives deepest purpose and meaning to any life is being made and nurtured by other creatures.

Can love, in its unaccountable weirdness, hope to overcome a culture of individualism built on denying all our millions of kinships and dependencies? That is our central drama now. It’s the future’s one inescapable story, and we are the characters who will steer that conflict to its denouement.

To find the stories that we need, we would do well to look to the kinship of trees. Trees signal one another through the air, sharing an immune system that can stretch across miles. They trade sugars and secondary metabolites underground, through fungal intermediaries, sustaining one another even across the species barrier. But maybe such communal existence shouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, everything in an ecosystem is in mutual give-and-take with everything else around it. For every act of competition out there, there are several acts of cooperation. In the Buddha’s words: A tree is a wondrous thing that shelters, feeds, and protects all living things. It even offers shade to the axe-men who destroy it. Incidentally, the same man once said: The self is a house on fire. Get out while you can.

I write this on the morning after the forty-fifth president of the United States, seeking power in the very opposite of kinship, asked from onstage in front of an adoring crowd, “Who do you like more, the country or Hispanics?” A few days ago, his administration announced its intention to roll back the Endangered Species Act. On such a morning, I can’t help but feel that we are so lost. Our capacity for salvation through sacrifice seems to be shrinking, even as catastrophe draws near.

But we make the leap in ones and twos, helping each other across like so many fictive siblings in one great adopted clan. The key is to recall how we each succeed by virtue of endless others, and that none of us will end until we all do.
Hamilton himself—he whose equation compels any life to sacrifice itself for its eight first cousins—knew this more than most of us. In an essay called “My Intended Burial and Why,” he writes:

I will leave a sum in my last will for my body to be carried to Brazil and to these forests … and this great Coprophanaeus beetle will bury me. They will enter, will bury, will live on my flesh; and in the shape of their children and mine, I will escape death. No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.1

To be many—what more does kinship strive for? To live on in some distant branch of the spreading experiment, even in the buzzing urgency of a corpse-eating beetle: now that is how to make a common cause. In the shape of their children and mine—a person could find real family, out there. The math seems sound to me, and it makes a magnificent story. For to steal from that most quotable scientist J. B. S. Haldane: God Itself has an inordinate fondness for both beetles and stars.

ENDNOTES
1. W. D. Hamilton, “My Intended Burial and Why,” Ethology Ecology and Evolution 12, no. 2 (2000): 111–22.

This essay published by Emergence Magazine is an excerpt from Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations—a five-volume collection edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer. 

Resting on and for the Earth

Interview By Brontë Valez
Photographs and Styling by Denisse Ariana Pérez

So many of us are worker bees, trapped in a capitalist 9-to-5 grind mindset that leaves us sleep-deprived, exhausted, and unable to imagine. Nap bishop Tricia Hersey, founder of the Nap Ministry, sees rest as a radical act of resistance and decolonization—particularly for Black people, whose rest has been and continues to be disrupted by white supremacy. Hersey speaks with brontë velez, a founding member of Lead to Life, about how to envision a new way of living that centers rest and liberation.

TRICIA HERSEY

You were the first person who came to my mind when Atmos reached out about this opportunity to talk about decolonizing, rest, and all these ideas around climate and environment—and really what capitalism is doing to the Earth. I think it’s so skipped over. Everything goes back to decolonizing in so many ways, but we skip over it for these quick tips. I always am trying to go back to the idea of decolonizing. This is a long, meticulous process, an unraveling for life.

BRONTË VELEZ

I’ve been thinking about this concept of eschatology—the theology of the end times and of death and theology at the end of capitalism—which I think your scholarship and your practice is at the center of. You embody your theology through rest as a praxis. It’s not even just like you’re bringing theory; you’re bringing humor, you’re bringing memetics, you’re bringing culture. You’re bringing performance in ministry. I’m curious what you think our dreams have to do with climate collapse and what you think our dreams have to offer to this moment?

TRICIA

That’s such a great question because that is the center of the work: this idea around a secretive, a metaphorical-literal dream space. I have uplifted that from the beginnings, when I started the work. The work began with me deep, deep in ancestor reverence and ancestor communication. It started there along with the ancestors, reading the slave narratives, working in archives, looking at photos, and really deeply going in and out of literal dream states where I felt like I was communicating with my ancestors. I would wake up in this unconscious state—between that liminal space of being awake and being asleep—and be having visions of my grandmother and visions of cotton fields and people laying down.

When you’re an archivist and you’re working in archives, it can be very overwhelming. When I first started working in them, one of the main archivists who I was training under was telling me that there will be many times when you’ll need to get up and you may get overwhelmed by the fact that you’re touching and you’re engaging with these objects that are real objects that people have held. They hold energy. And I was like, “I’m waiting for that, I want that. Overwhelm me.” I was here in Georgia holding documents that were slips of paper that would have a sale price of bodies—of Black bodies—and it was $20. Reading the slave narratives, thinking about how they were literal human machines—20 hour days. Uncovering all of this really traumatic cultural trauma and then taking a nap with it. Laying down and really uplifting my grandmother.

What came to me is that our dream space has been stolen, that there has been a theft, a complete theft. What could have happened if our ancestors had a space to rest, if they were allowed to dream. They may have received downloads from their ancestors and from God to say, “Go right, not left, and you will be free. Do this and you won’t be in slavery anymore. The button to that thing is here.” You know? These downloads that could have been given to us. Could our freedom have come quicker? I’m thinking about Harriet Tubman and her prophetic dreams, of waking up and saying, “My people are free.”

I think when we miss out on that dream space, we’re literally missing out on very important information, very important downloads and knowledge that are going to be for our benefit. I really literally believe that our path to our liberation, to really getting to the next dimension, is in dreams. It’s there. The information is waiting for us. The ancestors are like, “I wish they would just stop for a minute and lay down because I got the word for them.” They’re looking at us like grind machines and saying, “If they would lay down for a moment, I’m ready to come in through that dream space, that ancestral liminal space. I got a word, but I can’t give it to them in this dimension.” You know? If rest is another dimension, which I think it is, I think the more we go there, the more we’re going to wake up. The information is there for us.

BRONTË

Wow. I have goosebumps all over my body. This is liberation.

TRICIA

People think it’s just some fuzzy little luxury wellness idea, and they literally are not understanding that when you go there, it’s a space of deep imagination, deep generative freedom for us. I believe that the powers-that-be don’t want us rested, they don’t want the Earth rested, they don’t want us as bees rested—because they know. They know that if those folk rest enough, they’re going to figure it all out. They’re going to figure it all out and overturn them and the entire system. Keep them numb, keep them zombie, keep them on the clock. Keep them in a machine state. Continue to degrade their divinity. Because once they know they’re divine, they will not deal with a lot of this shit. So, I think that when I say sleep helps you wake up—it does help you wake up to the fact of who the fuck you are. And they don’t want us to know that.

Now, we even have people who feel so guilty for resting. Now, you have people who are collaborating with corporations so that the corporations can offer rest for you. The revolution will not be given to us by corporations. You know what I’m saying? The revolution will not be televised, nor will it be a collaboration with a corporation. They got to go, too. You know what I’m saying?

These odd ways in which we think we’re going to get our freedom. These odd ways of colonizing our own selves, of being colonized so deeply. When we talk about decolonization, we have to look at ourselves and understand we’ve been trained under the same curriculum, so we are colonizers as well. I think the pandemic has shown me great grief, great evidence and observation that we are literally at critical mass—and that’s why I keep telling people, “This is not about a soft, fluffy idea around just laying down. This is not some little fun, little cute thing. This is literally life or death.” It’s the matter of whether or not we’re going to stop and listen and slow down and reclaim our bodies and reclaim the Earth and honor ourselves and honor the Earth. We’re only going to be able to do that by slowing down. Rest is really literally going to be the foundation to build this new world. If we don’t catch that, if we don’t get that—not just in a meme and not just retweeting some bullshit—if we don’t really catch that in our hearts and minds and spirits and in our souls, and start to meticulously see resting as a love practice that’s going to save our lives and save the world, we’re done. So, that’s why I’m so passionate about this work, because I see it from that lens of: It’s decolonizing us, and it’s going to be allowing the Earth to be free. It’s a global bond for humanity, resting is.

BRONTË

I’m going to be in conversation this week with a scholar, Tiffany King. It feels like a strong week to be in conversation with both you and her, because her book, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies has had me thinking and preparing for that interview about the “shoal.” And how, basically, Black people have been understood and have been historicized in relationship to water and these metaphors around liquid, the Atlantic, the lake. And native folks have been historicized in this relationship to land and to being displaced. So, she brings it to our relationship to the shoal, which is both land and water.

There’s this moment where she speaks about how the shoal would often be the last point before the enslaved folks were brought off to the boat or to be sold. The shoal was a site where, for a moment, the ancestors might have a moment to stand or wait. For some people, it may have been the last moment to rest your feet before you’re made to swim in shackles.

TRICIA

I believe rest is a form of resistance because it pushes back and disrupts capitalism and white supremacy. It is an active way of pushing back and disrupting these toxic systems. And it’s actually just pushing back and saying, “You can’t have me.” It’s a politics of refusal. It’s a politics of resistance. It really means something. It’s not a quick little hashtag or fun quote. This is life or death, and people need to see that. I do see this work as my life’s calling. I know my God and the ancestors have put this work there for me to be able to tap into. And I’m forever grateful if one person, if one Black person says, “You know what? I’m going to nap today and rest and not go do that.” If one Black person can begin the process, it’s going to be a pilgrimage. It’s not going to be a quick fix. It can begin as pilgrimage. Unraveling from the lies, from what they’ve been told about themselves, what they’ve been told about how much their worth is connected to what they do—if they can begin to unravel from that, I feel that my life has meaning. I feel that God and my ancestors are pleased.

I feel deeply that if one person can connect and say, “I’m off that train, I’m resting for my ancestors. I don’t care. I’m not going to be another tool for this capitalist system. I just won’t do it.” And that refusal, it makes space for others to join in and start this process. And so, I’m so grateful for that. So grateful for you.

Whatever that liberation looks like, it also means liberating the Earth from the pollutions and the poisons and things that we extract from it. And so, liberation to me is expansive. And I believe wholeheartedly that Black liberation is a balm for humanity. No one will be free until Black people are free. And so, we got to dig deep into the idea of humanity and what Black liberation has to offer the world. It is a message for our redemption. It is a message of resurrection, of a spiritual resurrection and, in a lot of ways, is a resurrection for the earth as well.

I believe rest is a form of resistance because it pushes back and disrupts capitalism and white supremacy.

TRICIA HERSEY

BRONTË

When I was in Alaska in September, I learned about the Arctic ground squirrel that sleeps for a whole seven or eight months, which felt like your kind of hibernation.

When these little beings are asleep for that long, then their neurons and the connections between them are shrinking, but then their brains are repairing after all of that decay. They have these intense growth spurts that are exponentially generating neural links that didn’t exist before they were hibernating. But when I was in Alaska, it was hot as fuck, and they are supposed to go into hibernation in the fall. And I was wondering, What’s their relationship to hibernation right now when the weather and the atmosphere and capitalism and all of this extractive industry has changed the weather and it’s changed their rhythm? I’m curious, what does it mean to not only protect our own risks but protect the land that facilitates the possibility for us to rest and for these other beings to rest who are entangled with our health? What do the Arctic ground squirrel’s hibernation practices have to do with how we get free?

TRICIA

I need a picture of this squirrel in a frame to put it in my office! This is like the muse here. I really want to be inspired and engaged with this squirrel a little more because I feel that so deep—no one is talking about the sleep science and biologically what’s going on in our bodies when we don’t rest, in conjunction with how that affects our environment and our community and our culture and everyone around us. Our bodies are their own technology in that way. And so, when you ignore your body’s need to rest, you’re deeper and deeper into violence. And so, what does it mean to have an entire culture that is sleep deprived?

They’ve already claimed it as a crisis—a public health crisis—that we are so sleep deprived. So, you have a whole culture of millions and millions of people who are not getting adequate rest, which means that they’re not tapping into spirit. They’re not tapping into empathy. They’re not tapping into any type of care for their bodies. Their brains are eroding. They’re not healing from trauma. There’s a chemical that your brain is actually bathed in when you sleep. It’s in the book Why We Sleep by Dr. Matthew Walker—he’s a neuroscientist who’s been studying sleep for a long time. And I love this book because he talks about this chemical that your brain is literally bathed in when you’re going through a full REM sleep cycle. Your brain is bathed in this chemical, and it helps you to process trauma.

Sleep helps you to forget trauma. It helps you to process it and deal with trauma. So, when I think about the trauma of our bodies and the trauma that we are under every single day, and the fact that we aren’t resting and we aren’t sleeping—we’re really killing ourselves on a biological level. Cancer and high blood pressure and diabetes all come from sleeping less than six hours a day consistently. And we’re walking around with a bunch of people who are literally sleep deprived and not able to connect with who they are. That’s a dangerous thing to have people walking the Earth and not connecting with themselves, let alone with the Earth around them. Let alone with that tree or with the water or with what’s happening in their yard. They’re not in any way connected to what’s going on with the sky.

I believe also that our lack of resting has stolen our imagination and our ability to be inventive and subversive and to imagine and to have hope. And to me, that’s true oppression.

TRICIA HERSEY

They’re just totally oblivious to the fact that this is a whole ecosystem happening within them and around them. I believe that’s why we have so much violence, so much racism, so much white supremacy, so much trauma. We’re constantly re-traumatizing ourselves and the Earth because, biologically, we’re in a state of pure sleep deprivation. I think it’s dangerous for ourselves, it’s dangerous for the Earth. And it leads to everything you’re seeing now. So, people think this is just about naps. One of our taglines is: “This is about more than naps.” I believe also that our lack of resting has stolen our imagination and our ability to be inventive and subversive and to imagine and to have hope. And to me, that’s true oppression. To me, once you have taken away a person’s ability to see their way out of a situation, to see a new way, to imagine a new world, to see something different, to invent, you pretty much have them. And I think we’re at that right now.

I have thousands of people in my inbox being like, “This sounds good and everything, but I got to work. I can’t even see how I can get 10 minutes to nap today.” If you can’t imagine how you could subversively and flexibly rest your eyes for 10 minutes, how could we ever imagine a world without police? How do we imagine a world without climate change? How do we imagine all these things where people can have justice and equality in a world where we weren’t killed by the police every day or shot in our sleep like Breonna Taylor? We can’t even imagine or get into the consciousness to be like, “You know what? I can close my eyes for 15 minutes. I can refuse. I can resist. I can say no. I can get off social media for two seconds. I can have a healthy boundary. I can refuse and resist and stop being a tool for grind culture.”

You can imagine it and do anything you want. We can imagine a new world. A new world is possible, but it’s not going to come from exhaustion.

Production and Casting Denisse Ariana Pérez,
Talent YMD, Opoku, Mooquidi, B4MBA

This interview was originally published by Atmos Magazine