The Briar Patch | Transformative sunrises
- Published: December 27, 2024
“Mary Willie Johnson Durgans Willett passed away peacefully surrounded by the love of her family during a majestic sunrise on Tuesday, Dec. 18, 2018.” I’d written this line in her obituary on behalf of my family.
Grief, as it ebbs and flows over time, never truly leaves, but the in-betweens can sometimes provide an opportunity for a clearing space. Memories can suddenly appear, seemingly out of nowhere. Like recently, when I suddenly remembered that the gorgeous sunrise in which my mother left this realm, gave me a crisp, cold, sunny day hike in one of my favorite places on earth — Glen Helen Nature Preserve — with one of my dearest and oldest friends.
Since then, other memories of that day have emerged. How could I forget that she was wearing one of her favorite pairs of jammies when she transitioned — and that they were brightly colored, reminiscent of her alma mater, Spelman College “Columbia blue?”
My mother was 90 years old when she passed away. She’d survived childhood in the Jim and Jane Crow South, and the generation-defining redlining practices that have resulted in the continued suppression of economic progress for Black people in the North. Mom left Griffin, Georgia, where she was raised, for Spelman College in Atlanta, after it was suggested to my grandmother Elsie to, “get that gal out of town,” because she was too “uppity,” smart, and feisty for a negro girl. She participated in the migration of Black people from the South — in her case to Chicago — where she met my dad, an electrical engineer. When his employment-limited options meant a job at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, they then migrated to Ohio, eventually Yellow Springs, where they raised their family.
Yet, for all of that, my mother truly expressed the greatest alarm I’d ever witnessed from her about the state of our current world, when 45 was first elected in 2016. That’s when my mom announced she was ready “to go,” having had enough of this world. That was the last election she voted in.
In rereading her obit, I had not remembered that she was voted by her high school classmates “the most optimistic girl” in the senior class. I think about the times when I’d experienced her optimism in my life, combined with her almost other worldly level of grace: a lot. The levels of forgiveness and discipline it takes to live in that space is unfathomable to me still. How do I do what my mom did so well? I’ve been communing with her, with my other ancestors for answers, studying our history, gleaning how they survived all that they did, taking care not to start with the trauma of captivity, but to consider the knowledge brought to this settler colonial outpost through the minds of my people chained to one another in the underbelly of the slave ships that left Africa’s coastlines.
Switching tenses, we need those lessons now, more than ever, from all of our ancestors. We must survive this latest post-reconstruction backlash coming from the fascist and white-supremacy-leaning shift of this country, on a narrow majority of the voting populace comprising mainly evangelical Christian white men and women on Nov. 5. Elections worldwide have resulted in a far-right tilt. Our very existence as a Black people, our collective vision of a just and safe world for all people is more than just an existential threat to their supremacist ideologies.
How my mom balanced her warrior spirit with pronounced optimism is a question I ponder as the descendant of a protracted 500-year struggle for liberation. My own mother gave no ground when it came to learning. She laced hat pins along the spine of her schoolbooks — literally weaponizing them— because the white kids would shove her and other Black kids into the street, in the path of oncoming cars, when they crossed each other to attend their segregated school in her small town. Her life was literally on the line. Imagine the strategic initiative, perseverance, and resilience it takes for a kid like herself, and her peers, to protect themselves from racial terrorism on their way to school every day for years. How do you coalesce such power that will result in a victory for freedom?
I think my mother, like many of our elders, would say, “Start with your community. With your family.” My mother’s motto, which she adopted early on as a teenager, was, “Learn to live, and live to learn.” She was a passionate educator, an English teacher who taught special education. My mother loved to read literature, and on the bookshelves of our home, in no particular rhyme or reason, were books by Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Lerone Bennett Jr., James Baldwin, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange. They were often interwoven among her treasured Agatha Christie mystery novels. Although I ultimately inherited my mother’s love of reading, it wasn’t a skill that was forced on me or my siblings. My mother wasn’t always the most direct with her intentions; the resources were subtly placed for a precarious, lover-of-reading teenage girl to find — if she were looking.
My mother left this realm close to the Winter Solstice, and in the years since my mother’s transition, the Solstice has become a more pronounced marker of meaning for me. I’ve been reading more mythology books about the earth and the greater cosmos. In these forgotten stories are pathways of reconnection to the land through the still relevant themes of love, loss and birth that teach us the lessons of transformation through the seasons.
The Winter Solstice, being the longest night of the year, represents a journey through the process of death to regeneration in the form of spring. It is one of my favorite metaphors for transformation and change.
How dare we not seek to remember?
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