Dreaming My Ancestors

In my dreams, sometimes my ancestors use it as a time to connect with me, to remind me of the struggles our people endured, to make me feel what they felt, for me to become alive as they were in a modern adaptation…

I sit in the room, chained to the stairs, as Erica is taken to the room across from me and beaten. Screams and grunts, tears and sweat, hot stings and burned hands. I am petrified, shaking with fear in my actual body that is asleep, but in this dream I am all too accustomed, so I sit. I sit with my head down, not wanting to experience the witness of this beating yet again. It is the 3rd time today, 3rd time in this dream that she is whipped. Somehow, the master’s wife is never satisfied with the cleanliness of the kitchen once Erica is done cooking, and so she is beaten relentlessly daily.

But this time is different. I sit chained to the stairs because I tried to make an escape this evening. I was tired of constantly taking care of children, children who weren’t mine, and I was tired of Erica being beaten. Well, we didn’t get far because just as we left, the baby woke up and alerted the master’s wife of my absence. So here I sat, for the first time awaiting my beating. See unlike Erica, I never got beat. The master’s wife hated Erica, not because Erica didn’t clean the kitchen to her liking, that’s just what she told her husband. The children I took care of were Erica’s. She had now had 3 children by master, all of which I had to raise because the master’s wife wanted her nowhere around the children. Her jealousy and rage of her husband sleeping with the slave and giving Erica 3 children, but her none, was too much to bare.

Erica was happy she didn’t have to watch the children because as much as loved them, she hated them even more. Every time she would look in their eyes, she would see her rapist eyes. The eyes that would look at her tenderly at night and with disgust during the day. Every time she saw their light skin it reminded her of her rapist body on her. Night after night, entering the sweet grace of womanhood between her legs without consent. Every time she heard them cry, it reminded her of the tears she cried at night, and the screams she quietly let go during the day.

Erica was tired too and so I figured we would make a run for it. But we didn’t get far. As we ran through the trees, trees that would one day hang with the strange fruit of our seeds; we prayed that God would guide us to safety. We prayed aloud, no longer wanting our voices to not be heard. No longer afraid to speak more than just “no master, yes master.” We prayed much too loud for slaves trying to escape. After only 10 minutes, we were on our way back to the plantation.

 Erica got her beating first, because master was saving mine for last.

As I was unchained from the stairs, I was taken outside, not to the same room Erica had been beaten in. I was taken to the stable, tied to the pole in the middle of the room and beaten. Beaten for hours, until every inch on my body was covered in welts, swollen blood clots dropping from my body like sweat, every breath of air hurting my breast with the constant movement of the chest.

I had suffered this brutal beating not for leaving, but taking master’s most prized possession, Erica.

And as the beating ending, I slid down to the ground and then I woke up.

I woke up in another nightmare of more present racism. I woke up in the dark, muddy woods. As I began to walk, only God knew where I was going, I stumbled upon a mob. And there I was; now only a spirit looking up at what my spirit felt was the great grandson of my first character. There he was, in flames, charred, pieces of skin dropping to the ground where other bodies laid. A lynch mob had taken my great grandchildren to this awful place on this night to have yet another night picnic. There, I was filled with grief. There I became the embodiment of sorrow. Where had our freedom taken us to but more enslavement? We were still enslaved by fear and this fear no longer had us as human cattle, but now as hopeless beings hanging from trees, buried in seas, and worse off than ever imaginable.

I woke up, fully awake now, in present day, in my body, as me, Brittini. But it was still a nightmare. I woke up this morning and thanked God for another day. But just as I finished my prayers, I got call after call reminding me of the enslavement of our minds now in this present day. What else but an enslaved mind would explain the still endless and senseless black on black murder? What else would explain why our black men are still the largest population in the jails and our black women have the leading numbers of new diagnosed HIV/AIDS cases in America. What else would explain why our black children are disinterested in school and unable to learn in the traditional environment of the classroom? What else would explain why still in the urban ghettos drugs, gangs, and prostitution run rampant? See Dr. King, Malcolm X, DuBois, Harold Washington, and other great black men understood the greatness that lied within our people, but also the importance of a freed mind. Our liberation can only come through the freedom of our minds, not just our bodies.

A friend sent me a text today; she works at an alternative school in the Buffalo school district as a tutor and mentor. Her observation today is just another example of how our schools perpetually keep the African American child’s mind enslaved. “The chart of what not to wear is filled with pictures of Negros, but the chart of what to wear only has one Negro. Such a sad representation and wrong message to the kids, even though they may not even be thinking about it.” They may not consciously recognize it as she does, but it adds to the negative self-image our youth grow up with of themselves.

Is this an account of a slave never told? An account of a grandmother passed on now who lived through the Jim Crow era?  Is this a random firing of the brain? I can’t say. But what I can say is that our stories should have never been lost. Every single generation should have had stories to tell and to be memorized and to be passed down to future generations. We have lost our stories here in American civilization and so our young people have no connection to the struggle of our ancestors. So if the ancestors now realize the mistake they made in not doing so then, they have chosen to do it now. In my dreams, maybe in others. We must bring our story back to life; it is the key that will liberate us and our minds.