Healing doesn’t mean the pain never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives. NotSalmon.com
I had walked in the back door of the Higgins estate many times over the past three years. I always wanted to see and name all the different colors of roses and in the winter get a clear view of the majestic snow-covered Jemez mountains after the clearing below. This couple, having been together for almost 60 years, had indeed been God’s messengers at a critical stage in my life. With my children 800 miles away, having no siblings, and few extended family members to speak of anymore, I was pretty much alone. They became my family.
Dr. Higgins and his late mother were accomplished artists and the walls in almost every room of their sprawling home and once successful dental practice location were tastefully adorned with museum quality creations from the duo. There was one painting recently displayed from the combined mother and son collection that made me suddenly stop one day. The raw and painful memory of my first serious ‘why’ as a little black 6-year-old living in a racially pathetic white world came alive again after almost 70 years. It was that trauma having remained dormant for decades, suddenly stepping out of hibernation and unable to talk to anyone about how I felt.
The painting was created from a photo the Higgins took while on a vacation trip when their children were quite young. It was of a dilapidated, inoperable, roadside park restroom sitting all alone on a stretch of the infamous Route 66. As if it were yesterday, I can still remember standing in front of a dirty, rundown restroom ironically located on Route 66 and looking just like the image in the painting.
I held my beloved mother’s hand firmly with my legs crossed as tight as they could be, and then with tears rolling down my face and warm urine running down my legs and into my favorite tennis shoes, my being became hollow and the pain excruciating. If a black went into a restroom where whites were still there, they could be reported by the car license plate and my parents later arrested. I even remember my mother’s red eyes from her tears as she pulled me away before the white mother and daughter exited. We had both been humiliated enough as she hurried to clean me up
Like so many, the uncertain and deadly pandemic baffling even the top world scientists, an irrational and dangerous racial divide and unrest, and January 6th 2021 had isolated me even more than I had been for quite some time. Good white people didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t know who to trust, who to believe. Along with my writing and consistent Divine connection keeping me sane and hopeful, I often heard from some of my former students who had a lot of unanswered ‘whys’ their parents couldn’t answer, and many educators have been told not to answer through instructional delivery.
I had become accustomed to listening to the daily silence, or occasionally viewing old shows like, “In the Heat of the Night”. It was always a reminder of white privilege mentality lasting more than four centuries, being for some a continued, sheltered, unexplainable racist mindset. I came to the realization that it was hypocritical and un-Godly for some to get on their knees and repeat the Lord’s Prayer and then stand up and not want to shake my chocolate hand. It was like malice and favor were etched in their hearts and souls.
‘They’ tend to forget that 715,000 Americans have perished in less than 2 years, we’re killing the earth, and our youth, both black and white, want to know why the Capitol insurrection had to happen. Some are wise and conscious enough to recognize the disparities and again ask why while a few turning their parents over to authorities. Think of the trauma they have endured. As in Nigeria where 70% of the population is under the age of 30, it will be the millenniums of all ethnicities and walks of life on the front lines telling the world they have had ‘enough’
Trauma takes away our body control and propels us to question our mind’s intuitiveness in making decisions. Over the past two years especially, African Americans and other BIPOC communities have sought the commonsense wisdom of unity in city leadership. That just has not happened. Perhaps the state of current affairs will change after the November elections. What has emerged, though such a long way to go, is the determination that voices would be heard, demands would be made in an organized and well-thought-out plan, and the words ‘I love you and I care about you and me” would have meaning.
Children have built-in resiliency and must be encouraged to concentrate on the positive things in their lives and what is most important. When that armor wears thin, violence and hopelessness take over. Eliminating the hurt requires responding to adverse occurrences differently so as not to re-traumatize or add additional trauma as with the young children in Tennessee being hauled off to court or watching an unarmed black man take his last breath.
The innocent deserves to feel psychologically and physically safe. They need to feel empowered and taught to embrace their strengths and their entitled humanity. Relationships in multiple venues begin the healing along with being open to diverse cultural connections and recognizing historic trauma perpetrated against people of color for generations. To Judge Peter Cahill who would never understand black trauma, I just wanted to say I never forgot the roadside rest room, that traumatic event among so many experienced in my black childhood and 30 years later happening to my own children and students. But we called upon our ancestors who are close to our Creator, and were given the Grace, the strength, and the knowledge to help us move forward by doing the work and keeping our faith.
