Passing on . . . joy

All month I have been reading bits and pieces of Passed On: African American Mourning Stories, a memoir by noted literary scholar, Karla FC Holloway. I am a bibliophile and an academic. Consequently, many of my books are signed by their authors. My copy of Passed On is inscribed simply: “To Aisha Francis. Peace. April 2002”. Holloway's tender wish for peace hits home particularly as the nation and world reels from the midst of multiple storms. Reading this inscription alone has been both affirming and confounding in these difficult times.

I reached for Passed On--or rather it reached out to me--after almost 20 years of keeping it and it's difficult subject matter hidden on my shelf out of avoidance. Who wants to read a book about death and dying in Black communities? Yet, I turned to this book for answers after weeks of facing writer's block despite the fact that writing is my typical way of processing difficulty. This era of collective mourning of so much death from a public health crisis and from systemic racism is overwhelming. The words would not come.

Among the things on my mind making the pain too close for comfort have been the following: Breonna Taylor’s last name is also my maternal grandmother’s maiden name. The Taylors in my family are originally from Louisville, KY as well. Breonna and I could very well be related. When Amaud Aubrey was gunned down while jogging, he was a mere 4 years older than my own brother, who, like Amaud, is a Georgian through and through. George Floyd, stood as tall and strong as my own father does. I have been almost paralyzed with the thought that my father's pleas for his life could be similarly ignored for 8 mins and 46 seconds while a law enforcement officer and cowardly officer witnesses killed him. 

In this context, Passed On, which once seemed too morbid and too macabre to take in, has now become a therapeutic—if painful—source of education about the root causes of this tragic Black community narrative of death. Reading Holloway’s recounting of the white supremacist underpinnings of Black death and dying in the context of 19th and 20th-century life reminds me that we’ve been here before. Reading Holloway's text while being bombarded by daily images and reminders of Black death makes me understand why this summer’s tragedies feel at once familiar and singular. This moment is familiar because for centuries, “Black folk died in mournful collectives and in disconcerting circumstances. We died in riots and rebellions, as victims of lynchings, from executions, murders, police violence suicides, and untreated or undertreated diseases (57).” This moment is singular because the circumstance and timing of COVID-19 quarantine has meant that there is little to no escaping the historically prevalent tragic, violent, early, and often preventable ways that we die.

Striving for multiple degrees won’t save us. Running to the suburbs won’t save us. Proximity to the King’s English and mannerisms won’t save us. Remaining down and repping our ‘hoods won’t save us. Staying in “our place” won’t save us. Turning off the television and refusing to watch that 8 min and 46 second scene won't save us. What will? What gives?

I believe we are tasked with saving ourselves as we have been doing to withstand centuries of oppression. We save ourselves in many ways:

• through telling family stories of how we made it over;
• by cataloging brutal truths and histories like those that Karla Holloway shares in Passed On ;
• each time we have “the talk” with our children and loved ones;
• with shared knowledge of the proud and surviving people that we are; and
• by joining generations of ancestors who filed petitions and called out fence of protection, standing in the gap and other intercessory prayers to cover us all.

These kinds of survival skills matter. We still need them. They must carry on.

And we also need change and accountability. We need new policies that call out and call to task excessive policing in Black and Brown communities around the nation. We need more financial support from allies to advance efforts that shine sunlight into dark spaces where discrimination, racism, and white supremacy have been allowed to ferment. We need collective and individual recognition that racism is an open wound and festering sore in every single system and every single institution with which we interact on a daily basis. So let there be bold new legislation. Let there be protesting with a plan that sheds light in the darkness.

Finally, let there also be joy. Radical, life-giving and affirming joy. Both an act and an emotion, joy flies in the face of pain to combat and counterbalance what Holloway rightly names “inherited Black melancholy” born of so much oppression, physical violence, emotional trauma, and death. On this day, I am reminded that an aspect of properly mourning the loss of a loved one in Black communities--along with many others--is to share fond memories of them in better times. As I attempt to recover from my own sadness, I am doing so by looking for joy on the horizon. I join in the call of many others to claim joy as an act of resistance.

I do this by reveling in the laughter of my children, by turning my face to the rising sun for as long as I can, by spending time at shorelines as often as possible, by delving into literary and genealogical records to fortify my soul with knowledge of my people’s legacy as a way to inform "the how" of things even if I might never know "the why". As a song from my faith tradition reminds me: “This joy that I have, the world didn’t give it and the world can’t take it away.” Today, I am buttressed by joy. And I vow to pass this legacy on to my children even as I prepare them as best I can for the ways that the world will try to take their joy away.