By JAMINNIA R. STATES
My mother told me that becoming a mother is a tremendous sacrifice. That you have to give up everything to be a good mom. Your own hopes, your own dreams, your own needs are now nullified, unimportant. Your primary responsibility is the new life you brought forth. Watching her I saw that she lived it. She worked jobs she didn’t like. When finances would allow, she chose to stay home, to raise us. She spent hours of her “free time” in the grocery store, negotiated finances and parenting with my father, stayed with him when less tolerant and less dedicated women would have left. On the toughest of days, I watched her skip dinner so that all three of her children could have enough to eat. I noticed, and I wondered, “How many times has she done this without my noticing?”
I grew up observing this woman give up her life so that I could be fulfilled in mine. Sometimes, I was disgusted; self-righteous in my youth. Idealism untempered by the realism that only comes with life experience. Most times, I admired her, but I also became fearful. Watching my mother and feeling frustrated by her and for her, I learned that I was less tolerant, and not nearly as willing to be dedicated; certainly not in a self-sacrificial kind of way. At age 13, I learned that self-sacrifice will kill you. (Another story for another day.) That’s probably the point. There were days in which my mother’s sadness, her emptiness from pouring into all of us was palpable. Lots of days spent in pajamas, lots of scheduled TV. Her friendships fell away. One by one, she and the women in her life moved away from each other in physical space and lost track of years and years of time in between phone calls. Birthday and holiday cards became more and more sparse. My mother had a flip phone until 2009 and never checks her email. If chain emails weren’t going to keep them together, Facebook was not going to be able to reunite my mother with her lost friends.
Instead, she threw herself into motherhood. Into creating memories with her children and her husband. Celebrating our successes and guiding us through our tribulations the best she could.
Her heart broke again and again as I went to college (500 miles away), graduated, got a teaching job, got a car, and moved into my first apartment (900 miles away). She threw the word “abandoned” around too loosely to not mean it. My mother felt that I had abandoned her by growing up. That’s a heartbreak trauma—I shared her body for 9 months, her home for 18 years more. And I left. Happily. My worst break-up couldn’t compare. Apples. Potatoes.
The real root of her struggle with empty nest syndrome was that my mother was suddenly alone with herself in a way that she had not been in over 25 years. She had her husband—my father—but she was a stay-at-home mom with no one to mother. She told me at some point in my teen years that she had forgotten who she was before she was a wife and a mother at age 24 and 25.
“Imagine not knowing what made you you outside of being a mom and a wife,” I thought to myself. I imagined not knowing what music you like, what hobbies and passions light your fire. Not knowing how to socialize with people your own age. Suddenly, you emerge from a time capsule to find that the world changed without you, and everything you liked, loved, and loathed has become unfathomable or unrecognizable and “uncool.” If coolness mattered to you. And last you checked, some 25 odd years ago, when you were a Bright Young Thing, it did. You grew up without evolving.
I decided there were other ways to live a life besides becoming a wife and mother. To cope with and to justify my choices, I became a detective. Motherhood, after all, is a mystery until you experience it. The best we can do is trust the accounts from the other side. I sought the voices of women who rejected motherhood. Who regretted motherhood. Who decided that self-sacrifice would not be their way. Women who tactlessly chronicled the tribulations of pregnancy complications and the trials of the first days, weeks, months at home before the bonding hormones ran their memory wipes.
“But women keep having babies,” my godmother said to me one day. “Mina, if it were really all that bad, would there be so many people on the planet? If childbirth and motherhood were so horrible, we would have died out a long time ago.” She was right, but she wasn’t right enough. I encountered more and more people, women, men, and children who changed the tide of my investigation. I found women who live—chose to live—separate from their husbands and everyone in the family is happy, well-adjusted. I found women who do live with their husbands and have excellent communication, reflection, and problem solving skills. Women and men who were conscious and conscientious in their relationships with one another. Women who went to sperm banks and loaded up, gave birth, and now fly around the world with mini-partners in crime. Women who balance work and motherhood by taking time to be alone, to be fabulous, to be engaged in work, in communities, in world-building. Unashamed. Unbridled. Honest about their challenges and their triumphs in their quests to achieve balance. Their self-determination was empowering. Enlightening. Freeing.
Still, I clung to excuses about the difficulty, the impossibility, the cruelty of subjecting a Black child to the current state of the world and its attitude toward Black people in general, Black children in particular. Systemic racism impacting health from the womb. The achievement gap. The opportunity gap. Oversaturation from the media impacting self-esteem in Black children. Student loans destroying all hope of discretionary income. The rising tide of state-sanctioned murders of Black children on the news, on YouTube, on Facebook Live. Crying mothers calling for justice and receiving none. My sweet babies don’t deserve to be subjected to this life.
I know better now.
On a blustery, cold afternoon in Washington, D.C. I entered the National Museum of African American History and Culture with my aunt and my sister. The lines are notoriously long, the tickets hard to come by, but we were waved into the museum thirty minutes before the walkout tickets were released. Lucky day. The visit is a blur for me. My friends would ask me about artifacts; I only remember the information.
For instance, in 1860, enslaved people were valued at just over three billion dollars. The cotton they produced the following year was valued at almost 30 million dollars. That is one industry. Indigo, sugar, tobacco, steel, shipping, and fishing are all industries that ran on violently enforced human labor. The mortgage bonds allowed banks to collect interest on the bodies of Black people. My people were mortgaged right along with the ostentatious plantation homes with the column architecture reminiscent of Gre—Egypt. I am not a mathematician, so my brain would not allow me to add up the number of years slavery lasted in the United States and calculate the money amassed by big banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions. It wouldn’t allow me to extrapolate those numbers to guess at how much more wealth sharecropping allowed America to rake into her coffers. It doesn’t matter. I don’t need to be a mathematician to deduce that every single dollar in the coffers of the early State and the multi-generationally wealthy and elite was due to the labor of my Ancestors. Suddenly, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” became polite fluff.
In the same exhibit, we saw images and heard tales of the rapes, the murders, the mutilations of Black bodies. The pains the slaveholders took to ensure the spiritual, emotional, and mental deaths of Black people. Violence against the bodies, minds, and souls of a people sanctioned by the State. The same State emerging as a world power, touting FreedomTM, and promising liberty, justice, and the pursuit of happiness. Upon close listen, I heard the roaring silence of the millions of non-slaveholders who benefited from “The Peculiar Institution”: bankers, sea merchants, textile manufacturers, and the thundering alliances of those who benefited from not being at the bottom of the social structure: the poor whites.
It is no surprise. It is no secret. From the capture in the Motherland to the slave breaking in the Caribbean and the Deep South, the Black body has been under attack since the earliest encounters with white supremacy. Chinedu. Efia. Amir. Amadou. Trayvon. Sandra. Michael.
My moment of clarity began at the display about the sales transactions, the auctioning and purchasing of people. Descriptions of the “merchandise” in stylized text dotted the walls. They read something like:
“Sarah, age 25, excellent seamstress and breeder, $1800.”
“Tom, aged about 46 years old, plantation hand, fully guaranteed, except for having a defect in the right knee.”
“Negro child, aged about 2 years, no defects, $2400.”
The descriptions were punctuated by images of white men holding infants upside down by their legs in one hand, gun in the other hand, while the half dressed mother is dragged away in chains by more white men. While their fathers are torn in the other direction by even more white men. Or while their fathers collect checks. All of this narrated by a woman reading an entry from a Freedman’s Bureau interview describing the slave quarters rattled by moaning, crying, howling, screaming late into the night. Shacks shaking with the weariness of broken hearts. The sounds of people losing their minds, broken by the loss of loved ones to the whip, to the auction block, to drowning, to firearms. It’s all the same. Loss is loss.
Their tears, their sadness, manifesting as physical pain, gaping holes in their hearts and wombs mix with the tears and cries of the families missing them and their children in the motherland, mix with Sybrina’s, mix with Lesley’s, mix with Geneva’s, mix with mine.
The assault on the Black body is an assault on the Black mind is an assault on Black love, peace, and happiness; is an assault on the Black family, is an assault on Black community, is an assault on Black existence. It is spiritual, intellectual, psychological, emotional, existential warfare. The goal is total oppression of the African and her descendants. 1817. 2017. And all the years in between.
The museum has an exhibit on everyday acts of resistance. I didn’t see it. But I know it doesn’t include the miracles in the years in between. It doesn’t talk about how my great-great-great-great-great grandmother fell in love in despite spending her days doing back-breaking work. How she covered her child in love and prayers for a better future despite him being born of rape, unlike his brothers. Prayers that produced my paternal great-grandfather who courted Ms. Gussie in the midst of sharecropping in central Mississippi. How my maternal great-grandmother survived trauma after trauma and gave birth to three healthy girls anyway. How my paternal great-grandmother had seven children and her daughter had seven children at the height of violence in the Jim Crow South.
To have babies, to build families, someone had to be in love. To have consensual sex, to make love, to give birth even at the risk of loss, someone had to have psychic freedom. To be fearless and unbothered even when everything and everyone around them was falling into despair, they had to believe that everything would be okay. We’ve been under attack. And we’ve always had children, built family, created community.
My very existence is the latest in a long line of miracles. My birth is an act of everyday resistance. How dare I let the current state of the world scare me into ending what has been a long line of natural wonders?
Who else creates miracles in everyday acts of living? Who else gives of themselves for the greater good of future generations, family, community, for the healing of an entire people?
The Black woman is God indeed.