Resistance. Fortitude. Resilience.
Emancipation Day is around the corner. Without fail every year on the day and during that period, I catch myself doing a quick self-assessment. I ask myself some variation of, will they be proud to have endured to allow me my existence? I think of the ancestors who trod on the land where I now live and I wonder about the ones before them. Who are they? What are their stories? What did they not tell, so as to forget? What did they tell, lest we forget? But, we have managed to forget.
I think of what it must have meant to forget: Massa. Massa’s wife. Massa’s children. Being made a commodity. Being born to be a tool in a perverse system of capitalist exploitation. But what if you were massa’s exploited or privileged child? I wonder about the Scotsman from whom I inherited my name and that woman. I know his name but not hers. Was it a union by her will? How old was she when…? Were his children treated as (his) children? I wonder about the lives of the women whose names I do not know …will never know. I wonder, how might they have resisted? I pray my women folk knew to malinger, to use natural biological occurrences to earn needed rest. I wonder, was the work too strenuous for that natural occurrence? I worry they may have been punished, nonetheless.