I sit, on this 2022 Thanksgiving day, with my 94 year old mom in her bedroom and me in the kitchen. I go into her bedroom thinking, “ok, enough is enough.” It’s nearly 2pm and she’s having a very unusual flow to her day - she is still laying in bed! This flow is a continuation from yesterday evening when waking from a nap, she felt sure that we had a performance that we had been preparing for and that it was time to go, NOW! I assured her that we had no such performance and that she had just been dreaming. “No,” she proclaimed. After a couple of minutes of arguing back and forth, her mood changed and she began to look a little confused, “Weren’t we just practicing?” “Is the performance today or tomorrow?”
Caught between worlds. That’s what it is often with mom these days. And, that is what this Thanksgiving has felt like. This is a holiday that represents the brutalities of colonization, the lies of “Let us break bread together” AND, it is the holiday with the truest memories of family togetherness and of heartfully breaking bread together that existed in my dear family.
As I prepare our meal today, I move through the kitchen with more loving intention than at any other time of the year. For generally, I am not much for domestic hosting. I don’t get worked up about sharing recipes or filling folks bellies with delightful, scrumptious meals made by my very own hands. I love those kinds of people: my Auntie Thelma, my eldest son Kai Ashante or my first born, Tai Amri. I only feel this way once a year: Thanksgiving.
Yeah, I remember the cutout Turkeys hanging in the hallways of my elementary school and the pictures of the “Pilgrims and Indians” dining together. But I never associated what I saw as that ‘white folks stuff’ in school with what took place when mommy, Aunt Vivian and Auntie Thelma got up at the crack of dawn to “do the turkey” or get the yeast rolls rising. Family prayed together around the table and even us kids were asked to say what we were thankful for…and they actually waited for each of us to think and give an answer. This was literally the ONLY time where the big family circle prayed together with no minister as intercessor. A time for calling out and honoring “those no longer with us” (ancestors) and “those still in the belly.” Even at funerals or weddings there was no such communally held sacred time.
So, today I am grateful to sit with this dual consciousness. I choose to acknowledge the whole of it all. I completely reject the lies of Thanksgiving, born of and upheld by white supremacy. As a teacher and elder who identifies as black and with knowledge of my Indigenous heritage, I commit to teaching about the millions of brutally murdered peoples of this land, and how the traditional story of Thanksgiving contributes to attempts of annihilation of a people and their culture.
I also commit to and honor what my black family made and make of this day - family still walking the earth and those who’ve crossed over. As always, they dipped down through troubled waters. We/they transmute the poisons therein and travel onward to the heart of the Mother. They’ve wrapped my soul in rituals of true thanks giving and within that covering I take refuge; I expand my capacity to see and tell the truth. Because of their coverings, I more courageously bring forth my own gifts with a spirit of gratitude. So it was, So it is and So it shall be!
Comments