What Makes You Come Alive?
It dawned on me (ha, ha—pun alert) sitting here staring out the window at the breaking morning light (what has happened to me? why am I waking up so early? who the hell knows): I have sorta/kinda become the family historian. How can I not admit this when I recently THREE times told to family members the story of the Mississippi ancestors, a story they didn’t know. Then my thoughts turned to Howard Thurman, who says, ” Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive.”
Something about the past makes me come alive. Else I wouldn’t research, remember, and recite these stories. I wouldn’t share them with you. But that realization gives me extreme trepidation. I can’t be one of those folks who worship the past. Cue the “my ancestors died under that flag”; “you calling my people monsters?” folks. If you dig a burrow in the past and wedge your body inside, you’re cramped, covered in dirt, blinking in the dark. You’re not alive. You’re a mole. I don’t want to be a mole.
Howard Thurman is the genius mystic who mentored Dr. King and radically changed Christianity in America. He would never burrow into the past. But using the past to come alive to the future….
For me that thought releases the fear. Dug-in heels relax, mulishness recedes. More charitably, the protectiveness is assuaged. It’s a “yes, now.” Yes, that’s our past. Now, how do we move into the future with it?
But if someone doesn’t want to move into the future, how does that feel? To be honest, as if they want the past to BE the future. It’s a stripping of motives into the light.
Our options on coming alive
Seems to me when it comes to our relationship with a difficult past, we’ve got 3 options:
The Mole: Unexaminedly protect our family heritage
The Thurman: ask how I can live that heritage into the future
The Racist: actively deny the problems with our past because I really, really want a time when white folks reigned, Black folks knew their place, and we all got along without divisiveness.
We all have choices.
What makes YOU come alive?
The breaking light at the window that made me ask: What makes you come alive?
How to interact with a difficult past, Howard Thurman, living the past into the future, Our difficult past, What makes you come alive
Randall Mullins
Dear Ellen,
This post really hits home for me. I have been wrestling with my (known, or at least half-known) Mississippi ancestors for many years.
Your question, “how can I live that heritage into the future?” is one that I want to be with some more.
I am about spent on ancestor research and responses, but I have a great nephew in his early 20s who is showing some interest.
One ancestor, Antonio Molina (Later Anthony Mullins) came from Italy in 1773 as part of a group of vineyard workers brought here by a group that Included Thomas Jefferson, fought in the Revolutionary War, owned at least one slave, moved to Tennessee in 1815. From dozens of descendants of Antonio Molina, a large amount of information has been put together in a book and passed around to his now hundreds, maybe thousands of descendants.
His son John, born in Virginia in about 1800, moved to Tennessee with the family in 1815, and bought a farm in Alcorn County, MS in the 1830s. He apparently owned a small number of slaves and killed a Chickasaw man when by Mississippi law “the people called Indians shall have no rights.” He was my great great grandfather and from family stories seemed to have all the qualifications of a son of a bitch.
John’s son, “ANDREW JACKSON MULLINS” (Ahem!) was a private in the Civil War until he went AWOL and traveled by night from Reelfoot Lake to the home farm back in Alcorn County. My father remembered him from the 1920s. His youngest son Hugh Ray Mullins was my grandfather, and the last one to live his whole life (1890-1974) on the “family land” or “our place” in Alcorn Co. I was legal owner of a part of that property for about 20 years (1985-2006).
I wrote maybe 8 or 9 letters to Grandfather John as my way of seeking some peace and reconciliation. I never felt a lot of emotional progress or relief, never learned how to hold that past inside of me some where. One clergy colleague told me that I should just stop carrying that load of the past that I was “totally unresponsible for” as he put. He just did not “get it” about Southern identity (at least not mine).
I took a large step forward in my healing just a month or two ago when I wrote a poem about/to Grandfather John with the realization that we are both “beloved sons of God” and that this somehow redeems everything. I believe it does. This comes from he core of my values and my faith. Still, something feels incomplete about it all.
How can I hold this heritage in my being with honesty, responsibility, love and respect and olive that heritage into the future that I have left, and pass it on to kinfolks in descendant generations — expanded version of your question — may bear some more fruit for me.
So all of this is a long thank you and intended as encouragement from one Southerner-to-the-bone to another with kindred heartaches mixed with great love.
I listened in by zoom a year or two ago to Laura Gettys interview with Elizabeth Jemison about Elizabeth’s excellent book. That was a source of sustenance for me as is the lives of the two of them as Southerners seeking ways to “speak the Truth in love.”
Laura introduced me to the Bitter Southerner a few months ago. I just bought Sharon a t-shirt from their site that has “Bless Your Heart” printed on the front. I am blessed to be with this Slovakian woman who has loved being in communion with you Southern women. She “gets it” about being Southern much more than most.
And one more mystery to share: nephew Eliott Reese, now about 35, lives in Chicago, an out gay man, just got married there in February to Pedro Reyes, with family history in Mexico. They have decided to change their last names to “Molina” after 4th great grandfather Antonio. I had no idea at all that Eliott even knew about Antonio Molina. Eliott and I don’t communicate much but of course this make me curious about what led to this decision.
Thank you for reading all this. As your can see you hit an open vein of love and longing in me.
I always appreciate your posts.
Sharon and I saw you and Tom on the zoom broadcast of Suzanne’s service yesterday. The service moved us both. Sharon wore her matronly black hat as she watched and bawled through much of it. It was a great service. Suzanne was someone I came to know mostly through stories from Sharon and hearing about your lively, rowdy conversations. A great soul. Suzanne Henley, PRESENTE!
Thank you again for agitating my heart with your wonderful translation/expansion of Howard Thurman’s wisdom.
Blessings,
Randall M.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
As you know, I, too, find all of this so hard. It seems I get an epiphany that turns out to be a step along the way, then another epiphany step. And another.
It really stops me in my tracks to think how many descendants exist of these early settlers. So many different ways of peering through that time telescope into the past. And me thinking I can pin them down as if they were only my own…
I read the poem you wrote about your GGGF—your SOB sounds like my Scoundrel. So much to be redeemed there, so much that can be redeemed there. And I’ve read how very many Civil War soldiers deserted, and that has always made me wonder what they would have made of this worship of a war they gave up on.
I’d forgotten about Elizabeth’s book! I must look it up. Thank you for reminding me.
I thought Suzanne’s service was perfect. I know she adored both Roz and Scott, and they seemed to care deeply for her. I introduced myself to her daughter as one of the Crones. She had to ask, will you remind me your name? I’m like, all that matters is I am a crone.
Good to “talk” with you, as we will again.
Joanne Corey
Thank you, Ellen and Randall, for sharing so much of your history and how you are living and loving into the future.
Ellen, one of the things that struck me in particular is at the end of the racist response, “we all got along without divisiveness.” It made me reflect on the tendency to misremember the past or, at least, to generalize our private experience to everyone else’s. As you know, I’m not a Southerner, but I do recognize the dangers of wanting to return to some imagined “good old days” when, no doubt, there was a lot of oppression going on, whether based on race, religion, gender expression, sexuality, nationality, language, wealth, or some other characteristic that was an excuse to limit recognition of human dignity. One of the glories of the future is its possibilities to make progress toward being a true beloved community but we won’t get there if people don’t acknowledge and learn from our past.
Ellen Morris Prewitt
“An excuse to limit recognition of human dignity.” I love that, Joanne. Today’s Word of the Day with A.Word.A.Day (which I love, by the way) is “Roman Peace.” A peace imposed and maintained by force. Those lamenting “the good ol’ days” refuse to recognize it was a Roman peace, a “harmony” maintained at great expense to the oppressed and also to the detriment of the oppressors. Coincidentally (maybe not) the quote the service also provides each day is “Shadow owes its birth to light.” -John Gay, poet and dramatist (30 Jun 1685-1732) We really cannot see the shadows in our past if we refuse to let in the light. May we all focus on the possibilities of the future.