blank american
an exploration of family lineage in the absence of information
blank american
ayan view
Joanne told me to close my eyes.
Picture the word death above your head. In this word exist all your anxieties about death. The death of your family members. The death of your dog. Maybe even your own death. Take a breath in and when you let it out, feel all your anxieties about death drop into your brain, and into your shoulders, and into your stomach, and into your seat, and into your knees, and into your feet, then into the ground.
She told me to open my eyes and come back to New York and back to this room and back to my chair. It was only at that moment, that I realized I had ever left.
I saw myself.
I feel I have been born into a deficit of self. As a young child, I envied my peers who could proudly recite their heritage down to the percentage. They knew their immigration stories and traditional recipes from the homeland. They were American by nationality, but they were a continuation of family lineage that started centuries ago. I grew up accepting that my family arrived in the United States by way of the slave trade. I don’t know the names of the émigrés or their countries of origin or hundreds of years later, still possess precious heirlooms.
I have been bequeathed a void.
I took a DNA test that tells you your genetic makeup across regions worldwide. I remember first receiving the results, not knowing what I hoped for. I think I simply wanted a feeling of pride or connection to something larger than myself. It seemed so many people define themselves through experiences that are not their own. I thought if I knew where I came from, I would understand where I am now. Knowing my ancestry answered none of my questions. It only left me searching for more. European countries account for about thirty percent of my DNA. But I’m black. I started defining myself in ways I never had. I started to imagine the scaffolding of lives systematically effaced.
When people ask me my ethnicity, they often pressure me to say something other than just “black”, presumably not knowing how frustrating a question that is and how desperately I want to know the answer myself.
Once, I was waiting for a train in Syracuse, New York, and two older women asked me where I am from. They interrogated me until I finally decided to tell them my exact countries of origin according to the test. They responded in amazement and said something along the lines of “isn’t it so wonderful that you’re a mixture of so many cultures?”. I smiled politely and thought to myself that I’m probably only a cultural melting pot of slaves impregnated by their owners of European descent. They wanted to see the beauty of globalization. I only saw the horror of colonization. But was that not the moment I was waiting for? I finally had the chance to declare myself a meld of nationality the way my childhood friends could so why was it still so painful?
Joanne says that through hypnotism, we can reach our younger selves and nurture the wounds we may have wanted someone to treat for us. She says that knowing what I know now, I can talk to the child I once was and give myself the care I needed. I don’t know if I believe her, but I let myself pretend for an hour a week.
My great grandfather's WWII draft card
Sometimes I find myself weeping about being black. Not out of hatred or sorrow or shame. I’m weeping for my own ignorance. I used to feel angry about being black for those reasons. Now, I have rediscovered that “the negro problem” is not a flaw of mine, but other people’s problem with negroes.
The anger came from a fear of being black and, more scarily, be likened to "blackness". I didn’t want to be a minstrel caricature. I assumed that everyone already saw black people that way, so I needed to create a measured version of myself to negate that. I didn’t want to be aggressive; I didn’t want to see a movie about black people because that meant it wasn’t good (or at the very least it meant that I was more focused on race than quality). I wanted real art.
Post- awakening, I thought I understood better than anyone and wanted to scream the doctrine of my enlightenment. But then I read James Baldwin, he was born in the 1920s, I in the 90s, and I realized he was saying that too. (Of course, he said it first and he said it better). Decades before, me decades since me, nobody has a solution? Maybe it’s due to the dissonance between the angry black person and the academic African-American, the Black Panthers vs. MLK. Can those who envision change be the same ones who truly need it? Probably not. This would require the relinquishing of a kind of power that perhaps even I am guilty of wielding. I grew up well off, both my parents are lawyers who also grew up privileged. Are we only bettering ourselves to become the people who oppressed us for so long? The monolith so many strove to uplift has left a schism between the black people who were repatriated into white society.
My mom’s side of the family has a website called Ellis Family History. I found an account of my great grandmother the said
Maggie Ellis frowned on the use of the word “nigger.” Although mostly outlawed in the Ellis house, Grandma Riley used the word liberally, frequently using the forbidden slang word to comment on the behavior of black relatives, friends, and members of the community when their actions did not meet her high expectations. She was often heard commenting, “Just like a bunch of niggers, always trying to ....” When extremely perturbed at Grandpa Riley, she would refer to him as “that ole nigger.”
The House Slave vs. The Field Slave.
There’s an image of a vestibule in my mind. “I” open the front door, ('I' is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. -Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own), wipe my feet on the mat and jiggle the handle to the following door –the door that leads into the house. It’s locked but through its pane, I can see a table of high-minded individuals. They’re different races. They look up when they see me, and they wave, and someone stands to let me in. They don’t care about the color of my skin but before they unlock the door, they quiz me on my total carbon emission used to get here, the NPR story I listened to on the way, and what ethically grown farm-to-table dish I have brought with me. I answer to their satisfaction and they let me in.
Sometimes as Jews, we get Holocaust’ed out. Like for our whole lives, the horrors of the Holocaust have just been drilled into our heads. Ariel was my high school English teacher. A Jewish, feminist, Ivy League scholar from Tennessee who taught at my liberal Quaker Boarding school, to put her simply. She said this one day in class and I think about it a lot. I think she wanted to say that when you’re born into an oppressed minority, you can’t define yourself in other ways without some kind of guilt. Your whole existence becomes a symbol of resistance. I wonder what it’s like to just be. I always have to be black. I always have to be the descendant of slaves. Sometimes, I get slavery’ed out.
When I take a seat at this table, I realize this is the table. The one where everything happens and yet, astonishingly, absolutely nothing happens. This is the table that is supposed to cure the ills of the world.
I once worked in a restaurant as a host. On a busy Friday night, an older lady requested a table for six. When I told her that we were fully booked and asked if she had a reservation, she replied “Hmm. I suppose in my mind I did.”
I think she was probably used to sitting at the table.
Vitamin D3 5000IU. Vitamin B12 1000mcg. Zoloft 200mg. Wellbutrin 150mg. Vyvanse 30mg (sometimes more but the prescription says not to). This is what I take every morning to feel human. Trazadone 50mg. Melatonin 10mg. Sometimes Klonopin or 2 hits of a joint. This is what I take every night to forget.
Close your eyes. Imagine all the buildings outside the window. You can see the empire state building behind the fog. You can hear the car horns and sirens. Now imagine you’re on the train, you’re going upstate. You can see the Hudson out the window. The weather is perfect.
My paternal grandmother has always loved trains. She hates flying and travels by rail throughout the country, often for several consecutive days if necessary. The Smithsonian held an exhibit several years ago about African-Americans and train travel. My grandma took me along with her and as we walked through the museum, she came across a plaque describing the “shoebox lunch”. During segregation in the United States, black people were denied access to the café car on trains and for the first time in her life, standing there with me, she realized why every summer her mother had sent her to Rock Hill, South Carolina with a shoebox full of fried chicken and snacks for her journey to visit her aunt and uncle. She started to cry, never having known why she couldn’t buy food onboard. I witnessed the pain of her plight. She will forever exist in these memories. She told me recently that her grandfather was a cook on the railroad for many years. He must have served thousands of hot meals to white passengers over his career. As my grammie wiped her eyes, she said “I’m sure my mother’s food was better than whatever they were serving on the train.”
I wonder what my ancestors thought when they were captured and brought across an ocean some four-hundred years ago.
Burial Record for "Thomas View" in the UK March 1692
I am a pragmatist by nature. I think that generally, the good and bad in the world even out. I think that human life is expendable when it comes to a greater cause. That’s not a pleasant thing to say and it is easy to think about when the life at stake is not my own. I believe in the pendulum effect. I believe that Donald Trump is exactly the president we needed to galvanize us into reckoning with our very flawed conceptions of progress in the United States. The American problems of today have always existed. They did not leave with the abolishment of slavery, or the civil rights movement, or the election of Barak Obama. They were not created by Donald Trump, but he is the manifestation of everyone the table leaves behind. The machinations of the dinner guests cannot withstand the reality of our existence. I leave with a sense of satisfaction, full of food for thought made from empty calories.
Lately, I’ve been trying to combat my dilemmas by attempting to meet myself. If I think of my existence in terms of everything I’ve done, then I can’t fathom understanding myself as anything else. I can be the version of my identity that encapsulates everything. Or I can just be.
Once a week I sit in a chair with my eyes closed in Midtown Manhattan. I think if I sit in that chair long enough, I can write my own history, a narrative to comfort me and convince me that I really exist. With my eyes shut, Joanne instructs me to imagine a place where I feel at peace. I picture this place and I let it sink down into my shoulders, and my stomach, and my knees, and my feet.
With closed eyes, I finally see myself.