Sunday, August 27, 2006
Beloved’s Return: Reflections on the “Envisioning A Better Mississippi”
Last night was amazing. Oxfam America and the Mississippi State Conference NAACP sponsored a town hall meeting on the weekend before the first anniversary of Katrina entitled “Envisioning a Better Mississippi.” This meeting featured the presidents and CEOs of Oxfam America, the NAACP, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law as well as state and local activists and a celebrity: actor/activist Danny Glover. Although Mr. Glover has a slew of film credits to his name, his work is most familiar to me through his rendering of Paul D in the movie version of Toni Morrison’s tale of Beloved. This story is so appropriate to what went on at the town hall meeting last night that I want to take the time to share parts of it with you as a prelude to my report.
If you haven’t done so, I highly recommend that you read it and then watch the movie and then read it again, for it is one of those stories that needs to seep slowly into your soul like water on a parched earth. The story is about a battered community, a tossed and battered people who encounter a mysterious force that lances their festering communal wound and allows them to step into a vision of hope, healing, and potential. In short, the story is about transformation—and it is not pretty.
In fact, it’s pretty torturous. The wounding in this story runs deep and wide, contexted as it is by slavery. The traumatic chain of events that puts the story into motion is Katrina-like in its life-shattering force. But the force is made all the more powerful for the characters because decades of slavery and hardship have leached away their capacity for resilience.
Although the setting is historic, it is not totally unlike Mississippi today. And Mississippi today is not totally unlike the many, many places throughout time where the most down-trodden have been called to be agents of change. Apparently change is always hard, and comfortable people are always little inclined to want it.
Instead, however, of focusing on the external circumstances that have overpowered these people beyond their control, this story dwells on ways that they behave among themselves that trap them into squandering their collective power. Petty jealousies divide them and prevent them from passing the underground warning that may have saved Sethe, the major character, from the confrontation with the slave master that ended in the death of her child.
Years later when the story actually opens, the community is still fractured and demoralized. Sethe has been judged and ostracized to an almost solitary existence in a house actively haunted by her dead baby. All this begins to change, however, when Danny Glover’s character, Paul D., arrives and—as Sethe’s daughter Denver notices—that baby is “whooshed away in the blast of a hazelnut man’s shout.”
But the baby ghost is not so much whooshed away as called into being. It is at this point in the story that a strange woman/child appears out of nowhere and intrudes upon Paul D and Sethe’s giddy hopes of escaping the past by forgetting it. Real transformation requires us to deal with the past, not forget it, and this mysterious being who called herself Beloved proceeds to show Paul D, Sethe, and the whole community just what that means.
Beloved became their teacher, and last night she became ours, for she stepped into our midst at the town hall meeting. Did you see her? She was there at the microphone when members of the Latino community broke through the “rules” to tell us of their pain. She was there on the stage when an African American panelist responded to the break with a report of his own pain. She was there when we heard about the struggles of the disabled and the dangers to workers—and again in our anguish over the lack of housing and daycare and the continuing, life-threatening demise of our wetlands and environment. Beloved was there as we spoke truth to each other of our post-Katrina lives in Mississippi.
Story, of course, is able to collapse many important elements of life into a neat and contained narrative. In the story of Beloved, when the break-through occurs and the community rallies around Sethe with the promise that unified action brings into sight, Beloved bursts into a shower of butterflies—a symbol of transformation. Last night, although there were no butterflies, there were solid moments when unified action appeared to be possible. No doubt, however, our transformation will not be nearly so neat or clean-cut—or irreversible. In real life, even the most amazing moments of solidarity take effort to preserve.
In his closing remarks, Ray Offenheiser, president of Oxfam America, offered important words of wisdom on this count. In suggesting what success must look like “out there,” he gave us important clues as to what it will have to look like within our “unified effort” as well. He identified the following four essential characteristics that I suggest we must claim for ourselves:
Inclusiveness. We had a taste last night of how we are divided. As Mr. Offenheiser pointed out, the lack of a national policy on immigration creates for us at the grassroots level communities of disadvantaged people who are more likely to be at odds with each other than unified in the task of holding national leaders accountable for doing their job. Divided, we are weak and we are conquered. United, we have a chance, not only to influence the creation of policy, but also to influence the kind of policies we get.
Transformation. It will not be enough for us to work simply to get a bigger slice of the existing proverbial economic “pie.” That pie is excluding more and more Americans by the minute. If our efforts are to be worthwhile, we need to engage the political process and find a different recipe that will allow us to bake a new pie. As the story of Beloved suggests, however, the task of finding different recipes that are truly transformational is never under our control. By definition, transformation occurs in participation with the Divine. We can court that experience, but we can never control it. So we must court, and that takes patience.
Sustainability. No matter how passionate the actors, no effort can sustain itself without attention paid and time devoted to the task of organization. Creating an organization is the work of creating the relationships and the “rules of the road” that are needed for the work to proceed. This is most especially true when members of different cultural communities are aspiring to work together. We dare not be naïve about the challenge we have placed before ourselves. Many a talented and well-intentioned group has faltered on the rocks of cultural difference. If Steps is to be the organization through which we work in concert on the Mississippi coast, then we owe it to ourselves to pursue and nurture that venue—to devote the time and resources it will take to stabilize the organization.
Value. We all know this work is not short-term. Just as our houses must be built to withstand the coming storms, so must our coalition. For storms there will be—political storms. And these storms will tear us apart if we are not committed to and organized, not merely for unity, but for long-term support of a truly democratic process.
The most beautiful image of “success” in Beloved is the image of Denver, Sethe’s daughter, who inherits tragedy from the adults in her community and then is released from it as they do their transformational work. This is a remarkable example for a world that too often chooses to pass the costs of current profits on to future generations. So why does Morrison end her tale by claiming that it is not a story to pass on?
Morrison speaks of loneliness—the inside kind and the kind that roams—and she speaks of forgetting. “They forgot her like a bad dream,” she writes. “Remembering seemed unwise.” “Disremembered and unaccounted for, she cannot be lost because no one is looking for her.”
No one is looking for her? Surely this is not so. The people in that room last night were looking. True, we didn’t know her name, and as Morrison says, it’s difficult to call her if we don’t know her name. But it’s not impossible. Beloved’s clamor for a kiss lingers in our souls and mingles with our own aching hunger: to be loved for who we are on the inside and to be allowed to love others, our world, and ourselves as fully as we can on the outside.
I’d say we were looking—and I, for one, plan to continue. On behalf of the Steps Coalition—this newly blossoming dream of a vibrantly active and deeply democratic community—I invite anyone in search of that vision to join us. I can with certainty guarantee that the ride will be rocky, but then, isn’t that why it’s worth taking?
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