Once, under the ship you had a baby. You died there under the ship, you see. Your baby became my baby, though I was too young for one. Another time, they put me on a cart and you watched from a field as I got smaller and smaller with the others going nowhere forever. My babies became your babies.
We held hands until one went cold, or both. We bore even through the surprise of it. We found each other and raised each other in health and love.
If you can grasp what it would have taken not just for my line to survive, but for our lines to survive collectively, you can understand the role of our ancestral mothers.
Like Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer, many of these mothers were mothers though they pushed no one through into the flesh—they kept our whole race in the flesh and loved on their adoptive children. Many of our great mothers bore no children. Many of our great mothers woke up without the organs they needed to bear children. They mothered nations; they mothered humans. They preserved god for new generations.
Because if we came from the Kingdom of Kongo, and my people went to New York, and South Carolina and yours went to the Bahamas, went to Barbados, and found a Akan lover to lay with, made another and that baby disappeared among “seasoned Blacks” to New Jersey; or stayed in South Carolina until freedom then moved to the Dominican Republic taking the AME Church with them, then came back to New York City then our mothers are our mothers are our mothers!
When we talk about the ancestral mothers, particularly the spirits that make up the Big Mamas and Madamas, we’re not only talking about the work of mothering—we’re talking about spirit work within and in excess of that mothering.
The ancestral mothers are the ones who teach their children and grandchildren to work roots, clean house, make anointing oil, lay hands, dance, play spades, cook, how to take an offering to the river, how to leave a lover or make a lover love you better.
As a worker and student of Jessica Valoris’ How We Be Free: Black Fugitivity Study Kit, I often think about the Four of Hearts within the deck. She writes about how Black women enslaved in their captor’s houses were often unable to escape. Instead of building resentment against her self-emancipating neighbors, she often became the person who distracted their traffickers, laid out food for them to take, created obstacles to their reimprisonment.
The Queen of Hearts is exactly the kind of person who would take sacrifice for the collective, who would do whatever they could to navigate the cruel realities the water brought us. She is, after all, the watery queen: tears and other waters, salt and sweet, are the Queen of Hearts’ domain.
This reframing always hits me hard. While most of my ancestors were enslaved in the South, those who were enslaved in the Dutch territories of New Jersey and New York had very intimate relationships with their slavers. Enslavement here was domestic; slave society came together only occasionally and always directly under the eye of the slaver.
Such women would have lived side by side with free Black people without having freedom themselves.
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I talk about my mothers a lot here. It would be unethical for me not to do so, since they were my earliest spiritual teachers. But my earthly mothers are either physically dead or mentally gone at this age in my life.
Without my ancestral mothers, my life would be…honestly, I don’t even know if it would be. I remember being a teen and young adult crying to my grandmother, saying once she died I wouldn’t have anyone. This isn’t entirely true, but it doesn’t feel entirely false either when you’re motherless in the realm of the flesh.
Uncles, husbands and the like don’t fill the void where a flesh and blood mother lived. I found I had to mother myself, to be my own parent and my own charge.
It’s hard. Everyday meeting myself with softness and reverence. Challenging the gendered expectations of who can mother; resisting a tendency toward self-sabotage, toward self-sacrifice aka martyrdom.
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