Relationships make a difference even in the hardest times

Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” does not open with the menacing faces of slaveholders or the whip of an overseer. It does not open with the scenes I always imagined, of children torn from their mother’s arms to be sold in the intra-American slave trade. Instead, Jacobs describes her childhood and family, her parents and brother, and her maternal grandmother.

Likewise, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass starts with Douglass talking of his mother and grandmother, and the enigma of his father, who everyone believes is a white slaveholder. Douglass’ mother worked 12 miles away, walking the route daily; his only memory of her is her holding him in the early mornings. She died when he was young, and he was raised by his grandmother.

The brutal life of slavery is there too. Douglass speaks in detail of his experience with a slave breaker, someone who beat and tortured enslaved people so much that they fell into compliance. Jacobs’ mistress tortured her, jealous of the attention Jacobs garnered from the woman’s husband.

Even given the abject horrors enslaved people endured, both Jacobs and Douglass chose to begin their stories with descriptions of loved ones. Without that, I would not have considered their interior lives. Their existences would have been reduced to submission and terror. The terror’s there too, but intimate friendship gives color to the narratives of violence we know. These are the details of their lives that I hadn’t thought of before.

When Douglass escaped, his biggest regret was leaving behind his friends. He writes: “I had a number of warm-hearted friends in Baltimore, — friends that I loved almost as I did my life, — and the thought of being separated from them forever was painful beyond expression. It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to their friends.”

I recently participated in a seminar on Black religious autobiographies sponsored by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and hosted by the Office of Black Church Studies at Duke Divinity School. We read Jacobs and Douglass along with other biographies stretching into the 20th century. We began our day in worship to center ourselves spiritually before a rigorous discussion of what we read.

Our activities included a trip to Stagville Plantation. The guide discussed the history of the place, the landowners, the design of the buildings and the highly skilled unpaid labor that built them, but my entire body paused at something he said toward the end.

One of the children of an enslaved woman from Stagville escaped to the North, where he earned money for his mother also to escape, but she refused the offer. She remained enslaved because her other children lived in North Carolina, and she couldn’t bear to leave them. Could she not bear to leave them because she needed to care for them, like Jacobs’ grandmother cared for her?

While Jacobs worked at the Flint plantation, the slaveholder did not offer food during the workday, so her grandmother rose early to prepare breakfast for her. She writes: “I was frequently threatened with punishment if I stopped there; and my grandmother, to avoid detaining me, often stood at the gate with something for my breakfast and dinner. I was indebted to her for all my comforts, spiritual or temporal.”

I too am indebted to my friends for my comforts. Reading Jacobs, I thought of my best friend, whom I met while working as an organizer in North Carolina in 2011. She still lives there, and her home is a respite.

When I visit, a room is prepared for me. I awake to the sound of the birds visiting the outdoor feeder, nibbling at seed. Her daughter lays a cup of tea, and berries surrounded by a blanket of yogurt, on the bedside table. My friend knows that I love her mother’s cooking, so she packs away fresh tortillas and frozen tamales from her weekly visit to her mother for me, and I make a breakfast of tacos or posole.

Stories of care and friendship must be woven into our stories of protest and resistance. I think about these past weeks living in the nation’s capital. Since Aug. 11, when President Donald Trump ordered the National Guard into the city to “help reestablish law, order and public safety,” residents have been stopped from riding their scooters and delivering another family’s dinner.

If someone were to write about this time in the history of Washington, D.C., they could focus on armed forces harassing and kidnapping our neighbors. They could talk about children “loitering” in the Metro stations, as young people are arrested simply for standing there.

Under the glare of federal surveillance, do Black and Brown people become faceless? Do we become a blur that fails to register our humanity when we are smiling at a text message from our beloved, pausing to take a breath from the exhaustion of unemployment, or laughing with friends, excited about an evening out?

Or will there be stories from this moment about the woman I saw recently, hustling to get to the Metro door before it closed, leaving her to wait for the next train? She carried the accoutrement from a day’s commute, including flats in her bag for changing into. While she hurried, one shoe fell out of her overloaded bag, and a woman ran up behind her, rushing also to get to the door before it closed so that she could return the shoe.

Would the writers of this moment’s history recount the urgency of community and relationship?

Let’s not wait for them. We will write our own stories.