Sculptures by Kwame Akoto-Bomfo, Source
When I was growing my daughter in my womb, I was often overcome with visions of a pregnant mother shackled to the bottom of a slave ship. I would see glimpses of this nautical hell, of a massive vessel, transporting hundreds of captured African peoples at a time, sailing somewhere between home and never-going-back-home. The Middle Passage—a system of torturous trade routes zigzagging across the Atlantic Ocean, spanning multiple centuries and coastlines—in all its fullness and mystery, the Middle Passage continues to haunt a significant part of my beginnings as an African-descended mother born in America, and also the beginnings of my own children. This passage, this portal, is where a grand rupture of my ancestral, cultural, and mothering identities took place, and also where alternate, more tangible realities began to initiate and take root.
Along with these images that came to me when I was pregnant, I would often hear negro spirituals, and be moved to just start singing them. A voice that did not feel like my own would emerge, large and luminous, as if it was made of its own wings, and could carry me back across the relentless tide to the very mother who first uttered these same weathered and bruised tones. I come from such a people, I know. People who sang because the only remaining access to their freedom were the notes erupting from way down deep in their core, pushing up through the throat, and finally emerging from tongue and teeth as these soul-stirring hymns. Lasting long after their physical beings were beaten and discarded, these aural memories retained the truth that even though their bodies be caged, not every part of them was able to be bound.
The singing would overtake me especially when I was dancing and couldn’t find the right music for the moment on my playlist. Shuffling through hundreds of artists, thousands of songs, and sometimes I still wouldn’t be able to feel a vibe that matched what my body needed. At some point I would stop searching, and just allow the silence—or the chatter and bustle of my munchkins—to be there. As I would just start to move my limbs, my hips, my spine slowly inside that non-musical space, a song would come to me. Sometimes like a moan, sometimes a whisper, sometimes a full on cry—
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—
And I wouldn’t question the intensity of the words, or wonder about how they landed in my mouth without having heard or read them in so long. I would just sing, feeling the presence, the magnitude of all those many mothers before me who sang themselves through the darkest of times with these same rhythms, maybe even these same words, sounds that gave them the room to both mourn and to hope.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—
I sense deeply that somewhere within the etchings of my ancient strands of DNA, these charged melodies reverberate from one of my faraway grand-mothers. If we were to travel across the parallels of time, we would find her there, still singing in this moment, bound on her back, a belly rising defiantly against the forces of violation and devastation. Everyday she comes to the point of no return, and must make the same choice: Will we live or will we die?
I look over Jordan, what do I see?
Coming for to carry me home—
Just when she thinks she’s endured all she can, she considers the final way out of this despair: the next time she chokes on her vomit she could simply not gasp, and writhe, and fight so hard to clear her throat. She could just lie there and let the airways close once and for all, protecting herself and any futures she holds from any continued miseries. But always she comes back to the baby growing inside of her. She knows she will never see her other children again, separated from them three moons ago when the slave traders ravished her homeland and stole all the people from the interior, transporting them to the coast, handing them over to the strange men with ghost-like skin and no color to their eyes. All this they did in exchange for more gunpowder, to be more successful in causing more destruction to more families who would not hear them coming until it was too late.
A band of angels, coming after me
Coming for to carry me home—
She aches for them all, says their names one by one so that they can feel the remembrance of their mother, even as she is unable to save them from the sure terrors they have all encountered by now. A grieving mother, the only child she is sure to ever see is the one becoming fully human within the soft wonders of her womb. It is this opportunity to mother again that propels her to choose life every time she could choose death. And in choosing to remain a part of the living world, and offering her labors and her baby into the uncertainties ahead, she continues the succession of biologic matter, the sacred formation of the next mother’s eggs inside of tiny ovaries. These are the radical, loving acts of a distant ancestor mother of mine, making a way for the many futures of her children, and her children’s children’s children, one uterus to another. Her seemingly simple labors protected the possibility of my existence, a single echo of life surviving slave ships and auction blocks, plantations and whipping posts, Jim Crow and sharecropping, lynchings and redlining, water hoses and police dogs, voter suppression and discrimination—surviving all that so that one day a light such as me could expand inside my own mother’s womb.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home—
I know that my existence is a precious gift of that long-ago, enslaved mother’s forward fertility, of her courageous labors and those of many more like her. A holy council of unnamed and undocumented mothers, each one of them choosing to birth various components of my potential even though they had no assurances that the future would be any sweeter.
Swing low, sweet chariot
Coming for to carry me home
I see my fertility choices as a birthing mother in today’s world as so much more vast and privileged than many of my foremothers. It is from this space of immeasurable reverence and gratitude that I anchor my own faith in my fertility dreams. If I am here because countless, enslaved mothers decided that the possibility of my life was worth surviving all their unspeakable horrors, if they were able to access the beauty and majesty of bringing life into the world amidst so much terror and loss, then I too can insist on preserving and supporting the futures of my children and grandchildren through the labors of my own body. I too can rally for the lives of the coming generations that are now more possible because of who I am allowing to come forth through me today. And I too can find eternal threads of opportunity, celebration, and love with which to weave together a bright band of tomorrows for all my babies.
This has always been the work of the mothers, to see more when there is nothing yet to see, to pour our whole selves into realizing dreams that the future will not promise us. To trust—above all else, and in the midst of whatever turbulence we might be facing—in the abundant blessings of life even if there is no one but us who believes our children should be, must be, born.