When I visited my great-grandparents in Florida as a child, I often shook the trunk of the old orange tree in their front yard. At the time, I did not know of the tangle of roots that stretched for miles below, the worlds upon worlds of living things that existed beneath the surface.
My ancestors picked oranges in the groves of Southern Florida. I imagine their shadows moving against the skyline. Lanky men in straw hats and women with heads covered in sweat-stained rags, hauling ladders and baskets filled with fruit from morning until dusk. Years later, when the men moved from the orange groves to the packing plant, my great-grandmother spent her days cooking and cleaning in someone else’s house. They used to call it “day work” back then, even if the day’s work extended into the night.
We called my great-grandmother Nanny, the name she was given by the white folks she worked for, the name she wore like her lavender church hat on Sundays, fancy and with a fringe of lace. Educated in the ways of the family she cooked and cleaned for, Nanny spent her days watching the world in which her existence was peripheral. Through the corner of her eye she watched. She listened to the house guests, gathered around the table for lunch. She listened with a fierce intent to this world she was not allowed to enter unless bearing a tray of sweet tea for the guests.
It is with a deep sense of urgency that Nanny resolved to learn the careful art of assimilation. It is from this place she returned home to groom her own daughters with hopes that their futures would not be spent in someone else’s kitchen. She corrected their speech, along with their manners, and pulled each girl’s hair back into a single braid. She commanded them to lift their chins and to cross their legs when they sat. They would now carefully unfold their napkins and place them on their laps. And from here on out, you would not say ain’t in this house.
The open arms that once carried baskets filled with fruit in the orange groves now embraced the ways of those who lived in a world of which she would never be a part. I presume that this rejection of her self was not propelled by any sense of shame. To raise her daughters to assimilate with the folds of white culture was instead driven by an instinct for survival.
When the guests left and the children were settled into bed, Nanny polished the silver and cleared the porcelain dishes from the table. She was the silent keeper of the house. Her presence was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. And even now I am reminded of this sense of invisibility in my own life.
A short time ago, one of my students admitted to an assumption she’d made about the setting of an Alice Walker essay. The student’s interpretation of Jim Crow South in rural Tennessee had become, in her mind, an impoverished village of Eastern Europe. Really? Did the histories and struggles of people of color in our own country simply not exist in her mind? I wondered, then, how many other students of European descent were unable to see beyond the reaches of their own experiences. Later I returned to the text in search of clues that led to my student’s misconception. Was it in the descriptions of the rural landscape? What would I find buried in Walker’s sharecropping roots that conjured images of a tiny village in Yugoslavia?
We closed our class discussion with a reflection of how our identities, our histories, and social locations inform our interpretation of the world around us. In hindsight, I recognize that without exposure to the history of the African American experience, why wouldn’t we imagine Walker’s childhood spent in an Eastern European village? When we belong to a privileged group, what motivates us to explore that which exists beyond the margins of what we know?
It occurred to me then that in order to foster a space for critical thought, a thirst for knowledge beyond the picket fence, and to nurture engagement in global citizenship, we must first seek to see, to hear, to smell and taste the world beyond the limitations of our own experiences.
What motivates the human spirit to crack the undisturbed earth with the blade of a shovel and to explore the realm of hidden things that live beneath the surface? Settled back in the easy chair of our own imaginations, where is the impetus to transcend the confines of our own identities? How are we to recognize the great tragedy that most often only half of the story has been told? The roots enable the orange tree to bear fruit, and this is the whole story that I seek to understand.
As a woman of color, for me, it is much more than a search for my own reflection or a wish to transform underrepresented voices from novelty to necessity. I seek to expand the reaches of my own imagination and to transcend the dominant narrative that has shaped my own worldview. Yet, within the context of a segregated community in which social stratification most often occurs along the lines of race, we continue to bear witness to history repeating itself in our own cities and beyond. In the wake of Ferguson and Baltimore and ten years post-Katrina, some of us know fear like we know our own hands. We urge young people toward civic engagement and community service. We send them to public schools and nonprofit organizations with hopes that what they learn in the classroom may find deeper purpose in the presence of real world experience. If there is no pressure to escape the lens of what we know, no longing to seek worlds beyond the limitations of our own experiences, Alice Walker will continue to live in Yugoslavia, and these streets will continue to burn.
We are charged with preparing students to navigate within a world that is unjust. Yet so many young people arrive to our classrooms with a gaping chasm in their worldviews. At the center of this black hole exists a universe filled with moons and stars, all revolving around this sense of one’s own life experience. If not driven by an impulse to seek the discomfort of viewing the world through someone else’s eyes and if the instinct for survival is asleep, how do we inspire young people to engage in global citizenship? How do we challenge them to view the world through multiple perspectives in an effort to illuminate the whole story?
In my own universe, my great-grandmother’s secret power may have only been visible to herself, acknowledged when she looked at her own reflection in the mirror, when she removed her powder blue maid’s uniform and replaced it with a dress of her own.
Nanny died when I was 12 years old. Many years later, when I reflect upon her contributions to my life, I see myself as a daughter of the Third Migration, among the generation of Americans of African descent who returned to the land of their ancestors to learn the whole story. In this place I call home there are many trees in my own front yard, and when I shake the limbs to watch the autumn leaves fall, I feel the strength rooted in the earth below.
Tamiko Ambrose Murray is a writer, a teaching artist and is the co-founder of Asheville Writers in the Schools and Community. She is on the executive committee of Alternate ROOTS, a southeast regional arts service organization for artists, activists and cultural workers, is an Asheville Arts Council Regional Artist Project Grant recipient and received the Wilma Dykeman Award for non-fiction at UNC-Asheville. Her poetry, short stories, and commentaries have appeared in various publications including Verve Magazine, Gentle Strength Quarterly: A Journal of Fine Arts, Headwaters, and the Mountain Xpress. She is an adjunct professor of Literature and Language at UNC-Asheville and is presently writing her first novel.