Jesmyn Ward on American history and racial “threats secreted like seeds”

The author of National Book Award-winner Salvage the Bones writes in the New York Times:

As a child of the ’80s, my realization of what it meant to be black in Mississippi was nothing like my grandmother’s in the ’30s. For her it was deadly; it meant that her grandfather was shot to death in the woods near his house, by a gang of white patrollers looking for illegal liquor stills. None of the men who killed her grandfather were ever held accountable for the crime. Being black in Mississippi meant that, when she and her siblings drove through a Klan area, they had to hide in the back of the car, blankets thrown over them to cover their dark skin, their dark hair, while their father, who looked white, drove.

Faced, herself, with non-threats that were comparatively mild (“a boy sat on the desk and told nigger jokes while the teacher was out of the room”) Ward wondered why she was “so threatened, so overwhelmed, why I was often silenced when people said these things to me.”

But it wasn’t until I was older that I understood that the undercurrent of violence I’d felt was actually more than a deep, cold current — that it in fact exerted a strong undertow in the present. That it could take my great-great-grandfather, but also take young men like Oscar Grant III, shot to death by a transit officer in Oakland in 2009, like Trayvon Martin, like my only brother, killed by a hit-and-run drunken driver who was charged with leaving the scene of an accident but never with the crime of my brother’s death. That it could assert they were less in life and deny them justice after death as well. That living in a country where one group of people owned another group of people for some 250 years yielded a culture where one life was worth less than another. Again and again. Then and now.

The point of her piece is simple:

In the end, I learned that all I could do against something so great and overwhelming, all those histories and years and lives and deaths and threats secreted like seeds, was to open my mouth and speak… There is power in naming racism for what it is, in shining a bright light on it, brighter than any torch or flashlight. A thing as simple as naming it allows us to root it out of the darkness and hushed conversation where it likes to breed like roaches. It makes us acknowledge it. Confront it. And in confronting it, we rob it of some of its dark pull. Its senseless, cold drag. When we speak, we assert our human dignity. That is the worth of a word.

[NYT]