That Mean Old Yesterday by Stacey Patton

Author:Stacey Patton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books

SEVEN

Were African Americans mentally, physically, and spiritually damaged by slavery? In freedom, did they relive the experiences of their bondage through nightmares and flashbacks? Or did some former slaves choose to anesthetize themselves or just simply forget the past?

Black folks never got the chance to heal from their wounds that were inflicted during slavery because they continued to face mental, physical, and spiritual degradation during Jim Crow. Even those who hadn’t lived through slavery and those who hadn’t yet been born couldn’t forget it. Some blacks felt disgraced by the past. Others mediated their recollections through writing, art, music, narratives, reflections, and race leadership and work. This past trauma and pain wrought out of enslavement grounded African Americans’ individual and collective sense of identity. The memory of slavery would continue to play over and over again in black minds because racism continued, and still continues, to perpetuate the memories of exploitation.

When I freed myself from my own bondage, I expected to find peace and feel safe in the world and in my own skin. I didn’t expect my mind and soul to remain shackled to my past. I knew that I had physical scars that would either fade or remain with me until death. But I didn’t know that I had some deep internal wounds that would affect how I functioned in the world and how I saw myself and others for years to come. All those years I had survived in part because I learned to disassociate from all the pain. I protected myself by pretending to be a wallflower, a piece of the carpet, a window, anything. Sometimes I removed myself from my world altogether and imagined places I had never been. Memories became my worst fear and declared war on me even as I moved away from Myrtle and G physically and emotionally.

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