Angels and Motherlands

She bought the small porcelain brown angel in New Orleans in 2003. She saw it in the window of a store, shortly after returning from a tour of a Big House and the slave quarters of a plantation.

Margo Natalie Crawford © 2010

Journal Entry, 2003, New Orleans:

In southern country the roads are too long for the sore knees but the heart stretches easily when the brown hands touch the precious green moss covered roots of the oak trees that the French Creole planted when he was first building the plantation. This other country feels like the back of the back of her hard head when she has lost all the double mirrors her mother always warned were so important. She stretches tight neck muscles down to the side views of slavery, the ones the twenty-first century projects on her when she’s lip-sticking, food chewing, or breathing hard. Has the black body survived the real Civil War? This plantation tour has promised to deliver people to the “Pre-Civil War South . . . As It Really Was.”

The big house is the slap that actually entered the shocked face, and you know blushing brown is a mistake. The oak trees are crying, “Don’t look away.” The branches have dropped all the way in remembrance of the enslaved Africans’ pain. She wants to hold the cut veins, rock the lost roses, promise them “it’s okay, it’s okay.” But the bus leaves in an hour and thirty minutes and she’s sure this is a haunted place. At night she’d be afraid of the long languorous tree sways. And in the morning she might be so scared that the Big House rooms roped for the twenty-first century exhibit might pull her in as if that infant bed built by a “talented slave” is her natural inheritance.

Journal Entry, 2010, Addis Ababa:

She carried the brown clay angel with metal wings, seven years later, when she went to Addis Ababa. The explanation given to her traveling companion, her sister, was: “Remember when Ma told Dad just bring me some soil, some earth, when he went to the 1977 FESTAC conference in Nigeria?” She told her sister, “I don’t know. I just had to bring it.” And she thought about her friend who put roses in the Atlantic Ocean the first time she waded in it. And she thought about the title of Leon Forrest’s novel Two Wings to Veil My Face. “Africa” might make African Americans face what they veil or veil what they face.

She presented her paper on Pan-Africanism and Black Feminism. She never paused enough to write in her journal and she never found that perfect place to leave the little brown angel. The rain and thunder started right when she was delivering her paper and made her words gain wings. African Americans may keep asking, “What is Africa to me?,” but the answer may be “earth and wings.” The only way to really reclaim the word “motherland” is to remember the Nigerian soil that her father brought to her mother. Once back home, she put the angel back on her windowsill.

What She Projected (through a thunderstorm at Addis Ababa University):

Pan-African black feminism makes “Africa” signal the ground where black women’s trauma matters, the ground where black women fight the use of Africa as the sacred motherland as a way of silencing the suffering of mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters.

Listen to words of Stella Ngatho as she thinks about the male-dominated control of women’s travel and movement that makes the woman in the poem plead, “Return my mother to me.”

Foot-Path Path-let . . . leaving home leading out Return my mother to me, Though you are wide or narrow Return my mother to me. The sun is sinking and darkness coming Hens and cocks are already inside and babies drowsing, Return my mother to me. We do not have fire-wood and the hurricane lamp I have not seen.

There is no more food...