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83 = 6 Balm in Gilead Memory, Mourning, and Healing in African American Autobiography Albert J. Raboteau Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. —Matthew 5:4 Permit me to begin autobiographically. The sun is bright. I am standing next to a wooden fence. Beyond the fence is a cow. The cow moves slowly towards me. She is called Mr. Frank’s cow because she belongs to Mr. Frank, who lives next door to us. I try to feed my bottle to Mr. Frank’s cow through the rails of the fence because milk comes from cows. A black dog named Sappo sits beside me. He belongs to my sisters’ friend Racille. I am laughing, and Mr. Frank’s cow is laughing, and Sappo is laughing, too. I run to tell my mother and my sisters. This, my first memory, is a very joyful one. Perhaps this early experience in my hometown of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi stuck so firmly in my memory because my mother used it to wean me from the baby bottle. When we moved north not long afterwards, my bottle disappeared. When I asked for it, she told me, “Oh, Mr. Frank’s cow took it.” I did not quite believe her. We moved to the North when I was two, but returned South during summers to visit relatives down home. One summer I remember especially well, the summer of my education. I remember one Sunday, when we awoke too late to attend Mass at St. Rose de Lima, the black church in Bay St. Louis. So we went to the white church, Our Lady of the Gulf. White ushers directed us to sit in back, squeezed together in a half pew. I remember going to receive Holy Communion and watching the priest carrying the host pass me by, and again pass me by, passing me by until he had given communion to all the white people. I remember stumbling back to the pew dazed, confused, shamed. 84 Albert J. Raboteau There had been two previous incidents during that same trip: my mother stopped me from drinking at a “whites only” water fountain and two white ladies objected to me wading in the bay from the white beach. But the incident that hurt me the worst was discrimination at the Communion rail. Even at seven I knew it was a sacrilege. Forty years later on a research trip to Charleston, South Carolina, I decided to attend Mass in the historic cathedral downtown. Arriving late, I sat in back. When it came time to receive Communion, I stood in line amidst a sea of white faces. I felt as if something were holding me back. I turned from the line. I talked to myself and turned back, but I could not make myself go. I left the church and on the sidewalk outside I began to cry—a grown man shedding tears that had not fallen forty years earlier that summer down home. Memory and the Roots of Racial Identity That summer I was initiated into the racialized character of American society through my own particular experience, not just of being racially other, but of being identified as pejoratively other. This experience, accompanied by deep feelings of shame, loss, and rejection, constitutes a significant dimension of identity formation for African Americans (and other racialized minorities) as persons and as a group. The moment(s) of racial trauma live on in memory. Even when seemingly forgotten, an incident, remark, or situation can precipitate the feelings of a past experience of racism. These hidden wounds affect white Americans also, as Thandeka poignantly demonstrates in her book, based on her interviews with whites about their memories of racial identity formation, Learning to Be White. When asked, “How and when did you learn that you are white?” a significant number of her respondents spoke of painful memories of loss, shame, guilt, and betrayal, associated with close childhood interracial friendships that their parents broke or forced them to break. Recalling these childhood memories caused some to react emotionally with tears or with anger.1 Groups, like persons, have memories that serve to constitute their identities as groups. Moreover, our nation, constituted by diverse ethnic, racial, and religious groups achieves a unified identity, not only through a set of shared principles articulated in civic institutions but also through memory. A prime source of identity for a nation is history, construed as a set of interlocking stories...

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