The first time she went to church, she was a dewy six years old. Her grandmother wanting her safe and protected, in the tradition of many Jamaican matriarchs, believed the sooner her spirituality was developed the better her life would be. Grandma did not have much to give her, but she could make sure that for church she was clean and in a new pretty dress with matching ribbons in her freshly plaited hair. Grandma placed her in the taxi on the lap of her church sister and sent her on her way through the Kingston streets to a local Catholic church; in her little fist, the girl tightly held a 50 dollar note for offering. Watched over by her grandmother’s friends who had their own army of pickney to attend to, Maxie attempted to follow the strange rituals of those around her. Later as a teenager, she graduated to an initiated full-fledged member of Christianity; in Pentecostalism, she found her spiritual home. Church became more than a weekly visit to ensure entrance to the pearly gates. For Maxeen Ferron, Church was an Event- from youth fellowship where she stewarded young souls to youth choir where spirit was invoked through songs to the annual sleep away camps where she and friends were finally away from the surveillance of their parents. Church became cemented within her social life. It was her home in the truest sense of the word. It was her raft that provided her community on a tiny island with shaky economic prospects and seemingly never-ending violence. When she became Maxeen Wright when she married my father when I was nine, she followed the direction of her grandmother and placed her wayward new child in the Church with the firm belief that I would become as in love with and invested in the church as she was, and it would straighten out the out-ov-orda child.
And for a time, I loved church. In the ritual of dressing up, singing songs that lifted me emotionally, watching in amazement at the grace of dancers and the passion of the speakers, I found stability in my childhood. I had pride in learning my bible verses, the songs and the lessons of my Sunday school teachers. I went to church and saw a community that though they had disagreements and gossiped about each other, showed up every time someone needed a prayer, a babysitter, a new lead on a job, funds, or a person to talk to. That stability, however, was shattered when I was fourteen. I remember the sermon of an “ex-lesbian” who spoke of how she was saved by God, a God that wanted me straight and cisgender. In that moment, I was frozen with my face burning as if my queer identity would leak out of me and pollute the space that I felt that I was a stranger to for the first time in my life.
Due to my queerness and transness, I have a vex relationship with my spiritual upbringing in the Pentecostal Church and how it has affected my understanding of my stepmother and other members of my family. Yet, I feel that to discard this place and the community it provides is to place it in a good-bad binary when the reality is much more complex. I do not believe in the complete discarding of people and spaces, rather I choose what remains a difficult process of picking accountability and consequences over punishment and eradication. Hence, I aim to remain amid the complexity of my family’s spiritual practices rather than reject them completely even if I do not have the same relationship to their religious practices.
Church was home in all its complex meanings. bell hooks argues that homeplaces can be sites of resistance where, “Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, nor objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.”[i] Whether in the church or the yard, my mother and her spiritual practices allowed for her to cultivate spaces that held the capacity for Black life. I want to consider how the lessons I learned from the spiritual practices of my mother and also, my grandmother might lend itself to understanding what I call abolition home practices. If we are to understand abolition as a desire to eradicate white supremacist and racial capitalist practices that were birthed from colonization and slavery such as policing and imprisonment, then I want to honor those from whom I first learned of abolition before I knew the word existed: the ancestral teachings of my family. Abolition home practices are those which allow for the cultivation and care of the lives of marginalized folks and the development of freer worlds; practices that do not need to exist in strictly political abolition organizing but that have existed as ancestral teachings and traditions that kept, hold, and allowed for life. Hence being an abolitionist allows for me to not only hold my mother’s church accountable for its harm against queer and trans folks but also to understand how those in the Church, going beyond the Church’s colonial and white supremacist foundations, had the capacity to care for the lives of its Black and Brown practitioners amid the systematic injustices they faced in the US.
While my stepmother honed her spiritual skills in the city of Kingston, my father was being raised by his mother, my grandmother Cecilia, who was lovingly known as Mama, in the hills of Brighton, Saint Elizabeth. In the country, far from the cities of Montego Bay and Kingston, my grandmother, my father and his seven siblings tilled the land my grandfather labored for from afar in England, sending money back home to keep that land. My father learned how to birth fruits from the soil. It is a task he has never left. My parent’s home is filled with plants and a backyard garden my dad built on top of concrete that produces scotch bonnet peppers, sweet peppers, cucumber, tomatoes, strawberries, and callaloo. My father loves to share his harvest with his family, especially Mama until her death. Farming and harvesting are my father’s connection beyond the Carribbean working class neighborhood of Canarsie, Brooklyn we immigrated to when I was four and back towards to Jamaica.
Back home, if you look at our Brighton farm, our yard, you will see pieces of wood that create makeshift stairs on either side of the wire fences that enclosed different parts of the land that create boundaries for humans and animals like goats, chicken or a pig or cow if it could be afforded. These pieces of discarded wood that I now know are called a stile allow for individuals to cross over boundaries like the wire fence creating easier communication, movement and sharing. I consider ancestral teachings like the sharing of food, bread breaking, burying and mourning each other, the way we hold each other as ancestral stiles allowing for these abolition home teachings to pass generationally beyond physical and ephemeral boundaries. The stiles between my stepmother’s grandmother and her and I, between Mama and me.
To some, it may seem that I am romanticizing my family practices. Do not be mistaken, I am. I want to radically claim romanticization as a Black feminist practice of honoring, holding and home archiving against the forces of coloniality and antiblackness. It is easier to discuss my mother’s homophobia and the harm inflicted upon me by her unmanaged trauma than it is to discuss her capacity to care for me against the grain of her homophobia. These are interlocked and I argue we must stay in the tension of the complexity of those around us. This does not mean allowing and accepting abuse but understanding that we share different yet linked lived experiences. I want to lend her a role not often given by colonial white supremacy; I want her and women like her in my family to be romanced. To romance in this way, it is to hold her in the complexity of who she is and still believe in loving her.[ii] It is not to be blind to her mistakes but to see. To see her.
Seeing becomes an act of Black feminist practice.[iii] Black feminism allows for us to see the fullness of home and world making practices of Black women which is why I consider Black feminism an incredibly significant field of thought that encourages me, pushes me and makes space for the communities I come from. I write from and within Black feminist practice for the tenderness of its vision holding possibilities. I become able to witness and register the stiles that allow for Black life, to see wholeness. Ashanté Reese explains that in her ethnographic work on Black communal practices, “Black feminist theory, praxis, and living constantly teach me to see myself in the work, to experience my and others’ wholeness.” [iv] What does it mean to see one as whole? It is to reject colonial understandings of the Black body and Black people. And I claim the romance of that. Romanization becomes an affective stile allowing me to reach into, hold and imagine my family’s abolitionist home practices.
Big Pot Methodology
Hot steam lashed out like a slapping hand across her brow from the bubbling pot. Ignoring the heat, Cecilia dipped her spoon into the pot, breaking the bubbling mustard surface. She brought the spoon to her mouth, blowing it gently before tasting it. Did it have enough salt? Enough cumin? Enough peppa to make her children squirm as sweat broke across their foreheads and backs as they eagerly yam it down? Curry was a favorite in this yard; lucky it was cause it fed a lot of people. A bit of curry on a bowl of white rice settled the hungry pickney. A lesson she learned from her own mother, Beatrice Adora, daughter of Indian indentured servant, Anna who braved two oceans to come to Jamaica. She called her eldest daughter, Judy to bring together whoever was in the yard for dinner. Her daughter reported back all her siblings were here plus two of her cousins who lived with them while their parents were working in Montego Bay, her sister’s baby son and her brother’s school friend. Cecilia kissed her teeth and chuckled to herself; her son’s little friend always seemed to know when dinner was being made but she was glad to feed the pickney. If someone was hungry, they were fed. She believed it was the Christian thing to do and it brought her joy even if meant stretching the curry a bit more. And anyways, curry always filled the stomach even if it was more carrots and potatoes than chicken that swam in the hot pot.
My father’s favorite story of my grandmother was that of her big pot. Everyday with eight pickney around her legs, she filled that pot with food for her children, the neighborhood children and later her grandchildren; every child who crossed her threshold was fed no matter their relationship to her. And this was true for other pots in the small town of Brighton, Jamaica; neighbors fed each other’s children ensuring that everyone who needed food for life, to continue breathing and living, received food. She believed it was the Christian thing to do.[v] Through hardships of economic strife, health issues, immigration, the threat of violence, it was her spiritual practices that gave her the energy, the soul, to move forward caring her herself, her Black children, her family and those in her communities. Mama grounds my approach to my own work. She inspires what I call a big pot methodology where leaning upon both my family’s teachings and women of color epistemologies, I research and archive communal healing practices by bringing folks into my kitchen or sharing food so we may break bread while navigating our relationship to food, acts of care and world making. I believe the care work that makes life possible occurred at my grandmother’s kitchen table and I continue it at my own. And such abolitionist home practices occur at many tables.
To bring someone into one’s kitchen and feed them from your pot is an intimate act of communal survival and care. Food goes beyond simple nourishment and helps us to understand community building, cultural work and personal identity.[vi] It becomes a spiritual, decolonial act of abolition world making that urges us to, to shed colonial myths that aims for us to discard each other the way colonial powers have. As we sit around the “big pot” we hold tight to our own visions for the future¾ abolitionist futures where we feed, yam, and share. Futures built by our current interdependence and coalition building. And it means we can hold each other in the wholeness of who we are. As Nora Samaran argues, “Collective healing is possible. We can heal when we can finally be our whole, unguarded selves, in human community, without shields or guards, and be liked, accepted, seen, held. This is systemic change, spiritual change, at the core levels of our culture, lived each day.” [vii] My grandmother existed in the nexus of multiple colonial legacies: the attempted genocide of the Yamaye, the original Taíno stewards of Xaymaca, the brutal enslavement of West Africans and the tolling indentured servitude of Indo-Carribbean people. By feeding everyone who crossed her threshold, she invested in their wellbeing, their wholeness, their healing. She cared for those discarded and harmed by colonial agents. Though she would never apply this term to herself, I see Mama in the wholeness of who she was, a healer. And utilizing the stile she built, crossing her Jamaican soil to US, I carry her big pot with me to continue her healing practices.
Soul Work
I knew my new mother through her church. My stepmother’s social life revolved around her church, The Church of God of East Flatbush. Surrounded by her closest friends, her pastor married my father and her in that Church. She graduated from usher to head usher in my childhood. She dragged me every Sunday until my teenage years to Church. She dutifully gave portions of her income to Church and volunteered and spearheaded community soup kitchens, and clothing and toy drives. After church service as she finished cooking Sunday dinner, she gossiped for hours on the phone about other church members with her church sisters even though they had just seen each other an hour ago. If I could not get her on the phone, she was at Church. For her it was protection, community, joy.
It was a locus of familiarity that was steadfast in a world of everchanging economic and social situations. For many Caribbean families like my own, church is where you made sense of the world you had immigrated to that was so unlike the island you left behind. Across the Carribbean diaspora, Church is where you were saved, where you shared food that was familiar to everyone, where you were not embarrassed if you slipped into patois. You did not have to explain yourself. You did not have to make yourself fit into this new society¾you grew up going to church, so the well-rehearsed role of churchgoing became a familiar security blanket.
My mother, when I spoke to her about her community organizing in her church, stated that her most important task was to build a relationship with those around her as those relationships were a way to embody the spirit.[viii] When my mother serves food to someone in the soup kitchen or gives out toys or clothing, she makes sure to know the names of those who come especially if they come repeatedly. She said she wanted to make sure if she saw them in the community later, she could check up on them and acknowledge that they had a relationship with someone who knew of their circumstances and cared. It’s an extension of her work as an usher in which she greets everyone who enters the space and attempts to call them by their name and ask about their family.
In addition, she discussed how during moments of accidents, health issues and bereavement, it was important for folks to know they could lean on their spiritual community for comfort and support. She tells me that you cannot provide comfort without soul. For her, building a community is an embodied spiritual practice. My mother’s work touches upon sacred African cosmological practices of caring for the soul of her community by illustrating that there is no separation between the sacred and everyday practices.[ix] Her actions convey that we need to practice ways of caring, of acknowledging each other’s humanity and through this, we find ways to build communities that challenge the afterlife of slavery and coloniality. And this practice has always existed. We simply must continue it.
My favorite song from church growing up was the song, “I Need You to Survive” by Hezekiah Walker. He sings:
I need you, you need me.
We’re all a part of God’s body.
It is his will, that every need be supplied.
You are important to me, I need you to survive.
As church members held each other hands, swaying in the power of the words, I felt the feeling I feel when I envision abolition, when I envision all of us in a communal healing journey where we radically believe in the power of care. I need you and you need me, and through us, we make another world possible. Though I am well aware of how my mother and grandmother’s spiritual practices practice exclusion, I still learned from them how to build communal networks of care. Through their spiritual practices were linked to Christianity, there are lessons that extend beyond a specific religion and that tie into the larger role of spirituality in worldmaking. And these spiritual practices are where I first learned of abolition possibilities. My own family spiritual lessons, our abolition home practices, become the wood that I use to build my own stile to pass down my teachings as a future ancestor.
Author Biography
Dr. Akae Wright (they/them) is a Jamaican first-generation healer-scholar and storyteller. They are an assistant professor of Black Feminist Studies at George Washington University in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and American Studies. Their book project, Embodying Abolition: Healing Justice, Black Feminism and Ending Carcerality, investigates how Black individuals communally and intimately live, resist, and care amid carceral forces. Situated in Black feminist thought, queer and trans studies, and carceral studies, their scholarship and research explore communal healing justice approaches to carceral abolition, centering the care, spiritual, and life flourishing practices of Black folks by tracing Black feminist genealogies of healing through historical and contemporary moments. They were awarded the Leadership in Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity Fellowship in 2020 and the 2021 Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Following receiving their Ph.D. in Feminist Studies at the University of Minnesota, they were a Black Feminist Thought postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University in Africana Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Their work has been published in the Review of Communication, Abolition: A Journal of Insurgent Politics, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking and American Studies. They were raised in Brooklyn, New York and love their plants, biking, yoga, baking and cooking, and creating embroidery art.
Notes
[i] bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 384.
[ii] bell hooks, All about Love: New Visions (New York: Harper, 2000). In her work bell hooks tells us, “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility” (13).
[iii] Terrion L. Williamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, Commonalities (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). Terrion Williamson defines Black feminist practice as “radical commitment to the significance of black female life and the humanity of all black peoples, regardless of whether the practitioner identifies with feminism as a formalized ideological commitment or holds some views that might ultimately be deemed antithetical to feminism itself” (7).
[iv] Ashanté M. Reese, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 136.
[v] I imagine my grandmother’s cooking practices as linked to these Bible Verses. Mark 14:22-23 New International Version (NIV): 22 “While they were eating, Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying, “Take it; this is my body.” 23 Then he took a cup, and when he had given thanks, he gave it to them, and they all drank from it.”
[vi] Psyche A. Williams-Forson, Building Houses out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 4.
[vii] Nora Samaran, Turn This World Inside Out: The Emergence of Nurturance Culture (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 35.
[viii] M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, Perverse Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). As M. Jacqui Alexander states on communal spiritual practices, “We have been neighbors, living in the raucous seams of deprivation. We have healed each other’s sick; buried each other’s dead” (298).
[ix] Leah Penniman, Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Chelsea, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), 53.