Womanist Spirit and Womanist Healing for Sandra Bland and George Floyd

CAROLYN M. JONES MEDINE

Abstract

Womanist thought offers a holistic worldview from which to interpret the deaths of Sandra Bland and George Floyd. Alice Walker, in the novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, introduces the Grandmother Spirit, a figure of the Great Spirit, an important element in Walker’s definition of what it means to be “womanist.” The Grandmother informs the action of Grand Mothers, both living and ancestor, who offer potential healing to Black people under violence, including death at the hands of police. The article analyzes one episode in the novel, Lalika’s arrest and rape by police, and the appearance of an ancestral Grand Mother, Saartjie Bartmann, who sustains Lalika. After exploring this visitation of spirits, the article turns to the cases of Sandra Bland, for whom no ancestor appeared, and George Floyd, for whom his mother and a host of Grand Mother witnesses, did appear. The article concludes with an examination of Walker’s essay “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” in which she meditates on intergenerational interconnectedness and truth-telling and suggests art as a site of imaginative justice.

Key Words: Alice Walker, womanist, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Grandmother/Grand Mother, Saartjie Bartmann, Sandra Bland, George Floyd

Womanist thought offers a holistic worldview, as Layli Mayparan puts it,¹ from which to see and to interpret the deaths of Sandra Bland and George Floyd. Alice Walker’s novel Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart introduces a figure, the Grandmother Spirit, a sign of the greater Spirit, that is the basis for understanding Womanist spirit and healing. Alongside analysis of healing in Walker’s novel, this essay also explores the Grand Mothers, both living and ancestor, who offer potential healing to Black people under duress and facing death – particularly, the death of Black people at the hands of police.

In this paper, I analyze one episode from Walker’s novel, Kate’s encounter with Lalika, whom Kate meets on a pilgrimage to Peru. Lalikia and her friend Gloria are arrested in Mississippi for murdering a man who raped Lalika. In jail, prison guards and, later, other prisoners, rape Lalika and her friend Gloria, and the guards film and market the rapes. In the prison, Saartjie Bartmann, exhibited during the 19^th century as the “Hottentot Venus,” appears as an ancestor who comes to their aid and sustains them. In addition, I examine Kate’s encounter with the earth as ancestor through her use of the herb Ayahuasca.

Kate aligns Ayahuasca with the Grandmother; and the Grandmother, as figure of the feminine, of earth, and of the ancestors, opens up a new dimension of Womanist power. Drawing upon these visitations of spirits, I explore the cases of Sandra Bland, for whom no ancestor appeared, and George Floyd, for whom his mother, a feminine ancestor did. Finally, I turn to Walker’s essay, “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,”² in which Walker meditates on, not a solution, but a response to such violence.

Situating Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart among Walker’s Work

Now Is the Time is the story of Kate Nelson, who has renamed herself Kate Talkingtree, and her reconnection to indigenous – what Toni Morrison calls “discredited” – knowledge. Kate is a fifty-seven-year-old writer who is dissatisfied with her life and begins a search for fulfillment, peace, and community through journey and through quest. Walker’s perennial womanist concerns are woven throughout the novel. Isabelle Van-Peteghem Tread notes Walker’s concern with female sexuality, connecting it to her eco-spirituality. Tread suggests that the novel “adopts a new angle to explore female sexuality, as pleasure is intertwined with the relations women are able to build, not only with their nature but also with the earth.”³ Pamela A. Smith links Walker’s eco-spirituality with three ongoing themes in Walker’s writing: first, eros, women’s sexuality and love, which is, as Smith puts it, “learned, often fought for, birthed in pain; second, her ongoing activism; and, third, her pantheism” – all of which form “a womanist spirituality which…might be called not a realized but a realizable eschatology,” attainable through practice.⁴ In addition to sexuality and eco-spirituality that Tread and Smith note, in analyzing the Now Is the Time, we might add the importance of dreams as communication from the Spirit, as both Kate and, her estranged lover, Yolo are highly attentive to their dreams. This womanist spirituality is, as is Walker’s, practical and mixed. In the novel, Kate is practicing Buddhism, but becomes disenchanted with the White sangha of which she is a part, and she links this experience with her disenchantment with Christianity, as Kayle Garton-Grundling notes, “In both cases, a foreign faith doles out undeserved criticism of people whose experiences the religious tradition does not understand.”⁵ By the end of the novel, Kate returns to Buddhist practice, but a practice infused with ancestral knowledge, which we will explore in the next section.

Kate embarks on a journey, crossing both land and water,⁶ undertaking a quest through which to recapture both holiness and wholeness.4F⁷ Van-Petegham sees Walker’s characters on a journey “towards the wilderness, a vast parable for human nature,” in a quest for reunion and wholeness.⁸ This use of the quest motif, combined with a physical journey into the wilderness, into nature, marks the novel as an essentially American one, similar to Mark Twain’s Huck Finn or Jack London’s The Call of the Wild. Walker marks this traditional motif as womanist, as, for example, in Celie’s quest in The Color Purple, rethinking what generally has been, in literature, the province of men. The journey is marked by a womanist search for healing. As Mayparyan describes it, “this nonlinear neo-Odyssean journey” has both inward and outward directions that signal the “womanist process of coming into consciousness, moving through consciousness, and ultimately expanding consciousness… – all without scripts!”⁹ Kate searches for the tools to create a sense of well-being and relevance in the world.¹⁰ Journey and quest as themes signal, in a womanist mode, healing and the therapeutic,¹¹which for Kate entails a search for the ancestor, including Kate’s parents, the Buddha, and Saartije Baartman. For Walker, ancestors are not always direct relatives, but also may be adopted global predecessors.¹² The quest for Kate includes cleansing through spiritual instruction, consumption of yagé under the supervision of a spiritual guide, and meditation. All of these elements in the quest bring Kate to a sense of wholeness that she can take back to her ordinary life.¹³

In addition, the importance of story is a key theme, as it always is for Walker. Similar to Maya Angelou, Walker is one of our most fearless autobiographers, documenting her life in works from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens¹⁴ to The Chicken Chronicles.¹⁵ The telling of story is a way to speak back to the metanarrative which has defined Black people; telling of story is a tradition beginning with the slave narrative and extending into the present. The novel, which has a global view, is, therefore, about reconnection and self-narration, on multiple levels, as Kate and her lover Yolo separate to reunite, each experiencing an indigenous culture and reconnecting with ancestors, which lets them heal and re-form community. For Walker, the sharing of stories, the journey through reflection, is as important as the physical journey into the self: “It is from our stories that we will remake the world,” Walker says in an interview. “Knowledge supplies the mind with facts; stories give sensation to the heart.”¹⁶

The exploration of “self” marks a return to the mother – here, the Grandmother or Grand Mother. Yolo’s experience of matrilineal culture in Hawaii parallels Kate’s experience with Grandmother in the Amazon. Both are connected to the Earth Mother. Kate’s experience with indigenous traditions is with yagé, Ayahuasca, a drink, which she calls the Grandmother, made of two plants native to the Amazon. In an interconnecting current, Walker explores her own past. Her grandmother, whose name was Kate, was murdered by a man whom she rejected as a lover.¹⁷ This loss points to the role of the ancestors in the novel and the human dialectical relationship with them. Some ancestors in the novel – like Remus, whose master pulls all his teeth because the master’s wife finds Remus attractive, and George Slaughter, whom we discuss later in the paper – need healing.¹⁸ Other ancestors, like Saartjie, come to heal us.¹⁹ We, in this relationship, Walker suggests, are moving towards the maturity of becoming ancestors ourselves.²⁰ Ultimately, Kate recognizes herself as a Grand Mother, an elder aligned with, a friend of, the ancestors, the earth, and the indigenous who can return to – and indeed, recognize in – Buddhist practice all these elements.

Ayahuasca: The Grandmother Herb

The herb that Kate and her companions take while in the Amazon is Ayahuasca (aya-wascha) or yagé (Banisteriopsis caapi). It is a tropical shrub used ritualistically, as a tea, under the supervision of a shaman.²¹ The consumption of yagé brings on vomiting or diarrhea after which one has a psychic experience that shows one what one needs to know about the self. Olivia Lavecchia writes, observing an American ritual,

For the next four to five hours, those in the room do what one may call “the work.” Some take trips into their childhood memories. Others have visions: of nature, of healers, of fireworks. Afterward, they say the tea offered an opportunity to look at their problems in a new light.²²

In the novel, yagé brings us into touch with our own suffering²³ and opens a connection to the Mother spirit. The drug is called “The Vine of the Soul” or a teaching drug.²⁴ One shaman calls it love, bringing us into relationship.²⁵ Kate calls the drug Grandmother and aligns her with the Earth Mother of Walker’s eco-womanism, aligning Black women’s bodies, as Melanie Harris writes, with the body of the earth.²⁶ Grandmother is a medicine of origins and ends.²⁷ As a tree-like plant, Grandmother reminds us of Kate’s being surrounded by trees and is aligned with the feminine – every woman must find the Grandmother in order to live without fear²⁸ – and the Earth. To understand Grandmother is to be in tune, more broadly, with the endless cycles of becoming. Kate tells Yolo, “And the main thing is that she makes you see that the magic of the mystery we’re in just goes on and on…Something is always happening. In fact, everything is always happening.”²⁹ Just as Grandmother suggests time is a construct, she also suggests that space is. She tells Kate that she must live two years in space. That is not to leave the Earth, but to realize that, small though it is – “a dust mote in the cosmos” – life on earth is a raft in space: “It is like a raft on a river and the river is space.”³⁰ Part of taking in Grandmother’s teaching, therefore, is to learn to be where and when you are, while, as shaman Guillermo Arévalo says, learning all the realms of existence and “the relationship of nature, energy and light.”³¹ This, as Debra Walker King establishes, is the womanist connection of “human-to-human-to-spirit-to-nature.”³²

In Now Is the Time, Kate becomes so adept with the drug that it does not affect her in the typical way – with nausea and visions – but gives her the capacity of lucid dreaming³³ so that she can help the others on the trip, both living and dead, on their journeys. Taking Grandmother, she becomes a Grand Mother.

Through Kate’s mastery, Walker expands the idea of what yagé is: she aligns it with the Grandmother ancestor archetype. Grandmother, for Kate, is the ultimate ancestor – a relative.³⁴ Throughout the novel, Grandmother speaks; she teaches. Grandmother teaches that she cannot be destroyed: “There is no potion, no poison you can create, that will do anything but rearrange the pattern I have made.”³⁵What we destroy, in exploiting the earth and in refusing to suffer, is our own happiness. To be in touch with Grandmother gives us peace:

I am peace, said Grandmother, and nothing has to die for me to exist. Not tobacco, not grapes, or sugarcane. Not human beings. And not me! She added, laughing.³⁶

She is, Kate tells Yolo, loving and patient, but brisk and no-nonsense.³⁷

Grandmother offers a way of knowing what is before and beyond language. Talking, Grandmother asserts, has made us lose the ability “to read one another, to feel one another, to know one another at a glance.”³⁸ Grandmother takes us into the wilderness, in contrast to civilization, which, Kate learns, limits and drains us.³⁹ Such a quest opens the heart to healing, and the novel’s title is a line from one of the shamans, Armando’s icaros, or healing songs.⁴⁰

The pilgrims on Kate’s journey include Lalika, a woman all know to be a murderer. It is through Lalika that we connect the Grandmother, healing, and the tragedies of Sandra Bland and George Floyd.

Saartjie: The Visitation of Spirits

Lalika is a Black woman from Mississippi. She weeps throughout the rituals, holding herself rigid, “as if sitting on a runaway train”⁴¹ or writhes on the floor, as if “trying to escape from her own body.”⁴² Lalika, the group knows, is a murderer. She killed the man who raped her and tried to rape her friend Gloria. After the killing, Lalika and her friend try to escape, but are captured, beaten by the patrolmen who catch them, and thrown into a county jail. In jail, they are under surveillance, constantly. Guards and inmates rape them repeatedly – later, the inmates are charged to do so – and the rapes “had been preserved on video and marketed by two of the guards.”⁴³ The women are exploited even after they are freed, as the media wants them to tell and retell their stories.

They are on display, never having on a moment of privacy, like the ancestor who visits them: Saartjie, holding a jar, signifying her pickled genitals and brain, which she raises level with her heart, and the jar disappears into her heart.⁴⁴ The women read about her in Jet magazine and begin to dream of her. Saartjie comes, in a visitation of spirits, to offer comfort as the women are being raped.

Saartjie Baartman, also called Sarah or Sara Bartman(n), is an important historical figure, and in womanist terms, she is a symbol of the exploitation of Black women’s bodies and of the dehumanization of Black women.⁴⁵ She was brought to England in 1810, by William Dunlop, and promised riches from being in show business.”⁴⁶ The “show” was Baartman herself. She was displayed, between 1810-1815, in “freak shows, exhibited, humiliated, lampooned in cartoons and mocked in music hall doggerel.”⁴⁷ She was also privately exhibited. When British abolitionists sought to free her from her essential slavery, her “‘contract’ was sold to a French operator of a traveling circus”⁴⁸ who was an animal trainer. Her story came to light during the 20^th century when, in 1985, Stephen J. Gould “stumbled upon the ‘dissected genitalia of three Third-World Women’”⁴⁹ in the Musée de l’ Homme in Paris. Saartjie’s organs, genitals, and buttocks, along with her skeleton, had been on display in the museum from 1937-1974, then pickled and stored. In his essay Gould decried the “scientific racism” that led to her, and at least one other woman of her tribe, being exploited and her body being exhibited. The return of her body parts, the recovery of her remains, coincided with “the rise of postcolonial theory, especially the concept of ‘the Other,’ [and] with crisis for South Africa…the beginning of the end of apartheid.”⁵⁰

Although she is a figure more narrated than narrating, she is a “named person, and this facilitates a sense of identification with her as an ancestor.”⁵¹ She is a site of conflict. Rachel Holmes, in her biography, explores the combination of sexuality and racism that surrounds Baartman, the “erotic/anti-erotic dichotomy.”⁵²

“Hottentot Venus,” a symbolic appellation that combined the demeaning Dutch term for the Khoi peoples of Southern Africa with a name for the Greco-European goddess of love, was assigned when Baartman was placed as an attraction in a 19^th century European show. United, the words Hottentot and Venus carried a potent force. They couple Eros with notions of ugliness, desire with degradation, license with taboo, and transcendent goddess with carnal beast.⁵³

This is encoded in Baartman’s name as well. Her first name is the Cape Dutch form for “Sarah” which marked her as a colonialist’s servant. “Saartjie” the diminutive, was also a sign of affection. Encoded in her first name were the tensions of affection and exploitation. Her surname literally means “bearded man” in Dutch. It also means uncivilized, uncouth, barbarous, savage. Saartjie Baartman – the savage servant.⁵⁴

Lalika recognizes that the Europeans must have as much feared as they had been fascinated by Saartjie: “She was a big woman, big tits, big ass, big everything, I guess. I could see why the puny Europeans who first saw her naked body must have felt fear. If she could have so much – you know, tits, ass, pussy – why did they have so little?”⁵⁵ Saartjie, having become ancestor, a Grand Mother, as we shall discuss later, has overcome their fear: Saartjie’s taking her dissected body into her heart symbolizes the opening of the heart that is healing.

How are we to deal with the fear? [Kate] asked.

How else? said the snake.... Make friends with it.⁵⁶

Saartjie brings the women “pure love” and escape.

From that time on, we disappeared from our captors. We did not fight them. We did not curse them. We did not even try to ignore them. All of which we had done before. They did whatever they did to our bodies but we had flown. Into that luminous grass skirt…. Into that big red round hat…. Into that rose-colored cape that seemed to be made of thorns.⁵⁷

The women begin to call each other Saartjie, as if they “are two expressions of that one loving and constant being, all of us with one name.”⁵⁸ She is an ancestor and a saint,⁵⁹ her spirit combining with another mother, the Virgin of Guadalupe, who becomes a key figure for them.⁶⁰

Gloria does not gain freedom of mind and soul after being freed; she dies of a heart attack from using crack. Lalika, who says she never had a mother, survives partly because of her grandmother, an ancestor of her own, whom she can align with Saartjie, through the use of Ayahuasca, and through the creation of her own ritual. As she and Kate talk, in the cleansing rain of the Amazon, she is crocheting a hat, that, she says, if she completes the journey, she will wear. “‘If I survive this journey,’” Gloria tells Kate, “‘I will shave my head. Then, until I am used to being bald, I will wear this little crocheted cap. It has many tears woven in…but if I live, the sun will dry them.’”⁶¹ Kate adds her own tear to the cap. When we reach the end of the ritual, Lalika, head shaved, is wearing her cap, and her “eyes were serene and clear.”⁶²

Coming to the healing of one’s pain is a step towards becoming an elder, which is the level of maturity a living person must reach before becoming ancestor.⁶³ Kate, who has become a friend of Grandmother, is becoming an elder: sage, counselor, mediator, and judge.⁶⁴ One qualification of becoming an ancestor is proper burial.⁶⁵ Proper burial of memory by mourning the past is a modern path, Walker suggests, to becoming ancestor. As Deborah E. McDowell, writing about Toni Morrison’s Sula tells us, “the process of mourning and remembering…leads to intimacy with the self, which is all that makes intimacy with others possible.”⁶⁶ The journey on the Amazon, aided by the use of yagé, along with the sharing of stories, is a form of mourning and reclamation of self.

The Grandmother ancestor and the Grand Mothers, who are living elders, are, for Walker, the power the postmodern world needs now. In a poem from Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, Walker asks men to step back and calls the grandmothers:

Come out… / Step forward / & assume / the role / for which / you were / created: / To lead humanity / To health, happiness / & sanity.⁶⁷

The Grandmother ancestor energy – “a force perhaps less physically powerful but spiritually dynamic and global, perhaps cosmic, in her scope”⁶⁸ – is, for Walker, worked out in the world through Womanist Elder power. The use of Ayahausca, therefore, is not an end in itself, but one tool or practice, a way of reconnecting to memory and to the ancestor.

Walker envisions, in the novel, a practice or way for Lalika to survive her encounter with corrupt and evil police officers who use her and Gloria for their pleasure and profit. Many, however, in our present historical moment, do not survive encounters with the police, as we see in the case of Sandra Bland, for whom, we may speculate, no ancestor came, and in the death of George Floyd, whose mother, we believe, appeared.

Sandra Bland and George Floyd

Sandra Bland’s death in a Prairie View, Texas, jail cell is a matter still under dispute. Either she was hanged or hanged herself with a plastic trash bag. The offense she committed, failure to signal a lane change, is “technically” an offense for which one can be arrested in Texas, but “it rarely happens.”66F⁶⁹ She is one of 4,200 people who have died in custody in Texas in the past decade, The Guardian reports.⁷⁰ And, she was one of five Black women – Bland, Kindra Chapman, Joyce Curnell, Ralkina Jones, and Raynette Turner – who died in police custody in July 2015. Chapman was only eighteen.⁷¹ Their cases are eerily similar: fairly young women in jail for two days, held on minor charges, and waiting to see a judge. Bland, if she did tell her jailers that she was depressed and had tried to attempt suicide – and one booking document shows she did not – this status was improperly assessed, and Bland was not put on a required suicide watch.⁷² Even sadder, a female officer showed up at the arrest scene –no one is talking about her – and she says, “I saw everything.” When Bland protests, the female officer says, “I’m not talking to you,” and tells the Officer Encinia to have the EMT check him out.⁷³

The Grand Jury met in 2015 and declined to indict the sheriff and the jail staff. Charges against Encinia were dropped in 2017. Bland’s mother, Geneva Reed-Veal, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the trooper, Brian T. Encinia, and settled for $1.9 million.⁷⁴ In an important development, a thirty-nine second video that Sandra Bland herself filmed of the encounter with Encinia surfaced in 2019. Texas officials were aware of the video, and referred to it “‘multiple times’” in the investigative report.⁷⁵ The family lawyer had not seen the video and asked for the case to be reopened. At last report, it has not been reopened.

Two elements of the Sandra Bland case stand out. First, the surveillance of Sandra Bland – both in the arrest video and the jail video – and second, the way Bland was treated as a person and a non-person simultaneously.

In Walker’s novel Lalika says that she and Gloria were not just filmed, but watched.⁷⁶ There was, she says, no privacy. This, as Valerie Jenness, David Smith, and Judith Stephan-Norris argue, is characteristic of surveillance. Surveillance operates at both the micro and the macro levels. At the micro level, it is a venue through which people are sorted, classified, and treated differentially, while at the macro level, social structures are formed, institutionalized, and occasionally, challenged and changed, with varied effect for different populations.⁷⁷

This occurs through surveillance because surveillance illuminates the “workings of the state and systems of inequality…cultural dispositions, and the promise of criminal justice delivered as well as the threat of justice denied.”⁷⁸ Michel Foucault’s metaphor of the panopticon is the leading model for analyzing surveillance, suggesting issues of both control and discipline as elements of surveillance in our society. The watched – and we may think of Saartjie Baartman on display here – become, disempowered objects, as filming gives power to the watcher.⁷⁹ Michelle Alexander discusses this issue in The New Jim Crow, where she illustrates how monitoring of schools, homes, and those on parole creates, in the name of controlling crime, in, for example, the War on Drugs, “a racial undercaste.”⁸⁰ As Foucault writes, the watched one is seen, but does not see; he or she, whether she knows she is being watched or not, is an object of information, not a subject in communication, as the female officer’s response to Sandra Bland suggests.

Discipline, in surveillance society, can involve small matters. Therefore, I find disturbing Officer Brian Encinia’s response to Bland’s refusal to put out her cigarette. Early in the traffic stop, he recognizes that Bland is irritated:

Encinia: OK, ma’am. (Pause.) You OK?

Bland: I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on you. When’re you going to let me go?

Encinia: I don’t know; you seem very really irritated.

Bland: I am. I really am. I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over, and you stop me. So yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket, so [inaudible] ticket.

Encinia: Are you done?

Bland: You asked me what was wrong, now I told you.

Encinia: OK.

Bland: So now I’m done, yeah.⁸¹

It is after this that Encinia asks Bland to put out her cigarette. When she refuses, he grows angry and orders her to “Step out of the car” – three times –then threatens to remove her, to drag her out, culminating in his threat to “light her up.”

What was it about Bland’s refusal to put out the cigarette that so incited the officer? Bland makes a claim to her space, “I’m in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?” The officer never answers, only insists more and more forcefully that she get out of the car. Perhaps he felt disrespected, from the moment he saw that she was irritated and that she acknowledged that irritation.

On a psychological level, however, more is happening.

In the novel, Lalika tells Kate that her rapist loved her resistance: “When I hit him with my fist he laughed. When I kicked him in the balls, he said he felt excited.”⁸² He wanted, he told her, to “‘fully experience himself’” and that full expression “‘was only possible with a nigger.’”⁸³ Kate argues that he “‘needed a perpetual victim…in order to feel like a winner.’”⁸⁴ He needed a person of color to control in order to be a full self. Kate calls this an inferiority complex. It is, I think, deeper and centers on recognition – which, Sandra Bland, by refusing to put out her cigarette, refuses to give the trooper Brian Encinia.⁸⁵ If we focus here, for a moment, we come closer to understanding Lalika’s attacker and Officer Encinia. Both interpret a woman’s resistance to their orders as disobedience which they, then, are able to overcome with violence, proving their superiority – and, thereby, giving them the sense of self as powerful and superior, a sense that they want and need. The White self is “created out of the violation of the black self, through its inclusion [as a person ‘under’ the law] and degradation.”⁸⁶

In this specific political and cultural moment in our society, we are experiencing this desire for people of color to be controlled, invisible, or gone, and we are experiencing the redefinition of whiteness and a reassertion of White supremacy in relation to the fact that minoritized peoples are going to be the majority in this country by 2040. The irrational responses we are seeing from police and citizens, like the murder of Philando Castile in front of his child, and the murder of George Floyd on a public street need response. But of what kind?

No ancestor came for Sandra Bland – or if one did, she could not hear that ancestor. And so, it becomes our obligation to remember her. Sandra Bland became an object for expressing power and control, and, whether she committed suicide or not, she was killed. In Passed On, Karla F. C. Holloway confirms that being Black and dying are consonant in horrible ways in American culture. “Black folk,” she writes, die

in mournful collectives and in disconcerting circumstances. We died in riots and rebellions, as victims of lynching, from executions, murders, police violence, suicides and untreated or under-treated diseases. In such deaths, being black selected the victim into a macabre fraternity…. [C]ollectively, the story of how we died shaped a tragic community narrative.⁸⁷

Walker fears that this painful narrative is murdering “our every wish to be free” and “ultimately, insidiously turning a generous, life-loving people into a people who no longer feel empathy for the world.”⁸⁸ How to narrate a counter-narrative is one of Walker’s aims. Telling our stories may not seem like much, but it is a form of resistance. To “say her name” and to argue that “Black Lives Matter” is to demand that one who has been made into bare life be regarded as a person, and remembered. And perhaps a remembered one, even one who has suffered horribly, can come, as Grandmother ancestor Saartjie did to Gloria and Lalika, to another in crisis, if only in memory, to offer strength in a time of pain. Also, perhaps living elders, the Grand Mothers, can stand with the violated, as did someone who called out to Derik Chauvin, reminding him of Floyd’s humanity.

As George Floyd was dying, he called for his mother. Lonnae O’Neal aptly analyzes this moment:

“Momma!” Floyd, 46, calls out. “Momma! I’m through,” the dying man says, and I recognize his words. A call to your mother is a prayer to be seen. Floyd’s mother died two years ago, but he used her as a sacred invocation.

“He is a human being!” comes an anguished plea from someone in a desperate attempt to engage the officers’ reason or compassion or oaths of office. But in that moment, those officers are beyond the reach of humanity. Not Floyd’s, but their own.⁸⁹

When Floyd called out to his mother, saying he was “through,” I hope (and, as a Black Roman Catholic who believes in the Communion of Saints, in our holy dead who become ancestors, I know) that he did so because his mother had come to him in his moment of anguish.⁹⁰ Her name was Larcenia Jones Floyd, called “Miss Cissy,” and she struggled to bring up her children in a poor neighborhood in Houston call the Bricks.⁹¹ She was “‘the center of his world.’”⁹² That she came, like Sajaartie comes, in Walker’s fiction, to Lalika and Gloria, that she was there to help him to cross the threshold into eternal life is a sign of the Grandmother spirit lives in all Grand Mothers who witness.

The Grand Mother of Amadou Diallo, a man killed in New York as the police fired forty-one times outside his apartment building, said, “‘Every mother heard him… We hear George Floyd. We hear him.’”⁹³ She is like Eric Garner’s mother, who attended George Floyd’s funeral; like the mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina; like Camille Bell, a mother whose son was murdered and who headed the committee to stop child murders in Atlanta; like Dorothy Alston, mother of Tarik Alston, whose murder remains unsolved. They all are Grand Mothers. The Grandmother, who is the ancestor spirit of all the Grand Mothers, as I have written, may not be able to stop violence, in the moment, but as Walker tells us in the final poem of Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, the Grand Mothers know and embody compassion and healing. In the poem, Walker suggests that there is something new in the world. The Grandmother/Grand Mother is a “consciousness that knows, witnesses, and loves”; she “keeps/the record” and shares the pain: “this/unspeakable/… is happening/ to me/.”⁹⁴

In addition, Walker thinks that our active and compassionate acknowledgement of the unremembered helps to heal them. Walker argues, “What heals ancestors is understanding them…They can only be healed inside us.”⁹⁵ For Walker, and for Kate at the end of the novel, Buddhism becomes a practice of healing, though, in the essay “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” Walker affirms all practices.⁹⁶ Like meditation, Ayahusca is just a means – something one uses and, then can discard, like the self as raft in Buddhism. I think of Ayahuasca, as similar to Richard Hardack’s understanding of violence in Toni Morrison’s work, as what is used to “break through” secrecy⁹⁷ so that we can witness to what has been done and, doing so, do not do violence to other victims, and instead, as Sethe does in Beloved, let rise a form of resistance that points to the right persons, the perpetrators – and, more important, to the cultural forms and systemic inequalities that make them perpetrators. This type of story-telling acknowledges the tragic narrative, but asserts, as Walker’s definition of womanist does, that there is a narrative of freedom-seeking and love as well.

We may find Walker’s Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart strange in some of its assertions, but I would suggest that its point, asserted in the novel’s title, is the right one. As another of Walker’s titles argues, now is the time, and we are the ones we have been waiting for, generation after generation. Opening the heart is not just for personal healing, but is “necessary for social change on a larger scale.”⁹⁸ What Ayahuasca-as-a-means, story-telling, the formation of community with multiple living others, and the ancestors all point to is the need for healing. To move to some wholeness, we need, Walker asserts, as we will see, a ritual restaging or recreation of the past, that acknowledges it and opens it up to the healing power of the Spirit.

In “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations,” Walker shows the power of the Grandmother Spirit that comes to us, creating charged spiritual moments, insights, rituals that allow us, as Charles H. Long writes, to crawl back through history and, as he put it to a class once, on our hands and knees.⁹⁹ This posture is different from a posture of power, that we see Officer Encina take. It is a posture with power to deconstruct and to think critically¹⁰⁰ – it is one of addressing suffering, of paying close attention to our past, particularly, what we fear to remember and to acknowledge, so as to open up a different future.

Opening the heart is what Walker sees as the result of this “crawling back.” In her sense that ancestors both need healing and heal, crawling back and opening the heart let us meet, address, and, perhaps, heal, those ancestors, so that their power can come forth in the present for another in need. In Walker’s large metaphysics of “human-to-spirit-human-to-nature,” and I would add bodily-living-to-spiritually-living, that includes our living, our dead, the earth and the Spirit in all its forms and manifestations, the individual heart is invited into the eternal dance, the dance, as Emilie Townes puts it, of the womanist dancing mind of a particular community, “where we tease through the possibilities and the realities, the hopes, the dreams, the nightmares, the terrors, the critique, the analysis, the plea, the witness” that signals “an enormous intercommunal task.”¹⁰¹ It is a womanist dance that is, as Maparyan puts it, a methodology (a form of practice), a movement (ongoing struggle, like Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter, but also human mental and physical movement), and a spirit (an orientation to the world that is hopeful and just).¹⁰² Such a womanist mode might move us to creative response to a moment when the kind of violence Walker explores in the novel, which is the kind of violence Sandra Bland and George Floyd experienced, might be addressed, and, we hope, end.

In a spirit of recognition and solidarity, of hope and of healing, I want to close with Walker’s meditation for George Slaughter, from “This Was Not an Area of Large Plantations” from We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness. Slaughter was a Black man murdered, in the 19^th century, by his own White father and a violent mob. Walker first told this story while on jury duty, and she recognized that the young men of color who were to go on trial, were like George Slaughter. Later, in her first dharma talk, Walker offered this meditation to heal George Slaughter and all those involved in his story. I offer it for Sandra Bland and for George Floyd and all others who have died by police violence and for all those in their stories, for they, too, are our brothers and sisters, and for us:

May you be free / May you be happy / May you be at peace /

May you be at rest / May you know we remember you.¹⁰³