The Importance of Telling Our Stories

There’s this moment of clarity of hearing someone’s story, whether they are a real person or a fictional character. It is that moment their words become a mirror and you look and see your reflection. I saw my reflection today. I was watching the movie Flight starring Denzel Washington as the alcoholic Captain Whip Whitaker who has his skills questioned after he manages to land a plane safely after a failed engine.

There was a scene at the end of the movie where his son asks him who he is and it reminded me of my own father, that I’ve known all my life, who along with my mother raised me. I do not know who he is. The same can be said of my mother and some of the answers of who she is came through in the stories she told me growing up. These were the events and a life of someone I never met, and person who existed before I existed. I pieced together those stories into a picture of who she is, the events, the people she loved, and the parents that raised her into the woman as I knew her in my life. Her parents died before I was born and I remember the first time I clearly saw their faces. My maternal grandmother I had only seen in pictures of her when she was older, probably closer to the time she passed. It was of her in a bright, sky blue dress, stepping out of the doorway of the family church (if I remember correctly). It was an 8”x10” and the picture taker’s hands must have been shaky as her facial features were blurry. The only photo I had seen of my mother’s father was an old, worn, newspaper clipping my mother carried in her purse. He looked like my uncle (my mother’s oldest brother) is what my mother told me. Then I saw the photo that my aunt had, a photo of my maternal grandparents when they were young. I look at them and see so many faces in theirs: my uncles, aunts, cousins, and as someone else noted to me once, my own.

Putting my father’s stories together left many gaps and and only created slight glimpses into who he is. They were usually the same stories filled with anger and trauma which were events he repeated in his own life. His father a tall, thin, man I saw in an old polaroid. He is wearing a white shirt with a black tie and pants. His hat and mustache were like my father’s. My oldest brother is tiny, standing beside him holding a stick. My father’s mother died when he was young. Mt farther told me she looked like my aunt, his oldest sister.

I feel so many of us come from generations where children’s questions weren’t allowed, or where hurt from our past makes us angry so we never talk about it. We create this wall and anything behind it doesn’t exist. We remain strangers to even those closest to us. There is a freeing and therapeutic moment, away from shame, where we expose ourselves in our words. It is like that moment in Flight where Captain Whitaker explains that he felt as if he couldn’t tell another lie, that he had reached his lifetime limit of lies. It is in others’ faces we see ourselves, our true selves, and we are forced to reveal it. We have to let go of things in us that makes us human (like pride, shame, fear, vulnerability) and expose ourselves.

I come back to the scene in Flight that I mentioned earlier. It’s not just knowing our roots or knowing a history, long before our people were allowed to read and write, and long before internet and Facebook. It’s sometimes about growing up with strangers and using their stories to paint their portraits as it can be all that you have. I hope to be able to paint a picture of my father, to piece together the stories and lives of those before to know who he is, or to bravely sit down as Captain Whitaker’s son did in the movie and ask him if he could tell me his story.

It has been about having photographs and names from those before, before the only people that knew them are gone. The researched I’ve done so far I can say my great-grandfather’s name, the names of his parents. It’s about finally being able to climb over a wall to see people and lives that existed before me, roots that tie me to Earth when before I felt like a lost alien fallen from the stars, living among strangers and forever looking for home.

For Harold, Etta, Tommie, & Ella (For Those Before)