Father’s Day in 2022 falls on June 19, or Juneteenth, a day that is marked in US history to celebrate slaves in Texas being made aware of their freedom, which happened long after the Emancipation Proclamation and the ratification of the 13thAmendment to the US Constitution. As an African American who is a descendant of slaves, I have often thought about the significance of our Freedom Day. I think about what that meant for my ancestors, particularly as it pertains to family. For instance, slaves were not allowed to marry legally (even though they marked their own marital unions by jumping over a broom hand in hand), but once freed they would, by law, have the right to marry. Through abolishing slavery, black parents would be spared from their families being torn apart by a slave master who at any moment could decide to sell one or more members of a family to other slave owners, with the severed family never to be reunited again.
I do not know the specific stories of my genealogy: whether my direct ancestors were spared such a cruel fate as to have a child ripped from a parent’s arms, if any were a direct result of a violent rape by a white man who at the time was deemed more valuable than any with black skin, or some other unthinkable direct or indirect destruction of family. Even without direct knowledge of the facts from my family tree, I believe it is more than likely that my forebearers, at the very least, lived with the full knowledge of those risks and that they likely suffered the subsequent psychological and possibly even physical manifestations of bearing such stress throughout the course of their entire lives.
With that in mind, I can only imagine what those who suffered might think about what their decedents do willingly to our family unit with all of the freedoms that past generations could only dream about. What would their reactions be to deliberately walking away from the lives that they brought into the world? Their heirs, their legacy? Splitting up our families so that they could never come together again was a way that we were victimized in the past. Why do it by choice today? Even if freedom means having the right to choose to leave a family, why is it done with such disrespect as to never return to one’s offspring and their offspring again?
I don’t think my father thinks about this, but perhaps I am wrong. Maybe his heart does ache about the severed ties among the family he created but since he may be unaware of how to process his own emotions, his default is to hide. And if that is the case, maybe his response is to some degree a byproduct of slavery: the aftermath of trauma without adequate healing being modelled over generations so that is still evident today. I make space for grace and mercy to be extended to him for this reason, among others.
I am undoubtedly disappointed in my father and in the choices he makes to abstain from relationship with the family he created. I am torn in my role for repairing us and further burdened by the decisions I am faced with regarding the unity of my own family apart from him. As I consider how I can learn and grow from my life’s circumstances and even those of my ancestors, I draw the conclusion that in exercising our individual freedoms, we must consider others as well.
