Divine Details: Rest (Or Ella Baker's Halo-ed Crown)
“Act Like You Know” for Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker
Today is Ella Baker’s birthday, and I wonder what they call her in the ancestral realm. Goddess of the Grassroots? Archangel of all Activists? More than anything I wonder, is Ella Baker at rest? My devotional collage “Act Like You Know” in honor of Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker is based on one of my very favorite images of all time: documentary evidence of Ella Baker’s divine work on this planet and her partnership with Fannie Lou Hamer and many others to create the Freedom Democratic Party. The Freedom Democratic Party was a visionary intervention into electoral politics that didn’t wait for racism to no longer be a factor in national electoral politics (they would in that case, still be waiting now) but instead went ahead and created the multi-racial class equitable delegations that grassroots organizing could create and placed them alongside the segregated and rigged delegations that US electoral politics as usual generated. Simply put, what would an actual “democratic” party look like if the people were free and democracy wasn’t a code word for racial capitalism? Well, short answer? It would look nothing like the Democratic Party. This national work, with its epicenter in Mississippi was a performance of the possible, demonstrating the presence of another mode of governance right alongside the desperately dominating racist status quo (does that sound relevant to you today?) I think of this work as a precedent to the work Black women like Charlene Carruthers, Stacey Abrams and others are doing now to engage electoral politics with a revolutionary vision. And I also think of it as one of the most effective performance art projects in recorded history.
So in that case, my collage is meta-art, a work of art about a work of art, a still visual with a grand performance as it’s primary reference. But I’ll leave that for some wonderful emerging Black feminist art historian to explore in their thesis. What I really want to write about is rest. And I want to write about it because I want to learn how to do it. Ella Baker is well known for her words, popularized by the freedom singers Sweet Honey in the Rock, “We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.” And I have written elsewhere about that time that Ella Baker’s community fundraised for her to take a sabbatical and she couldn’t find the time to take it. And it’s time for me to write about it again, because I can still relate. What would freedom feel like to me? Well, it would feel restful, abundant, balanced. I would feel in tune with the cosmic cycles, the ebb and flow, the hibernation that my mammal self craves right now instead of the pressure to fight the systemic oppression that don’t quit. But if freedom includes rest, and we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes, then does that mean we can’t be free until we are free which is not now?
I don’t propose that Ella Baker didn’t mean what she meant. What she meant was that the work of justice is urgent because people are dying in myriad ways because of systemic racism and the deaths of Black people are erased as if their lives were never sacred. And we are not going to accept that ever. Ella Baker’s standard for rest was not the ascendence of a charismatic Black leader, even a Black president, it was accountability instead of apathy for the racist production of Black death. To be specific, Ella Baker said
“Until the killing of black men, black mothers' sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother's son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest until this happens.”
So rest, appears twice. Rest as in “the rest of the country” which is who? The people who don’t value Black life. And then who are “we”? The ones who cannot rest until the “rest of the country” values Black life? Those of us who already believe in freedom. So in the life of this sentence, “rest” first signifies division. The rest of the country, those who can sleep at night because they do not identify with Black life or identify Black lives as inherently valuable, sacred, worthy of existence, respect and protection. Rest, first signifies the false rest, unearned comfort of those who benefit from the systemic oppression of others. And the second reference to rest is actually a call for unrest or disruptive action on the part of we who are woke, because we believe in freedom. In other words, if Black mothers can’t sleep, white mother’s are about to get snatched out of their rest, because nobody in here is going to rest while I’m still stressed! Look at the angle of Ella Baker’s face, the tilt of her chin! She is not playing.
Ella Baker’s profound, brave and prophetic words are fueling direct action for Black Lives right now. As they should be. And I still want to talk about rest. How we move from the unjust rest of apathy to the resortative abundance of shared power, a life of action that knows deep peace, a progressive life where there is space for rest.
And even though Ella Baker could not see sabbatical in the urgency of that particular moment documented in her collection of letters at the Schomburg Center in Harlem (where she moved and lived at the YWCA after her North Carolina education), we know Ella Baker knew about rest. Because it was Ella Baker, as Barbara Ransby’s research and Baker’s own words teach us, who knew about stepping back. Who felt no need to do everything. Who in fact cultivated and demonstrated the political value of leadership from the most, from the mass, from the people and she knew how to trust that. Ella Baker’s life was a long beautiful song, and part of that may be because she led, not from her ego but by her faith in the multitude, the power of the people. Yes, though as many reading this know as well as I do, youth development work is some of the most rigorous presence-requiring work that exists, work that has certainly kept me up at all hours, the actual practice of developing leaders to replace us, which Ella Baker modeled in her mentorship of the leaders of SNCC, implies sharing power, an intergenerational invitation to allow our elders to rest in certain ways and grow in others.
I want rest in my life like the part of the song where we take a deep breath and remember how good it feels to be singing. I want rest in my life like a baby’s head on the chest of a parent as if I have no need yet for strong neck muscles, and can sleep anywhere. And my skull hasn’t fused so my mind is still open and downloading love direct from the source. Okay. There it is.
When I was adorning angel ancestor Ella Baker in the ceremony that has this collage as its only visual artifact, I was chanting her words “Give light and people will find the way.” Which are some of the most restful words I know. I was chanting those words in gratitude and and to reprogram my brain which had become cluttered with a lot of doubt and ego, a lot of worthless noise about how I personally had to make sure every good thing I wanted to exist in the world got done and how no one else could do it and how I had to personally supervise and things had to look how I would have imagined them and also I had to keep reminding everyone and also if i stepped back and things didn’t work out it would be my fault and most of all that I couldn’t trust the people because haven’t I been hurt and disappointed so many times by people I should be able to trust… In other words, my head was filled with the opposite of rest, not just that but ego-driven babble about the impossibility of rest.
But Ella Baker not only knew how to trust the people she also suggested it was possible to “give light.” What light? From where? Mmhmm. And that’s exactly what is at stake in my study of Ella Baker, marked visually here by her halo, her crown of bracelets with an open center, aligning her crown chakra with the dazzling O above, the referent circle beyond, the opening for light to come through. Trusting the people and trusting an infinite source beyond my lifetime and control is the same act of opening, it moves me beyond my ego. And so the way is opened, it is unlimited, and because it is unlimited I am free, and because I believe in freedom, which in practice, looks like believing in you, we are free. And if we are free than we can rest, not because it’s all over, but because we are all here, and because this life-force is ongoing and it’s so much bigger than our fears, it’s so old that it’s new.
There is love beaming, beaming into us always, if we can breathe deep enough to let it through. And what would we do, what we would act like, if we knew?
P.S. Prints of my collage for Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer are now available online in different sizes, as are my other ancestral collages. All proceeds go to the continued work of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.
