The Revolutionary Children Who Raised Us

I don’t have any picture of my grandfather as a child. He never saw a camera. My grandfather who grew up under colonial rule on a so-called desert island grew up hungry. By the time he was an adult and had found a way to leave Anguilla the governmental authority made their plan to “starve the people of Anguilla” explicit. They bragged about it. These were the conditions that inspired my grandfather to come back and participate in the Anguillian Revolution in 1967. A grown man who had scraped through his education, upgraded a coal and ice business in New Jersey into a heating and air-conditioning company came home to fight for clean accessible water, food, autonomy for whom? For his people. But also for the starving child he had once been.

In this moment, in my grief and shock at how many young children, intentionally starved by an occupying colonial force have suddenly become ancestors far too soon in the past weeks because of incessant bombing and displacement, I am reaching for the revolutionary child. The child in myself who knows that none of this actually complex. The child self who knows the stakes of survival. And I reach Jeremiah Gumbs, whose face I wouldn’t let go of once I met him. Whose beard I held to as if it would transfer his wisdom. But instead of the wise grandfather who recited me his favorite poems and let me record him sharing his memories, I need the little boy.

Here is a journey I took last year to imagine one week in the life of that little boy in seven different ways. And each time I learned something new about myself, my longing, my ethics, my beliefs. You can read “Three Tries” that ancestrally co-written experiment here:

“Once upon a time in Anguilla there was a little boy named Jeremiah Gumbs. He was the youngest of nine children and they never had enough to eat. One day while little Jeremiah was out fishing with his friends he saw a beautiful rainbow fish. Beautiful, as in, delicious-looking. And big.

The rainbow fish wasn’t big for no reason. The rainbow fish was wise and had grown large over the years by avoiding the hooks of the people who fished in the cove. The rainbow fish stayed safely beneath the edge of a rock watching. Keeping guard.

But little Jeremiah was hungry. And he had a vision. He decided he would catch the rainbow fish and bring it home to his mother to cook for dinner. He prepared his pole and his line and his hook and tempted the rainbow fish with the most delectable bait he could charm from the grown fishermen. When he lowered the bait near the rainbow fish’s home rock he just knew he would be victorious. The rainbow fish smelled the bait and got curious. You know, fish get hungry too. The rainbow fish peered out from the edge of the rock, but the sun glinted off the edge of the sharp hook. The rainbow fish quickly swam back under the edge of the rock. No way. Not today.

Jeremiah went home hungry. His mother fed him and his brothers and sisters with grease, salt tears, and hard flour rolls left over from what she’d baked for the workers that morning.

But Jeremiah was hardworking and patient and he believed that he would prevail. So the next day he went and told the fishermen his story about the sneaky old tricky rainbow fish and how HE would be the first one to catch him. The fishermen laughed and laughter was worth something. So they gave him an even bigger piece of bait… (continue here)

I end up telling the story seven ways based on the contradictions in our intergenerational conversation. For example sometimes my grandfather said his father taught him to fish, but when I asked more about him he said he didn’t remember his father who I learned from other family members was abusive to him and my great grandmother. When I centered each of these contradicting “truths” in the story and gave them their own space instead of allowing them to cancel each other out I saw that the longing in each revision of his story had something different to teach me and that I needed every lesson. My prayer is that our journey (which ends with an important question for you) can accompany you in this time where we need all our lessons and where the complexity of the moment, or the stories we are hearing need not stop us from acting on behalf of all children, including the children within us, including the children who raised us…seeming like adults.

And if you want to go deeper on this journey and access my guidance and love in a journey of reaching for your own ancestral stories, your ancestors as children and your child self, you can sign up for 2024’s first self-guided course “Repetition is Sacred: Practicing Seven Generations” which is based on what I learned from this ancestral experiment. The course goes live on January 1st and offers seven units of videos, meditations and journal prompts that you can engage at your own pace. I’m recording the videos right now and there is a good chance that you’ll see my crying, but I’m okay with that. Early in the year we will also have a live webinar only for participants in this course to that we can support each other and gather our collective ancestral support. Your offering for the course will support us in making a monetary offering to the ongoing work to save and protect children suffering from occupation and war right now.