Hi friends,
I hope this finds you well or well enough to see through it all. I’m… okay. Still living apart from my beloved. Exploring the new (to me) space that is Madison, Wisconsin. Transitions are always challenging but perhaps are even more so when you’re not entirely settled into a place because you so often have to travel to maintain basic relationships (Marriage, family, friends, etc.). Still I am grateful because I have found some community here and I hope to keep building with those folks and learning about this place.
I really need to keep this thing up more often. Oh well. I’m not going to judge my productivity about something so… recreational as this little newsletter especially when the world has still been worlding and I’ve been just trying to get my own bearings and catch my own breath. So I’ll be gentle with myself and grateful for the moments that I do get to come to this little record and drop some thoughts.
Today I’ve been thinking a lot about faith and about ancestors. This is in large part because my cousin passed away this weekend. My cousin’s name was Napoleon Harris, Sr. and the last several years he was known as Bishop Napoleon Harris, Sr. due to his service in that capacity in the COGIC church. We just knew him as Cousin Bill. How one gets the name Bill from Napoleon… haha unclear, but that’s what we called him. He was born in Jackson, MS in 1935 and was the first cousin of my paternal grandfather. Because my Grandfather Marshall died when my dad was just a kid, Cousin Bill was really the closest thing I knew to a grandfather on that side of my family. Every Christmas of my life (except 2020) we visited their house for Christmas dinner and virtually every year of my childhood we spent time at the church he pastored in the south suburbs of Chicago for “Family & Friends Sunday” or Pastor’s Anniversaries or some other occasion.
A few years ago, in 2019. Cousin Bill self-published a memoir of his life. He gave me a copy and we talked all Christmas evening about his process of working with a writer to produce the book and about the stories it contained. Some of the stories I knew already from years of conversations and some were new to me in that moment. Cousin Bill was, for me, someone with a deep warmth and kindness but also the sort of person who… felt almost intimidating to me as a kid. I think it was maybe only in the last decade of his life as I began to settle into adulthood that I really appreciated the wisdom and the history that we was a living testament to for so many years.
Cousin Bill was, I believe, the last person in my father’s family living who was part of The Great Migration. He moved from Jackson to Chicago at the age of 8. After helping his blind grandfather (my great great grandfather) to go to Chicago to visit he took his grandfather home to Jackson and then returned to live with his aunt (my great grandmother) and his favorite cousin (my Aunt Dimples). They had moved to Chicago a bit earlier and after visiting he resolved to follow them and so his aunt gave him a round trip ticket when it was time for him to escort his grandfather back to Mississippi.
It is shocking to envision, in this moment where so often we surveil and micromanage the lives of our youth that… an 8 year old would just be allowed to migrate hundreds of miles to home. Surely the world is a dangerous place today but I can’t imagine it is… more dangerous now than it might be for a young Black boy in the Jim Crow South of the 1940s. It makes me think of the memoir Solito from the writer Javier Zamora where he delves into his own solo migration from El Salvador to the USA. So many of our human stories rhyme.
Cousin Bill was one of the only people who ever told me much about my paternal grandfather. He remembered when his Cousin Marshall came back from Army service in WWII. He told me about meeting my Granny when she and Marshall were courting and hoping that she would be his “choice.” He told me about our family’s roots in Mississippi beyond Jackson, which was the only place I knew as a kid that I could trace that branch back to.
Losing a loved one is hard. So many of us have lost so many of our loves these past few years. There’s a particular grief to feeling like someone was taken before their time but there is also a sort of depth to the loss when you feel sort of certain that someone was blessed with so many years on this mortal coil. In some ways it feels selfish almost. You wish you had them a little bit longer to ask that one more question or to tell that one story once more. I feel so much gratitude that I had Cousin Bill for so long and that he shared so much of his life and his journey with me and with so many people in his family, communities, and congregations. One part of his book that I’m sitting with in this moment is his description of the early revivals that first exposed him to Christianity and began to draw him into faith. I think about my own faith and relationship to faith. When asked why I still feel in fellowship with Christians I often answer with this:
“It gives me peace to pray to the same God my grandmothers did.”
Maybe there’s more to it but often I think… it is just that simple. Maybe even more simply put:
“It gives me peace.”
For me, as I grow older I have found myself in deep and loving community with folks from all sorts of faith traditions and no faith tradition at all. I’ve been in community with people who have converted to faiths out of a deep searching or to be in deeper community with their chosen spouse. I’ve had friends who have fallen away from faith communities because of interpersonal and structural harms. Perhaps it is heretical to say but I believe there are many paths to walk towards the divine, even if for you the extent of the divine is the miraculous set of circumstances that put us here on this planet with a capacity to love or loathe or destroy or create.
The book I’m working on now (slowly and in fits) is tentatively called Married or Buried. The title is a bit of a joke to myself or better put it is the answer I give to the question people sometimes ask me about “the place of poetry in our world today.” I tell folks that we reach for verse when someone is getting married or buried. Those moments of human life that are the biggest, that overwhelm, are when we need these little bursts of wisdom and elevated language that verse holds whether that verse is the King James Bible or The Holy Quran or Assata Shakur’s poetry or fragments of the poet Rumi. When all that other stuff fails, you need a poet. I’m trying to write this book because the last several years (and maybe my whole life) has been bracketed by deep grief of so many losses that sometimes it’s difficult to hold them all and of such deep boundless love. Married or Buried. That’s all it comes down to for me.
I keep returning to this poem “The Rented Boy” by Yusef Komunyakaa. In the poem Komunyakaa’s speaker recalls meeting a great grandmother who had been enslaved. Komunyakaa is, for me and many others, one of the great poets in the English language. He was born in 1947 and served in Vietnam. I once stole a Komunyakaa book from the Chicago Public Library (somewhat unintentionally but maybe not) because it felt… too smart for me. I remember as a teenager wanting to become a smart enough reader to feel something more than perplexed when I sat with those poems. I believe the book was Taboo. I am thinking about this poem and this poet because I am thinking about what exists in his living memory that will one day be lost. I am thinking about what existed in Cousin Bill’s living memory that slipped just beyond our grasp the other night. I am thinking about what it might be like if one day some of us are those elders holding on to memories so blurry to the world that we have to call them history. I am thinking about so many of my ancestors… both by blood and otherwise, some of whom were younger than I am now when we lost them on this side. Some of them are always my big homies but with every passing year they are also my little homies.
Love Live Cousin Bill. I am glad we got him for so long and I am glad I got to know him as a man in a way I could never know my grandfather, his cousin. I am grateful to him and his wife my cousin Dr. Sherelene Harris for opening their home and their church and their hearts to us little cousins for so many years. I am grateful that they shared so many recipes and pieces of wisdom with me and my wife Alison. I am grateful Alison loves cooking in a way I generally do not so that we can make their pound cakes and sweet potatoes in Bill’s memory. What an ancestor I have gained. What an ancestor we have gained. We are so lucky.
with love,
Nate
So tender & true. And I love the title of the work in progress!