The Black Experience of Departure
Making choices when you have few
The forts on the West African coast, some of which still stand today, bade them farewell. For many, it was a departure from this life. For others, it was a departure from all the life they had ever known. A life of their own. A life of belonging and tradition, of rituals and ancestors, of family and connection to larger things.
They had no choice in their departure. They could take nothing with them. They strained to keep their ancestors in mind, but even their memories were pillaged. They started over. They built new families, communities, traditions, languages. New belonging. They became the ancestors of a new people.
Frederick Douglass chose to leave. So did Harriet Tubman. He jumped a train and donned a guise. She left cloaked in night, crossing rivers and weaving through trees. Like many thousands of the enslaved, they risked their lives to own themselves. And they kept risking them so others could do the same. They started over.
Later on, many millions wandered the ruins slavery left behind, ragged, hungry, parched, searching, inquiring, piecing fragments together. Have you seen my child, my mother, my sister, my brother? I heard they were sold to a master down in these parts.
They started over again, in families both resurrected and newborn, in new communities and towns and churches. As much as they could, with the zombie of slavery reaching out of the grave and grasping their ankles. They pushed onward, through its quicksand, dragging it like dead weight.
Many became dead weight, swinging from a tree limb. A spectacle. A warning. A whisper. You can never leave. You can never begin.
But they did. First as a trickle, then as a flood. Those who could left behind those who couldn’t. Or wouldn’t. There was only so much deliberation either way. Individuals and families weighed risky options, but many millions chose the fluffy, bounteous dream over the relentless reality. A million tiny, personal droplets of decision formed an oceanic movement. They left for northern cities and found few dreams and more inescapable reality.
They started over, again. They made new neighborhoods and music and art and culture. They made new friends, but they also made new enemies, as cruel and ravaging as marauding bands of hooded horsemen.
But there was nowhere left to go. So they dug in. They dissented and died. They did not accept that “all are equal except.” They stayed and became thorns in rotting flesh, prodding, begging it to let go of the infection and allow scar tissue to form over open wounds. They became mirrors for faces disfigured by fear, coaxing jaws to unclench and brows to unknit and held breath to unleash.
They couldn’t leave. So they beckoned us towards a different kind of departure. We’ve started over again and again and again and again. And we must keep leaving and beginning, now more than ever.
I just got back from St. Simons Island, Georgia, where I attended Southern Lights, a progressive Christian conference led by Diana Butler Bass and Brian McLaren. And like many progressive Christian spaces, this one was WHITE. Skin, but frankly, hair too.1 It was like a blizzard up in there. But the warmest blizzard you can imagine. These folks were phenomenal in their kindness, friendliness, and thoughtfulness. I met no strangers.
Just a bit of a side note: I am BLOWN AWAY by people who continue to grow and welcome change as they move into older age. People who are willing to rethink beliefs they’ve had their whole lives or consider new perspectives or listen to new kinds of voices. People who are willing to depart in various ways. That includes many of you. Do you know how amazing you are? The adult brain is not a huge fan of change just generally, but it physically fights it as we age. Not to mention that earlier generations were not raised in a therapeutic culture that encourages introspection and the processing of the kinds of trauma that can paralyze us. These folks, and so many of you, are my role models as I age. I want to be like you when I grow up.
All the speakers were outstanding, including Diana and Brian themselves. But I was most moved by Rev. Jacqui Lewis and author Danté Stewart, whose presence with us increased our racial diversity by, well, two people. And Danté, who is only 32, lowered our average age by a smidge. Rev. Lewis joked that they were on the “nice white people tour.” She admitted it’s not always a comfortable tour to be on, but she felt called to it because “we are not going to fix what’s broken in silos.”
But Danté’s words really hit their mark, given the headspace I’ve been in. He spoke to the tension between staying and going, between finding home and making it, of thinking of home “as a question and not an answer.”
“There’s nothing wrong with running,” he said. “But there’s something sacred about being where you’re at.” Blacks who stayed in the South, and still do, as he does, “find a way to dig deep…to find a way through what we have to face.”2
He read one of his beautiful poems entitled, “You Get to Be Alive.” I can’t begin to do it justice—I was too mesmerized to take notes—but the message I took away was that we shape our worlds even as they break our hearts. We belong to our worlds even after they do.
When we leave, we never really escape. And when we stay, we’re always called to depart. To make peace with constant change. To participate in that change instead of fighting it. Not to leave things how we found them.
We’re born to leave—eventually life itself—but we’re called to stay, to be wherever we are, to live fully in this life, to keep going back, to make things right.
“Every moment of reckoning is deepened by return,” Danté repeated over and over, like an incoming tide.
Black Americans are still departing. Or they should, according to historian Dr. Jemar Tisby. He and Danté both have stories of trying and failing to find a home in white evangelicalism before realizing their presence there was crushing their true selves and enabling white Christians’ ongoing unwillingness to examine their complicity in racism.
Dr. Tisby co-hosts the Pass the Mic podcast with Rev. Tyler Burns, which tells stories of Black experience in Christianity, including in predominantly white churches and their departure from those places, both physically and spiritually. For years, Dr. Tisby has been imploring Black Christians to “Leave LOUD,” to not just walk out but talk about why they are doing so.
I’ve read most of Dr. Tisby’s books and other work and have heard him speak numerous times. But I was struck by his words on an appearance he made recently on The New Evangelicals podcast.
He was helping host Tim Whitaker talk through the agonizing decision of whether or not to leave white evangelicalism. And he said something that stopped me in my tracks.
Dr. Tisby observed that in that culture, staying is presented as a sign of faithfulness. And, of course, it often is. Staying in relationships, investing years in a church or job or other organization, sticking things out through difficult or unpleasant times can have enormous rewards for oneself and one’s communities.
But, he said, the white evangelical church has also “weaponized this idea of commitment” in a way that induces people to endure and empower toxicity and abuse. Sometimes you must leave, for your own good, and for the good of the larger whole. Commitment to a harmful institution or relationship usually just perpetuates and expands the damage.
This rang true for me. And it’s kind of ironic, because evangelicals are also obsessed with “calling,” which usually involves some kind of heroic departure. My entire life, in fact, has been shaped by my parents’ calling and departure, which caused a chain reaction of other dramatic departures for me.
But I also know what it’s like to stay when you really should go. And I was also surrounded by a Christian culture that “weaponized” commitment to compel me to do that.
Dr. Tisby went on to discuss the mind-body connection, and how your body often knows before or more acutely than your mind does that it’s time to go. In immediate danger, of course, that knowledge is exhibited by an adrenaline rush and an instinct to fight or take flight. But you also feel it when you are in slow-burn danger, when things just aren’t quite right, or not quite right for you.
My body knew before I even got married the first time that I shouldn’t be in that relationship. And I finally left when I physically could not do it anymore. My body biologically rebelled, to the point where I traumatized myself with my commitment.
My body also told me when it was time to leave my job, a great job that I had loved well but was no longer where I needed to be. Getting a promotion for which I had worked for years felt more frustrating than empowering. My temper became shorter. My focus fell off a cliff. I came home every day with tensed shoulders.
It was time to go.
Of course, as we’ve seen with the Black experience, sometimes you can’t leave. And other times you are forced out against your will. Sometimes there’s not a question of staying vs. going because you aren’t given the option. But even in physical confinement, you always have agency. There’s always a choice.
You can begin again and again and again, whether you stay or go. You can create a beginning through finding small joys and reinventions and through dissent and camaraderie and resistance and stubborn, dogged refusal to shrink yourself down or shut yourself up.
This week formally ushered in a major departure in the life of our nation. We returned to power someone who blatantly subverted the constitutional order and the rule of law. That’s never happened here before. Even amidst all the evil and darkness we have embraced, we have never had a President who has attacked the foundations of our constitutional order. We are on a road of many of our rejection that leads to an unknown destination.
Some Americans will go into exile. Some Black Americans have done that throughout history, too. Danté talked about the influx of Black artists into Paris in the 1920s, and how he himself makes an annual trip there, where he can escape the American brand of racism at least (Europe has its own problems) for a time. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That may be the best option for some.
The vast majority of us will stay. Because we want to, or because we have to. Regardless, we still have a choice, and we still have a voice. We can stay cowering in fear or we can stay and fight. Not with violence, but with compassion, with love, with a commitment not to place or people, but to these self-evident truths that we hold in our hearts, of what this nation is supposed to be, what it can be, what we will do our best to bring forth. The more perfect union.
“If you do stay, be a voice of dissent,” Dr. Tisby said. “Make them kick you out.”
Yes, sir.
For a long time, I didn’t love this country, not really. I loved my passport, I loved my grandparents, I loved it in theory. But I didn’t want to be here. I had arrived as a result of a forced departure. And for a long time, I wasn’t really here. I chose to leave my full self suspended in time, floating in space.
But now, I am invested. I have started over and over and over, and I have chosen this place for myself again and again. I am claiming its promises not just for myself, but for the least of these. I am finally understanding the dream of Dr. King and the waking nightmare in which my own people ensnared us all. Nice white Christian people. I am digging in even as I am digging out.
And I tell you what, they’re gonna have to dig my grave before I let them have my America, the one that’s always been there, the one of Dr. King’s dreams, the one that Black Americans had no choice but to build and then built of their own choosing.
Stay or go as you will and as you can. But don’t you dare let anyone decide for you the kind of America that we call home.
This may include me. I have no idea what my real hair color is.
I’m paraphrasing a bit here due to my terrible handwriting and I apologize if I have misquoted Dante.
Holly this was just exceptional. I got a little weepy. And I so relate to certain parts of this 😭❤️
Beautifully done, friend.
Thank you for sharing your Southern Lights experience. I now consider it a blessing that I was kicked out and banned from the Southern Baptist religion as a teenager for daring to ask questions. I journeyed through the Orthodox faith, learning about the original church. I joined the Episcopal faith and then had the priest meet me at the door, forbidding me to enter because my husband was divorcing me to marry the parish administrator. My therapist shoved me in the direction of another Episcopal church, not knowing her husband was the rector. I learned and continue to understand the difference between corporate worship and spiritual growth here. I continue to journey knowing the building is there when needed, but the journeys I have and continue to be on are wondrous.