Reclaiming Our Story

The Restorative Power of Storytelling

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

The boys emerged from the field, shirts stuck to backs after cropping the tobacco.  They threw the plants on the bed of a rusting cream Chevy truck. She grabbed the stems of the large green leaves with her hands and stacked them on a rack that looked like a chair.  After she, her sisters, and the other girls filled up the rack, they'd put a pitchfork-like apparatus in a hole to secure the tobacco. Once that was done, the stronger boys came to lift it up and hang it in the barn where the leaves would turn from green to yellow, yellow to brown, brown to dried brittle bronze.

Leaning the rusted hand sickle against the side of the barn, her brother climbed up the rafters to check the drying tobacco.  He lifted himself with the swiftness and energy bursting from his dusky 10-year old body, looked again, and climbed back down the hot barn, face covered in sweat and dust.  He ran back to her.

She turned to him, “C’mon I heard Ms. Pete.”  

Leaning the wooden tray forward, Ms. Pete directed, “Gal come here and get this soda, and call the rest of ‘em.” 

Spurned into action, she ran over to the older white woman to grab a small bottle of flat, tepid Coca-Cola for herself and her younger brother, calling her three older sisters to get their warm Cokes.  

She drank it down in one gulp, though it did little to quench her thirst under the hot South Carolina Lowcountry sun.  July, then August, with their brazen humidity, would soon come and pass.  She loved the short swift September breezes and warm rain.  She would stand outside just before it all came down–the sun still bright, but not as beating–stretching her brown arms upward and wide, tippy-toed, eyes closed, exclaiming “Pho-to-synthesis!”

Ready for summer to end, stacking and racking tobacco, carefully watching her younger brother climb up and down the barn stairs, bending down in the fields, looking out for snakes while picking cucumbers from rich, brown, wormy soil. All under the sun’s unrelenting rays.  Standing, sweating, aching for fall to come.

As one of seven children, my mother didn’t have a choice growing up–she had to work in the fields.  Like other Black daughters of the South before her, she could not escape agricultural work for white people.  Generations before her grandmother toiled in mandatory labor through chattel slavery.  Generations after toiled in sharecropping and tenant farming, mandated through false promises and economic necessity.

The story of my reclamation was borne in my mother’s toil.  She recognized the back-breaking labor for what it was, even as a girl.  When I was offered the opportunity to work on a large farm for summer money at age 12, my mother’s response was a quick and hearty “No.” My mother’s choice afforded me the opportunity of many choices.

In this season of my life, I’m using that opportunity of choice to grow into who I want to be.  My world is shifting because of the stories I tell myself and those around me.  My life and time have expanded greatly. The stories I told myself, my husband, and my children had to change in order for me to add more time back to my life; and to give myself space to pursue what engages me most.  I've been able to get my time and story back, and in a house full of six kids this is no small feat.

This shift has had a profound impact on life now. I've told them (and myself) that they are far more capable than I've been giving them credit for.  They must try first, seek help from each other, try again, try again, try again, and then they can consult me. We live the stories that we tell.  In order to create a life with more meaning and impact, we must tell different stories.

My story of reclamation is an opportunity made possible by my mother and the mothers before me.  She toiled, and told herself that her daughter would not have to in that way, as a result I’m the first generation in my family that didn’t work on a white farm–not in slavery, share-cropping, or Black child labor.  Her choice reminded me that nothing is in my way that I don’t put in it.  I made a choice to reclaim my time and story which served as a nudging awareness to myself that I was the one who decided to deny myself space and that my happiness and intentionality could only grow when I was actively shaping my own identity.   I almost forgot and lost myself in false pressures and contrived measurements.  

Now and perhaps always, our world serves as a reflection of our inner lives - elastic, dynamic and constantly changing. The shift we’ve experienced from manufacturing/industry/agricultural labor to knowledge, technology and service work is a result of storytelling.  We’ve told ourselves this should (1) be possible (2) go faster, (3) be more efficient, etc. and have worked to make it happen.  The truth of our macro-lives has often forced us to adopt it in our micro-lives.  Shedding that skin is the beginning of story reclamation.

When we change the stories we tell, we create an identity shift.  In my case, I went from busy, busy, too-busy  mother-martyr to a curious, imaginative person seeking and chasing serendipity and possibility in herself and those around her.  When I find myself falling into old habits and ways, I push back.  The boundaries I established with my story reclamation disables the old, worn story of self-sacrifice. The life I choose is one where I actively live and inhabit who I want to become.

I reflected on my own mother, the mothers before her and their stories, and I found the bridge to becoming through reclamation of my story.  Changing my story changed my world.  Storytelling solves problems.  It saves, transforms, and restores.  I found my reclamation because I changed the story that I told myself and others, and as a result I’ve changed my past, present, and future.