On racism, reparations, and tending the bones
A few months ago, I met an artist in New Orleans. Her name is Madeleine Kelly, a friend of a friend. I’d been admiring her paintings for a while (find them here). She was selling some work at a small street fair while I happened to be in town, and I came home with this: “Tending the Bones.”
Madeline is an arts educator. She painted this after a beloved student was murdered. In her own words, this painting is an invitation:
To honor the descent, to tend to the bones, to meet the grief, to surrender to stillness, to even slip backwards. In the deep descent we encounter buried things and fertile ground.
Through art, through grief, through surrender, Madeleine tended the bones.
Somewhere in Santaquin lies a woman I owe my life to. I do not know where her bones are. They are white like mine. Her skin was not.
Her name was Chloe. She was the slave of my fifth-great grandmother, Mary Lee.
Without Chloe, Mary would not have married her first husband, and I would not be here. Two weeks ago, I wrote an op-ed about Chloe in the Salt Lake Tribune. I provided a photo that I took at the Santaquin City Cemetery last year. Here is the caption the paper included.
Santaquin City Cemetery, where Mary Lee, ancestor of Kristi Boyce, is buried. Her close friend, an escaped slave named Chloe, could not be buried nearby because she was black.
Mary Lee Bland (yes, of that Lee family) fled Kentucky, and though Chloe came along, that hardly constituted an “escape.” More like corporate relocation.
There was never a day in Mary’s free life that she did not rely on Chloe’s enslavement. She suckled at Chloe’s breast, crossed icy plains with her in tow, and learned handicrafts from Chloe to support herself when her husband died.
The Constitution declared Black people three-fifths of a person. In the debate over representation, we decided their bodies partially mattered, their voices not at all. Today, voter suppression laws and gerrymandering continue that white supremacist legacy. Redlining kept Black people out of home ownership, while wars on drugs and crime (enter: Joe Biden) kept them incarcerated (modern slavery).
The Mormon church did not deem Black people worthy of salvation until 1978.
Our government, economy, and institutions have been built on Black suffering. It is our deepest collective shame. As the Tribune so perfectly illustrated above, we blithely rewrite history to make it go down easier. A spoonful of sugar laced with violence.
Only 15% of white people support paid reparations. The case for reparations has been made repeatedly, powerfully, yet we wring our hands. We pontificate the practicality and price in an endless loop of do-nothing feel-goodery. What is the price of indifference?
For Black Americans, racism is not theory—it is family history. It is a life. Theirs, and the life of their mother, father, sister, brother, friends, lovers.
We the people, in order to form a more perfect union, have reparative power. Let us give not just of time and talents, but of money and justice.
Let us have clear hearts and eyes. Many people in my Mormon faith have flint and tinder for reparations, but they don’t realize it. We are obsessive about family history, with unprecedented access to well-kept records. These records can be deep wells of empathy—the root of activism. But we need to look beyond pioneer heroics to stories never told at the pulpit.
We need to tend the bones. So here goes.
Mammy Chloe, as she was called, nursed Mary Lee and her own son, Sammy, at the very same time.
My ancestor took Sammy’s milk. And she grew strong, and her babies grew strong, and everyone was strong and I am strong because Sammy’s milk was stolen.
Before Sammy was born, Master Lee took Chloe’s husband (“ma lovin’ man Sam,” she called him) and sold him up the Cumberland River. Master Lee’s wife—a kind woman who pitied Chloe—tried to buy Sam back. As he swam from the raft to his wife and newborn son, Sam drowned.
Seventeen years later, Mary threw herself on her bed, disconsolate. She wanted to marry a Mormon, but her father did not approve. Chloe knew the pain of love lost. Mary says Chloe rocked her in arms and said “We don’t want nothin’ like that to happen to you, honey.”
So together with Mary’s mother, they made a plan.
Young Sammy saddled two horses. In the dead of night, Chloe and Mary met her paramour at moonrise and fled Kentucky on horseback. They found a preacher in a small Missouri town the next day and married each other. Chloe was the wedding’s only witness.
Years later, they made one return trip to Kentucky. Mrs. Lee was sick and wanted to see her daughter one last time. When they got there, Sammy was dead. The records don’t say how or why.
When Mary’s husband died of tuberculosis, Chloe helped her cross the plains with two young children. In Mary’s own words:
She softened all my hardships wherever she could. Mammy Chloe taught me to spin and weave materials for our clothes, carpets for the floor, how to card the wool, to make quilts and straw hats like the darkies make in the South.
I managed to create a little fancy style and Mammy Chloe sold them to stores and others. Thus we made our living until my sons were old enough to earn and make a home for us.
Poor old Mammy loved the gospel. I taught her to read, and she often remarked “I’d be willin’ honey to be skinned alive if I could just go in that temple.”
Temples, graveyards—Chloe couldn’t get in anywhere. It didn’t seem to bother Mary much. Poor old Mammy. “I am a descendant of Henry Lee, signer of the Declaration of Independence,” she continues, “and second cousin of Robert E. Lee, of which I am proud.”
At her grave, I read these words back to her. I pounded the earth with my fists and said out loud “Fuck you, Mary Lee. Spoiled Southern brat.”
I sensed something. Not a voice or a visage—a knowing. I’m not sure how it works. But words came to me: First time someone’s thought about my bones in a long while. First time someone’s come around to feel me. Kristi, Mary was all I had. It wasn’t right. But she was all I had.
I recoiled. Spit out the words like a piece of gristle. Song-of-the-South bullshit, I thought back. No, no, that has to be my shadow, not Chloe. I didn’t come here to be comforted.
Barefoot, huffing, I walked the cemetery looking for a place to honor her. A sloping little hill in the sun, perhaps? Or at the roots of a beautiful tree? Where might I lay an offering within these gates that kept her out? Where might Chloe want to be?
There was an open patch of land next to Mary.
Come, sit. You can be angry today.
Whose voice? Maybe mine. Or one of theirs. Or maybe it belonged to all of us. I knelt down, curled up like a baby, and sobbed into the grass.
Watered the bones.
Ask not what your country can do for descendants of slaves. The story is on our skin and in our family history: we are all descendants.
Descend, descendant! You will never transcend this horror if you don’t!
Let’s find the bones. Let’s tend them.