by Jay Walker

I've been thinking a lot about how some ancestors are being controlled by white people.

Like puppets with the cognition to know they are being used, our ancestors have to keep accepting the petitions of descendants of those that killed them so that we, the living children of the diaspora, can receive their messages.

For them to retain the strength to “charge up” enough to try to reach us, their grandchildren, they have to accept petitions from those that may even mean us descendants harm in order to save not only themselves but us.

Through appropriation, some white people are trying to drive our ancestors.

Through algorithms their likeness dominate the subcultures surrounding Conjure craft and Hoodoo.

They are also profiting off of the black bodies that their families already killed at least once, being the main proprietors of the magical shops both brick and mortar and online. 

The wealth distribution gaps in this country (from the damage our ancestors endured) are partly why this has happened and add another layer.

From the ability to get loans to start up small businesses to the disposable income that allows “learning trips” to Haiti and New Orleans most frequently. 

During those vacations, the same white folks are given certificates, coming home to show them off and appointing themselves high priestesses and other titles that mean not what they say. With their status as expert rootworkers, they then use all their privilege to allow us to pay them for information on our elders in the form of curio stores and books.

But even if all these layers did not exist, would you pay white folks to connect with your ancestors that died at the hands of theirs?

Would we ask massa yet again for a pass to talk to our kin? 

This time the notes aren’t pinned to our shirts but to our souls - with them still in positions to control our ancestors and exploit us living.

Will you beg them to share what they stole from us?

Join their groups and ask for the tools to connect us to our own bloodlines much like the ancestry tests we all clamor for. As stolen people, we have to recover ourselves to progress but at the cost of whom?

At this point, I can't even tell what of this we are supposed to know or what of it that our elders taught those white folks to hurt them and/or help us. 

Because you're not going to convince me that our ancestors weren't doing some shady shit as they gave these folks our information.

Maybe subtle things, like telling them that brushing their own feet with a broom will rush the honey jar or major acts like messages that using the bark of the cotton will help a fetus develop well. 

Even though our ancestral spirits need fed, they are still powerful beings tied to us who exist now and knowing that, I cannot believe in my heart that they would sell us living to the devil just to charge up.

Our ancestors have been sustaining themselves as socialist spectres; taking and giving energy from all open to resource sharing so that one day, we would pay attention. 

Yet, many of us that have been able to feel, hear and know what others have forgotten have become so desperate for company that they make excuses as to why AFRICAN traditions belong to everyone. From the “we’re all African” to excuses more like than unlike those of an Uncle Ruckus type, saying #allwitchesmatter and then blaming us for not retaining the traditions, considering them fair usage now since most of us were bloodily assimilated. 

A look in any forum will quickly make you aware that when white people get old time religion, they get into it for vengeance and to force people to love them and do all sorts of what we generally consider dark work. 

They are quick to want to sacrifice an animal, mess with a goofer and break up partnerships that have nothing to do with them, twisting our Earth based practices into something intentionally hateful. 

That’s what happens when entitled people get access to the power of and for the marginalized. 

They have not ever lived in a world where roots were the only medicine, where their lives truly did not matter so when you ask them what they want, it’s always MORE. 

More power, more love, more, more, more, as they are the violent, tantrum-throwing children of the world.

But for us, and for our black and brown skinned ancestors, we always just wanted to LIVE. 

Our people hexed to draw master’s desire away from taking their children as concubines. 

To take away the monthly and birth less slaves.

To heal the lashes across the backs of their peers.

To make the cruel feel pain enough to understand that it hurts.

How many generations must they be ignored? 

How much can the church do before we reject it for what we know in our blood? 

How much damage has to come from us trying to attain the respectable behaviors that get us accepted as not black people or exceptions but as individuals? 

Will you clear your spaces this spring and reach out to the blood that scream into the air for us each day?