A World Alongside Our Own
For those who long for a path with heart and look for the answers to life’s unanswerable questions within the realm of spirit, America looks alternately like a spiritual desert and a spiritual shopping mall. In between, an increasing number of us (Blacks, Latinos, etc.) have begun turning, or returning, to African-based religions, whether in the form of Santeria, Yoruba, Vodun, Palo Monte, Akan, the Egyptian mysteries, etc., as ethical-spiritual-religious foundations on which to base our lives in a time of world-altering crises and to attend to changes in culture, economy, ecology, technology and social life that beset us all in the waning years of the twentieth century.
Whatever differences may exist among these traditions, they all teach that there is a world parallel to the everyday world that usually appears to be our only one. That world is much like our own except that all its residents are dead people, as indeed many of us now alive were once dead some time ago. While the dead may envy us because they no longer have bodies or the pleasures of physical sensation, it is they who, in the overall scheme of things, are more powerful; and of all the forces that exist in that parallel world, it is the ancestors who have the greatest interest in and concern over the fate of their still-living descendants and relatives. A number of stages have to be gone through before the dead can be considered to be securely seated in their ancestral realm, but the barrier between their world and ours is indeed very thin and so permeable that in some circumstances it vanishes entirely. It is against this background that I would like you to read this account.
My Mother’s Death in 1995
In 1995 my mother died of colon cancer. Her descent was relatively swift - about seven weeks from hospital admission to interment in the cemetery - but agonizing and painful at the end, when she lay in the critical care unit of the hospital surrounded by machinery and intravenous lines that took over the functions of her body while the semblance of life was maintained via the LCD displays on the monitoring devices, and the few times her morphine haze that hid her pain from her lifted enough for her to open unseeing eyes and gasp “Jesus!” Before long there was not even this, then nothing but a phone ringing late in the night sounding her expiration and the fact that not even the heroic mechanisms of biomedical technology could sustain life where there was none, and she had left a husband and two sons behind to step through death’s infinitely wide portal.
Since she was a regular churchgoer up until the last few years of her life, when what was probably incipient Alzheimer’s disease pretty much confined her to home under the care of my father, her funeral service was at the Baptist church, the Christian ceremony conducted by the Baptist minister there and at the graveside. Even though her death finally came as relief to the pain all of us were suffering, I still worried how it would affect her afterwards. It seemed so unjust, so unfair. Why did she have to die like that? She who had harmed no one and surely committed no great evil deserving such an excruciating and lonely punishment.
A Visitation During Meditation
Weeks later she appeared to me while I was meditating: a felt presence, then a face before me that hovered and came close, whose invisible hands touched both sides of my face and pressed her lips to mine in a gesture of love and unspeakable tenderness, then lifted and returned to the world from which she had momentarily emerged into this one. From then on I knew that all was well with her wherever she was.
My Father’s Grief and His Own Passing
Of course I told my father about the visitation and he, too, experienced some temporary relief, although he never experienced these visitations himself (or if he did he never told me of it). We drew even closer after mother’s death and I came over from New York to visit him more frequently to spend time with him at the New Jersey house he now inhabited alone. We often talked about history, Black culture, union politics. He told me that a lot of the things I was studying and learning about Black history and African religions clarified things for him and he had begun to understand and appreciate many things from his childhood and earlier life whose meaning and value had eluded him all this time.
He now had plenty of time to think about things. Among his regrets was that he had never been able really to share in my mother’s religious and spiritual life. While raised a Baptist, in his adult years my father belonged to no church or religious group and his spiritual orientation, such as it was, was best expressed and apprehended aesthetically, that is, in cultural terms via the art-making, drawing, painting and sculpture that took up the spare time left over from his livelihood as a steelworker and warehouseman and his love for jazz.
Nonetheless, every day upon rising and before retiring at night, he went to a portrait of my mother picturing her in the African dress she wore to my wedding (and in which she was buried) and spoke to her. He died eighteen months after my mother. A sudden death; quick; a stroke; probably never knew what hit him; maybe didn’t even experience being hit. One afternoon, alone in the house, he just headed for the bathroom and slipped into another world before he got there.
The funeral service was conducted by my brother and me at the funeral home. We had agreed to design it ourselves, to exclude the ministry and perform it in a way that was congruent with his character and outlook and the interests of his last years. Consequently the elements of the funeral included African-style libations and ancestral invocations, eulogies from relatives and jazz for the final viewing, processional and recessional. My father and mother share the same burial plot with his coffin on top of hers, and this time there were no prayers at the graveside because this burial was not the end.
For those of us who profess to be practitioners of African religions and spirituality, visitations are to be expected and the path that ensures them is something we must create as a duty to our ancestors and to ourselves. Subsequent African rites took place at the now-empty house in New Jersey and were led by a traditional Nigerian priest and his assistant. These were in two stages.
The First Stage: Distance That Makes Communication Possible
The first stage was to establish the distance necessary to facilitate communication between my father and me. Too close an attachment of my father to the house and the material plane would preclude a true and beneficial communication between us. The Nigerian Yorubas use salt for this purpose and I had obtained sixteen boxes of salt, sprinkled the salt into big mounds on eight white plates and placed the plates in different locations throughout the house. I was told to expect a visitation from him, most likely through a dream visitation, and that is what occurred.
When my father died it became my responsibility to deal with all my parents’ financial matters: all their medical bills, their bank accounts, safe deposit boxes, wills, deeds, property taxes, insurance, etc. I was much more grief-stricken at my father’s death than my mother’s and all this lonesome detail was depressing and tiring and I often worried that I was not doing things the way they would have wanted. That night he came to me in a dream to reassure me that I was doing the right thing and handling everything as he would have wished.
The Second Stage: Establishing an Ancestral Shrine
The second stage involved the construction of an effigy from a suit of my father’s clothes, and providing the two priests with large squares of red cloth, white cloth and black cloth, as well as gin, two guinea hens, coconuts and honey, money in coins, and earth secured at dawn and at midnight. The ceremony took place at night in the backyard and at the front of the house.
We spread the cloths on the ground in the backyard and put the appropriate objects on each of the cloths. The effigy lay half in the house and half out just until the libation, after which I dragged it out. Prayers and divination preceded the main actions of this second ritual, in which the cloths and the things placed upon them came to represent the different spheres of life in which my father could intervene and assist me: career and business affairs; family life and children; and the spiritual and religious realm.
I addressed prayers to him and to the contents of each of the cloths and then offered the contents of each of the cloths to him. Just as the first ceremony established the distance necessary to facilitate communication between us, the second established and became that communication and created a place where we could meet to talk: the burial of the effigy and the cloths and all they contained in the backyard constructed a second gravesite and an ancestral shrine there, later to be marked by flowers and bottles left from libations of gin. A point of invocation and of communication separate from the joining of our consciousnesses that might otherwise occur in my waking mind or sleeping dream world.
Sacrifice of the guinea hens in front of the house and the burial of the offerings in the backyard became the sign and the seal of our new relationship. A final divination reading pronounced the success of the proceedings. My brother was not present at these proceedings, but when he was able to come to the house from Virginia, we did it all over again for his benefit.
Two Different Ancestral Presences
Visitations from both of my parents continue, but in the course of time more frequently in the dream state. My mother comes in vivid, visually oriented dreams where I see her primarily as a beauty; whether as a young woman or an old one, she is always well dressed and beautiful and I tell her so. Her continuing love serves me as a map to the treasure that is the great goodness of life.
It is my father who comes much more often, though, always friendly, steadying and helpful, to tell me that I am doing the right things by them. His visits are reassuring without the pangs of tenderness and pain that accompany my mother’s. My mother comes to adore and be adored; my father wants nothing but to assist and reassure.
A Path Created Through Relationship
As I said before, for those of us who profess to be practitioners of African religions and spirituality, visitations are to be expected and the path that ensures them is something we must create as a duty to our ancestors and to ourselves. Because of this, the occurrence of visitations is not disruptive or frightening. Instead, visitations confirm for us that the world is indeed as we believe it to be, a world in which the dead are living and reside near us continually.
If we have the eyes to see, and the ears to hear, and do what is necessary to maintain the varied existence of all beings - whether human, animal, plants, water, wind or rock - we will surely experience and recognize them all, not only those we see every day but also those others who surround us and are, for the most part, invisible.
George Brandon
Harlem, New York
September 1, 1999