Black mothering as spiritual praxis: Engendering a multigenerational leadership paradigm

Introduction: Black mothering as moral biography and spiritual praxis

Nobody warned you that the women whose feet you cut from running would give birth to daughters with wings. ¹

Ijeoma Umebinyuo

Black ² mothering is nation-building work. In her book, When Momma Speaks: The Bible and Motherhood from a Womanist Perspective, Stephanie Crowder writes, “Women of African descent came from a familial tradition where mother-centered authority was the core of tribal life.” ³ Reconstructing this communal norm as a displaced people amid the pervasive physical and epistemic violence of White supremacy, anti-Blackness, Afro-phobia, and Black misogynoir upon Black female identity has been an enduring project of mothering Black women who know who they are, where they come from, and their ancestral responsibility.

To be clear, Black mothering is not only a biological project. It is a project of Black women who mother social movements. Community mothers who nurture activists, serve as spokeswomen, and offer space on their couch. Black women writers and educators who birth language that names the particularity of experience. Church mothers and religious leaders who protect congregations from death-dealing rhetoric. Harriet Tubman. Fannie Lou Hamer. Ella Baker. Alicia Garza. Stacey Abrams. Sybrina Fulton. Wangari Maathai. Mary McCloud Bethune. Angela Davis. Toni Morrison. Katherine Dunham. Amanda Gorman. Maya Angelou. These are mothering women in the African epistemological tradition who orient their community, and society, toward the actualization of its highest moral truths as messengers of divine righteousness. To this auspicious list I would add my grandmother, Mama Eva R. Bird, who has embodied Black mothering as sacred praxis as a community mother for over five decades.

Becoming Mama Eva: A moral biography

My grandmother (b. 1924) is the youngest child of Amanda “Mandy” Rosa Goldenbird Spencer Brown and Walter Earl Brown, born in Dixie, Georgia. When she was 4 months old, her family relocated to Chester, Pennsylvania, joining the great migration of Black families in search of warmer suns. In Chester her parents worked odd jobs to provide for their six children. Mandy eventually became a teacher, and the couple would own and operate a community convenience store. My grandmother recalls disagreements between her parents because of her mother’s excessive charity to neighbors who could not afford to pay for their necessities, leading to lack in her own household. That same innate selflessness would be a hallmark of her youngest daughter, Eva, throughout her life.

Despite the double portion of racialized poverty dealt by the Great Depression and Jim and Jane Crow, my great-grandmother, a devout Baptist Christian, constantly reminded her children of their value in her God’s eyes. Great-Ma made her children feel special, glorious even, planting seeds of pride deeply within them that would root and bear fruit in her descendants:

I will never forget what my mom told us growing up, especially during segregation because it was as bad in the North as it was in the South. She told us every day “you are as good as anybody else. It doesn’t matter how rich or how pretty they think they are.”

Her father was a strict disciplinarian with a third-grade education,

but he had wisdom. He would tell us to always look people in the eye, no matter how important they think they are. He called it the bull’s eye. Looking people in the eye has been a big lesson in my life because it sends the message that you are to be taken seriously.

At 20 years old, at the encouragement of her Aunt Mary, also a teacher who had attended Spelman Seminary (which would become Spelman College) in Atlanta, Georgia, my grandmother returned to the South, where she attended Fort Valley State College. At Fort Valley she met my grandfather Van Samuel Bird, 2 years her junior and a brilliant campus leader, who was discerning a path to the Episcopal priesthood. Both were highly intelligent and active on campus; my grandmother was editor of the school yearbook and a charter member of the Fort Valley State NAACP, and my grandfather was class president. Both were raised by God-fearing mothers in the Black Church tradition. Their match was a natural one. Guided by the tenets of the Bible and the wisdom of Khalil Gibran’s literary magnum opus, The Prophet, Eva and Van began a love story that would last for 66 years, biologically producing 3 children, 8 grandchildren, and 10 great grandchildren. Together, they would mother many more as ministers in the US northeast, the Virgin Islands, and Canterbury, England. While my grandfather earned his PhD in Sociology of Religion and progressed within the Episcopal diocese, my grandmother became a school teacher, earning three advanced degrees in Education, Teaching, and Religion along the way. Eventually, their ministry brought them to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During this time, my grandmother would earn the title Mama Eva.

The 1960s–1980s was a time of extreme racism in Philadelphia, not unlike most US cities. For Philadelphians, the hate-filled political reign of documented white supremacist Frank Rizzo, first elected as police commissioner and later as two-term mayor, was debilitating to Black communities. Walking in the pride and legacy of their elders, my grandparent’s children became activists, refusing to accept anything less than liberation from oppressive systemic regimes:

They were so involved in the Black freedom movement and its tenets of community. Anika [oldest daughter] was involved in sit-ins at the University of Pennsylvania and Shaka [middle son] founded the African Community Learning Centre [AFCOM]. All day long they were bringing people in. They had gotten to the point where they were so conscious, it increased our consciousness.

Through their children’s passion, my grandparents turned their heart for each other and their God into a tangible outward expression of love. Their house became a sanctuary for members of Philadelphia’s Black Liberation Movement.

Spanning more than 100 years, to include the moral wisdom of her mother, my grandmother’s story weaves together a reverberating and evolving set of experiences and cast of characters that shaped her becoming Mama Eva. Eco-womanist scholar Melanie Harris refers to this as a moral autobiography. Much more than a historical or biographical sketch of events in one woman’s life, it is “keeping with the womanist ethical task of uncovering black women’s stories and highlighting their experience as an important source for their moral framework.” ⁴ My grandmother’s emergence as a community mother was activated by her (and her mother’s and her children’s) lived experiences of oppression. Her agency arose over time through the crystallizing of her own moral interpretations of a viciously malignant society. Her ethical response to that malignancy was motivated by her belief in a just and liberative God.

This essay employs a womanist methodological lens to shape the moral and ethical dimensions of my grandmother’s life as a salvific source for Black women. As a discipline of the academy, womanist theology emerged to claim space for critical examinations of Black women’s religious and societal experiences. In a comprehensive article on the history and urgency of womanist theology for Christian Century magazine, womanist scholar Eboni Marshall Turman writes, “At the heart of this faith is love: an unapologetic self-love in a world that has historically despised Black women; love for the Spirit; and a deep love of creation, culture, joy, and laughter.” ⁵ It adopts a hermeneutic of suspicion to “talk back” to society and troubling passages within the Bible, assumptions Western Christian theologians have made about the universality of religious experience, the cooptation of Christian values to undergird White supremacy, to reject death-dealing narratives about Africa, Blackness, and womanhood, and to construct salvific narratives that lead to flourishing and wholeness. Womanist theologians are committed to the recovery of biblical narratives, through careful hermeneutical scholarship, that tell of Black women’s roles in the entirety of the biblical story. In addition to the Bible, womanist theologians rely on their experience and the experiences of other Black and Afro-Diasporic women to construct a holistic and redemptive Christian narrative that liberates. Womanist theologians engage the art, music, literature, mother wit, and old time ‘legion of Black women to piece together the story of Black survival and Black liberation. An example of the womanist impulse is my great-grandmother’s daily affirmations of worth to my grandmother. Through her daughter, my great-grandmother engaged in womanist “talk back” to a society that tried to make her believe she had no value. ⁶

As womanist theology “grew organically and in many spaces at once,” ⁷ scholars including Karen Baker-Fletcher, Monica Coleman, Yvonne Chireau, Tracey Hucks, Dianne Stewart, Rachel Harding, and Melanie Harris, among others, reclaimed and integrated, within a womanist paradigm, the embodied spiritual systems, epistemological framework, and indigenous ontologies that enslaved Africans carried with them during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This inclusion has contributed to a complex transnational and intersectional social analysis of the myriad realities that simultaneously give Black women of the Diaspora spiritual nourishment and prevent them from flourishing. Some womanist scholars, including myself, have included the orisas, messenger divinities of the Yoruba religion, Ifa-orisa, as a spiritual and ethical framework for understanding and interpreting the divine nature. In particular, the mother-orisas Yemoja, Osun, and Oya have been incorporated into multireligious understandings throughout the Americas and the Caribbean.

In addition to an embrace of the orixa in the Yoruba-influenced Candomble spirituality of Bahia, Brazil, scholar-practitioner Rachel Harding connects the subversive African spiritual indigeneity that was sustained within the collection of African American spirituals. Harding writes,

The spirituals, the traditional songs of African American religion, were created by enslaved Africans and their descendants in nineteenth century America and hold generations of trauma and transcendence in their tones. They are the religious form that has most faithfully nourished the link to ancestors and ancestral traditions among African Americans and they continue to be a source of great cultural and spiritual sustenance for all people who experience them. ⁸

The Gullah culture in the Southeast US barrier islands, once a central slaving port, also sustains a deep connection to indigenous West African food, artistry, language, and an earth-rooted spiritual system through Geechee people dispersed throughout the US South. The traditions of conjure, hoodoo, and rootwork are the result of a distinctly Afro Atlantic spiritual indigeneity that developed alongside Black Christianity and continues to be a source of power and healing for many.

Thus, like the Yoruba mother-orisa, Yemoja, my grandparents’ theological understanding of divine love and justice was wide and deep, expansive enough to hold together the thread of justice inherent in the Bible, the demands of Black liberation that included the embrace of the orisas and African studies, and meet the practical needs of the activists, communities, and families of North Philadelphia. Strategy sessions, educational classes, cultural and spiritual rituals: for many years, these were regular occurrences in the three-story house on Lehigh Avenue in North Philadelphia:

I would buy food once a month in bulk because I was feeding so many people. I set up a charge at the store near us and bought anything we wanted—quality food—and we would pay at the end of the month.

Community mothering became central to my grandmother’s self-understanding of the Divine nature. Crowder describes community mothers as visionary Black women, both formally educated and grass-roots activated, whose responsibility was “not only securing a political future, but also ensuring the physical well-being of young activists in the heat of the battle.” ⁹ For my grandmother, community mothering was and is spiritual praxis. Spiritual praxis is embodied spiritual dialogue, the receptive and responsive sharing of spiritual gifts for the creation of a better society. Spiritual praxis is prayer in action. Maurice Nutt writes,

Spirituality is faith lived. As such, it encompasses the totality of personal and collective responses to religious belief, including relationships, morality, worship, and daily living. Thus Black spirituality is pervaded with the African American experience and awareness. It is at once a response to and reflection on African American life and culture. ¹⁰

My grandmother puts her spiritual praxis thus:

Scripture says you have to fill the gap. We have to grow into what God has already put into us. You have to grow into Scripture. When I go to the prayer room, I go expectant. I go excited. Lord, whatever you want to teach me, I’m ready to learn.

In her embrace of the community mothering tradition, my grandmother accepted and claimed a Divine call and responsibility and, in the process, became Mama Eva, a woman with a heart capable of deep and courageous love. Her instincts as a community mother actually began years before and would continue into her senior years. Over the course of her 97 years of life, my grandmother has regularly provided sanctuary and harbor to young women, and occasionally families, in need. “I have had so many people stay with me, taking care of them on and off. It’s been the story of my life. There is always somebody you have to really look after.” My grandfather also found his theo-ethical place in the liberation movement. In addition to his position as Director of the Office for Social Concerns with the Diocese of Philadelphia, he served as a spokesperson, along with Episcopal priest and activist Paul Washington and others, for activist demands. It was my grandmother, however, whose heart dreamed new visions for the couple:

My husband never objected to any of the crazy things I did. That was one of his best qualities. Sometimes I was foolish and gave too much and he never tried to stop me. Never. It was always the two of us working together.

Divine Black mothers

Black mothering is an ancient and sacred charge. Both the Hebrew Bible and the Qur’an reveal a sacred love for Black mothers. One central example is through the protection and anointing of Hagar, an African enslaved woman, and her son, Ishmael. Womanist scholars, like Delores Williams, have developed deep exegetical and hermeneutic scholarship rooted in Hagar’s wilderness experiences as a parallel to the Black woman’s experience in the United States. In the Hebrew Bible, Ishmael is shunned by his father, but ordained by YHWH to be a leader of nations. Hagar’s role as royal mother is less documented in the Hebrew story, but in Islam, she is revered as a woman who wielded significant power. Feminist Shia Muslim scholar Mahjabeen Dhala writes,

Albeit the narrative of Hagar is solely built on Islamic traditions and not Sacred Revelation, she is undoubtedly one of Islam’s most important female figures and a symbol of Islamic identity. Hagar is credited with a groundbreaking feat that has irrefutably established her role as a vital element in one of the pillars of Islam. Her narrative suggests an independent enterprise because she acted solely on her intuition, relying fully on her trust in God, without any directive from Abraham, and a relentless physical and spiritual pursuit of survival. ¹¹

In the Ifa-orisa corpus of religion, ethics, and spirituality, Black mothering is ubiquitous. Ifa-orisa religion originated among the Yoruba people of West Africa. A result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was the transmission, relocation, and summoning of the orisa to the Americas and the Caribbean. Ifa-orisa is now a global religion practiced by millions of people throughout the world. Orisa are primordial spiritual forces, embodied within nature, established by the One Creator Olodumare. Orisa are also divinized humans, akin to the hagiography of Catholicism, albeit with deep nuance of culture and intention. Through Odu, Ifa-orisa’s institutionalized corpus of wisdom, orisa, teach and guide practitioners. Among the most enduring orisa are the mother-orisas ¹² Yemoja-Olokun, Osun, and Oya. Yemoja, embodied as the upper half of the ocean, is the bringer and sustainer of life. Ifa-orisa religion venerates the spirit of water as the most essential primordial element. In nature, Yemoia is represented as the upper half of the ocean where life thrives. In her theomorphic representation, Yemoja is a full-bodied African woman, and sometimes mermaid depending on the geographic region, whose generous body represents the abundance and origin of life. Yemoja is the epitome of unconditional love. For context, Olokun rules the lower half of the ocean and is embodied as the king, or sometimes queen, of a dark and vast kingdom of wealth. Among other things, Olokun’s kingdom represents the profound depths of African genius lost in the holocaust of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and signals what must be raised to the surface and retrieved for Black liberation.

Despite the sacred and auspicious legacy of Black mothers, Mama Eva’s ability to wield the mother-centered authority defined by Crowder is under attack because Black women and communities are under attack. They are prey to the twin predators of the US religio-racial context, White Christian supremacy and Afro-phobia. Afro-phobia, systemic disdain, distrust, and disenfranchisement of African derived people, religion, and knowledge systems, is not just a plague on the white hegemonic imagination; it is also a cancer in the minds of Afro-Diasporic peoples of the world who have been systematically indoctrinated into self-loathing by discursive tropes about Black inferiority and primitivism. African and matriarchal religion was particularly targeted to relinquish spirituality and memory under oppressive colonialism.

Part II: A Sankofic ethic of survival

Linda Tuhiwai Smith names 25 projects for indigenous researchers to counter the oppressive Western appropriation of knowledge. One of the projects she names is “discovering the beauty of our knowledge.” Smith writes, “This project is as much about rediscovering indigenous knowledge and its continued relevance to the way we live our lives.” ¹³ Challenging Afro-phobia and rediscovering the vitality of African epistemologies within Black cultural and religious spaces requires a process of decolonization I have defined as a Sankofic ethic of survival. Sankofa in this conception is a philosophy, a methodology, and an ethic. In the Twi language, the literal translation of Sankofa is san, to return; ko, to go; fa, to fetch/to seek and take. Its representation within the Adinkra philosophical symbology of the Akan and Asante people of Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, West Africa, is of a bird with its head turned backward, feet planted forward, holding an egg in its beak. The image expresses the importance of reaching back to knowledge gained in the past (the egg) and bringing it into the present in order to make positive progress. As a methodology, a Sankofic ethic of survival is the embodied process of reawakening an African episteme through immersion in African religious, philosophical, and communal epistemologies and knowledge systems, learning. As an ethic, it stimulates a growing appreciation for the vibrant African epistemological systems that our ancestors treasured. It also guides a growing comprehension of the potential of synchronous spiritual meaning-making between these indigenous traditions and African American Christianity.

One way a Sankofic ethic of survival accomplishes this work is by demythologizing African religion, particularly in Black Christian spaces. A Sankofic ethic of survival in this context will reveal central elements of African indigenous spirituality, such as ancestor veneration, ritual, and possession, which share meaning-making possibilities with Black Christian spirituality. A path forward is through a socio-critical examination of the philosophy of Sankofa and Psalm 78:2–4:

I will open my mouth with a parable;

I will utter hidden things, things from of old,—

things we have heard and known,

things our ancestors have told us.

We will not hide them from their descendants;

we will tell the next generation

the praiseworthy deeds of the Lord,

his power, and the wonders he has done. (NIV)

This Hebrew Bible passage points to a known and expected Jewish cultural mandate to retrieve and preserve ancestral ways. Historio-textual analysis of the books of the Hebrew Bible assert that, while the stories contained within them were taught or shared much earlier, their actual canonization into what is now known as the Hebrew Bible occurred much later. The canonization of the Hebrew Bible, a composite of Israelite culture including religion, philosophy, wisdom, laws, and literature, and subsequent texts were a response to the rift in ancestral memory caused by the fall of the Jerusalem Empire in 587 BCE and again at Masada in the first-century CE. Repairing that breach through the preservation of cultural memory was, and remains, a core of Jewish religious and cultural identity.

Africans, like the Israelites, experienced a violent displacement from their land and the possibility of a deep breach in cultural memory. Maafa is a Kiswahili word that means “great disaster” and is a word Africana Studies scholars such as Marimba Ani, and others, have used to refer to the trans-Atlantic slave trade as a container to hold the deep well of profound intergenerational loss. ¹⁴ A despicable dimension of the maafa was to destroy all memory of indigenous culture within the African psyche. This destruction included language, religion, philosophy, education, aesthetics, family, and communal life. Cultural re-discovery has been ongoing in the generations since, as bodily and psychic memories stir and refuse to settle within Black being. Both Sankofa and Psalm 78:2–4 function to preserve a people’s cultural, religious, and ethical ways to ensure their survival. For African Americans, this is particularly relevant in light of European colonization’s demoralizing impact on the African psyche and the recovery of an African episteme.

Part III: Engendering theo-ethical paradigms to our daughters

Womanist scholar and anthropologist Linda Thomas writes,

We use our foremothers’ rituals and survival tools to live in hostile environments. Moreover, we gather data from a reservoir of bold ideas and actions from past centuries to reconstruct knowledge for an enhanced and liberating quality of life for black women today. ¹⁵

My grandmother’s lived experiences of race, gender, and class oppressions and her courage and will to transform them into a justice ministry are the liberation songs for which Black women and girls yearn. For generations, women like my great-grandmother and my grandmother have wielded their faith with courage and boldness, challenging evil, and mothering Black women of fire, daughters with courage and faith who “talk back” to injustice, from the pulpit to the boardroom.

My grandmother’s daughters and granddaughters boldly continue the legacy bequeathed to them. Her oldest daughter, Anika, is a Methodist deacon, community organizer, and founder of Women in Transition, a spiritual mentoring program for women exiting the prison system and re-entering society. In addition to her love and theo-ethical leadership presence, Anika values her mother’s unconditional acceptance of people:

Whether it is sexuality, behavior, or religion my mother is wholly accepting of people. That is who she is. I endeavored to instill in my own daughters to know who they are and accept who they are. You are fearfully and wonderfully made. Whether or not you fit into the pegs of society, you are in this world for a reason.

Her youngest daughter, Tafiti, is founder of Chrysalis Lab, a social innovation firm that centers intersectional dialogue to generate solutions to intractable systemic inequities. Prior to this venture, Tafiti served as the Senior Vice President of the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta, one of the largest community foundations in the country. My grandmother and her youngest daughter share a passion for gardening. Similarly, their metaphors for leadership, survival, and thriving are often references to the natural rhythms of the earth. Melanie Harris references this as “eco-wisdom” born out of an African epistemological consciousness in which “spirit, nature, and humanity are interconnected in an interdependent web of life.” ¹⁶ A sought-after mentor, Tafiti counsels emerging Black women leaders often using nature as a metaphor:

Leadership should be fluid like the running water of the river. Water moves and flows, it builds and pushes. But it never stops because it can’t stop. Leaders can’t not be leaders. But it doesn’t mean they are always talking. It is like the running waters of the river. In this way, I identify with the orisa Osun [goddess of sweet rivers].

My grandmother’s life has been guided by a steadfast theo-ethical commitment to the justice tenets of the Gospel. Her life is a reminder that leadership is not always loud and bombastic or possesses a need to claim center stage. It can simply be consistently present and nurturing. Miriam, not Moses. Within our great grandmother and grandmother’s lived experiences our ancestral mothering heritage is revealed. Black grandmothers are the blueprints to our ancestral memories. Their bodies bear the memory of our glorious and painful history. The African American liberation story is inscribed in their cooking, their singing, their crying, their dancing, and their praying. In the sacred solitude of their negotiating conversations with their God, they came to know a benevolent and loving Spirit who, while slow at times, eventually sees, bears witness, and makes a way out of no way. Their persistence with their God equipped them to give birth to daughters with wings who would fly home to retrieve and claim their ancestral authority.

Black and Indigenous women of color (BIWOC) exist at the bottom of nearly every quality-of-life index. Even the revelation of devastating statistics, such as the disproportionate rise in Black and Indigenous maternal and infant mortality rates, raises little to no alarms. Black women and women of color in the United States often appear destined to remain a permanent underclass. We need the moral autobiographies of women like Mama Eva and her mother, Mandy, and others, to give us courage and hope. Now is the time for us to sit with our elders and retrieve their stories of survival. Now is the time to ask the uncomfortable questions about multireligious identity and the roots of those wives’ tales. Now is the time to confront our colonial mis-education. Now is time to raise the dead for the sake of the living.