Blood Lines

The experience I described in ‘When One of us is Wounded, We all Bleed’, when I dreamed my husband punched his brother and then woke with blood on my hand, got my attention.  Writing from the dream helped me to discover some of the ways I have blood on my hands.  Still I felt the dream was asking more of me.

Because my wounding occurred in a church sanctuary and because I was raised Roman Catholic, my experience of blood appearing on my hand without apparent cause made me think of the stigmata. Stigmata are bodily wounds, sores or sensation occurring in the location of the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. It felt presumptuous  of me to relate my experience to the stigmata suffered by devout and selfless holy ones, still the similarity was eerie and I felt compelled to follow that thread.

I searched for books about the stigmata.  In addition to religious books documenting details from the lives of saints, I found a contemporary novel called Stigmata by Phyllis Alesia Perry. 

The story is of a young African American woman, Lizzie, who inherits from the maternal grandmother she never knew, a quilt and a diary.  The quilt depicts images from her great-grandmother’s life as a slave.  Her grandmother’s diary tells of strange experience in her life that ultimately cause her to abandon her young family.  Lizzie episodically begins to leave current reality and enter the lives of her ancestors. Wounds inflicted on her great grandmother during slavery (manacle abrasions and welts from whips), appear on Lizzie’s body.  To the external world it appears Lizzie has had a psychotic break and has made a suicide attempt.  She spends 14 years in mental hospitals.

Lizzie eventually learns what she needs to say to secure her release from the hospital.  She returns to her southern home and begins the healing work of piecing together the history of her family through appliqué images she creates and attaches to a new quilt.  Slowly Lizzie’s mother is drawn into the quilting project. While they stitch together, Lizzie tells her grandmother story to her mother.  That is to say the daughter introduces the mother to the mother’s mother.  Healing occurs in the family lineage.

The novel, powerful in its own right, was personally impactful for several reasons.  First, I never knew my maternal grandmother.  She left her young family unwillingly when she was committed to an ‘insane asylum’ in South Carolina.  There is a belief, at least in me, that the reasons for her commitment were other than mental illness.

The similarities between the fictional story I was led to by a dream and my family history, grabbed my attention.  This is a thread I intend to continue to follow.  In the fall I will travel to South Carolina to meet cousins I have never met and to claim my membership in the lineage of my southern family. Meanwhile I will invite my grandmother and great grandmother to visit me in the dream world.

While preparing for the Dream Quest, I looked through my dream journals.  I came across a piece of writing I’d done about 7 years earlier.  The piece is called ‘Great Granddaughter.' The writing came out of my exploration of a dream.  The dream consisted solely of the words, great granddaughter.  The words of the piece resonated in my soul.  I took the piece with me to the dream quest.  The dream I received at the dream quest led me to a novel told from the perspective of a great granddaughter.  The story that great granddaughter told is leading me home to the land my mother’s family inhabited.  All of this reminds me that Everything’s Connected – No Exceptions.