You're invited: Join Scalawag and Nnenna Freelon in Durham, North Carolina, on Sunday, December 10 for Great Grief—Live! Home for the Holidays, a musical performance and conversation exploring loss, love, and how to move forward with grief during the holidays.
Grief can take us to our knees—right back to the dirt, dust, and the earth, from which all things grow. In this episode of Great Grief, Nnenna Freelon consults Mother Nature—and a Black woman hemp farmer—to lean into how we might grow on even in harsh environments and bitter seasons.
Subscribe and listen to all four episodes of the second season of Great Grief: "Seasons of Change," available now wherever you listen to podcasts:
Episode Transcript:
[Singing]
♪ Ring around the rosies ♪
♪ Pocket full of posies ♪
♪ Ashes, ashes ♪
♪ We all fall down ♪
♪♪
We've all heard those words.
As a child, ashes belonged exclusively to ring around the rosy.
[Music]
♪ Ashes, ashes ♪
♪ We all fall down ♪
♪♪
Never was certain why ashes made us all fall down, but it was fun to collapse in a heap for no reason other than the song said so.
And dust, was well… If your chore was dusting, it's the job you can never finish. Dishes stay washed, and beds, well, they stay made—but dust, dust is always in the way, making more of itself, and you just chase it around from place to place.
Dust is made up of very, very tiny pieces of everything else that exists, and life is apparently always exfoliating.
My husband Phil did not want a burial, nor did he want a funeral. He wanted those who loved and cared to find him in their memories. His desire was to be cremated. His remains given back to the earth, recycled. This was an alignment with his values, and the way he lived his life.
About a week after Phil died, I received a small white cardboard box. It felt heavier than it should have been for such a small box. On it was written: "Philip Freelon, July 11, 2019. Durham, North Carolina, Durham County," and there was a drawing of a dove in flight.
July 11 was not the day he died, but the day of cremation—and I felt some kind of way about opening that white box.
Afraid? Uncomfortable. What was it exactly?
Can I, if I open it, be with what's held inside the box? Can I? Befriend these ashes, this beloved dust? Can I hold? Behold? Can I trust myself with this dried bouquet? Bewildered, my bones quaking, I cried until I was dry.
There's no pretending with grief. I can tell you she don't play. You can act like it's not anything at all. Yeah, you can put on that mask that says, "I'm okay." But oh my goodness, you pay a high price for trying that little trick.
It's not a philosophical exercise, this gritty messy business of mourning. This is life. Extravagant, bold—hurt feelings and all. It makes you question everything in your life, and then it turns you into a question too.
♪ Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. ♪
Bewildered, I sat with this small white box and my stirred-up feelings inside feelings wrapped in questions, and I missed Phil all the more. You know, Grief knew it was so.
I did not open the box, not right away, but the seeds of grief had already been scattered in the dust of that moment. Questions within questions: Are we part earth-dust? Ashes? Where did his spirit go? Does it linger with these ashes that held his form, my beloved? Ashes to ashes. What does that mean? And what of dust's return? Return to when, return to where? To itself? Questions.
Sometimes you really don't know what you think until you enter into conversation with someone else. Sharing thoughts with others is kind of like working on a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. I wanted the unraveling of my thoughts with someone else. I needed to talk about it.
Intuition has led me to Clarenda Stanley—or Farmer Cee, as she has come to be known in the agricultural community. Clarinda is the owner of Green Heffa Farms in Chatham County, North Carolina. But actually, I called on the black woman, the farmer the southern born and bred who's engaged in an intimate relationship with the land on her farm.
I was calling on her lived experience. My heart wanted to share in her knowledge of the land, the earth, seeds, nature—growing things, starting over, cycles of life and death. I was curious about the intersection of grief and the ashes that remain.
I wondered, did the earth whisper secrets to her?
Clarenda Stanley: So when things ended as they needed to end, then I had this piece of land and I'm like, so what now? What do you want to do with it? And it actually gave me the grace to grow in my own vision for my life.
Nnenna Freelon: It was as if those words were meant for my heart alone. A door shut closed in one area of her life and another opening wide to possibilities—the land, the earth, its arms wide. I'd asked for guidance to that place where true life story and grief story meet up. The grace to grow is an answer, a song, and a prayer for living.
Clarenda Stanley: So we do grow hemp, but we grow over a dozen other beautiful medicinal plants. And what was growing in Clarenda was curiosity and the willingness to try and study. You know, I have to learn these plants, after learn what kind of conditions they like, if they like their soil neutral or if they like it more alkaline or acidic. I need to know if they prefer to be water in the morning or in the evening.
And as you start to have that intimate relationship—because growing is pretty intimate, we really get into it—you know, you form these bonds with these little sentient beings that you're going to, you know, probably later eat, but that's part of the relationship.
Nnenna Freelon: I'd asked Clarenda questions about dust, ashes, and endings. And here I was, receiving stories of growth, learning, and renewal. Yes, ash is what it is. That stuff left after the fire has transformed it. That's one story. The tale of the former shape rendered unrecognizable.
But is there something else hidden in the ash story? Multiple meanings that ashes and dust can offer?
We have such a complicated relationship with soil. On the one hand, to be soiled is to be unclean, dirty, unkempt—not a good thing at all. On the other, the soil sustains life, and good soil offers abundance.
I wondered what it could mean to be connected with the soil, to listen to the earth, to the dust, to be in conversation with ashes, such a complex and rich idea. In the next breath, Clarenda explains how the land was a reflection, a mirror of her own energy.
Clarenda Stanley: There was no harvest. The land did not harvest either year. One year was hit by a hurricane. And then the next year, just, you know, it wasn't maintained the way it needed to be maintained. So, the land wasn't even performing. I felt like its fertility was suppressed by the situation. And yeah, me and the land had it in common. Me and the land both had it in common—fertility suppressed, oppressed in some ways.
And so it wasn't, we didn't have a harvest until I planted some seeds. And I had to plant some seeds in myself as well.
Seed wisdom. Now that keeps coming up in my grief journey. When she mentioned seeds, that sparked something in my spirit. Heads on the back of my neck stood straight up. It was a feeling, like a big truth, even though my mind was rattling on, that nothing could grow in my season of loss.
Learning to plant seeds in the ashes of your parched heart, really? Oh, it was like a dream recalling a seed story. I was reading about the history of rice production. Now, historians had for years attributed the introduction of rice to the Portuguese. Also, its cultivation as a staple crop in South Carolina in Georgia as a "stroke of genius" on the part of the colonists.
But if you ask the seed itself, it tells a completely different story. You see, African women carried rice seeds across the Atlantic basin by braiding them into their hair. Great, great grandmothers four times removed, captive, and facing an unknown fate grasped and shaped a future—my future—by carefully and purposefully, hiding these cereal grains within their braids.
My imagination in full flight now, I can almost hear those hushed voices.
[Music]
"Be still, binta," she warning-whispered, locking my head between her knees. We'd been working the muddy bottom, the earth like a thick porridge ankle deep; our backs bent to the planting of rice. This was women's work, and that's where they caught us, all of us.
Except for the few who ran away, but I was not so lucky. If I'd been looking up instead of down, I might have seen them coming and run for the safety of the bush, but I was caught.
Thirty of us, women, most of them my clanswomen, were caged, like little birds. Some were moaning, begging, and crying out, imploring the gods to help them. They were put to the whip. After that, most of us kept our silence.
We were held in that awful place for many, many days. The men who held us captive called themselves traders, but we knew them to be in legion with the outsiders—not to be trusted, for they were without honor.
During the daylight, we were made to continue working the fields, but there was no joy in it. None of the songs were used to sing to make the work go well, and appease the goddess of fertility. We were afraid, abandoned, working like wooden puppets, certain only of the unknown.
Mama Fatoumata had told us not to drink from the calabash that the men brought to us at night.
"This is a drink to make you stupid in your sleep," she warned. "It is better to be awake, your mouth dry, thirsty, than to be drunk on their false promises that no harm will come to you."
She held in her hand a small wooden pick, which she used to part my thick black hair. I thought it was a waste to attend to personal grooming at this time, but I'd learn never to question the queen mother.
She was humming a song as she worked through the unruly forest of my hair.
[Humming]
"Which hairstyle are you putting on my head?" I asked.
"This is no hairstyle," she whispered flatly. She continued humming this strange tune.
"I'm braiding the future. Your future," she murmured.
"These seeds, each one will feed multitudes."
"Seeds?" I ask. "What seeds?"
And then I felt her heavy hand, placing what felt like grains of sand in the parts on my scalp.
"You binta," she shuddered as she spoke. "Your name means with God. You are chosen to carry these seeds of sustenance for generations yet unborn. I braid into each part the hopes of a nation. You will survive, my child, this horror that I have dreamt. It will change you, mark you. There is no escaping that. But I am sewing good medicine in these grains of rice, and they will ripen in their own time and be food for you and for many on the journey."
But Mama Fatoumata," I protested, "We are going to be together, come what may, no matter what, am I right? Mama, am I right?"
She would say no more. She continued making the parts on my scalp and carefully placing the seeds along my exposed scalp, twisting, twisting left over center, right over center, in a steady rhythm. My thick black hair a hiding place for tomorrow. And all the while, Mama Fatoumata humming that strange-sounding tune till the sun peaked over the horizon.
[Humming]
Wow, what kind of people braid seeds into their hair? What does that say? Now I have to return to my conversation with Clarenda Stanley, my friend and the owner of Green Heffa Farms in Liberty, North Carolina, to hear more about that.
Clarenda Stanley: They didn't know where they were going, but they knew that the people who got them didn't have good intent, obviously. And so they wanted to make sure that they could eat when they got to where they were going. They wanted to make sure that they had access to their culture, the foods that they were accustomed to, something that can connect them. And I believe for many, because you know, seeds have been used as currency. They've been used as a sign of wealth. And for some, I am sure that that's, you know, they were putting up some money and hiding it in their braids.
And just that, you know, really, wow, yeah, I think about that when I'm out here and things aren't going quite the way, sometimes I want them to go. And I just think about that resiliency, that fourth site—that in the midst of fear, in the midst of being unprotected and feeling unprotected and vulnerable and separated from all that you know, they still had the strength to go and put some seeds in their hair.
[Music]
[Singing]
♪ [Scatting] ♪
♪ And you wait, quiet. ♪
♪ Every orchard song belongs to you.
♪ And you wait. ♪
♪ Bees dream, hallelujah applause. ♪
♪ And you wait. ♪
♪ Winter breathes, spring's first name. ♪
♪ And you wait, braided in the darkness. ♪
♪ You wait. ♪
♪ Mid-summer moon beckens, and you wait. ♪
♪ Undressed autumn extends her threshing palm, and you wait. ♪
♪ And you wait. ♪
♪ Silent stories intact. ♪
♪♪
Clarenda Stanley: I have some seeds that just have me cussin'. Like, how is a plant going to come from this little speck of air? You know, you sneeze and the seeds all disperse. And then you have some that, I mean, are downright, you know, just aesthetically unpleasing. Like, this is an ugly little seed, and the plant is so beautiful.
Yeah, it's amazing. And they can store for years. You know, they can lie dormant. So not only is there all that potential in such a little, just such a little piece of matter, but the fact that you can set them aside for years and put some seeds in the ground and things grow. That's powerful.
Nnenna Freelon: Now that's magic right there. That's some true, "I didn't make this happen," in-dwelling-God-present magic up in there. You know, we're often looking for magic on display facilitated by a magician's wand, but this magic, it's all around us. Everyday magic in seed song, hidden in the plots of my grandmother's hair, sewn in the spirit of Harriet—who liberated herself and went back to gather, gather, gather more and more seeds of freedom.
I'm discovering this gathering on my personal journey, too: Sseed memory that's been waiting for a close encounter of the grieving kind.
This is a very tender and delicate time in my life. I can feel my heart wanting, reaching for peace and illness. And I don't always feel patient in the process.
It's like: Okay, all right, what can I read? What movie can I watch? What can I do to fix this? You know, what can I do to be better right now in this moment?
Clarenda Stanley: Plants are very specific about their preferences. A lesson I learned from plants was not to negotiate on my non-negotiables. You know, a plant has specifics. If you give me a certain temperature, a certain amount of light or darkness, a certain amount of moisture, and you make sure the ideal conditions, even if you just barely made it, but if you can just hit the minimum for the ideal conditions, I will do what I was designed to do. But I'm gonna sit here and wait until you get yourself together. Okay? You're not going to force me to germinate in a less-than-ideal situation—at least, minimally.
So for me, it's like being more like the seed, because sometimes we just go ahead and bloom, and we know that not even the minimum was met for our ideal situation.
Be more like a seed in my grief journey. That's what I'm hearing. My spirit is saying that to me. Patient and willing to trust the process. Now, this is a hard lesson for me, and I'm still trying to learn a little bit every day.
A friend told me that the really good thing about trust is that it brings with it rest. And now I need to rest.
And one of the main things I've learned about grieving is that it's exhausting. There are times when all I want to do is sleep, and I can't find it anywhere because my grieving brain is moving at warp speed, looking for answers, trying to figure it all out, making elaborate plans—and my favorite: To-do lists.
[Music]
Oh, perhaps from the heart of a seed, lessons in patience and trust.
[Music]
[Singing]
♪ Can I let time be my friend? ♪
Can I let time be my friend?
And rest on her sturdy shoulders. Can I let rest become a daily practice?
Can I request, of ashes and dust, a sweet, sweet song?
A bedtime story?
Can I? Well, can I?
Scalawag knows that for many of us, our grief is simultaneously never news and the only news.
Listen to the latest season of Great Grief with Nnenna Freelon, available now on all podcast platforms.
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