Hallowed Grounds: Sacred Sites of African American Memory

Hallowed Be Thy Name…

In my mind, there are sacred sites of striding and struggling

Striations of strain and strength 

In memories I once lived and those I inherited, I marvel at how they and I “made it over,” as if I floated in on the broken but braced backs of a superhuman ancestral brood…

For how on earth, Heaven, or hell could I have moved clay lips to laugh, lie, cry, love, preen, protest, speak life, and dodge death…

And I’ve come to realize that these sanctified places of terror, trial, and triumph are ordered in my thoughts, a reminder that true freedom is always bought with a price of great sacrifice and and justified only through an ointment  of redemption

And so the Spirit moved among these places

Gave a massaging message while they were moaning while in manacles

Hallowed be thy name…

Inspired  their holy dance while in deprivation 

Hallowed be thy name…

Gilded the Grace that would carry them

Hallowed be thy name…

Answered prayers whispered only in their thoughts

Hallowed be thy name…

Cloistered me in an ancestral seed

Hallowed be thy name…

Birthed me on a bank of better 

Hallowed be thy name

Reined in my reckless

Hallowed be thy name

Gave me strength to fight the feckless 

Hallowed be thy name…

The Spirit has moved in many times and places, yet today can be seen in faces of those who know in their hearts that they are but a small part of a greater plan and can still cry “Hallowed be thy name…” in wholly fickle lands

Regina Yvette Carter Garcia

I am Regina Yvette Carter Garcia, daughter of Evelyn Jean Simpson Carter, daughter of Bessie Lee Teel Adams Simpson, daughter of Carrie Teel Adams, daughter of Margaret Carroway Teel, daughter of Cinda Woolard Carraway.

A powerful lesson that my grandmother Bessie Simpson taught me during a time that I was having a crisis of faith was that whatever I believed had to be something that I knew for myself. I needed to be able to see it proven in my life. She never told me that I had to believe what other people told me, to believe one ideology or another, but to believe what I saw working in my own life. Then she shared her testimony with me. It rocked my world! As I applied and tested, my faith in my Divine Power grew stronger…Everyday, I praise my God for who and what she was in my life.