The Lucky Dark by Cynthia Winton-Henry

wisdom. Some treated their families as dead wood. Were we a nation of walking stumps? Is deforesting the planet parallel to our treatment of ancestral lines.

A New Zealander told Masankho and me that Maori people see ancestry as a fountain. Descendants ride it at the top. The Maori warn that those who make decisions far from their family tree, who forget the stories of grandparents, and don’t connect to the dead, often find their life force diminished. They have only governments and employers for accountability; institutions that can cut you off in a minute.

Sitting on my own stump, I meditated on fragments of family history: the jail time, alcoholism, gambling, “unwanted pregnancies,” domestic violence, and endless immigrations, some of us arriving when America was a “new world,” others coming in the 1900s. I knew little of ordinary or good times.

In my thoughts I tended my stump and honored its limits. Finding a rotting stump on the street, I dragged it home and used it as an altar. I confessed the role of my people in collective misconduct and grieved the ways we were not able to stand up to forces that cut us down. I clung to the promises of the prophet Isaiah who sang, "You shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water whose waters never fail. Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt; you shall raise up the foundations of many generations and be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to live in.” (58:11-12) Masankho and I began using dance, drum, and imagination to travel into the intuitive caverns of memory. When he danced on behalf of my ancestors he found a few women who just wanted the best for my lifework and me. They gave him the message, “You are not required to heal the past. Go on.” They helped me surrender the burden of healing generational shame.

Without knowing anything of my prayers, my mother’s companion, George, a devout agnostic, began to research my mother’s family tree. George quietly pulled up and documented Wentworth family roots extending back through laundry workers, laborers, mayors, pioneers, early governors and across the ocean all the way back to England’s Magna Carta and the largest castle in England, the Wentworth castle. With his aid, I reunited my story with Wentworths, Wintons, Stumpfs, Hugs, Mossmans, and many others. The stump was no longer a stump. Like the stump of Jesse, it burst with