A Collective Journey Towards Freedom Dreaming

On the surface, Freedom Dreaming at Historic Stagville was a daring gathering. As our facilitator Monèt Noelle Marshall perfectly summarized as we began: We were a cross-race, cross-class group, meeting on a plantation, to talk about dreams, on a Saturday morning, in June, in North Carolina. 

The air could have felt thick. It certainly was thick with the humidity of the day’s heat wave, and some anticipation. But Monèt is a brilliant facilitator, and knows how to move a group through big emotions with depth and spaciousness. Our group that morning also played its part to move through the hot thick air by tapping into its own collective brilliance and ability to move continuously together towards the gentle shade, each time the sun shifted our shade away and the air got hot again. 

Together, that morning, we transformed the thickness into powerful conversation about what it means to dream towards freedom and to resource collective liberation, or what Monet likes to call “Freedom Dreaming.”

I’d like to share about what happened during our morning of Freedom Dreaming at Historic Stagville and what I keep thinking about through our collective process of REFLECTING, UNDERSTANDING, GRAPPLING, & EMBRACING.

Reflecting

We began the gathering in a semi-circle under the shade of the backside of the second slave quarters at Horton Grove. Monet grounded us in being here together at Historic Stagville, a former plantation and ALSO a place that as Monet likes to remind us was a place people lived with their families, had friends, had crushes, and had foods they liked and didn’t like. Horton Grove was a place where whole humans lived their whole human lives.  

Monet then reminded our group of the many practices available to each of us to help us through the day, like breathing, turning towards the forest and up towards the leaf-filled branches, and choosing a buddy to be with us in our moments of supportive need. We all had a moment to make eye contact with a buddy, which immediately made the air feel less thick.

Monet also reminded us that today was about planting seeds for Freedom Dreaming, not instantaneous transformation. This gave me space to feel open to possibility, rather than pressure to get it all right.  

Monet then told us the story of Mary Walker through a reading of a letter Mary Walker wrote to her youngest daughter Aggie. Mary was a woman enslaved at Stagville who liberated herself in 1848 and who, after many years of organizing, freed her youngest children too. The letter tells the story of Mary Walker’s Freedom Dreaming; of dreaming her freedom, her family’s freedom, and also the freedom of the Lesley’s, a White family who acted in solidarity with her. 

After the reading, we were all invited into a period of quiet reflection around Horton Grove, moving around the two slave quarters, the beautiful old growth trees’ shade, and the surrounding forests. Using some of those practices Monet had mentioned earlier, we all were given space to connect to this powerful place, to ourselves, and our connections to Mary Walker’s story. Monet likes to remind us that we ALL have a connection to this story because we all live in this place called the United States of America, and, whether we like it or not, the story of Mary Walker and of Historic Stagville is a story we all have inherited.  

Sitting at the base of a pecan tree, I first began to see myself in Mary Walker, with her love of her children as a Mother, in her unwavering commitment to her children, and the unbreakable desire to hold them again. As a mother of an almost two year old, that fierce mothering love and instinct feels palpable to me in many, many ways. 

I wanted to see myself in the Lesley’s - the White family in Philadelphia who helped Mary Walker fight for her children’s freedom under the Fugitive Slave Act – desiring to see myself as someone who would act in courageous solidarity with those fighting for their freedom, willing to put their lives and comfort on the line for the freedom of another. As a White person and person with access to wealth committed to acting in solidarity for racial and social justice, their story feels hopefully relatable to me. 

Realistically, however, I probably most see my story, my family’s story and the story of White folks in the United States in general in the Bennehan-Cameron family – the owners of the plantation or, put more bluntly, the enslavers. The Bennehan-Cameron family chose their comfort and accumulation of power and resources, through the use of harm, violence and extraction to enslaved peoples. Their story enabled their proceeding bloodline generations (which still span deep across our region) and White folks generally to continue to benefit from their collusion with White supremacy. While uncomfortable, it feels important to me to compassionately examine how I and my family collude with white supremacy, and continuously benefit from different direct and indirect forms of extraction and harm. 

Much like Monet started us off by helping us see the wholeness of those enslaved at Stagville, my time reflecting at the foot of the pecan tree and with an intracommunal group of other White Folks left me feeling a sense of my whole humanness represented in the story of Mary Walker and the people around her – the loving, aspirational, and complicated. 

Understanding

After time in intracommunal spaces sharing our reflections, we returned together to begin what Monet calls “Freedom Dreaming”. 

To be able to engage in Freedom Dreaming, we must first understand its antidote - which is white supremacy, and the imagination and horrific realities created by white supremacy. Plantations are a product of a white supremacy imagination, a dream that enabled a system that oppressed and stole the freedom of Black people for the explicit benefit of White people. White supremacy's imagination dreamed of and justified layers of violence and extraction, and instilled unshakeable fear, collusion, and individualism. It’s some powerful stuff that we continue to move through today. 

Monet had us all turn back towards the forest, and said that while she has no official evidence of this, she believes the people who lived at Horton Groves and places like Horton Groves must have traveled into the forest to “Freedom Dream.” The forest was a protected and beautiful space to dream their freedom beyond enslavement and of white supremacy. The evidence she relies on for this belief –is that she is here today – a Southern, Black femme cultural organizer and artist living in her fullness in North Carolina.

Freedom Dreaming is an invitation to all of us to dream beyond white supremacy. For Black folks, it’s an invitation for having unapologetic, fully resourced dreams. For White folks and non-Black POC, it’s an invitation to grapple with how we benefit from and reproduce the anti-blackness created through white supremacy's imagination. For all of us, it’s an invitation to imagine our collective liberation at many levels and in many forms.

I find it helpful to think about “Freedom Dreaming” in terms of  the question: “if we took away the limitations created by white supremacy, what would be possible?” 

Monet helped deepen our understanding of the spectrum of Freedom Dreaming, by sharing some of her personal and systemic Freedom Dreams, including: 

That her mother would be able to go on a vacation without regret. 

That her father would have been able to have a career as a NYPD officer doing the thing he believed he signed up to do – to protect his community. 

That her brother could be seen as the tender-hearted, gentle person that he is. 

That she could leave the house wearing whatever she wanted, without racialized and sexualized judgements from others.

That full reparations would be distributed, to all Black folks, at the same time. 

Grappling 

Back in intracommunal groups, we engaged in our Freedom Dreaming, for ourselves, our families, for others and for the collective. 

As a White person and person with access to wealth, it was my (and my fellow White folks) time to grapple. 

Grappling can feel hard to me, because my default is to want a clear answer and to know what I should do next so that I can move back into a place of comfort. Rather, grappling requires that we sit in the questions, unknown, and discomfort. 

I used one of our practices – I took a deep breath. 

My grappling began with thinking about where I feel the most freedom in my life. For me, that’s in my neighborhood where I know my White child will be able to walk around the neighborhood safely and with care from our neighbors. It’s also at our community pool club where we make joyous memories every day of the summer. This Freedom Dream isn’t so much to want exactly this for others, but the dream that everyone has access to spaces where they feel safety and joy. 

I appreciated the folks in my small group, who grappled together about our families, because often White folks and folks with access to wealth find their ways to these sorts of conversation due to some sort of misalignment or discontent with their family’s current relationship to racial and social justice.

What I grappled with was with what feels like my families’ unexamined acceptance that the resources our family has access to are for the good of our bloodlines, or the people in our specific communities that serve to benefit our interests. The narrative I feel like I’ve inherited is that we are deserving of these resources because we work hard, and that someone in an earlier generation of our family worked hard for us. Because of these beliefs, my family struggles to have real conversations about the benefits and resources we have accumulated. There are also relationships that feel fraught or transactional because of these resources. 

So if this was the white supremacy dreaming I’ve inherited, what was its antidote as a Freedom Dream?

Even writing now, I struggle to actually shift into the mindset of a Freedom Dreaming. It feels like something that has layers, and I can scrape to one layer that feels liberatory, only to realize it’s still tied to a White supremacy imagination. 

Doing my best to put words to my Freedom Dream, I think it’d be that everyone in my immediate and extended family will learn the tools and skills, ideally early in life, to be able to have constructive and honest conversations with our family about class, race, and systemic privilege, and to be able to talk about racial and economic justice, without quickly shutting it down as impractical or too emotional. Because if we could do these things, I could imagine something so different, beautiful, and more just for our family and broader communities. 

Maybe another Freedom Dream is a system that taxes our family wealth enough that this level of inequitable distribution isn’t possible, and, instead, that we have a government that provides real social supports – like housing, childcare, food, quality education, economic opportunities, access to natural space, and more – to all residents of this country, so that not only people who look like me and have bank accounts like me have access to them. 

A dream I’m still grappling with and feels a little vulnerable to share – is actually a dream of not having to spend all this time grappling with my class and race privilege (which only having to grapple with in itself is a privilege!!), because while there’s so much depth in these learnings and unlearnings, there’s also so much emotional labor and dedicated time that maybe I’d rather spend in a more creative or relaxing realm. And that I’d want other folks, especially Black folks, to have that freed up time and emotional energy available too. Just imagine what would be  possible for collective liberation then? I welcome conversation around this Freedom Dream because it feels still in process.

Embracing

As we returned to a whole group, we provided Black folks with space to share their Freedom Dreams, while White folks listened and received them. Monet made a request that the sharers put some numbers to their dream, when possible, to provide some specificity to what it takes to fully resource a Freedom Dream. I’d like to share some anonymized dreams with you: 

That as a young person, they could leave their house wearing their bonnet and not be criticized by white folks for looking lazy or sloppy (especially when many White folks do much less to be able to leave their house, and are not judged for it). 

To have two years to travel around The African Continent to be able to immerse themselves in different flavors and cultures to bring back for their budding food enterprise. 

To not be driven by a debt burden of nearly $300,000 so they could focus on their writing and creative projects, instead of chasing the next high-paying opportunity.

The final dreamed shared came from one of our event collaborators, Brittany Bennet Weston, founder of ROSA (an acronym for Resourcing our Shared Abundance) – a community wealth building project that seeks to address the challenges of entrepreneurship for Black women and femme business owners and creatives. I think informally, Brittany would call ROSA a community of Freedom Dreamers. 

Brittany shared her story of growing up in South Carolina, and how her extended family practiced community care and solidarity with each other, to ensure everyone was well and had the resources they needed to pursue their own dreams, like her grandmother’s hair salon and her great-uncles carpentry business.  As Brittany entered the world of impact investing as an adult, she began to see clearly the inequities in resourcing projects and initiatives led by Black folks. From these early lessons of solidarity and later awareness of inequitable resourcing of Black folks' dreams, she founded ROSA. The Freedom Dream of ROSA is to be able to provide a trusted network of peers and advisors, and access to the right types of capital for Black femme business owners and creatives to dream and thrive together. 

What I love about Brittany’s dream for ROSA is that it holds big, bold individual dreams within a container for collective liberation. When one of their members thrives, everyone thrives, which is what Freedom Dreaming is all about, no? 

Because this was an event co-hosted by New Legacy Lab, we, of course, wrapped up our time together with getting concrete and actionable. I teamed up with Brittany to make a $5,000 “ask” to support the ROSA collective and the Freedom Dreams of their members, knowing that collectively we had different resources to make these dreams real. Each attendee filled out “accountability cards” that we shared with a buddy, to make sure we followed through on our intention. To date, I know we've raised over $3,000.

To close, Monet had us all breath again, to notice the dwellings around us, the old growth trees, the forest, the increasingly hot air (98 degrees!), the gentle shade and breeze, and the presence and Freedom Dreams of each of us. 

****

I am endlessly grateful to this gorgeous team of collaborators for grappling deeply together for how to hold this complex yet necessary space. Monèt for her genius facilitation. Brittany for her deep questions and modeling of Freedom Dreaming. Chloe for her flawless logistical support and time keeping. And little Eden for allowing all of us to bring some of our inner child into the space.