Perhaps

Creative Non-Fiction by ​​​Shannise Jackson-Ndiaye

Northeast Ohio Writer

There was a hole in my family’s history—a dark and black hole.  I want to prove this happened to my family.  I want to prove that our stories—the stories of my ancestors during slavery and the nadir of anti-black racism in our nation’s history—where we experienced in mass the denial of access to civil rights, segregation, violence, and lynchings, are part of the American story, and are not works of fiction.  I want to fill that dark black hole with the truth—not an alternative history—where slavery helped Black people learn trades or helped them secure these so-called Black jobs everybody keeps talking about.  I want to tell the story of how my family was terrorized, forced to leave the south, and was traumatized to the point of a psychotic breakdown, that still plagues my family generations later. 

Or perhaps it wasn’t slavery, or white terrorism and white supremacy that caused the psychotic break that led my fourth great grandfather to an insane asylum.  Perhaps it wasn’t the murder of his youngest son, or the reason why millions of Black people fled the south in caravans or on trains during this same period of our nation’s history that is called the nadir—the lowest point of something.  It may have nothing to do with the fact that Jim Boyland my fourth great grandfather was listed as a mulatto on an 1880 census record, or that his father was white, and that he was born a slave in 1860.  It could be that two things existed at the same time, two realities moving parallel to each other.  It could be that my family had some kind of genetic trait that passed down mental illness like diabetes, or heart disease to the next generation and the generation after that.  

Maybe the murder of Jim Boyland’s youngest son was just a causality of a robbery or a dispute over payment or owed money.  Perhaps it was not a lynching like my grandmother described in her stories she told me about the south, and about Tennessee.  Maybe the story she told about fleeing Somerville in a caravan of cars during the middle of the night was just fragments of an old woman’s memory.  I may never be able to know the details behind the death certificate of Jim Boyland, or why he died in an insane asylum, after being held there for over a year. 

I do know that my grandmother, along with her mother and father, and all their siblings left Tennessee and relocated like millions of other Blacks, to places like Indiana, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and California.  I know that their stories haunt me, and I can’t seem to shake them or put them down.  It is plausible that Jim Boyland suffered and died from senile exhaustion, like his death certificate says.  He was a father to eleven children, born a slave, and was a farmer all his life, working and toiling in the fields for over forty years. 

The answer to my questions is a journey that may never result in the absolute truth, but it could bring closure and healing, and maybe these stories will stop haunting me. I don’t know why I felt the need to connect the two. The connection between the terror my ancestors faced, and my family’s history of mental illness seemed reasonable—or maybe it was denial.  
It could be that I am still in denial after thirty years since my own diagnosis with a mental illness.  It is a bewildering dance between denial and acceptance, that sends me searching for answers in old documents, photos, and books. I am obsessed with the past—which can be associated with a compulsion caused by trauma, which may or may not have been caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain. 

It could be epigenetics—the study of how environmental factors and life experiences can influence gene manifestation, and potentially impact behavior, development, and mental health. 
It is the search and the obsession that fuels me—some may call it a disorder or an illness—and some may say it is the ancestors calling out from the grave. See, two realities can exist at the same time, I can be obsessed with research which can be part of a creative process; and at the same time, it can be an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It can be a manic episode that keeps me up until the early hours of the morning combing through documents on Ancestry.com.  

It is my grandmother’s stories and the promise that I would one day write about them. It is her memory and that she chose me to bear witness. It is the current state of things, the banning of books.  It is outlawing the telling of these histories in our school systems.  It is a haunting.
It is the fast and furious thoughts, the hyper overthinking and connecting—the obsessive and manic way you fixate on something—and cannot rest until you reach the end of it.  The dark and black hole in our history, my history—cannot remain unaccounted for. 

Shannise Jackson-Ndiaye​

Shannise Jackson-Ndiaye is a passionate educator, loving mother, sister and daughter with over twenty years of experience working in the field of education in traditional and non-traditional roles.

She found the courage to tell her own personal story of overcoming the stigma and challenges of struggling with mental illness, childhood trauma, and she found her own unique voice through art and creative writing.

She embraces the power of testimony to bring encouragement, enlightenment, and inspiration to those hiding in the shadows, in order to combat the stigma associated with mental health in the Black church and the Black community.