Stories, Pain, and Suffering: Are We Every Really Prepared?

Shoun Hill, photographer and videographer from the Bronx, and I in the last days prior to our fifth trip to interview Black farmers for the Black farmer documentary project.  We have been working on it for over a year and are anticipating two more weeks of filming and then completion in mid-November when we will premier it at a Black land loss summit in Atlanta.

There is always much dissonance for me. While I have had my own life of opportunities and challenges, of successes and bitter failures, I have experienced none like the people we will interview. 

These stories are painful to hear. They are painful stories within which I will probe for emotional and relational themes.  While the stories will uniquely tell themselves, as the interviewer, I provide the prompts.  At some point in the process, they lead and I will follow.

There is something about story telling that allows the old pictures and pain to emerge into now. We have seen happy and cheerful people change before our eyes.  They countenance, demeanor, and all change before us as they remember times and places and events and words and insults.

On multiple occasions, as I was leaving interviews back in the day when on leave from Abilene Christian University, my comment was something like, "Thank you for sharing your stories with me.  I want to be a faithful witness to your stories in places that you cannot or do not wish to go."

Neither they nor I knew what that meant. Some are already deceased, and that grieves me sorely, as they did not have to die so soon, but the grind of the battle wore them out. The deceased lived in Texas, Kansas, North Carolina, Georgia, Oklahoma, and other states.

They will not get to see the fruit of their labors in the lives of people who want to do better in this world.  Yes, there are people who will want to do better in this world because they told their stories of suffering and resilience.

People whose skin looks like mine can make a difference in the world. If we sit with our anxieties, respect the people and their stories, listen empathically and not sympathetically, and if we seek to understand, we can become allies who walk alongside our brothers and sisters who have experienced systemic racism at its worst in our country.  Then, the world around us will not be the same.

Yes, Shoun and I are preparing to hear stories.  We are never truly prepared.