My Father’s Silence - A Personal Account of Trauma and its Origins
Thomas Reissmann Travel videographer, writer and documentary filmmaker
Family Constellation therapist Mark Wolynn once said: “Just as we inherit our eye color and blood type, we also inherit the residue from traumatic events that have taken place in our family. Illness, depression, anxiety, unhappy relationships and financial challenges can all be forms of this unconscious inheritance.”
The same analysis can be utilized in reference to the history of chattel slavery, trauma and systemic racism in America. It was an inhumane system whose historical attributes can be still found in the American prison systems of today. This history has left hurtful and paralyzing residues of trauma, passed from one generation to the next within African American communities. There has been long-term collateral damage and an ongoing psychic wound which deserves to be healed with Radical Self-Care and by providing the emotional resources for the personal as well as the collective well-being of African American communities. Mark Wolyn teaches that “traumatic memories are transmitted through chemical changes in DNA”. There is a need to understand the conscious and unconscious inheritance of terror and systemic racism long-term.
My Father’s Silence is the true story of Houston resident Hitaji Aziz, who tells her story in the documentary Adversity and the Art of Happiness. It reflects the epigenetics of a family and the humanity of all families.
I grew up right outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a town called McKee’s Rocks in the 1950s. McKee’s Rocks was a large Italian community with smaller pockets of old world European immigrants. We also had Gypsies, Jews, one Chinese family and even smaller pockets of Blacks that had migrated from the south and its terrors.
I was born out of one of those Black families that migrated from the same place where they were owned. Their plantation was based in Evergreen, Alabama. The journey was headed by my great grandmother Sally and her husband William Liddell who died just before they reached Pittsburgh in the late 1920s. They were part of the great migration of ex-slaves and Blacks looking for more freedom and less terror. They were running; running hard for their lives, leaving all their possessions, except what they could pack and what they wore on their backs. My father’s family got to there on the same emotional journey, migrating from Atlanta, Georgia; running for a dream called Pittsburgh.
My father Jack Kirkland, was one the first African American men to be hired in the steel mill near our government owned low-income housing in those days. We called them the “projects” and it was the first time we had an indoor toilet. We lived by the sounds of the steel mills. The sirens of the steel mills were always in the background of our lives. We always knew when the work shift started and when it ended. Being hired in the mill was a big thing for a Black man in ...
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My Father’s Silence - A Personal Account of Trauma and its Origi.docx
1. My Father’s Silence - A Personal Account of Trauma and its
Origins
Thomas Reissmann Travel videographer, writer and
documentary filmmaker
Family Constellation therapist Mark Wolynn once said: “Just as
we inherit our eye color and blood type, we also inherit the
residue from traumatic events that have taken place in our
family. Illness, depression, anxiety, unhappy relationships and
financial challenges can all be forms of this unconscious
inheritance.”
The same analysis can be utilized in reference to the history of
chattel slavery, trauma and systemic racism in America. It was
an inhumane system whose historical attributes can be still
found in the American prison systems of today. This history has
left hurtful and paralyzing residues of trauma, passed from one
generation to the next within African American communities.
There has been long-term collateral damage and an ongoing
psychic wound which deserves to be healed with Radical Self-
Care and by providing the emotional resources for the personal
as well as the collective well-being of African American
communities. Mark Wolyn teaches that “traumatic memories are
transmitted through chemical changes in DNA”. There is a need
to understand the conscious and unconscious inheritance of
terror and systemic racism long-term.
My Father’s Silence is the true story of Houston resident Hitaji
Aziz, who tells her story in the documentary Adversity and the
Art of Happiness. It reflects the epigenetics of a family and the
humanity of all families.
I grew up right outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in a town
called McKee’s Rocks in the 1950s. McKee’s Rocks was a large
Italian community with smaller pockets of old world European
2. immigrants. We also had Gypsies, Jews, one Chinese family and
even smaller pockets of Blacks that had migrated from the south
and its terrors.
I was born out of one of those Black families that migrated from
the same place where they were owned. Their plantation was
based in Evergreen, Alabama. The journey was headed by my
great grandmother Sally and her husband William Liddell who
died just before they reached Pittsburgh in the late 1920s. They
were part of the great migration of ex-slaves and Blacks looking
for more freedom and less terror. They were running; running
hard for their lives, leaving all their possessions, except what
they could pack and what they wore on their backs. My father’s
family got to there on the same emotional journey, migrating
from Atlanta, Georgia; running for a dream called Pittsburgh.
My father Jack Kirkland, was one the first African American
men to be hired in the steel mill near our government owned
low-income housing in those days. We called them the
“projects” and it was the first time we had an indoor toilet. We
lived by the sounds of the steel mills. The sirens of the steel
mills were always in the background of our lives. We always
knew when the work shift started and when it ended. Being
hired in the mill was a big thing for a Black man in those days
of the 50s and 60s.
My dad was a chronic alcoholic and wounded so deeply that he
had lost all of his social compassions by the time I was born in
1953. He rarely ever smiled and when he did he was usually
drunk. If he did smile it was a smile of shame, rage, terror, pain
and he would never be able to understand the complexity of
trauma and depression that co-created his pain and his living.
Today he would be classified as depressed but no one talked
about trauma and depression in those days and no one talked
about a man being deeply sad, especially a Black man. He was
naturally traumatized just by growing up in Georgia in the 20s,
30s and 40s where lynching and terrorist attacks were as
common as the air he breathed.
3. Every working day right after he clocked out you could see him
rigidly walking with lunch pail in hand to his mother’s house to
start the daily after-work-drinking-binge that would last for
hours. His mother, Grandma Vasey ran a “Speakeasy” out of her
apartment to make ends meet which was a common activity in
our community. He was a man who was bonded to his suffering
and chronic depression; sexually addicted and a classic
workaholic.
One day he accidently cut his finger off at the mill and his boss
had to force him to leave. Terrified that he would not be able to
return, my father was convinced that he could still work with
the loss of his finger and needed no medical attention. He was
known to be a hard worker, always on time and never late for
work yet always late in being a father.
On pay day my mother would send me to grandma Vasey’s
house to ask him for money. The eighteen dollars taken out of
his check was never enough to make ends meet on her disability
check she received for having a stroke. My dad always had
money for drinking, gambling, women and nothing for a
daughter in need. I remember sitting there for hours in a room
filled with drunken Black men; silently overwhelmed waiting
for him to just notice that I was there while literally watching
dollar bills fall out of his pockets. There were no words for
“children of alcoholics” back in those days.
My dad lived by a different definition of manhood than the
general White population of poor white men; both groups have
been historically silent about depression. He had to carry an
extra layer of shame by being the grandson of slaves. It was not
popular to be a Black man and it was never safe. You could be
killed any time and for any reason. Like I said, he grew up poor
in Georgia and impending death or the possibility of dying
based on race was a norm for Black men.
I understand now why my dad was so messed up. He was
profoundly disappointed with life. He was always afraid and
brokenhearted. His medication was alcohol, work, women and
anything he could do to take the edge off of the rage and terror
4. that walked with him every day. I suspect he was an incest
survivor by the way he acted out sexually. His whole world
reflected this terror and you could see the same terror in the
eyes of his drinking buddies.
My father was one of my first sexual perpetrators along with
several of those drinking buddies. Sexual abuse within my
family is another story to be told. It was not unusual for them to
ask or act like I was his “woman” instead of a young girl in
elementary school who looked just like her dad. I was called
“little Jack”. He would even pee in front on me on the side of
the street. When shopping for school clothes he would not
hesitate to steal in front of me. One time I even saw him
arrested for stealing. Another time when he tried to steal in a
store I started to cry and asked him if Jesus would do that and
he stopped although he was pissed off. On top of all of this I
would usually end up holding his hand to cross both of us
across the street because of his drunkenness. I was my dad’s
little mother; a parent, a child and a sexual object.
His sadness usually took on the faces of rage, violence,
resentment and coldness; mostly coldness and detachment.
Sometime when he was growing up he accepted the message
that said that men in general are not considered real men if they
showed their true feelings and allowed themselves to become
vulnerable. Somewhere and some place shame had taught him as
a little colored boy that it was too dangerous to be real and
human.
My father grew up with a mixed and confusing message. The
historical message was that my dad was a descendent of people
who were considered only 3/5 human in the early development
of this country, so how could he ever be a good-enough-man;
there was an energetic ceiling placed on his humanity. The other
part was that as a man you were not shown how to own your
own devastation as a human other than acting it out in
destructive ways. Yet another part was about their sexism and
that women were often objectified as a form of medication.
He internalized this message as part of his core self. My father
5. was not raised to see life with passion and dreams to be
pursued. His life was more about survival and his future held no
real meaning. He lived never knowing when his life would end,
based on the color of his skin. He would never be good enough
nor did he expect it. Along the road he managed to internalize
enough illusion and oppression that he believed the myth and
messages of the shame. He was what he thought he was and he
manifested those thoughts every day.
The majority of the men in my family were alcoholics and they
were depressed, violent and deeply sad like dad. They took out
this depression and sadness on their families. They were the
first terrorist that I was ever exposed to. When I was a little girl
pretending to sleep I would hear them only come to my
grandmother Bessie and they would cry in the wee hours of the
night about racism, the N -word and they would share with her
their fears and the most vulnerable parts of who they were only
to rise in the morning detached, cold and smiling that kind of
smile that only drunk men can do. Once again, they were men
and men had to stay strong by all means.
It all came together when I was a teenager that something was
critically wrong with the men in my family and my family in
general when my cousin Jean was beaten to death by her
husband James. Death-by-beating was never attached to her
death and it was said the she “just did not wake up that
morning”. We sat there in the church; a church where James was
the deacon viewing Jean’s body and still no one could really
name what had happened. We knew she had been beaten to
death after many bloody beatings. We could never name my
cousin James’s depression and mental illness after a thousand
times of hearing him cry in the wee hours of the night only to
rise early in the morning cold, detached and smiling that smile
that drunk men do.
I sometimes wonder how it would be if we had known how to
hear them with deeper attention. I wonder what it would have
been like if they could have named their depression, their terror,
their emotional pain and their addictions. I wonder how things
6. would have been if they had the opportunity to experience a
kind and gentle compassion from a society that saw them as
invisible and less than. I wonder how their lives would have
turned out if they knew how to define their own dreams and
passions outside of addiction and violence. I wonder how it
would have been if the women in my family would have been
empowered not to cosign the insanity.
I miss the father I never had. I miss having a safe father. I still
fantasize how it would feel to have a father be proud of you. I
forgive my father for the many days that I had to be his mother
as a child. I forgive him for the sexual abuse for I am too
worthy to carry such a huge resentment. I forgive him for
shaming me and for never saying the word love. I forgive him
for never hugging me and for never making it safe to be his
child. I forgive him for his coldness and the many days of
embarrassments. I forgive him for that smile.
I forgive myself for the many men I tried to make be my father.
I forgive myself for being attracted to the many men who were
just like my father. I forgive myself for the many years of
depression and self-abuse; thinking and acting that I was less
than human.
In the legacy of my father and the men and women of my family
I promise with intent to remember that all little boys and girls
are worthy of deep attention, respect and kind compassion for
their sacredness and divine spirits.
Hitaji Aziz- M.A., RMT, Reiki Master