Quote from Dreaming Me

Dreaming Me: Black, Baptist, and Buddhist, One Woman’s Spiritual Journey

by Jan Willis 

Wisdom Publications, Somerville, Massachusetts, 2008.  367 pages

"As long as I could remember, I had dreamed of leaving the South. I had wanted to escape the daily threats—not so much to life and limb, though those had been everywhere apparent, but the intangible threats to a tender soul and psyche, the subtle yet constant assaults on one’s very identity and dignity. I could have been no older than four or five when I formed the strong determination that I would not be raised up to adult life in Alabama; I was not going to live in a place that asked me to squash my dreams and ambitions.

But when, years later, I found myself free from those Southern threats, when I reached college in the North and discovered a whole new world, I paid a heavy price. As former escaped slaves had discovered once they’d reached safety, there being no friends and family to greet and welcome them there, they were strangers in a strange land. I had gained freedom, but my family was left behind. They were still in the South. And my own freedom meant less because they were still there.

So, as every black child must who has ever left the rural South for the Ivy-covered halls of Northern educational institutions, I felt guilty from the beginning. Guilty that I had made it out; guilty that I had succeeded. And in spite of the fact that my family tells me they’re proud of me, in all the subsequent years that I have lived in the North and enjoyed the comforts that come with a good job and a position of respect, this burden of guilt has remained with me."  (pp. 253-254)

 -- quote submitted by Sharry L.

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