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  Rev. daniel gregoire

yield and overcome

The negro house

2/17/2017

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The Bellamy Mansion Negro house

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a "The past is never dead. It's not even past." William Faulkner

While on Study Leave from my church, taking a break from reading, I had the chance to visit the stunning Bellamy Mansion in Wilmington, North Carolina. The city of Wilmington is a gracious southern urban center, an oasis, rich in history and culture. It is the kind of place to encounter the beauty, tragedy and complexity of the unfolding American story articulated in beautiful architecture.

I am a great lover of Victorian architecture in all of its forms and I can never resist a chance to visit a house museum. Traipsing through the rooms I like to imagine the life and times of their former occupants. Of all of the houses I've visited over the years, this one was unique in having a well preserved building for the household staff. Being a house in the south means that some of its inhabitants were enslaved and that is true of the Bellamy Mansion. 

The curious little building behind the mansion was described as the finest examples of a "Negro House" which is a sort of dependency that would have housed the senior household staff: the cook, bulter, laundress and coachmen, etc. The Negro House as the photo above shows is well within the shadow of the mansion. There is a small yard that separates the two buildings, but  the contrast between the gleaming white mansion and the subdued dependency couldn't be pronounced, and that is especially true when one considers the lives of their respective occupants.

The building itself seemed very sturdy, it is in the Italianate style, like the mansion it serves, but it is entirely pared down, with very little in way of ornimentation, but in that sense it was stronger in a way. It had a steep stairway and very narrow little rooms. Both the Negro House and Mansion were built by enslaved people. 

While the inhabitants in the Negro House might have had a better life as slaves in the city, better than their country house and field counterparts, they were still enslaved. Their full humanity was denied and their potential was brutally repressed and their freedom taken away. As a minister I am always asking myself "where is the holy in this?" and how will God show up here in this mess? It is hard to discern any good as it relates the institution of Slavery. Slavery is always bad-period. 

The tour offered opportunities for reflecting on the past and its strange mix of grandeur and brutality, humiliation and hope. If there is grace, which is God presence, in any of this, it has to be found in the hope of Sarah Sampson.

Sarah was the enslaved cook and head housekeeper during the Civil War period. I am sure everyday as the war moved closer and closer to Wilmington, she must've imagined a time when she might be free to choose how to live her life, or at least a time when her children, or their children, or their children's children, might be free to choose. Perhaps they would deside to be servants in a great townhouse, or they might choose to work in the building trades, or maybe to be minister in a New England church. The never ending hope for freedom is the spark of the holy that we all so desperately need.

May Sarah's memory, and the memory of all those like her be a blessing forever. 
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I am standing in what might have been Sarah Sampson room in the Negro House. And as I do I call to mind the line from a famous poem.

...Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise
                                                 -Maya Angelou

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At times look up!

2/10/2017

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​Over my head, I hear music in the air;

over my head, I hear music in the air;
over my head, I hear music in the air;
there must be a God somewhere.

Refrain from Over My Head an African American Spiritual


When you grow up in New York City, like I did, you will learn one cardinal rule, that is to never look up. Whatever you do never look up to see the second storey of a house, or the tops of buildings or worst still, the sky!

To look up at the sky, whether to actually see the sky or to take in the verticality of a very tall building would mark you as an outsider, or a tourist. Another rule is never be a tourist in New York if you can avoid it.

I tried very hard to follow the rule, and sometimes I even succeeded in presenting myself as someone who looks straight ahead with the kind of steely-eyed focus that said “I not only know where I am going, but I will walk over your corpse to get there!” However most of time I was too busy looking up to care. The most interesting things seemed to be over my head, calling out to me.

Above me were cornices and spires adorning the tops of buildings. And above them the limitless sky. There were timeless things: sunsets, the moon and a few intrepid stars twinkling with dogged determination above the city lights.

Looking up saved my life, not just by avoiding a falling flowerpot, but by reminding me that there is a reality far greater than the great metropolis--bigger than even the Big Apple. That reality refuses to be contained by steel, glass or concrete and it cannot be touched by any skyscraper no matter how tall. Looking up often helped me to see a way out by providing a way into a deeper truth that I fumble to find a proper name for. Sometimes I call that truth God, or spirit, or even the Good. Whatever it is I know not to call it “me” because it is not me. I know that I did not create and it cannot be undone, and through it I am made whole.

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The Craft of Winter Solstice

2/9/2017

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Here we are on the cusp of the Winter Solstice, when the light comes back! To celebrate I went to the discount store in search of inexpensive picture frames. I felt the urge to use what I have in the way of old photographs and glitter glue for some higher and greater purpose. So off I went to buy the most perfect plastic frames for $2.99. As I made my way to pay the cashier, an older man, he looked at me and my frames and knowingly exhaled, “ah, this is the time for reflection.” Apparently, I was not the first person to feel nostalgic and buy many picture frames near the end of the year. We then engaged in some small talk about Christmas and the state of the world. He lamented and I tried to cheer him up. But, both of our flames seemed to be flickering the cold winds of coming winter.

It doesn't help that on the eve of winter the days are so painfully short. The nights are relentless, and they keep coming earlier. But then the Winter Solstice arrives and although it is the official start of winter, it comes as a brief reprieve from the growing night and a hopeful sign post. I need the solstice and all it represents: a threshold, a closing of a chapter, the start to sunlight timidly warming our cold and frostbitten souls. Winter solstice neatly coincide with our collective desire for a break in time to unlock and revue the past and as we look to light of the future.

This time around I am greeting the solstice with craft, using my old photographs, re-framing the past with some bright, artistic flourishes courtesy of glitter glue. I am making the most of this unique astronomical time, perhaps not unlike the ancient peoples of Europe who gathered, breathlessly around bonfires and hearths for warmth to celebrate the new thing that is just on the horizon, growing light and the end of night’s dominion, even in the midsts of cold. The end can be a beginning too, as someone once said, and the solstice is where we start from.

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    Rev. Daniel Gregoire offers his life, thought and a different worldview through YIELD AND OVERCOME a weekly blog of personal reflections to help all people connect more deeply with each other and with the Holy.

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