Dreams of Mastery
Story and artwork from Zuri Dreamer
Hi, I’m Zuri. And I am a Dreamer.
I am the granddaughter of women whose grandparents were slaves. Both of my grandmothers toiled under abusive husbands in the rough conditions of what we Americans call “the Dirty South”; each feeding a quiver-full of children on withered breasts, educating them despite troubled minds and spirits. I come from a lineage of survivors, practical people who did what they had to. Stern faces and glinting eyes all swearing by the Bible and western principles as the women surreptitiously “laid hands” (as healers) on their community, doling out remedies that transformed every life they touched. My single mother, like many of her generation, lost the magic of non conformist spiritual dialogue and bought completely into the promise of respectability politics, the American Dream and the western standard of worth.
