Lead to Life: The Alchemy of Atonement
brontë velez, Lead to Life
Walking Toward A Time
Anxious in the Oakland redwoods, in “the sovereignty of [their] quiet” (Kevin Quashie), I beam a signal from my subconscious for assistance from an elder:
An elder in my life Orland Bishop receives the signal. He calls. I tell him Lead to Life is headed to Atlanta to host commemorative ceremonies in the wake of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination. I share I'm nervous and don’t know why I’m about to take a train from Oakland to Memphis to be at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was assassinated 50 years prior. I say I need to sit vigil with this place before heading to the ceremonies.
Orland shares that I’m taking the train because I'm going to a time, not a place. He offers that marching in public, as an act of resistance from forces of oppression, is not about heading to a physical location — but about ritualizing the agreement that we trust the liberation we long for is already here. When we walk towards that time, and when our ancestors walked towards that time, we enact a physical and spiritual affirmation of our agreement that we know this time exists.
Lead to Life was created to cultivate belonging to a time where Black diasporic communities and environments are free from the violence of white supremacy and environmental desecration. A time where America has gone through the cultural rites of passage required to honor the element of fire, anger, rage, violence, heat, and ancestral veneration. A time where security is measured by the health of our environments rather than the size of our police force. Lead to Life was crafted to belong ourselves to a time after state violence, after the trauma instigated by the military-industrial complex, a time after mass shootings. A time where no one wakes up to the news that children were murdered. Where no one hears of folks being taken from this earth while they are in the midst of prayer. A time where it’s safe for a Black child to knock on a stranger’s door, where it’s safe to be lost, where it’s safe to sleep, where it’s safe and loving to be Black on this earth.
Lead to Life is a trans-local collective led by Black-diasporic and queer artists, healers & ecologists devoted to embodying Mark Anthony Johnson’s prayer that “Black wellness is the antithesis of state violence.” Bridging racial and environmental justice through ceremony and art practice, we explore our commitment to decomposing systems of oppression through what we call applied alchemy - that is, wielding alchemy to provoke radical imagination toward justice.
Photo of ritualists washing a gun before it will be processed to the furnace by Black community members who have lost loved ones to police brutality. Lead to Life alchemy ceremony, 2019, Oakland, CA, Chochenyo Ohlone territory. Photo by Ayse Gursoz.
Following in the lineage of Mexican artist Pedro Reyes’ Palas Por Pistolas practice and the biblical prophecy of transforming “swords into plowshares,” our practice offers:
a public prophetic practice transforming guns into the otherwise, in ceremony, with predominantly Black families and community members impacted by the wake of police brutality and environmental racism;
hosting ceremonial environmental regeneration using tools made from those transformed weapons at Black diasporic sites impacted by violence to community and the land;
and grounding our work with media, pedagogy, campaigns, and experiences with local partners across our intersections to nurture organizing that fortifies Black livability and interspecies liberation.
We craft these ritual objects from weapons to bridge lost intimacies with transformation, with healthy death cycles, with miracles of alchemizing violence into life-affirming offerings. We craft these objects as a ritual meditation to inform our creativity in a time that needs the muscles of our imagination to be sharper and bolder. We are committed to supporting the trust and wisdom that we have the agency and capacity to create healthy, loving, safe environments.
A week prior to the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s murder, we initiate walking toward that time: an intergenerational group of Black folks, seeking ceremonial space to venerate our Black unjustly departed, gather at the site of the lynching of a brother named Mack Brown who was killed in 1936 in Georgia. I had to come know about the story of Mack Brown’s lynching through reaching out to Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Community Rememberance Project to request support for organizing a soil collection in Atlanta, GA. EJI’s Community Remembrance Project is a “commemorative justice” [1] archive where descendants of racial terror lynching victims and wider community members have organized to honor our Black unjustly departed at sites where they were killed.
The ceremonies include gathering soil from the site in a jar that includes the departed’s name, where they were murdered, along with the date they were murdered. EJI then hosts these jars on display as a part of their National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama that documents thousands of victims of racial terror lynching and white supremacy. Accompanying the Community Remembrance Project, EJI also offers a practice called The Historical Marker Project that “erects narrative markers in public locations describing the devastating violence, today widely unknown, that once took place in these locations.”
EJI sent us the story of Mack Brown’s life and lynching, details on where we should approximately host the ceremony, materials on the lineage of racial terror lynching in the United States, and the jar with Mack Brown’s name on it, inscribed with Atlanta, Fulton County, GA with the date December 23, 1936. We gathered together in the morning of March 29, 2018. The folks gathered gave offerings to the river where Mack Brown was grossly interred by the men who murdered him as a way to venerate his life and the life of the water.
We sat in a circle in a tucked-away grove, under a magnolia tree near the river. We prayed, we sang, we cried. We read aloud a litany of asinine reasons white folks justified the lynching of Black folks in Georgia: “wild talk, wild talk, leaving employer, scaring a white girl, scaring a white girl, wild talk, wild talk, disputing debt, informing, theft of a pair of shoes, leaving employer, resisting arrest/assault, miscegenation, scaring a white girl, writing letters to a white girl, refusing to wear his army uniform in public, leaving employer, wild talk, organizing Black farmers, circulating literature, intimacy with a white woman, insulting a white girl, wild talk, wild talk, testifying against whites…”
We sat in rage at the disturbing “justifications” of murdering Black folks. We talked about the current state of racial terror lynching through police brutality and mass gun violence through white supremacist terror. We announced and commemorated our own departed. We let the wild growl through us. We meditated on the ways white supremacy used the earth as a surrogate to do harm against Black folks. The ways trees, soils, rivers, mountains, minerals wanted nothing to do with their violence. We cried out with the stones.[2]
We gave thanks to the ancestral Black feminist lineage of archiving racial terror lynching: of Ida B. Wells, of The Mary Turner Project, of Equal Justice Initiative’s work. We read Torture by Alice Walker where she uses a refrain that invites folks to plant a tree any time their beloveds are tortured. With a trowel made from a gun blacksmithed by Lead to Life’s friends and co-conspirators at RawTools, we blessed this alchemized tool and each of us offered libations and a prayer as we dug and added soil to the jars. Some of the soil would go back to the Equal Justice Initiative, while another vessel of soil and water from the river would be brought to the 50 trees we would plant across Atlanta the following week with shovels made from weapons. We passed around the soil for each of us to quietly smell and feel.
After our soil collection ceremony, Tricia Hersey, curator of The Nap Ministry, led us in a nap installation to rest and dream with the soil. We gave our rest as an offering for the safe passage and rest of our unjustly departed ancestors, for the rest taken from our enslaved ancestors, for the rest taken from Mack Brown, for the rest taken from the earth.
Photo via Equal Justice Initiative x Fulton County Remembrance Coalition Soil Collection in Spring of 2019, one year after Lead to Life’s soil collection. In the fall of 2018, Fulton County Rememberance Project established a historical marker at the site of the soil collection and in the spring of 2019 hosted 36 soil collections for the 36 documented victims of racial terror lynching across Fulton County.
A few days after our ceremony in remembrance of Mack Brown, on April 4, 2018, the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination, we gather before Dr. King and Coretta Scott King’s crypts with his youngest daughter Bernice, along with mothers and organizers who have been impacted by the wake of police brutality. Bernice processes a gun to the crucible to be transformed into a shovel with Lead to Life’s metal artists. Later, we gather at a meal of 100 guests, each table led by Black ecologists, farmers, food justice organizers, and cultural workers in Atlanta. The chefs prepare the last meal Dr. King was on his way to eat before he was assassinated. The guests at the tables are of diverse influence across sectors in Atlanta who are crucial to informing who Atlanta becomes. The prompt for our bridge dinner, co-curated with The People’s Supper, was guided by the following three questions:
When is a time you feel or felt freedom? How does it feel?
What are you mourning right now? How are you mourning this?
From the voice of a future being, can you share what liberation you dream of for those alive in this time?
Photo of one of the tables at Lead to Life x The People’s Supper Commemorative Dinner. Each table was named after a departed ancestor. This table was in honor of the life of Sandra Bland. Each table had a recycled gun barrel as its vase and held the hot sauce from local Atlanta organization Gangstas to Growers. Photo via Lead to Life archive.
Two nights after the dinner, down the street from Dr. King’s childhood home, we gather in ceremony with families impacted by police brutality and intercommunal gun violence and process guns to the crucible to be transformed into more shovels. The next day we activate the shovels at a Black elder’s farm in Atlanta to plant 16 fruit trees, build a greenhouse, and attend to other projects needed on the farm. On the following Sunday, we plant the remaining trees around the city of Atlanta at significant Black cultural sites and sites impacted by gun violence.
The Rite to Carry
The commitment of Lead to Life’s practice is to offer ritual grief literacy in a time that Malidoma Some signals is marked by “a drought of rituals.” Our offerings make evident that protecting Black life is not separate from protecting the earth and protecting the earth is not separate from Black life. Lead to Life’s work is here to honor how critical the art of mourning is for our public health and for our planet. We are here to prophesy what we can do with the remains.
How do we prepare for the liberation we seek? What does liberation feel and look like? How do we support loving bedside care for that which no longer serves this planet and their most vulnerable? What does artful, creative, absurdist, cultural hospice care look like? How does that hospice care instigate the wisdom for us to show up for one another and the earth more skillfully and lovingly?
These are the questions Lead to Life seeks to embody through our practice as we transform the indigestible into the hospitable.
To offer the wisdom of the archives and teachings from our ceremonies, we invite you to keep watch with our ritual films Serotiny and between starshine & clay.
In this ceremony rooted in Black feminist prophetic traditions, Lead to Life transformed guns into star molds that reflected the constellations above Oscar Grant the evening he was taken from this earth 10 years prior by Bay Area Rapid Transit police.
In collaboration with community members across California who have been impacted by police brutality, domestic terrorism, gun violence, indigenous displacement and environmental racism, we gathered to imagine wellness for our people and the land, and cast our prophecy into the stars.
The Weather of our Times
I share these images of our time in Atlanta and the two commissioned short films, Serotiny and between starshine & clay, because there is so much medicine and wisdom in the beauty of the mythos. The systems of oppression we live in are narratives we inherit, are socialized into, and then recreate. Our cities are maintenanced by ahistorical relics, lineages and monuments rooted in harm and erasure. I am inspired by our practice and ceremonies at Lead to Life because they embody Free Egunfemi’s call for “commemorative justice.” They acknowledge that what and how we commemorate matters. Commemorate as in to remember together.
I want to remember together and make art for the Weather* we live in. Weather as in Christina Sharpe’s language of “the Weather as the totality of Black peoples’ environments”[3] and weather as in Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s language of “persistent-traumatic stress environments.”[4] As a descendant of enslaved Black folks, I think about how the Weather is unbearably humid — not a sacred, detoxifying humidity: the kind of sweat that shakes the demons off — but a climate sticky with the remnants of un-commemorated hauntings, or on the other end, crowded with the dissociative celebration and memorialization of hauntings. As someone who grew up in the shadow of Thennthlokfee (Muscogee) turned “Stone Mountain,” the largest confederate monument in the US, I have lived my whole life in that weather.
It’s a humidity that snatches the breath up from underneath you. From police brutality to polluted cities to raging wildfires birthed from colonial fire suppression to the prison-industrial complex to coronavirus — the weather of our times takes our breath away. And if this is the weather, Lead to Life’s practice asks: What are we being asked to put on and take off to meet this moment?
If the story is that we arrived to this epoch deemed the “Anthropocene” was through humans-at-large industrializing and extracting from the planet, then our maladaptive response methods for transforming the Anthropocene might look a lot how folks are responding right now: continuing the myth that humans are not useful to this planet and that the earth would be better off without us, the idea that we can do business-as-usual and make capitalism more sustainable, the idea that we can save the planet through our individual consumer choices or technology, or even better, that the wealthy can corrupt the earth and then leave it behind for space.
Or, we could re-historicize and re-narrate this epoch we are in. We could try on words like the “plantationocene,” one name among many re-framings, to disturb the mythos that humans at large got us to this moment, that humans at large are bad for this planet as though we are not of this earth. Re-framing the epoch through alternate stories and narratives changes how we are asked to respond. The framing of “plantationocene”[5] changes how the wake[6] began and instead positions the inauguration of this epoch through the geological forces of colonialism, enslavement, white supremacy, Indigenous displacement/genocide, and cisheteropatriarchy. It holds that the cumulative effect of these extractive violences were so distinct they changed the weather of our planet.
Crossing the Threshold
When we wade through the spiritual and ancestral implications of climate collapse and re-historicize and re-frame their origins, the resulting questions can guide our methodologies towards what we are being asked to repair and shift. We may instead begin to ask: What does the egregious lack of atonement have to do with the weather of this moment? What are the hauntings that live between us and in place? What must we grieve? What happens when we re-root our artistic practices in the cultural rites of passage required to better relate to our relations — human and more-than-human? In an economy rooted in capitalizing our attention, how can art shift our attention toward the miracles needed for the sake of life on this planet?
These are the urgent questions that will help us care for each other and the land in these times. And these are the questions I’m interested in inviting artists, art funders, and cultural workers to grapple with as creators and transformers of culture. As Lead to Life asks these questions of ourselves, we are expanding our work with transformation of weapons toward a transmedia practice that explores right relationship with the element of fire — and the power, possibilities and responsible wielding of fire — on Turtle Island.
Historically, there were between 4-12 million acres of land on fire annually through California indigenous prescribed burns. Now, there are only about 125,000 acres of prescribed burns happening annually in California. We need much more good fire, guided by indigenous leadership and traditions, moving on the land annually to regulate this region. I think about all the ways white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism has disturbed our relationship with fire. The way the haunting of fire suppression, enslavement, and indigenous displacement today looks like mass incarceration, an entire new weather that lives in the wake of white supremacy and the military-industrial complex, incarcerated firefighters going to fight wildland fires that are here because of the intense fire suppression, climate collapse, fear of fire, fear of heat, fear of Black and indigenous folks, fear of ritual, fear of folks in relationship to the earth.
I think about how the past couple of years of Lead to Life have been so powerful and beautiful, drawing from the memetics of Pedro Reyes guns-to-shovels and instruments work as an organizing tool to make connections between environmental racism, police brutality, the wake of enslavement, climate change, capitalism and the military-industrial complex. And I think about the gravity that Lead to Life’s ritual art, network and storytelling practices can offer through showing up for the land, and for Black/indigenous solidarity and interspecies liberation across the geographies the Lead to Life team lives in at the intersections of fire, Black liberation, earthcare, ceremony and rematriation. Lead to Life trusts that we have to attend to state violence, gun violence and climate collapse as a spiritual crisis. We have been able to offer beautiful ceremonies, experiences and teachings between Atlanta, Oakland, Puerto Rico, Detroit and London and through trans-local online experiences but the memetics as ritual objects, though powerful, have just been a medium to metabolize connections with source and right relationship with fire, heat, anger, rage, grief, belonging, and shadow.
I wonder what miracles and alchemy can be possible when commemorative ceremonies are in direct relationship with the earth and source? What is Lead to Life’s practice with fire restoration as the crucible? For a fire that directly heals the earth to be at the center?
As we enter the crucible of our prayer, I surrender to the gift of nigredo — the first stage of the alchemical process. Nigredo means the blackening and is the first stage in the alchemical process when the base metal the alchemist is seeking to transform begins to decay. I wonder about staying in the nigredo for a little while together — to notice what information the gift of darkness, of blackness has for us. To trust Lucille Clifton’s admonition that “white ways are the ways of death/come into the black and live.”[7]
Will you join us and come into the Black and live?
NOTES
[1] “Commemorative justice” is a term coined by historian and artist Free Egunfemi. You can learn more about Free Engufemi’s work here.
[2] A biblical reference to Luke 19:40.
[3] In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe.
[4] For Dr. Shawn Ginwright, it is critical to make a distinction between PTSD and PTSE (post-traumatic stress environments). “PTSE recognizes that the root cause of trauma is in the environment, not the individual, and occurs as a result of systemic problems such as racism, ageism, homophobia, othering, and a myriad of other issues of social inequality.” You can read more about Dr. Ginwright’s work here.
[5] Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin, by Donna Haraway
[6] In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christina Sharpe.
[7] excerpt from After Kent State, Lucille Clifton.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
brontë’s work and rest is guided by the cosmology and promise of sabbath for Black people and the land. As a Black-latine transdisciplinary artist, trickster, educator, jíbare and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of Black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, death doulaship, and the levity of absurdity.
The prayer of their life is to support safe and hilarious passage through climate collapse. They care for the crossroads of attending to Black health/imagination, commemorative justice (Free Egunfemi) and hospicing the shit that hurts Black folks and the earth through serving as creative director for Lead to Life ritual arts collective and ecological educator for ancestral arts skills and nature-connection school Weaving Earth.
They are currently co-conjuring a film with Esperanza Spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care (in an ecological and ministerial sense) as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in northern California. Mostly, brontë is up to the sweet tender rhythm of quotidian Black queer-lifemaking, ever-committed to humor & liberation, ever-marked by grief at the distance made between us and all of life.
