2109

“Atsa child, what are you going to do with your life?”

“I don’t know.” The wind was blowing hard on the rooftops, bending the new saplings halfway over. But down here in the grassy alley Atsa and her grandmother were protected by the high buildings either side.

“Well, what do people tell you you’re good at?” Grandmother was sitting on their favorite log, the one with a branch that served as a backrest. Atsa sat cross-legged on the ground, massaging one of the old woman’s arthritic feet.

“Nothing! I’m no good at the things the clan needs most. Plants don’t grow for me. I’m not a good communicator, or a healer. I’m no mechanic, no building maintenance tech. I don’t want to get pregnant and have babies sucking on my tits like Keisha. I’m just weird. I love reading old books in the library, but no one tells me I’m good at it. They just get fed up with me for it.”

“Well, believe your grandmother: you’re good at it.”

“Thank you!” Atsa brushed tears from her eyes.

“You know, child, you do have a good feel for feet, and aches, and bones. You know something else? In the old days there were people called ‘historians.’”

“I know the word. It means storyteller, doesn’t it?” A wind flurry brought the scent of new mown grasses from the upper rooves, where the rest of Atsa’s community were hard at work with scythes and twine, loading hay bales onto the chute system that brought them down to ground level.

“Sort of, but there was much more to it. Historians did research: they read old records and tried to work out what had happened in the past. Sometimes their discoveries contradicted what was thought to be true, and brought new thoughts to the people. Historians read books all day, unless they were writing books, or teaching from books.”

“Can I become a historian, grandmother?”

“You know well, child, there’s no extra food to keep someone who’s not doing productive work. So you’ll have to be creative. But I want you to think seriously about doing it. Because you never know what will turn out to be productive after all. And you know what we elders say, that we have to heal the seven generations after us, and the seven generations before us.”

“They say that, but it makes no sense to heal our ancestors. They’re dead.”

“It’s spiritual work.”

“I can’t even imagine trying to heal them. To be chained on slave ships from Africa. To be beaten and worked to death and separated from your family. Or to have your sacred lands stolen from you and most of your people killed or die of unknown diseases. It overwhelms me to think of healing the ancestors who went through that.”

“You know, you’re a light skinned child, and your nose sticks out big and straight.”

Atsa looked at the old woman with puzzlement.

“I’m just saying, you didn’t mention your white ancestors, did you? You think they didn’t need healing too? It’s a big question: is it only the people harmed who need healing? If the people doing the harm heal, do they then stop doing so much harm? Isn’t that the single major way to prevent future harm?”

“That’s what Mom says about Daddy. How much he needs to heal.”

“Yes, child. Sadly so. My son is still mad at me and Grandfather. But it’s different when people are as angry as he is and yet they belong to a dominant culture that tells them that pointing the finger at the other person is normal. Because then, how would they know they need to heal from blaming and shaming? You know that song, ‘When I point my finger at my neighbor?’”

“… there are three more pointing back at me,” Atsa did the hand gesture. “Yes, I know. But if you turn your hand knuckles up, you can’t see the three pointing back at you. That’s being oblivious.”

“You’ve learned your lesson well. Now, it’s time for you to go and play, or help with the haymaking.”

“I’ll go back to the library.”

2142

“Atsa, you can’t be serious!” Maria protested. They put down the pruning shears they were using to cut back the hedge.

“I’m dead serious. The Begay folk tell me time travel has become a real thing.”

“And you want to go back to heal your white ancestors? That’s insane!”

“It probably is. But it’s also real.” Atsa pulled nervously on her braids, not caring how it betrayed her anxiety.

“It’s dangerous! How will you get back to us?”

“I might not be able to come back.”

“By all that’s holy! And you’re just telling me now?” Maria stared at her as if she had no words.

“I’m sorry. Grandmother came to me in a dream. She told me to go. I have to.”

“This is why you’ve been practicing gendered language, isn’t it. All this ‘he / she’ shit. I thought you were just getting into the old times for your work. But you’ve been training to go back in time for months, without telling me.”

“I’m scared to death, Maria. Until yesterday it was just a fever dream. I never thought it would be real”.

“So why is it real now?”

“Because the elders have chosen me. They say all the research I’ve done about my ancestors, and that crazy story two of them told, a hundred and twenty years ago, you know what I’m talking about it.” She couldn’t say it aloud, not at this moment. Her ancestors, Morris Dale and Atsa Begay, had told the world that their lives were altered by a vision of Morris’s many-times granddaughter who appeared to them and called them to a different kind of work. In truth, they didn’t say a vision, they said a visit. But the historians naturally described it as a vision. And now the elders were telling Atsa she could, in fact, go visit them. “You know, the vision Atsa Begay had, the Atsa I’m named after, the famous one. The elders think it will work. That maybe my visit is why he changed his life. If I don’t go, history might have been quite different. We might none of us be here. They might have continued fighting each other, blaming and shaming, until it was too late. And all their signs say I have to leave tomorrow. I’m having panic attacks. I can hardly breathe when I think about the task they’ve given me. How can I possibly succeed?”

“Don’t you know I love you? We’re partnered, you can’t do this to me!” Maria threw their favorite pot at the wall and slammed the door on their way out. Atsa put her head between her knees and breathed fifteen times slowly.

2022

“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty! We are facing the destruction of our civilization! And these morons, these addicts of God, guns, and opioids couldn’t care less! They’re as high on their meds as crack addicts on crack. And we know how they despise crack addicts. They lock up Black and Brown people by the tens of thousands. But they’re the ones who should be locked up!”

I paused as the crowd yelled their anger. Hard to read those faces. Were they truly angry or just playing up to the spectacle of an old guy ranting?

The grey San Francisco fog streamed over us, looming like the end times themselves. “These morons…” I still couldn’t be heard.

My eye was drawn back to an anxious young woman in the second row whose face I had passed over with a jolt earlier, as if, as if…. The shouting died enough for me to yell, “These morons are the ones who are tipping us over the climate cliff, driving our species to extinction! And countless other species!”

“Yeah! Yeah! Preach!” Fists pummeled the air.

How was a 70-year-old white man getting such a rapturous response? An old man with a backache so extreme it was only the pills and adrenalin that were keeping me upright. There were older white folk in the crowd, for sure, but it looked like the young of all hues outnumbered them here. I guess scared young idealists love crotchety, old, principled lefties. I was shamelessly using the Bernie playbook. I’d been called “the Pied Piper of the Angry Ancient Bay Area Left” on one kid’s viral tweet.

Another speaker took over. I retreated beyond the crowd to lie on my back on a bench. Connie and Doug from our Grey Disrupters cell had brought a small cooler with ice packs for my back. Bless them. I was staring up at the blowing fog wondering how long I could keep all this ranting up, when a face bent down over mine and blocked the light. Oh God. Her face was a silhouette but I knew. It was the young woman from the second row.

“I can help you,” she said. “Just relax.”

She moved her hands towards me, and I blurted out, “Don’t touch me! I don’t like to be touched!”

“I can tell, Uncle Morris. Don’t fret. I won’t touch you.” I raised my head angrily to say, “What’s with the Uncle shit?” when I saw the ethereal look that had come over her face. She was kneeling beside me, her hands motionless about six inches above my heart, palms down. Then she began to move them above my body like a blind person feeling a face. Her eyes were closed. Whatever her anxiety had been, she had elevated herself into another realm.

Oh God. A woo-woo freak. Just like her mother. If indeed she was Deliah’s. Feel-the-energies-Deliah. Deliah the love of my life. Deliah the woman I had grievously wronged. This one had to be her daughter.

And maybe, my daughter. When Deliah disappeared, I thought she was pregnant. But as hard as I tried to trace her, I never heard a whisper. And now this woman. Her skin was about the right shade, halfway between Deliah’s dark walnut and my pasty Anglo. Her nose was surely mine. Up close, she wasn’t so young after all, already in her forties maybe. That would be right.

She opened her eyes and rose as easily to her feet as if she was a dancer or martial artist—like Deliah. I whispered, “Who are you?”

“Now you can get up,” she replied. “Go on.”

I started to move, just to prove how excruciating it would be. But it wasn’t. The pain was manageable. I swung my legs to the ground and stood up. I looked down at her: my nose, but Deliah’s eyebrows and mouth, the same distance in the eyes, as if both women saw further than the rest of us.

“I knew your mother,” I said.

“You have never met my mother. But I know about you and Deliah. Can we go someplace and talk?”

“I have to plan stuff with Connie and Doug. Come with us, explain yourself.”

The funky café on Market Street I’d loved was long gone. We ended up in a high-end espresso spot for techies, full of laptops and concentrated solitudes. Many people wore masks, intensifying the separations.

As soon as we sat, lattes in hand, she blurted out, “I’m just going to have to say this straight up. I know you once wrote science fiction. So maybe you can hear me when I say,” she took a deep breath, “I’m Deliah’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter. Four greats.”

“Very funny, Ms. Time Traveler. Who are you really?”

“I’m a victim of hundreds of years of men chasing false gods, and in my time we are paying the price a millionfold.”

Deliah wouldn’t have been that grandiose, but the daughter, if that’s who she was, soon showed she was just as good a storyteller. Not about herself, but about the world. We listened intently as she laid out the history of the coming century: accelerated climate change, the coastal cities half underwater, unstoppable waves of refugees, collapsed economies, warlords, starvation, disease. I could have written it myself.

But then she told another side to the story: the many ways unlikely actors had worked together to curb fossil fuels and create alternatives. In the process they had birthed a new culture of healing for humanity and the biosphere. “We call it the kinship society,” she explained. “We have a clan system, and no one is left out of the family. That’s why no one is homeless on our streets. The animals, the plants, the land are all part of it. We have powerful laws to prevent people amassing power and wealth, but they are hardly needed now that so many people get the concept of family and kin. People like my father may try to become powerful, but he can’t find enough followers. It’s the followers who give power to the power hungry.”

So she was a utopian activist with a fantasy problem. A joker or mentally ill.

“In our history books, you played a role in creating the kinship culture. If you and others hadn’t done that, we would have descended into civil war and horror.” She began to weep.

“I don’t have time for this. You haven’t even explained about Deliah. We lost touch over forty years ago. Where is she?”

Her tears ebbed. “I’m doing a lousy job of this,” she gasped. “I need to calm down.” She took deep breaths and closed her eyes like she was meditating for a moment, her tears drying on her cheeks. Her face calmed to that woo-woo place I’d seen in her before. She finally asked, “You know what the biggest goal of activism needs to be?”

“What, you’re going to give me a lesson in politics?”

“The hardest thing is to fight our opponents and pressure them to do what is needed—like getting America off fossil fuels—while refraining from judging them, while appreciating their wounds, while empathizing with their angers, while treating them as kin. We have to invite them in that loving spirit to co-create solutions with us. Like Gandhi said to General Smuts when he went up against his government in South Africa, “I will win.” And when Smuts asked how, and Gandhi replied, “with your help.” Which is what happened. In your time it was all laid out and demonstrated by Loretta Ross, who we call a grandmother of the new culture. The culture that brought America and the world together. Do you know her?”

“A nice fairy tale. Try doing that with MAGA Republicans.”

“That’s what I’m talking about. I believe you can do it, Uncle Morris. At least you can stop abusing them. If you do, you may at least appeal to their more moderate cousins who find you obnoxious.”

“Are you kidding me?”

She closed her eyes again. “You’re a skeptic, aren’t you?” She suddenly appeared formidable, less fantasist than inquisitor or professor. “Not about climate change. But about everything. That’s what it was called. A skeptic was someone who had to question everything.”

“Yes, I’m proud of that.”

“You can’t believe that miracles happen. And I’m not talking time travel miracles: no one will believe that. I mean miracles of people healing from trauma. Like the drug addicts and racists and God and gun addicts you’re angry at. You can’t imagine them healing. If you could, you wouldn’t be shaming them and writing them off like you are. You would have quite different ideas about how to prevent climate change.”

“Oh please! Miracles of personal change?” I was on familiar ground now. “You came to tell me to listen to my mother? I was raised on endless miracle stories of individual change. The kind they have in Alcoholics Anonymous, but ours were geared towards ending conflicts. Do you know about my background?”

“I know enough to know you haven’t learned the right lessons from it about social change.”

“Then let me explain. My mother’s religious people did conflict resolution behind the scenes in major conflicts. They may actually have prevented a war or two. But they didn’t change poverty, they didn’t change capitalism. They claimed to be “the Answer” for the world, but they had no answer to any of the powerful who refused to be one of their miracles. Force is the only thing that moves the powerful. Violent force or nonviolent force: one or the other. Movements of the people to bring down the mighty! How do you think we got such democracy as we have?” I glared at her. She faced me back with Deliah’s challenging eyes.

“Thank you for that demonstration of why Deliah left you: it wasn’t mainly because of your white male entitlement, as painful as that was to her. She loved you in spite of it. And she did forgive you for the one time you were violent with her. She knew you wouldn’t do it again.”

Tears came to my eyes suddenly. “How do you know that?”

“She knew there was a lot of good in you. What she couldn’t stand was the way you were always blaming and shaming your opponents. You leftwing men: always pointing the finger, never taking accountability.”

“That’s crazy! How do you know that about Deliah? Where is she?”

“Now, in 2022? I don’t know. The last trace we have of her was in 1984, in Santa Fe. Her journals stopped then. Anyway, I came to talk politics with you. I’ve read online essays you wrote, the ones that went viral. You have a bigger influence than you realize, or you will do. After you died, even though you had changed your tune, people unearthed your old essays. The worse things got, the more people turned to those old writings, blaming the believers for almost everything, them and the fat cats, you called them, the billionaires, the capitalists. ‘God and money, the two worst things to worship,’ you wrote.”

“Were you spying on me? I haven’t published that phrase yet. That’s in handwritten scribbles I jotted down this week.”

“Really? It was in the notes the team gave me yesterday. They didn’t imagine I could sway you, you know.”

“Sway me? Young lady, I’m one of the strongest voices we’ve got for rolling back climate change! I’m attacking these idiots who deny it every day! Racists! Homophobes! The folk who suck up to the billionaires when they should be fighting them! Don’t tell me you’re soft on them?”

“That’s the problem, Uncle Morris, right there. Can I call you uncle?”

“What’s the problem? And no, you can’t.”

“Oh, sorry, I’ll try to remember. We call our elders Aunty and Uncle. I’m talking about how when change happens too fast and the old ways get thrown into the fire, people have to be loved to be brought along. You have to fight and organize to resist their politics, so in that sense force is part of it, but if they feel you don’t love and respect them they’ll just dig in, or retaliate.”

“How can you love someone who believes white people are superior? Who thinks God made it so? Who thinks evolution never happened? But who takes meds based on modern biochemistry, for which evolution is central? They fly in airplanes but don’t believe in science! They don’t… Don’t get me started!”

“But let me ask you this, Uncle Morris. How can I love someone who still uses a flush toilet in the California drought, who eats animals, who eats produce from soil-killing chemical agribusiness, who still drives a gas-powered car, and who speaks hate at people who are much more like him than they are like me? You should know better!

“And aside from that, don’t you sometimes feel like you are hating your younger self, the self that at eighteen years old defended the Vietnam War in his school magazine?”

“My God, you’ve done your research, young lady.”

“Well, I’m a historian. It’s what we do.”

“I’m not proud of that magazine piece, I can tell you.”

“But Uncle Morris, don’t be ashamed. You were eighteen. Raised conservative. You’ve learned. We’re all learning.”

“So who told you about that article?”

“You wrote about it in your journals, earlier this year, I believe. I read them in the vault.”

“Vault? I’ve never let anyone see those journals and I don’t have a vault.” It began to strike me that something very, very odd was happening. Was she actually from the future?

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

“I’m Atsa.”

“But that’s my grandson’s name.”

“Of course. And I want to meet him. He’s the other reason I came.”

“Then let’s go meet him.” Now I was inviting her to my home?

We walked out onto Market Street towards the underground BART station. I found myself needing to prepare her for the encounter.

“My son and his wife, Atsa’s parents, both died of Covid, you know that? Both Atsa’s grandmothers previously dead from cancer, his other grandfather, Dr. John Begay, a thoracic surgeon in Albuquerque, completely absorbed in the pandemic. God knows why Atsa came to me after his parents died. He was a hell of a mess, still is. In and out of juvie. Fighting, drugs. I believe Begay was a kind grandfather, but overwhelmed after his wife died and the pandemic hit. Begay told Atsa he had to get to know the other side of his family. So he came. Berkeley’s repute as a counterculture scene surely helped.”

It was strangely natural to tell this woman stuff I hadn’t shared with anyone else. “So it’s up to me. And what do I know about raising a teenage boy? I wasn’t even present for my own boy. Let alone a closed-up, furiously angry one like Atsa. Taking God knows what drugs. I’ve paid for therapy for him. He hates the therapist. It’s a godawful mess. To be honest, he’s a millstone round my neck just when I’m making maximum impact online and on the talkshows. I know I shouldn’t talk about him like that. But he’s not even trying.”

She looked sympathetic as we walked but she was also short of breath, almost as if she was in a panic. As I watched, she took deep breaths and calmed herself again. A strange woman.

We took the escalator down to the BART station. “Do they still have these in your time?” I asked, meaning the underground trains. I could hear the ironic tone in my voice, as if I was only playing her game of visiting from the future. How hard it is to come out as a believer.

“Underground trains yes, the few that weren’t flooded out. But these poor souls? No.” She pointed to the bodies in blankets at the side of the tunnel, and the man trying to play a flute, too out of his mind to make the tune. “In our time, we look after each other. Ours is much more of a caring society.”

On the train I quizzed her about what she meant by a caring society, and about how much tech had survived. She described how labor-intensive agriculture had become the norm, saving fuel and minerals, ensuring healthy lives, enabling community. Travel was way down. People-centered and -owned media networked the world. I wondered what the passengers around us thought we were doing: a kind of improv, acting roles to come up with a screenplay?

I live up in the twisting streets that follow the contours of the Berkeley hills. It was a good walk from Downtown Berkeley BART. Normally I’d take a cab, never an Uber, given their labor practices. But after her work on it, my back was feeling amazingly good. “Let’s walk,” I said, bravely. She grinned. We needed to take two of the long staircases between streets and I was utterly out of breath and sweating by the time we reached my home. She did it easily, her anxiety once more in abeyance. So odd.

The house is drab, for lack of paint and any architectural input whatsoever. Still, it’s worth millions for its view of the Bay and the Golden Gate. “I inherited it from my parents, who bought it cheap,” I told her, fearing she’d think me one of the fat cats I excoriated. Which of course I am, compared to many folk at the bottom of the hill, especially those whose skin color was used to keep their parents and grandparents out of the housing market. I unlocked the front door, wondering whether the next generation would be home, the boy I was leaving the house to. We were met by silence, no pounding hiphop.

I turned on the electric kettle. “One hundred percent renewable power,” I felt obliged to say in my defense. “I pay extra for it.”

Just then the front door slammed. “Guess who,” I said.

A grim teenage boy strode in. He had his mother’s brown skin, high cheekbones, and sturdy build. His tightly muscled look was his own creation, as were the black half-moons under his eyes. A sleepless gym rat.

“Atsa, meet Atsa,” I said.

“Really? I never met another Atsa up this way. Who are you?” That was a lot of words for my Atsa. He was staring at her like she had stepped right out of one of his comic books: I’d never seen him so interested in a live human.

“Yá’át’ééh,” she said.

“Yá’át’ééh.”

The only Navajo word I knew. And then they were talking vigorously in his native language.

This was a different boy than the one I knew. Eager to make contact with her.

“Please guys, speak English. I want to know what’s going on.”

He stared at me. Reduced to his customary silence. I regretted my interruption.

Then he turned to her and asked, “Are you staying?”

“Do you want me to?”

He considered it carefully.

She added. “I want to introduce you to someone I think you’ll appreciate.”

“Ok.”

What was going on here? It was like they were mind-melding. The strangest day of my life was getting stranger. Maybe she could work a miracle with Atsa. Help him feel life was worth living. I certainly couldn’t.

“I’ve got a headache,” I complained. “I’m going to rest my back.” The pain had started up again. The only surprise was how long her woo-woo healing had lasted. They’d get on better without me, anyway.

Asleep on the couch, I dreamed of addicts injecting each other in a back alley behind a restaurant, packed with stinking garbage. They were coughing their lives out with Covid. Their baby boy cried helplessly in a dirty diaper, the mother trying so hard to help him while she died. I woke sweating and unable to get the horror from my mind. I struggled up despite the pain in my back, tried to swallow a Vicodin dry, staggered to the kitchen faucet, drank from a dirty mug, and put on the kettle. The dream stayed with me, as vivid as the reality it reflected. It was all true but for the baby. Atsa was already fourteen and living with his Begay grandfather, when his parents died in that alley. My son, Christopher. His longtime love, Angelina. I should pray for forgiveness. For all the ways I must have failed Chris. Even though I still don’t really understand what I had done. My divorce, of course. But lots of kids’ parents divorce: it doesn’t turn them into addicts. Many times in the past year I had longed for the God of my childhood, the God I had believed in, who could forgive, and understand, and guide. But I had never felt love from that God. Only demands for obedience.

Like I had never really felt love from my mother. I had known she loved me. But that was head knowledge. She had been too repressed, too upper class, too faded WASP gentry, to hug me. And despite my rebellion, my immersion in the 70s counterculture, my certainty that my wife, Rose, and I would do a better job, we had somehow failed our own son. Over the past year I had frequently thanked the cosmos that cancer had taken Rose before Chris and Angelina died.

Hours later, I was back at my laptop excoriating “environmentalists” who imagined the corporate world could ever be a driving force for climate sanity, when I heard chattering voices coming up the steps to the front door. My Atsa, chattering? The other Atsa, talking quietly. I needed a name to distinguish her from the boy: Miracle Atsa? And then a third voice! A voice I hadn’t heard in over thirty years. It couldn’t be. Not possible. Those Boston Brahmin vowels.

The two Atsas entered, still talking, and then her. I stood up.

“Oh darling!” she exclaimed. “You look so old! Older than me!”

“Who are you? I mean, I m… m… mean…”

“Oh darling, you haven’t stuttered since you were eight years old!”

We stared at each other. She looked in her fifties, as she had been during my late teens. She wore her stolid brown brogues, nylons, conservative tweed skirt, cashmere twin set, pearl necklace, pearl earrings, permed hair.

I turned to the time traveler: “What have you done?”

“You two need to talk.”

“You can do this? Am I hallucinating?”

“No, you’re not, darling,” Mother said. “I’m really here. I think. Atsa says it’s time travel, not a hallucination. But does it matter? Atsa’s right. We need to talk.”

“What good did talking ever do? You never listened.”

“I listened. But I didn’t understand. Maybe I can now.”

I held my head and looked at the floor. Took three long deep breaths to calm down. Studied the cracks between the old floorboards. I was clearly overwrought. In need of a new psych with better meds. I looked up. She was still there.

“Why the hell would you understand now? Look at you.” The perm, the pearls. “You’re the age when all you did was wail that I was abandoning God.”

“And look at you! I can see what you’ve made of yourself, and the Atsas have told me more. I’m sorry. I’m truly sorry.”

“What for?”

“I failed you. I know that, or you wouldn’t be spewing hate towards the haters. When I met the Oxford Group before the War, I was a far right racist. All my family were, as you know. My father opposed FDR fiercely every day of his tenure in the House. Of course, I never voted for FDR. We knew all about his philandering. But I did vote for Truman. Think about that. Do you know why?”

“Because Truman supported the Group.”

“No, it was because I had changed. I’ll use Atsa’s word: I had healed. I had faced my own bitterness towards the clergyman who raped me.”

“What? I never knew about that.”

“No of course you didn’t. It wasn’t anything I could speak about. Atsa has told me I need to do so now, for you to understand me. You see, I felt sure that the rape was my fault. I was a sinful girl, full of lust and ambition. And afterwards, I was consumed by anger and self-loathing in equal parts. I started drinking too much. But then I went to that Group houseparty, and Jesus came into my life. I gave my life to Him and I became free. I became honest about my sins, I gave my life over to God. And then my sins didn’t have the power over me they had before. I became part of a band of friends and warriors, out to heal the world. And then my politics changed. I was open to whoever had the most integrity.”

“You voted for Eisenhower. And Nixon.”

“I know, voting for Nixon was a mistake. But Nixon was a family man while that Jack Kennedy was a worse philanderer than FDR.”

“What is this, Miracle Atsa? Or shall I call you Nightmare Atsa? You’re trying to work some bizarre political reeducation in me by having my mother tell me about her sins and her voting record? Mother, what you people in MRA never understood is that it’s systems of oppression that matter more than the marital fidelity of politicians!”

“Hold on. What’s MRA?” young Atsa asked. I looked at him for the first time since Mother had walked into the room. His eyes, which had been so dead all this past year, were alive with curiosity. No wonder: he was getting the family dirt. “Great Grandma, that was an awesome story about how you recovered from being raped. That’s trauma recovery, big time. My friend June was raped and she needs something like that. So Grandad, you never told me about this MRA. What was it?”

“God! I hated that question when I was a teen. I couldn’t explain what MRA was and no one understood when I tried.” I sat down abruptly. “Mother, sit, all of you, sit.” I should have been the host, got them glasses of water at least. But I was too bemused. I looked at young Atsa again, caught by the curiosity in his face. “OK. MRA was short for Moral Re-Armament. Let’s say it was a cross between AA, Scientology, and a conflict mediation service. And throw in hefty doses of evangelical revivalism and pan-religious kumbaya.”

“Sounds weird.”

“Morris, you can do better than that,” my mother said in her severest tone, as if I was ten years old.

I stared at her and decided young Atsa did deserve better, and maybe Mother did too. “Ok, I’ll try. This is part of your heritage, Atsa. It’s what fucked me up. But I‘ll do my best to be fair. Interrupt me if I go on too long. In the 1930s there was this thing called the Oxford Group. It was a fundamentalist Christian revival focused on the experience of personal change. Its greatest result was to spawn Alcoholics Anonymous, which is all about personal change. But the Group had absurd ambitions. It thought it could stop Hitler by a revival of personal change. In 1938 it renamed itself Moral Re-Armament, or MRA: moral and spiritual rearmament instead of, or in addition to, military rearmament. After the war it was saddled with that awful name. Still, it built an unusual record of conflict resolution in high places. Its post-war reconciliation work between French and Germans was supposedly critical to founding the institution that became the European Union.”

Young Atsa’s eyes were starting to glaze over. How could I distill a lifetime’s experience for my grandson? “Here’s the thing. No one knows about MRA today. It’s been totally ignored and forgotten by academia and the media because it was homophobic, cultic, anti-sex, anti-intellectual, anti-Left: it thought personal change was all that was needed to end hunger, war, and conflict. My teen friends hated all the stuff about sin and obedience to God and redemption. How am I doing, Mother? Is that about right?” All the old fury was resurfacing.

“You’re bitter. Why? I don’t understand. You grew up in a loving home.”

“A loving home being one in which no one ever hugged anyone? I can’t even recall you touching me, Mother.”

“Oh! Oh, my dear. That was just our way. That was New England Brahmin culture. That was…”

“Breathe, Morris. Breathe,” said Miracle/Nightmare Atsa. And then, as if to give me time to do so, she asked Mother, “Shall I tell you what I think your not hugging him was?”

“Yes, dear, please enlighten me.”

“I think it was white trauma.”

“Hey, tell me about that,” young Atsa asked.

“Christians are all about sin as the problem, right? But what if the problem is really trauma?”

“You mean we do bad shit not because we’re bad, but because we’ve been hurt.”

“Exactly. When we’re hurt traumatically, it changes us. We can act defensively, or lash out, or numb ourselves: everyone’s different. You’re lucky to be living in the era when trauma healing is starting to become known. In your time, today, restorative justice is gaining traction. That’s based on the idea that people who do bad stuff need healing not shaming and punishment. That’s what you needed, Atsa, when you were acting out: healing not juvie.”

“On the Res they call it Indigenous Peacemaking. My family hasn’t had much to do with it. I mean, I’ve heard about intergenerational trauma: everyone on the Res is suffering from that. That’s what my grandparents escaped from. Much good it did my mom.”

“In your time people are just starting to understand how intergenerational trauma can affect the descendants of slavery and genocide. But if it’s hurt people who hurt people, then why were the white people committing those crimes against humanity? Had they been hurt? Yes. That’s what I’m saying. White trauma. Only they were in charge, so no one punished them. No one tried to heal them either, unless it was people like Morris’s mother.”

“Thank you, my dear,” Mother said. “Thank you. We were trying. From what you’ve been telling me, I do understand how little we understood about some people, like the homosexuals.”

“In MRA you did a lot of confessing your sins, right? Well restorative justice involves accountability, admitting what you did, which is a lot like confessing your sins. But then, with a trauma perspective, accountability requires working out why you did it, how you had been hurt yourself, probably in childhood, and how you had been taught a toxic culture. And from there, how to heal yourself.”

“So you’re trying to tell me,” I said to Miracle Atsa, “that trauma healing and restorative justice are like a secular replacement for MRA and AA?”

“In our time, we call it Healing Community, and it’s not just secular. It’s spiritual too.”

Young Atsa asked, “How were white people hurt? You’re just making excuses for them.”

“Well, some historians in your time began asking why had white people colonized the world? Was it just because they could, because they had the weaponry, had industrialized first? But why the brutality, why the contempt? And why did they have the weaponry, when others didn’t? Well, they developed it by fighting each other. They’d been killing each other for centuries in Europe, before they ever ventured out. A third to a half of the Irish population died from Cromwell’s repression, a third to a half of the German population died in the Thirty Years War. My own theory about why they fought each other harder and longer than people in other parts of the world is about their continent’s geography, but that’s for another day.

“Of course, there was so much more to European civilization than vicious warfare. All the art, music, theatre, spirituality, science. But there is a psychological cost to decimating the Cathars, the Irish, the Scots Highlanders, the Jews, the Slavs (that’s where the word “slave” comes from), the enslaved Africans, the indigenous Americans and Australians, a cost to impoverishing India and China, the wealthiest parts of the world. So we can add to the traumas of Europe’s self-harms the secondary traumas of killing and exploiting others. The emotional repression of the British, especially of the middle and upper middle classes which served the Empire, and their WASP descendants is one of those costs. That’s what I meant.”

“How can the trauma of being a colonial officer compare with being enslaved?”

“Well, of course it doesn’t. But the white culture was all about training its sons to repress their emotions and tenderness so they could be brutal in the most civilized way. What white people need to do to stop their own racism is to heal themselves from the long history of traumas that built their abusive culture. That’s all I meant. And it’s not about shaming themselves and each other for being racist: that doesn’t heal us. You know I’m partly white, like you, Atsa.”

“My dad was such a mess,” young Atsa said.

“So Trump voters are traumatized? That’s why you’re here?” I burst out. “To convert me to healing those racist, punitive morons on the Right? Because it’s all about Post Traumatic Whiteness Syndrome? What a crock!”

“No darling, she’s right. She wants you to become a healer, not a divider. And I’m starting to see what went wrong in our family. I am so sorry.”

“What for? Being part of that religious cult?”

“No, dear. And you know quite well it was not a cult. Well, not much of one. What I’m sorry for is… I have always felt there is something horrid about our type of people, how we can’t express love like other people. Like our Mexican maid, for example, the way she adored her kids. We’re repressed, I do know that. I didn’t feel able to change it. And then, when you were a baby the parenting experts said that too much mothering and tenderness made our boys weak, or homosexual.”

“And what would have been wrong with that? Oh, forget it, we can’t relitigate my whole experience of being raised by WASPs in the 50s and 60s.”

“I never was entirely at ease with it,” Mother said. “But you have to understand the times, and… No. If I have learned one thing about making an apology it’s not to put in the self-defense. Morris, will you please stand up?”

Bemused, I did as she asked. I didn’t know why.

Then she stepped resolutely forward, opened her arms and drew me into a very gentle and loving hug. The hug I had longed for all through my childhood.

I froze.

“It’s all right, darling. Believe me, I’ve wanted to do this for ages.” To my own shock, my head dropped onto her shoulder and I began to weep. My chest heaved with sobs.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. There, there, darling. Just cry.”

When I finally lifted my head off my mother’s tear-sodden shoulder, I felt I could speak. But I had nothing to say. Would I accuse her of not doing that before? No, I just felt grateful and bewildered. And, somehow, unmanned.

So I turned away from her and said, “Miracle Atsa—that’s what I’m calling you in my mind—what the fuck are you doing? This is enough to drive a man insane.” I sat back down, hard.

“Grandpa,” young Atsa broke in, “that was awesome.”

“What was?”

“Seeing you cry. Never thought I’d see it.” His face was younger and more eager than it had been all this past long year since he came to me. That stopped my throat. I looked accusingly at Miracle Atsa, and wagged my finger at her. Her fault. I felt like I could weep and never stop. I held it back and croaked, “Why? Why is it important to see me cry?”

“Grandpa, no offense, but you’re an old biligáana full of rage. My other grandfather says you need healing. I think it’s begun.”

“Goddammit, is the whole family on my case? And what the hell’s a bill o’ garna?”

“A white person, Grandad, just a white person.”

Miracle Atsa smiled as she wagged a finger at me. “Loretta Ross, who we call the grandmother of the new culture that was just beginning to arise among activists in your time, used to say that the way white leftists put each other down for not being woke enough was just another form of white supremacy: blaming and shaming is central to white supremacy. And you’re a master at it, Morris Dale.”

“Whoa. Awesome.” said young Atsa.

“Darling boy,” my mother said, and she was not referring to the teenager in the room. “Let’s have a cup of coffee. Or tea. What do you prefer these days?”

The others left me alone while young Atsa showed his great grandmother how to make coffee and Miracle Atsa went out to the back yard: to breathe, she said. Sitting on the couch I stewed in a morass of confusion. Young Atsa’s face kept coming back to me. I had never really given much thought to his Navajo grandparents: they had seemed so Westernized to me: a surgeon, after all, and a data statistician. What did they really think of white people? Chris had kept Angelina away from me, so I had only the slightest idea about her.

Mother and Atsa took a tray of coffees out to the backyard. I followed. It was a wild place, untamed since Mother’s death. I called it the wilderness. It was a home now for deer that leapt the fences, fawned in the back corner, and ate the plums in season. I brought out a deck chair, slumped in it, then got up to lay on my back in the long grass: aching again. I sank upwards into the deep blue of the sky.

I fell asleep there, and woke to find Miracle Atsa kneeling over me again, hands palm down over my stomach, no doubt “moving my energies” or some other nonsense. Except that my pain had gone again.

“Tell me what’s going to happen,” young Atsa said. “You come from the future, which means there really is a future? Everything I’m listening to says it’s all going to be dark and brutal.”

Miracle Atsa took a huge breath and said, “It’s up to you.” The words came out of her with such gravity, such certainty, it seemed to me that she literally meant it was up to young Atsa. “I can teach you,” she said. “You can probably find Loretta Ross and go study with her. And go find the Indigenous Peacemakers. And you could do worse than read The Ministry of the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. He didn’t get it all right, how could he; and he didn’t include Loretta, or restorative justice, which he could have done; but he was closer than most futurists in your time. How a culture swings from hatred to cooperation: it depends on the visionaries, the people who see the dangers, but it takes more than prophesies of doom, and more than dreaming of spiritual revolution. The visionaries have to work out the actual technology, the practices, the how tos, the speech patterns, for calling people in, not calling them out. New cultures only ever start with small numbers who are living in a new way.”

“That’s what I want,” said young Atsa. “That’s what I want.”

2142

“Oh, thanks be!” Maria dropped their hoe and stood unmoving in shock. “When you left for the Physics Lab yesterday I thought…” They began to cry.

“Hush, I’m here,” Atsa took Maria in their arms. “I’m here.”

“You didn’t go after all? They told me you had.”

“I went. I spent weeks with Atsa Begay and Morris and his mother, Mary. Then I came back to today.”

“Maiden, Mother and Crone. Let me look at you” Maria pushed Atsa away. “Your face is different.”

“It was amazing, Maria. I was so anxious. But I calmed down once we were all talking and healing together.”

“And you claim not to be a healer.”

“It turns out that I have learned a few things.”

“So tell me. Was it important like your grandmother told you it would be? Is it because of you that Atsa Begay became the leader and speaker and singer that they were? Quoting your own book, ‘Begay was perhaps the most effective leader of their time at calling in Americans, right across the political spectrum, to creating the kinship society?’”

“I believe so, I truly believe so. Am I forgiven?”

“Come here, sweetheart. I love you.” Maria opened their arms. “Just don’t ever do it again.”