By the Rev. Linda Hawkins
Despite his resistance beforehand, our eight-year-old son remarked on the way home from church, “I’m glad I went tonight because I made a new friend.” He had met Alex, and from the start they were kindred spirits. Never did he articulate their common bond so obvious to the rest of us.
Both had sisters with Down Syndrome. For Alex, it was his twin sister, Annie. Two boys, one black, one white, living in radically different neighborhoods but each loving and defending a sister enslaved by disability. Two girls, one white, one black, together blossoming in a church that delighted in their giftedness when the larger world did not. The freedom and growth of one fed the freedom and growth of the other in the years ahead.
Around that time, my son learned about slavery as I read a children’s book about the underground railroad. He interrupted the story with an urgent question, “This is make believe, right? This didn’t really happen.” His disbelief continued later as the neighborhood of Alex and Annie deteriorated. He could not understand why their family just didn’t move. He could not fathom the continued shackles of slavery woven into our lives. He expected his friends to have the same freedom he enjoyed. As a young adult, the little black girl died of lack of proper health care—a testimony to the continued legacy of slavery among us.
Today we give thanks for emancipation, for the bold act of freeing those enslaved one hundred and fifty years ago. As a woman of my generation, I know even myself to be the beneficiary of that movement of freedom. Only as slaves were freed and civil rights granted did doors open for women as well. Despite the privileges I had in a white family, never would I have imagined as a little girl in South Carolina that someday I would be a priest in the church with women as my bishop and presiding bishop. After all, the vocational interest test that I took in high school only listed “Nun” as an option, and I for one flunked that category.
Yet we dare not forget that continued legacy of slavery in our midst. None of us is truly free unless all of us are free—whatever our race, disability, economic or educational status, language, gender, sexual orientation, or place of origin.
We will know the truth, and the truth will set us free. But truth must have hands and feet to set us all free. May we find again our childlike disbelief that any child of God could be the possession of another. May we join hands like Alex and Crawford, Annie and Ellen, that someday all God’s children might be free.
