There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
-- Alice Walker

It is literally quite possible that Black people do possess the secret of joy. How else could we have crossed the 3,000 plus miles of the Atlantic Ocean from the West Coast to the Americas; 400 to 700 deep; shackled in cramped, unsanitary quarters in the bowels of a ship; eating one meal a day of beans and yams if such scant foods were available; diseased, frightened and depressed; not knowing of destination or fate; yet surviving in spite of it all? Somewhere deep within us, we held a secret of unmitigated and inexorable contentment that got us through the hardship of the journey we traveled.

It’s likely that we possess the secret of joy. How else could the 10 million of us who survived the trip from West and Central Africa have been dropped off in Hispaniola (present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic); Jamaica; Guatemala; El Salvador; Trinidad; Cuba; Jamestown, Virginia; and Columbia, South Carolina – all unwelcoming lands whose inhabitants’ sole intention was to create economic gain for themselves on the backs of our minds and spirits? Without the secret of innate joy imploding within us, how could we have lived through people selling our babies away from us as punishment; stealing sex from our girls and women because they could; emasculating our virile men to break their warrior energy; and splitting up the remnants of families just to show who was boss? The secret of paradise to come had to be what sustained spirits lost in the crush of chattel life.

We must possess the secret of joy. What other way could we have moved from the murky South, settled into an indifferent North, and moved fearlessly in the uncultivated West? What other way could we have stayed in the South, only to receive the lashes of Jim Crow, the nooses, the water hoses, the Ku Klux Klan, and Southern government? What other way could we have created a great migration northward to work in industrialized cities like Detroit and Chicago, leaving behind the only lives and family we knew? What other thing but a deep-seated secret of joy could have made us toil through Native American and Spanish territory that was as dry, dusty, and desolate as the moon was far?

We do possess the secret of joy.

This secret of joy probably has nothing to do with “the” secret touted by Oprah and Larry King, the one that basically says what you ask for and believe in you receive. Certainly Black folks didn’t ask for any of the above injustices, experiences, or off-chances, so this can’t be the secret referred to here unless, in fact, deep within the crevices of our Selves, we somehow looked beyond our circumstances, asked for freedom and redemption, believed it would be given to us, and ultimately received it in some form or fashion. Perhaps Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy had access to The Secret’s Emerald Tablet before the book and movie even came into existence. Humph, who knows? Who really cares?

Perhaps the secret we’ve possessed is one that has no definition, no name, no real form or content. Perhaps it just is and it just makes us do and be and live.

Certainly that same secret exists within each of us today. It’s got to in order for us to keep pushing through some of the things we endure daily. Thankfully it’s not the same stuff our ancestors encountered. Or is it?

Your secret of joy is at work right now, operating somewhere with the confines of your spirit. If you look and listen closely, presumably you can feel it churning. If you can’t, it’s in your best interest to keep pushing until you do so that one day we can remember and tell the stories of survival to babies who will need to know such a secret exists and that they do indeed possess it.

Sadiqqa © 2007