By Lilly Ward
Staff Writer
On Oct. 5, Cassandra Jackson, a professor of English and African American studies, discussed her new memoir, “The Wreck,” along with colleague Piper Kendrix Williams, associate professor of English and African American studies, at an event in Kendall Hall.
Jackson is also the author of “Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex in Nineteenth-Century American Literature” and “Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body.” She also co-authored “The Toni Morrison Book Club” with Williams.
In “The Wreck,” the past and present converge as Jackson reflects on the connection between her yearning for motherhood and the lingering echo of a family tragedy that took place before her birth. By focusing on her childhood, as well as her struggles with infertility, Jackson draws parallels between her own family’s experiences of racism, with her own chilling encounters of discrimination.
“When we talk about the past there is so much that has not only been forgotten but actively repressed,” said Jackson.
While struggling to conceive her first child, Jackson reflected on how a 1960 car accident in Alabama caused her father to not only lose his first wife, but his mother, sister, husband-in-law and his 3-year-old niece, San. This event irrevocably changed his life. The loss of San in particular, for whom Jackson was named, reverberated throughout Jackson’s childhood.
“There's a way in which grief was always present. It was always there. It was like another family member, and you just didn't talk about that presence, but I feel like you were all very aware of it,” said Jackson.
As a young child, Jackson struggled to put the pieces together of what exactly had happened on the day of “the wreck,” as her father referred to it. When she visited her father’s relatives, they always remarked on the uncanny similarities in her appearance to her deceased grandmother, aunt and cousin.
She knew there had been a car accident, but she didn’t know how many relatives had died. Her mother was resistant to questions asked about the accident, and her father was unable to talk about the event, haunted by grief. She often heard him call out the name that belonged to her and her cousin in his sleep.
As an adult navigating infertility, Jackson became conscious of how her own desire for a child mirrored the sense of loss that she inherited from an early age. She began to meditate on the need to continue her family line that had endured so much amidst what was considered to be the worst car accident on record in the state of Alabama, combined with the stark rules of Jim Crow.
A white driver was responsible for causing the accident that killed Jackson’s family. As they were going over a hill, a white driver decided to go around them, driving into an oncoming dump truck on the left side of the road. Still, it was her family that was blamed for the accident in the press, Jackson said.
“In 1960, if you were in a car accident and you were black, it was your fault,” Jackson explained. “That was the unspoken rule because the idea was that if you were black, you had to give the right of way to a white person.”
In the newspapers, news of her family’s members ' deaths was coarsely delivered. They were listed without monikers, referring to the deaths of “a negro man, negro woman and a negro child.” Only in a weekly column of the paper, entitled “News about Negros,” were the names of her family members included.
As she read through the archives in an Alabama library with her father, Jackson described the shock she felt at the callous treatment of her family members’ deaths. Despite having researched racial justice as an academic, Jackson found herself shocked by the stark reality of the pain that her family was subjected to.
“As a culture, we repressed what Jim Crow meant. We talk about it a lot in terms of water fountains. But I think that we don’t think about the fact that it penetrated everything,” said Jackson.
In “The Wreck,” Jackson draws parallels between her family’s experiences of racism, with her own chilling encounters with discrimination.
As Jackson chronicles her experiences of fertility treatments, she draws attention to the distress she has been subjected to — both emotional and physical — as a Black woman by doctors due to stereotypes that persist today about Black women’s bodies.
She describes doctors’ condescension towards her mother throughout her childhood, as well as the experience of visiting a Black gynecologist who asserted that she must be fertile, because she believed it was impossible that black women could be infertile. (In reality, research suggests that BIPOC women are disproportionately impacted by infertility).
The excruciating pain she experienced while undergoing treatment was dismissed by a doctor as discomfort, an experience that is not uncommon in women’s health care.
“My father’s grief was not just about the loss. The loss was doubled by the fact that his family’s lives were not considered important enough that they weren’t deserving of health care,” said Jackson, explaining that waiting for the “colored ambulance” to arrive prevented her family from receiving immediate care at the site of the accident.
Although much of “The Wreck” discusses the trauma left in the wake of the accident, there are stories of resilience too.
Jackson recalls hearing stories from her grandmother, who was a force to be reckoned with when it came to protecting her children from discrimination, even during a time when this could have resulted in a threat on her life.
Jackson, who is now a mother to two children, wants them to understand the legacy of their family’s resilience even in the face of unspeakable hardship. However, she also wants them to understand that they deserve to be protected too.
“On one hand, I want them to take away something about that resilience,” Jackson said. “On the other hand, I want them to understand that their ancestors would not want them to have to be as resilient as they were.”
