Ripples in the Psyche

Friday night and I’m doing my usual…. watching TV.  Watching TV isn’t anything like it used to be.  In my youth, watching TV was a choice between 3 channels on a very small, black and white screen, and of course, you didn’t have to pay for it. 

            Now days, you have way too many choices and have to pay for every single choice.  I’ve managed to narrow it down to a select few and have my favorites.  Last night I was roaming through my choices and decided upon PBS’s ‘Finding Your Roots’, which of course I am ‘streaming’.  I went to the first episode in Season 9 and clicked it on.  Then I sat there stunned.

            The one of two featured guests was Angela Davis.  Now there is a name I haven’t heard in ions.  There was a time, in the late ‘60s -‘70s when she was on the evening news every night.  Since then, maybe because I wasn’t paying attention, but since then, I don’t recall seeing her face or hearing her name….. EVER!  That name/face hasn’t even wandered across my consciousness for any reason since.  So, to see her on the show was a shock. 

            I remember her as a very radical Black Panther, Marxist, vocal, aggressive woman whose rhetoric, at the time, didn’t make a lot of sense to me.  I was of course a very young, naïve, protected white girl whose life experience was from a different universe from Angela’s.

            But what really struck me was her age.  If I hadn’t seen her on TV last night, and her name had come up for any reason, what I would have pulled from my brain would have been the image of Angela Davis from 1969…not what I saw last night.

            What I saw last night was a very distinguished, respectable, well-spoken  senior woman.  Aging does that to us, I hope.  Her comments, her observations regarding the findings of her ancestry were very typical of our black residents of the USA.  She comes from a past of slavery and of course, white male lineage.  The most remarkable of the discoveries is that she has direct lineage to a passenger on the Mayflower. 

Geeze, I wish there was footage, after she had time to process that discovery, of her commenting on the impact of that discovery on her politics, her sense of history, her sense of self.  Because for a woman with her political stance and as an extremely well-educated woman, that piece DNA must certainly cause ripples her in psyche.