This morning I stood in front of my altar and lit its candles, held a stub of palo santo to the sputtering flame, and even before I spoke I felt the tingling and buzzing in my shoulders and arms that let me know The Ancestors were already there waiting for me. As always, I circled the altar with palo santo three times: curling sacred smoke around the shells, stones, feathers, dimes, and pictures of my lost family. And I cried out to them. I called on my grandmother Esther who crossed over this very week last November. I called on Kirsten. I called on my Aunt Valerie and my cousin Devin, gone these many decades. I called on my great grandmothers and my great-great grandmothers, all the way back to my sixh great-grandmother, Lucia — born free, stolen from her homeland, enslaved, raped, and who died free — freed by her own sheer will.

I called on all of the powerful women in my line who came before Lucia, all the way back to the beginning. I called out to them and begged them to encircle me in return, to send me their strength, to let me borrow their hope, their courage, their bravery even when being hated, used every day … hunted. I asked them, in agony, how they got up every morning, how they kept their eyes on the horizon, above the misery, ugliness, and hatred forced upon their everyday existence.

I summoned Lucia, who ran away not once, but twice from her rapist enslaver (my sixth great-grandfather, to my eternal disgust) with her children who were the products of her torture and enslavement. I begged her to tell me how she woke up and got back on her feet the day after she was recaptured the first time.

How did she survive the horror and abuse and torture meted out to her as punishment for daring to make her own way out of no way? How did she get up every morning after that and care for her children? How did she control her face, her tone, to keep herself safe? How did she decide that this failure of her attempt to free herself was not the end? How did she survive enslavement? How did she keep waking up every day with the energy to even think about not only the hope of escaping her enslaver and being free, but to actively plan to create her own literal path to freedom?

Despite her fear, her day-to-day misery, and despite her understanding that failure a second time might be a death sentence, how did she keep on planning a way out of no way? When did she decide that possible death was preferable to living forever under the infected boot of her enslaver? Whose strength and confidence and fierce power did she draw on, surround herself with, emulate, and harness to keep her feet pointed toward freedom?

How did she stomach watching her rapist sit every week in a church that to this day bears a plaque with his name, honoring his Christianity and piety as he built those stone walls with the same hands that were unspeakably befouled with evil? How did she move every day through spaces where she was unsafe, treated like an animal, beaten and dehumanized, and every morning reassemble her determination to make a way out of no way? What ancestors did she wrap around her head and heart like a shield? How did any of my people survive slavery?

Maria Stewart, a Black abolitionist, said “Weary them with your importunities.” I have done that for so long, but now I myself am weary. Time is not linear, so perhaps my sorrow and anger and grief is the same that Lucia feels. Can Lucia hear me? Can she feel my overwhelming fatigue at the thought of getting up every single day to walk in the same ugly world through which she dragged herself? Am I an added weight around her soul, or am I the reason she got up and kept her mind stayed on freedom?

I bind my ancestors and their strength to me so their fight will not be in vain.

But I am weary.

Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton. She writes a monthly column.