FREE WILL ASTROLOGY SAVED US

Larkin & Betsey Lee have been hanging around for awhile now.

Nearly 10 years ago, I was checking in on one of my favorite weekly astrology columns in The Valley Advocate, a local independent newspaper in Western Massachusetts.

The column, called FREE WILL ASTROLOGY, still runs in many off-beat papers across the U.S., and its insights have always resonated with me.

I first discovered its prophetic wisdom long before the rise of Chani Nicholas and Co-Star, long before I knew I was a *Leo Sun / Capricorn Moon / Scorpio rising,* and long before I fully understood what those placements mean for my own journey as a human body careening through the stars.

My first discoveries of FREE WILL ASTROLOGY came in early high school, somewhere between the years of 2000 and 2003, when I would sit with my friends in the back room of Primo Pizzeria on Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts to see what the column’s author, Rob Brezsny, had to say about our complex, teen-aged lives.

FREE WILL ASTROLOGY horoscopes have a special knack for balancing the urgent and the playful. Brezsny skillfully draws our attention to the subtle currents that carry ancestral, psychic, and spiritual messages into our present realities.

The message I received on that day back in 2013 was hard to ignore:

ATTENTION PLEASE: This is your ancestors speaking. We've been trying to reach you through your dreams and fantasies, but you haven't responded. That's why we've commandeered this space. So listen up. We'll make it brief.

You're at a crossroads analogous to a dilemma that has baffled your biological line for six generations. We ask you now to master the turning point that none of us have ever figured out how to negotiate. Heal yourself and you heal all of us. We mean that literally. Start brainstorming, please.

When I received this message in 2013, I was living away from Western Mass for the first time in my life, having pulled up roots three years earlier to relocate to New York City for graduate school.

After finishing up a two-year Master’s program at New York University, I had just begun a PhD program in Women’s + Gender Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

I was living with a rotating cast of characters in an overcrowded apartment perched above a McDonald’s in Jersey City, learning to be a plant parent and working hard to create a life that looked very different from the one I grew up in.

My family, the root and the rock of my existence, was experiencing a series of ongoing crises. Upon my parents’ separation in 2009, my dad’s alcoholism was once again pulling him down, down, down into the depths of despair. For him, that looked like rotating periods of lock up in the county jail, chronic housing instability, and complicated health issues punctuated by long parties with the familiar demon called vodka.

Like always, I felt his desperation acutely in those days. I suffered alongside him, fearful and uncertain about his future. However, due to some years of intensive work in therapy and Al-Anon/Adult Children of Alcoholics and a life-sustaining connection to peer recovery communities in Franklin County, Massachusetts, I was beginning to learn that I couldn't really *do* anything to change the direction of his life or the heaviness of his spirit, regardless of how much it pressed upon me.

But like always, I still had so many ideas about how he “should” get his life back on track--ideas that I believed in deeply. As I wandered across 14th Street from the PATH train exit on 6th Avenue to my therapist's apartment in StuyTown, my dad and I had countless conversations about the role his own childhood trauma played in his current life circumstances and the many community-based supports I thought might help him (Hello, RECOVER Project!).

Sometimes, I hung up feeling sure we'd mastered a turning point. Other times, I hung up feeling angry and defeated and just cried about it hugging a throw pillow on my therapist's living room couch.

And yet, he soldiered on, drinking like there was no tomorrow, falling down, getting hurt, getting locked up, falling apart, getting his shit together, and in the process, generally wreaking havoc on the lives of the ones who loved him.

As a witness to the chaos, I was deeply affected and forever curious about the root of my dad’s pain and the potential solution that might change the course of events for him and I alike.

While reading Brezsny’s horoscope that day in 2013, I felt something indescribable shift and click into place. More than a realization, it was a kind of deep, old knowing that buzzed. Or a kind of rescue line tossed out from the cosmic soup Maybe it felt like something lost was found, or something was re-attached that I had forgotten broke loose. Maybe it felt like confirmation of something that had been tugging at me, unnamed yet persistent, since I was little.

It had to do with the sense that perhaps I wasn’t alone in the work of trying to “figure out” the root of my dad’s pain. Perhaps I wasn’t alone in the work of pulling up those roots and examining them for myself, in order to prevent their replication in my own body and soul.

Perhaps, this horoscope was saying to me, there was a deeper pattern to this pain, and maybe -- just maybe -- there was some invisible crew of involved entities who moved about in our shared genetic line -- a group of ancestors who were also deeply concerned about the lingering paths and roots of my dad’s pain and how to alleviate its pressure on all of our existences.

And, they could talk to me.

Up until that point, I had spent most of my life quietly listening for the unspoken undercurrents that flowed through family stories-- stories about the ways similar “demons” affected other people in my family line -- people lost too soon from the bottle, or from accidents that might have been something else, or from the many ways sadness and loneliness take people apart and away, even as they go on living. I saw him in those stories, and I wondered where I was in all of it, too.

In 2013, while reading that fateful Free Will Astrology horoscope, I began to brainstorm, as Rob Brezsny instructed me to do. Art and creativity were some of the main tools I was learning to work with in those days to access all the dirt that went beyond words.

So, I took out my colored pens and watercolors and went to work inscribing Brezsny’s message on a long, skinny, heavy piece of paper. I made the call to action concrete, and I pledged to listen to these voices who might be able to help me find the other worlds I already knew were possible.

I began to see myself as an active, living agent in the collective work of unpacking the familial baggage I carried forward into this plane of existence.

All those bottles rolling around in those old, dark New England closets are not my sole responsibility. It can't be my job to fix the pain, but I could begin to practice, minute by minute, a kind of deep listening--a kind of spiritual care--which might, if I stuck with it, lead to some kind of freedom for me, and for all of us.

When I discovered the story of Larkin Thorndike Lee at the end of last year, it took a few weeks for me to realize that I needed to calculate the generations between us -- to figure out where we are in relation to each other and in relation to the greater imperative presented to me by Rob Brezsny in 2013-- to “master the turning point,” so to speak -- which I interpret as the cultivation of intense self-love and self-trust.

So, I opened up the Ancestry.com family tree I’d made and counted backwards.

From Larkin & Betsey came:

1) Samuel & Lucy, who begot

2) Jeremiah & Mary, who made possible

3) Charles & Mary, who brought us

4) Harvey & Ellen, who delivered us

5) Charles & Sylvia, who brought forth

6) Leonard and Nancy, who made

7) Charles and Cynthia, who made me.

The math is shaky, but it's close enough for me. I am here for it, and I am here for them.

These people are my co-conspirators -- the “we” coming through in the voice of Brezsny’s horoscope.

We are here for each other.

Unpacking ancestral baggage can be a slow, tedious, grief-filled process. It involves making our way through tangled webs woven over the course of centuries -- nearly two in this case.

It involves confronting hoarded shame and fear, and the willingness to look deeper. It involves witnessing and observing the legacies that are held in objects and artifacts and memories.

A lost mummy. A model ship. A bottle. A silver coin. A bed pan.

Unpacking ancestral baggage also demands we look squarely at the harms we have perpetrated alongside those we have experienced.

History, as philosopher Michel Foucault reminds us, is for cutting. We use it to make new senses of the present. And there is much to be cut open and cut away in this story.

A merchant's ship coffers, overflowing with raw materials -- wealth generated from stolen human bodies, and stolen spices, and stolen stories. Our whiteness, protected and insured. Our citizenship and belonging, refracted against the deep blue grave of the Atlantic ocean.

Sinning. Trying. Failing. Falling.

In 2013, I barely had language to talk about what these co-conspirators wanted me to do, never mind what that work would look and feel like. Today, I can see the work so much more clearly. I trust it, and I trust them.

So here we are in October 2020, amidst the pandemic and the looming election and the fear and the sadness and the uncertainty of everything.

And here I am, the queer, non-binary recipient of this line of sad seamen and their offspring.

What is my work? My vision is clear and cutting. Heal myself and I heal all of you.

Could it be that simple? Could it be more harrowing?

***

Join me next week for a post on what it means to ALCHEMIZE TRAUMA for ourselves & our ANCESTORS. We’ll talk about middle school ass sweat & closing toxic circuits & the time-traveling potential of anxiety & as always, more will be revealed <3 <3 <3

THE STORY THAT STARTED IT ALL

Back in December 2019, when we all lived in a world unbelievably unconcerned with life under COVID-19 & I still lived on the Caribbean coast of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, I tuned in to the final session of a Wheel of the Year course offered by a witch I really respect.

The last class focused on cultivating long-term rituals & practices for transformation, and the witch talked about using online genealogy tools like Ancestry.com to seek out & cultivate missing links to Ancestors & Elders who most certainly play a role in shaping our inner selves & our greater purposes as we spin around the sun year in and year out.

I grew up listening to my dad’s frequent reminders of where he came from-- Born in SALEM! The city of WITCHES! With the DEVIL inside of him!

Family lore passed around by the enthusiastic storytellers that raised me made it easy to imagine that there might be some curious characters lurking in the higher-up branches of my tree.

The witch’s suggestion called to me.

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((A caveat: Both the witch & I agree that there are some major issues with the mainstream genealogy industrial complex represented by for-profit family history research sites like Ancestry.com or data-harvesting DNA services from biotech companies like 23andMe. They are what Audre Lorde might call “the master’s tools” -- that which works to keep the foundational violences of white supremacy & patriarchy in place. Follow my post next week for a deep-dive into the personal & political stakes of doing genealogy & ancestral work as a white person in the 21st century))

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From what I’d heard from the Whitmore side of my family (my dad’s dad’s side), our roots stretched deep into the landscape of colonized New England.

First, we were settlers: shipbuilders and revolutionaries from Salem and Newburyport and other coastal Massachusetts towns whose indigenous names were obliterated alongside so much more in the originary theft of that land.

Later, firmly settled, we were locals -- film projectionists and Vaudeville actors and furniture salesmen and professional trumpet players. Alcoholics, many of us.

On the Santos side of my dad’s family (my dad’s mom’s side), we were early-20th century immigrants--factory workers and carpenters and fisherman from the Azores, an autonomous archipelagic region of Portugal made up of nine islands formed when volcanic rock busted through the floor of the North Atlantic about 8 million years ago.

The lives and textures of these grandmothers & grandfathers were mostly lost to me when my dad lost his first-generation mother to breast cancer when he was a young kid.

She was 28 and he was 7.

Had I known her, I might have called her Avó, but she was mostly a mystery to me growing up, as were her family members and the stories they might have shared.

However, a hint about her father’s magic -- his ability to cure one’s illness by taking a hair from the sick person’s head into another room and doing his thing with it -- surely made me wonder if there might be some bruxaria in my line.

On my mother’s side, both parents were children of Polish immigrants. First generation factory workers and truck drivers and farmers, some of whom gained enough capital & connection to purchase land in Western Massachusetts and seed that land with new potential, which grew up each passing season as asparagus and tobacco and cucumbers.

Alcoholics, too. Some of us.

It would not necessarily be a light set of bags to unpack, but something told me that the records organized and held behind the Ancestry.com paywall might reveal something I wouldn't or couldn’t anticipate (lucky as I am to have records to access).

So, I signed up for a free trial offer at Ancestry.com committed to meeting my Ancestors. I went about the process intuitively--seeking and following connections to names, dates of birth, numbers, geographic locations, or other biographical details that rang a bell or seemed interesting or strange or somehow compelling. I followed my nose, which, as a life-long researcher and writer, is pretty much what I do best.

Within the first 24 hours of scrolling through the app’s suggested “Hints,” I came across a name that piqued my curiosity: LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE. I’m still not sure what about this specific name called to me, other than its lyrical ring and the strangeness of meeting a Larkin born in the 18th century.

I put his name into the Google machine and quickly found a match embedded within the website of a historical research project belonging to the archivist SJ Wolfe at the American Antiquarian Society. (Side note: when I went to publish this blog post, I discovered that the original site I looked at in December was no longer active. You can still see some of Wolfe’s related work here). The project seemed to be about “Mummy Mania,” or accounts of Egyptian mummies in 19th-century America.

Huh?

LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE, an empty name and a placeholder in history just a few seconds before, began to materialize before my eyes. A vessel for a story.

A few more keystrokes across Ancestry.com and Google and some of the other genealogy tools I had just been learning to use to track public records quickly returned more juicy Larkin bits.

He was, it seemed, a sea captain and a merchant. He was born in Beverly, Massachusetts in the early fall of 1780. A Virgo. He mastered vessels to Caribbean and Mediterranean ports. He was born 5 years into the Revolutionary War to a father, Seward Lee, who was also a ship captain and who fought for independence in the Beverly regiment, survived, and then died of yellow fever in the West Indies a few years later.

And, perhaps most shocking, according to the archival research of American Antiquarian librarian SJ Wolfe--LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE was a mummy importer.

On one of Larkin’s merchant voyages to Mediterranean port cities, he purchased an Egyptian mummy in Leghorn, Italy (now called Livorno) and imported it into New York City in August of 1824.

He then arranged for the mummy’s public unwrapping by two surgeons in New York City in December of that year. Wolfe’s research shows that Larkin’s was the first public mummy unwrapping in the U.S. at the time.

Less than a year after the event, LARKIN THORNDIKE LEE perished at age 44 on the exact same day his father had died 20 years before--August 2. The recorded cause and location of death? “Of anxiety, off the coast of Africa.”

What?!

As I knitted these details together, my curious mind immediately wanted to know everything.

What was this Ancestor doing “off the coast of Africa” in 1825?

What the hell did “anxiety” mean back then & how did one die from it? exactly

Why did Larkin's date of death (August 2) match his father’s date of death exactly 20 years earlier?

Why did father & son both die on sea voyages to places of intense colonial violence?

Who were his family & what did they think?

Was he an alcoholic? Was he a slaver? Was he an asshole or a good guy?

What residue did his deeds leave?

I could tell right away that this story would be a loaded one and that I needed to know it and write it in all its complex glory.

So, I began to write for 30 minutes every day. No judgement, no undo. Just flow.

I started by trying to conjure the environment, the politics, and the family ties that bound up this emerging cast of people: Salem and Beverly harbors. The ships. The trade routes. The politics of the early Republic. The weight of a generation born into Revolution and into a nascent nation-state built on paradox, contradiction and uncertainty. The advent of American capitalism & the merchants who drove its growth.

These are the things I could latch on to. My experience as a historical researcher in the areas of race, gender, and sexuality has trained me to do this work -- to seek out the deep, deep historical context of what appears to be an uncomplicated given, to notice where bits of the story are missing or handled without care and to attend directly there; to deploy research skills and imagination together to fill or at least take note of the holes and silences in archives, institutional histories, and even family lore by the ongoing work of erasure.

What I couldn’t quite latch on to so easily was the feeling element of this cast of characters:

What made them tick and talk and try new things in the environments they moved through?

What made them pull up anchor and leave behind a wife and 4 children and sail to Italy and purchase a mummy and then defile it in public?

Their dreams and fears and desires still feel far away, but the shape of it all continues to reveal itself as I commit to the work.

A few weeks into the process, I met someone I wasn’t expecting to meet. More archival research brought me to Larkin’s wife--Betsey Lovett Lee, a figure just as fascinating as the captain himself. After her husband’s untimely death at age 44 (off the coast of Africa, of Anxiety), Betsey lived another 50 years as a widowed woman.

The records tell us that she won a case she brought to the Massachusetts Supreme Court, which awarded her money for one of her husband’s ships that was captured by the French in the War of 1812.

Betsey shares a birthday with my dad -- August 17. They are only 169 years apart.

She was born at the tail end of the Revolutionary War and lived through the War of 1812 and the Civil War, before finally passing in Beverly in 1870. She is a grandmother with stories to tell me.

Today, I know that time isn’t linear & that I am a vessel for divine creative inspiration.

Today I know that my encounters with Larkin & Betsey are not a coincidence & that doing history with imagination is just another way of knowing.

Today I know that when I visited Larkin’s papers in an archive this past month he became less paper, more flesh.

I know that purchasing & unwrapping a mummy that was likely exhumed & stolen by French soldiers during Napoleon's occupation of Egypt could not have many positive effects. I know those effects are carried in me still.

I know that curse is just another word for the lingering energy of harm & that the salty air that Larkin breathed is the salty water that poured from my own dad’s eyes.

Today, I know that I am the vessel.

I know that the sea is deep and that it never forgets and that Larkin is down there waiting for me, alongside so many others who were not Masters or Merchants when they crossed.

So, let’s pull up the anchor & dive the fuck in.

Come with me on this journey & I’ll share what I discover & what I desire to discover.

I’ll tell you what’s working in my research process & what it means to this story.

I’ll talk about the ancestral & political & emotional dimensions of history & why those things matter in 2020.

We can map this story together & if we're lucky, we can find some other futures in the process.

MORE WILL BE REVEALED!

XO