By: Sondra Guttman

Memoirist and historian Stacey Patton on the abuses of the past and the present


Toni Morrison ends her Nobel Prize-winning novel Beloved with a refrain—“this is not a story to pass on”—that contains a troubling doubleness; the history she tells both can’t and must be told. Based on a true story of a slave who murdered her infant daughter to keep her from being returned to slavery, Beloved speaks to the inexplicable ways that violence has reverberated through generations of American families.

Historian and writer Stacey Patton finds a similar imperative in history. Her memoir, That Mean Old Yesterday, weaves her story as an adopted daughter of an abusive mother into the history of slave children on American plantations. “History is not simply a dead past,” she writes. “Things that happened hundreds of years ago, hundreds of days ago, hundreds of split seconds ago, influence right now. Slavery still lives through us. The past is immortal.”

Patton’s book goes far beyond the familiar observation that violent behavior is rooted in childhood: She argues that widely accepted African American childrearing practices normalize and condone violence against children, reproducing the psychological terror tactics used against slaves. “[In slavery] whipping was something that was designed to distort and destroy black bodies to bring about deference,” she writes. “And out of that legacy, my black mama tried to break, distort, and destroy my spirit to make me obedient.”

Patton, 30, spent her early years in foster care. Adopted at age 5 by a middle-class couple in Trenton, New Jersey, Patton endured years of abuse before running away; after a short stay in a shelter, she won a scholarship to the Lawrenceville School, a prestigious boarding school. She spent two years in Baltimore as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins, writing for the university-run Gazette and also for the Baltimore Sun. She finished her degree in journalism at NYU and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the history department at Rutgers University. In addition to teaching history at Montclair State University and writing her dissertation, Patton is working on an oral history of the African American and Caribbean communities in Montclair, New Jersey.




Q How did this book evolve from a straight memoir to this structure, where you alternate between telling your personal history and telling the history of slave children in the U.S.?

A My editor said to me, “You just need to figure out why you want to tell a story.” She asked me to describe my writing space. I told her the things that were on my wall—pictures of slaves and their scars. And then she asked me to run my fingers down the side of my face, and she said, “I want you to connect your scars to the scars of slaves and the people who came before you, because nobody lives and dies without being scarred in some way.”

So I divided my story into three parts: slavery, freedom, and redemption. At the same time, I was going to graduate school and I started discovering parallels between the types of games that slave children played and the games I played as an African American child growing up in the 1980s and ’90s.  For every little memory that I could think of from my childhood, I found something else in history that matched that. And I said, “Wow. I didn’t live on a slave plantation, didn’t grow up during Jim Crow, but I was still impacted by that history.”

Once I was able to identify the parallels between what I knew and the past, I had to make a larger argument. I said, “Look, within the African American community, we talk about this issue of whipping children the wrong way. We laugh about it; we preach about it; we call it a black thing. We laugh at white people who don’t beat their kids. We laugh at black people who don’t beat their kids. We give all these really bad justifications for this type of violence toward kids. And we ignore the social costs.”


Q What are the costs? Can you connect the dots for us?

A I think it starts in the home. Before these kids pick up a gun, before they sell drugs, before they join a gang or become corner boys, there’s something that happens in the home that’s teaching them to be violent.
You see a 2- or 3-year-old child on a bus, in the subway, in a grocery store, asking questions. And you see some young mother cursing at the child or hitting the child. Right away when you do that you’re teaching the child to solve conflict, to gain power and control, through violence. When they go to school and they’re in a classroom with a teacher who can’t hit them, can’t curse at them, who is not supposed to be yelling at them, do you think that child’s going to listen to that teacher? That child’s probably going to curse the teacher out and rebel. They don’t develop a healthy respect for authority that’s nonviolent. And as they get older, they get bigger, they get stronger; they get more defiant and more rebellious. And they take it to the street.


Q There’s a scene in your book where a classmate of yours at a Lutheran elementary school is beaten by his mother in front of the whole class, with the teacher and the principal looking on, because he called a white student a honky. It reminded me of Richard Wright’s 1937 essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” when he recounts how his mother beat him for fighting with white boys. One might think there would have been more progress, from the early 20th century to your own experiences in the 1980s.

A I think there’s been progress. Black people aren’t being strung up from trees anymore. But racism and discrimination still exist. I hear a lot of this from single black mothers who are raising black boys. They really fear for their boys’ lives. They’ll say, “If we don’t beat them, the police are going to do it.” And that’s a reality in a lot of urban communities. Black people aren’t imagining this stuff. And they understand that, even if they have a young black male who does what he’s supposed to do, he’s still a threat. Black parents still tell their kids today, “If you act out in school, if you act out in public, the consequences for you are much more harsh.” They have to prepare them, and the way they do it is with violence.

There is double terror here. You do have to socialize your kids and help them understand the realities of being black in this country, but when you beat one of these kids down, you’re undermining the child’s future and you’re undermining the future of the race. These kids are killing each other. They’re joining gangs. They’re not learning in school. You have to learn more creative ways to raise children and socialize them.


Q In your book you compare your life as an abused child to the life of a slave. In your view, how are children like slaves?

A There’s this feeling that you don’t own yourself, your body. And a lot of times within African American culture, children are taught that they have to stay in a child’s place, they don’t have an opinion, they can’t say what they don’t like and don’t want. This is the same way slave children were treated. We treat them as an extension of ourselves, as our property. Until they’re 18 years old we can do what we want to them. And we tell other people, “Don’t tell us how to raise our kids; don’t tell me what to do with my property, my child.” You hear people say, “I brought you into this world and I’ll take you out.”

That’s not to say that [these] parents don’t love their kids and don’t want the best for them. But we have to let them come into their own.


Q Should children have more legal rights?

A I think children should have the right to press charges against their parents if they assault them. I know that’s a very, very revolutionary idea. But I just think they should be treated as equal citizens.


Q So, by the same token, should juveniles be treated like adults by the criminal justice system when they commit acts of violence toward others?

A The reality is that when black children commit heinous crimes, they’re dealt with differently by the juvenile justice system, just as adults are. There are larger themes that have to be addressed—issues of poverty, race, and class—before we determine a universal standard for all kids who commit these types of crimes, because the standards are not the same. Black children have never occupied a space in that category of childhood innocence. I’ve read stories about a 5-year-old throwing a temper tantrum in the middle of class and being taken out in handcuffs by police officers. They’re not even dealt with the same way when they throw a temper tantrum, so what do we expect from the legal system when the kid does something really, really bad?


Q Short of overhauling the legal system, what can be done to address the problem of violent kids?

A I don’t think that giving them adult sentences is going to work. This has got to be a conversation that happens among people who care for kids, not just people who set the sentences.


Q What sort of responses have you received to the book? 

A I assumed that I’d get the largest response from black people. And I assumed that most of it would probably be negative. But the largest response has come from white readers, mostly white women — schoolteachers and social workers, the people who are dealing with the day-to-day realities of this type of dysfunctional behavior. They tell me stories of getting yelled at by some mother when they say, “Don’t hit the child; what you’re doing is wrong.” They fear they’ll make this situation worse for the child. Then they tell me about their frustrations at being outside the culture, and not understanding it. This book gives the history that’s attached to the stories to really help them understand something. And they say, “Thank you, because this is something I didn’t necessarily know how to articulate.” And now they can pass the book on to a parent.


Q  Did anyone suggest that you were doing something dangerous or counterproductive by talking openly about the role of violence in African American childrearing?

A I think it’s one of these books that make people uncomfortable. Especially black people, because black people don’t like dealing with the history of slavery. They don’t like dealing with Jim Crow. They don’t like the graphic ugliness of it.

So far, the people who are most uncomfortable tend to be black women. They find my depictions of black women—as domineering, aggressive, loud, and rough with their kids—to be stereotypical. But this was my reality. My view was that since black women tend to be more responsible for black families than black men, if you go by the statistics, then black women are responsible for transmitting these lessons of violence to the next generation. The cycle continues through these women. But I also talk about black women who were not like that.

I also expected to get a lot of backlash from churchfolk, because I implicate black ministers who get up there and say, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” They are aggressively — perhaps unconsciously — aiding and abetting in a system of devaluation of black children when they tell parents to beat their kids. And they use the Scripture in the wrong way. The rod is a walking stick. It’s about guidance and direction. Don’t pick it up and beat your kid over their head with it.

And I also blame the fact that a lot of people my age are reading street fiction. Ghetto literature. It’s like they want stuff that’s voyeuristic and sexual. But any sort of serious stuff that talks about what we need to fix in our communities is not going to help them escape. That’s what street fiction does. It helps people escape while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes and dysfunctions and pathologies and glorifying all of it. My book is not one of those things. I wanted to stimulate some dialogue, some conversation.


Q Have you succeeded?

A I have foster care agencies calling me, saying, “Can you come speak to our girls and our boys?” I’m doing an event in Newark soon, a candelight vigil to prevent child abuse. I’m talking to social workers, telling them, “When you’re doing your job right, you can save a life like mine.”

White sociologists and psychologists have written about “black family pathology” and “black dysfunction.” Those terms don’t get at the problem. We talk about statistics, like eightysomething percent of black people agree with whipping their children. Well, OK, tell us why. How as a culture do we understand this issue? What role does the historical transmission of trauma have to do with it? You don’t understand these issues without locating them in the history that spawned the behavior.

I thought I would write a book that would address these different things, not a book that would tell people how to raise their kids. I don’t have any kids, so I can’t speak on that. But as a historian, what I could do is not only locate myself within that history but also write something that would educate people about the history of this behavior—where it came from, and how we’ve passed it on from one generation to the next.

—Sondra Guttman teaches in the Liberal Studies program at Loyola College. Her research focuses on 20th century African American literature and culture. This is her first story for Urbanite. 



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