has the line “I hear the archangels are rockin’ Jerusalem, I hear the archangels are ringin’ them bells.” Imagine, for a moment, that songwriter: living in the oppression of slavery, torn from Africa, separated from family, driven by the lash, worked from sunup to sundown, yet able to imagine a rockin’ Jerusalem. In the pain of upheaval, there is the unremitting effort of the oppressed to shake off the agony of unequal treatment. It is that effort that calls us, tells us not to be afraid of the truth, but to join the movement toward a more equitable future.
One hundred years ago, the distinguished African American scholar Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that the problem the twentieth century needed to solve was the problem of the color line. It took sixty more years for the United States to engage wholeheartedly in the battle for civil rights. Yet, as we have faced the truth of the color line, we have acted, reacted, thought, and felt differently. We are a better nation for it.
I venture to propose that displacement is the problem the twenty-first century must solve. Africans and aborigines, rural peasants and city dwellers have been shunted from one place to another, as progress has demanded, “Land here!” or “People there!” In cutting the roots of so many people, we have destroyed language, culture, dietary traditions, and social bonds. We have lined the oceans with bones, and filled the garbage dumps with bricks.
What are we to do?
I have seen people in many towns and cities working to reconnect after root shock. Whether it was building a labyrinth, or holding a flea market, they were gathering together as neighbors to re-form the web of relationships. Within such a moment, people can recover and prosper. This highly respected type of healing, which is called “milieu therapy” by psychiatrists, works through the creation of healing places. For an environment to lift the spirit, attention must be focused on opportunities for relatedness. A psychiatric team might accomplish this by setting up a hospitable dayroom, or by having a meeting in which all the patients are encouraged to participate. The tools are many, and the intervention is powerful.
Fig. 0.1. Carlos F. Peterson. “At Freedom Corner.” This drawing represents the slow collapse of Carlos Peterson’s community in the aftermath of urban renewal. It depicts the Church of St. Benedict the Moor, with the statue of the saint soaring above the sanctuary. Pittsburgh civil rights marches start at this corner, hence the name, Freedom Corner. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.
But milieu therapy is not an intervention that need be administered by licensed health care practitioners. In the psychiatric hospital, any member of the unit—staff or patient alike—can promote the common good. Similarly, each and every one of us has the power to improve the places we hold in common, whether we are concerned with the neighborhood, city, nation, or planet. A man in Berkeley, California, decided to stand by the road and wave at passersby. His death was mourned by the thousands of people who got a daily dose of friendliness from his white-gloved hand. We are each that man.
This book, then, tells a painful story, but it also offers hope. We have a century ahead of us: we have a treatment for root shock; we have the possibility of preventing further damage by nurturing the world’s neighborhoods instead of destroying them; we who care about community are many.
I present here the words of the people who lived upheaval: the uprooted, the planners, the advocates, and the historians. Read their words with care for them and for yourself. Read their words not as single individuals living through a bad time, but as a multitude all sharing their morsel of the same bad time. Read in that manner and I believe that you will get the true nature of root shock. Read in that manner, and I believe you will be able to embrace the truth, not as a fearful thing, but as a call to join the struggle for a better tomorrow.
Every once in a while, in a particular location and at a particular time, people spin the wheel of routine, and they make magic. One such location was Ebbets Field in the heart of Brooklyn, where, through World War I, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, and the postwar struggles for equality in America, hardworking people enjoyed baseball. That small, unpredictable, and intimate ballpark was a gallery for characters to strut their stuff, and the characters in the stands took as much advantage of the opportunity as did the characters on the field. It was there that Jackie Robinson broke the color bar in Major League Baseball, and there that “Shorty’s Sym-Phony Band” tortured the opposition. Words like “raucous” and “zany” are invoked to help those of us who were never present imagine the intensity and the uniqueness of what went on.1
In 1957, Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, moved them to Los Angeles. The horror of that act is undiminished in the voices of fans. “I felt like a jilted lover,” recalls a sixty-year-old physician of the catastrophe that darkened his young life. Forty-six years after the Dodgers played their last game there, it remains important to people to tell the story of Ebbets Field, and in particular, to try to take us into its magic. This is the real essence of “nostalgia,” an emotion that is in one second bitter, and in another sweet, as the rememberer vacillates between the joy of what was and the grief of the loss. Enduring sorrow and untempered anger are hallmarks of the stories related by fans of the Brooklyn Dodgers. “I never rooted for them again,” says my doctor friend, and he is not alone in the implacable anger that still seems the only reasonable response to that kind of pain.
Three years after the Dodgers left, Ebbets Field was destroyed, and apartment buildings were erected on the site. People have to get the address and specific directions to find the small plaque that is all that remains of the cathedral of baseball which once stood there. And so the team is gone, the fans dispersed, the stadium demolished. Of deeper importance for people who had lots of work and not much hope, a place of magic was ripped from their daily lives, leaving them dull and gray. The loss of Ebbets Field was a tragedy that could not be repaired: it changed Brooklyn forever.
But how could the loss of a baseball stadium undermine what would be the fourth-largest city of the United States (were Brooklyn independent of the rest of New York City)?
The answer to this conundrum lies in understanding that places—buildings, neighborhoods, cities, nations—are not simply bricks and mortar that provide us shelter. Because we dance in a ballroom, have a parade in a street, make love in a bedroom, and prepare a feast in a kitchen, each of these places becomes imbued with sounds, smells, noises, and feelings of those moments and how we lived them. When we enter an old classroom, the smell of chalk on the boards can bring back a swarm of memories of classmates and lessons, boredom and dreams. Walking toward a favorite bar awakens expectations of friends and drinks, good times, good food. The breeze on a certain hillside reminds us of a class trip, while the sun in the garden brings thoughts of Dad. Try to find the shortcut you used to take to your best friend’s house and it is your feet that will carry you there. The cues from place dive under conscious thought and awaken our sinews and bones, where days of our lives have been recorded.
Buildings and neighborhoods and nations are insinuated into us by life; we are not, as we like to think, independent of them. We are more like Siamese twins, conjoined to the locations of our daily life, such that our emotions flow through places, just as blood flows through two interdependent people.2 We can, indeed, separate from our places, but it is an operation that is best done with care. When a part is ripped away, as happened in Brooklyn when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, root shock ensues.
What Is Root Shock?
Root
