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 About the Editors

Monica McGoldrick, LCSW, PhD (h.c.), is Director of the Multicultural Fam-

ily Institute in Highland Park, New Jersey, and Adjunct Associate Profes-
sor of Clinical Psychiatry at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Her videos on clinical work with diverse families are among the most widely
respected in the field. Her numerous books include Ethnicity and Family
Therapy, Third Edition. Ms. McGoldrick is a recipient of the Distinguished
Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice Award from the Ameri-
can Family Therapy Academy. An internationally known author, she has lec-
tured around the world on such topics as culture, class, gender, the family life
cycle, and loss.

Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, is Professor of Family Therapy at Drexel University

in Philadelphia and Director of the Eikenberg Institute for Relationships in
New York City. He is also President and Founder of the Eikenberg Academy
for Social Justice. Dr. Hardy is a recipient of honors including the Distin-
guished Contribution to Marriage and Family Counseling Award from the
International Association for Marriage and Family Counselors and the Dis-
tinguished Contribution to Social Justice Award from the American Family
Therapy Academy. He maintains a private practice in New York City special-
izing in family therapy.

vi
 Contributors

N. Norma Akamatsu, MSW, private practice, Northampton, Massachusetts

Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora, PhD, School of Education, Long Island University,
Brooklyn, New York
Deidre Ashton, MSSW, private practice; The Therapy Center of Philadelphia;
The Race Institute for K–12 Educators; and Widener University,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Christiana I. Awosan, MFT, PhD, Department of Professional Psychology
and Family Therapy, Seton Hall University, South Orange, New Jersey
Saliha Bava, LMFT, PhD, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences,
Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York; Taos Institute, Chagrin Falls, Ohio;
Houston Galveston Institute, Houston, Texas
Joanne Bowen, PhD, Anthropology Department, The College of William and Mary,
Williamsburg, Virginia
Nollaig Byrne, MD, Department of Child and Family Psychiatry,
Mater Misericordia Hospital, Dublin, Ireland
Fernando Colón-López, PhD, Ann Arbor Center for the Family,
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Donna Dallal-Ferne, LMFT, private practice, Syracuse, New York
Sarita Kaya Davis, PhD, MSW, Department of African American Studies,
Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia
Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio, LMFT, SPHR, GreenGate Leadership, LLC,
Palmer, Massachusetts

vii
viii Contributors

Ken Epstein, PhD, Department of Psychiatry, University of California,

San Francisco, and Department of Public Health, San Francisco, California
Celia Jaes Falicov, PhD, Department of Family Medicine and Public Health,
University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California
Linda Stone Fish, PhD, Department of Marriage and Family Therapy, Falk College,
Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York
John D. Folwarski, MSW, Raritan Bay Mental Health Center,
Perth Amboy, New Jersey
Nydia Garcia Preto, LCSW, Multicultural Family Institute,
Highland Park, New Jersey
Robert-Jay Green, PhD, Rockway Institute, California School
of Professional Psychology, San Francisco, California
MaryAnna Domokos-Cheng Ham, EdD, LCP, LMFT, College of Education
and Human Development, University of Massachusetts Boston,
Boston, Massachusetts
Kenneth V. Hardy, PhD, Eikenberg Institute for Relationships, New York,
New York; Department of Family Therapy, Drexel University,
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Ana M. Hernandez, PhD, LMFT, Rising Ground, Inc., Yonkers, New York;
Seton Hall University, East Orange, New Jersey
Paulette Moore Hines, PhD, private practice, training, and consultation;
Center for Healthy Schools, Families, and Communities, Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey; Department of Psychiatry,
Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey
Evan Imber-Black, PhD, Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, New York; Center for Families
and Health, Ackerman Institute for the Family, New York, New York
Christian Jordal, PhD, LMFT, CST, Department of Counseling and Family Therapy,
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hugo Kamya, PhD, School of Social Work, Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
Jodie Kliman, PhD, Clinical Psychology Department, William James College,
Newton, Massachusetts; Boston Institute for Culturally Affirming Practices,
Boston, Massachusetts
Imelda Colgan McCarthy, MSW, PhD, private practice, Dublin, Ireland
Monica McGoldrick, LCSW, PhD (h.c.), Multicultural Family Institute,
Highland Park, New Jersey; Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School,
Piscataway, New Jersey
Peggy McIntosh, PhD, Wellesley College Centers for Research on Women,
Wellesley, Massachusetts
Marsha Pravder Mirkin, PhD, School of Social Sciences, Humanities,
and Education, Lasell College, Newton, Massachusetts
 Contributors ix

Matthew R. Mock, PhD, Counseling Psychology Program, John F. Kennedy

University, San Jose, California; private practice, Berkeley, California
Elijah C. Nealy, PhD, MDiv, LCSW, Department of Social Work and Equitable
Community Practice, University of St. Joseph, West Hartford, Connecticut
Elaine Pinderhughes, MSW, Boston College School of Social Work,
Boston, Massachusetts
Salome Raheim, PhD, ACSW, School of Social Welfare, State University
of New York at Albany, Albany, New York
Rockey Robbins, PhD, Department of Educational Psychology,
University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma
Sharla Robbins, PhD, private practice, Norman, Oklahoma
Robert Shelby, LMFT, Men’s Center for Counseling and Psychotherapy,
Berkeley, California
Tazuko Shibusawa, PhD, LCSW, Silver School of Social Work, New York University,
New York, New York
Walter Howard Smith, Jr., PhD, Department of Human Services, Allegheny County,
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
David Trimble, PhD, Center for Multicultural Training in Psychology, Department
of Psychiatry, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, Massachusetts
Froma Walsh, MSW, PhD, Chicago Center for Family Health;
and School of Social Service Administration and Department of Psychiatry,
Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Marlene F. Watson, PhD, Department of Counseling and Family Therapy,
Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Hinda Winawer, MSW, LCSW, private practice; Princeton Family Institute,
Princeton, New Jersey; The Center for Family, Community, and Social Justice,
Princeton, New Jersey; Faculty Emerita, Ackerman Institute for the Family,
New York, New York
 Preface

The goal of this book is to transform the focus of our work beyond the inte-
rior of the family, offering an opportunity and invitation for our readers to
see how our clients’ lives are constrained by larger societal structures and to
develop new ways of working based on a more contextual understanding of
ourselves, our society, our history, and our clients’ lives.
We have long struggled to envision systemic theory and practice in ways
that transform our field to see our clients and ourselves more clearly and thus
more complexly and to provide services that are more trauma-informed and
healing. We have espoused approaches that take account of our connection to
each other and to all that has gone before and all that will come in the future.
Striving to build a sense of belonging for all who seek our help seems the only
way to pursue our work. Our original companion volume, Ethnicity and Fam-
ily Therapy, began with the lens of ethnicity in its exploration of culture; Re-
Visioning Family Therapy, Third Edition: Addressing Diversity in Clinical
Practice explores the intersections of multiple cultural perspectives (ethnicity,
social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion), attempting to view
families and family therapy from more inclusive cultural perspectives.
The aim of this book has been to provide in one relatively short, accessible
volume a broad range of brief contributions by many of those who have been
working to “re-vision” the family therapy field through a cultural lens. The
chapters in this volume are reflective of the authors’ efforts to make a truly
paradigmatic shift toward systemic thinking and practice, which we believe
is sorely needed in our field and in our world. We have worked assiduously to
include chapters that expand our definition of knowledge from an exclusive
reliance on evidence-based, scientifically tested practice to one that validates
also the “evidence” of subjective knowledge, creating space for the inclusion
of personal stories of suffering, subjugation, and strife born out of experiences

x
 Preface xi

with oppression, which honor a different kind of knowledge. There is great

wisdom in learning from the experiences of those relegated to the margins of
our society. This book includes many personal stories, a few of them known
over the years to some of us, but here available for a wider audience, which
help us pay attention to those who have been hidden from history. Creating a
space for personal stories and experiences enriches our work as therapists and
is central to our view of re-visioning family therapy. We have also included
chapters that expand the systemic perspective to larger systems in terms of
both conceptualization and intervention. We hope that these perspectives will
inspire future therapists to think as broadly as possible about the contextual
aspects of our work and our lives.
This new edition is appearing at a time when our world seems fraught
with polarities, discontinuities, and regression in the development of social
justice. Our search continues to strive toward finding ways to contain oppo-
sites, contradictions, and ambiguities—not oversimplifying the issues and at
the same time not obfuscating the prejudices and oppression that are increas-
ingly defining and destroying our world and us.
Each author was given frustratingly little space and asked to present a
few key ideas of clinical and theoretical relevance in a reader-friendly format
to contextualize the oppressions that are their work’s focus and to suggest
re-visions for our clinical work. We applaud the authors for their courage to
contend with these difficult issues and rejoice that they are our collaborators,
going through life with us, knowing we are not yet clear about how these
power dimensions operate on us, but striving with each other’s help to see the
road more clearly.
Re-Visioning Family Therapy is intended to be exciting and suggestive
rather than comprehensive in its articulation of where we need to go in our
work. Most of the material is intentionally personal. We want to make clear
how hidden aspects of our history have influenced our need to change the future.
Our ideas have evolved from our frustrations with the traditional boundaries of
clinical practice and our wish to expand our vision to see more clearly where we
must go to create a better world for everyone. This book has been an opportu-
nity to push our own and each other’s boundaries in hopes of helping to trans-
form clinical practice toward more contextual and systemic work with clients.
We trust readers will give us the benefit of the doubt, realizing that many of
these ideas are still in progress, awaiting the leavening of future conversations
to better see the issues. We know we have inadvertently left out or marginalized
some in this book and will continue to push ourselves to learn from our “sins of
omission” in the future. We hope, as we have expressed before, that this edition
will soon be out of date again, as the ideas expressed here become commonplace
and accepted practice. When this re-visioning occurs, we hope we will be in
the fortunate position of trying once again to reformulate the ideas to accom-
modate our evolving understanding and insights about change and healing and
that others will follow us to expand this endeavor. We hope this book will pro-
vide a small window into new possibilities.
xii Preface

PART I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

Like the other institutions of our society, family therapy has been structured
in ways to support the dominant value system. And, again like the other insti-
tutions of our society, our field has evolved many conceptualizations and
practices that keep invisible certain hidden organizing principles of our lives,
including social class, race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. This book
aims to unpack some of these issues in hopes that they become easier to hold
in our minds and in our hearts so that we can better go about our work.
The chapters on theoretical perspectives, and, indeed, the book as a
whole, evolved out of the work many are doing to uncover those dimensions
of “home” and “family” that have been kept hidden and to transform our
definitions of home and family so that all families may feel safe and included.
These chapters offer a framework for the possibilities of re-visioning family
therapy toward a more contextual perspective.
In Chapter 1, we have tried to locate this re-visioning in the history of
the family therapy field in general. Following the path established by Peggy
McIntosh in the field of education, we try to contextualize the history and
possible future of our field. McIntosh’s framework has provided a practical
tool for assessing where our field is, as well as where we need to get to in this
re-visioning process. We have expanded our overview on issues of social class,
spirituality and religion, poverty, gender, and power, with new chapters by
Walsh, Hardy, and Ashton and Jordal to expand therapists’ awareness of the
centrality of these issues.
Froma Walsh and I (KVH), in our respective chapters (Chapters 3 and 4),
provide provocative discussions of these most poignant, volatile, and sensitive
issues that are integral to the process of re-visioning related to social class.
In Chapter 3, Walsh thoughtfully lays out the dimensions of class, one of the
essential and, until now, one of the most invisible elements of re-visioning
family therapy from a cultural perspective. It goes unacknowledged that many
groups in society are not represented in our institutions and do not have the
same entitlements to participate even in our world of family therapy. It goes
unsaid that where you come from does matter; that you cannot shed your past,
become whatever you want, or move up in class just through hard work and
desire. Walsh addresses directly the therapeutic implications of class relations
and invites us as therapists to consider the ways in which our work is shaped
by the nuances of class. In Chapter 4, I (KVH) discuss poverty as sociocul-
tural trauma, illustrating how the limitation of resources organizes the lives
of those in need, and the psychological fallout of the assaults of poverty on
dignity, the learned voicelessness, shame, stigma, secrecy, and silence that fol-
low. This chapter offers suggestions on ways of transforming this fallout and
empowering clients through our acknowledgment, countering the devaluation
that typically accompanies poverty and encouraging clients to lean in toward
transformative possibilities of their survivorship and their voices.
Deidre Ashton and Christian Jordal (Chapter 2) take on some of the
aspects of gender and gender nonconformance as they play out in our own
 Preface xiii

lives and in the lives of our clients and the intersectionality of race and sexual
orientation, offering helpful insights into the hidden dimensions of power as
they affect our views of gender. They both remind and caution us that we have
outgrown the traditional binary constructions of gender that leave so many
clients, therapists, family members, and other loved ones sentenced to a life
sentence of invisibility.
Religion and spirituality also play a powerfully influential role in virtu-
ally all areas of family life. Yet having a critical discussion about religion is not
only difficult to do, but it is often considered inappropriate, sacrilegious, and
taboo. Although seldom acknowledged overtly, religion is a major organizing
principle in our society. Chapter 5 by Walsh is a firm but gentle reminder of
the role that religion and spirituality play in our everyday lives. Race, like
religion, is also an important factor that must be placed at the forefront of the
agenda for re-visioning family therapy. We believe religion is a salient vari-
able because it influences many of the more controversial issues that we, as
a society, seem to grapple with passionately on a daily basis. Family-related
issues such as same-gender marriages, abortion, masturbation, premarital
sex, mother employment, and child-rearing practices ignite strong feelings,
even seemingly irreconcilable acrimony, because they are all connected to reli-
gion. Former President Barack Obama was forced to claim and reclaim his
Christian identity amid numerous allegations that he was really both foreign
and a Muslim. In a society that exalts “freedom of religion,” whether he was
Muslim, Christian, or Sikh should not have mattered, but it did, because reli-
gion matters. By denying its significance, we give its hidden power even more
significance.

PART II. SOCIOCULTURAL TRAUMA AND HOMELESSNESS

The authors in this section have given voice to experiences that have also gen-
erally been marginalized in the main cultural stories of our society. In a sense,
this section is devoted to all of our respective journeys to find home—that is,
a place of belonging and acceptance of our multiple identities. In so doing, we
share our triumphs and our tribulations. The process of finding home involves
each of us, as a fundamental part of the existential search, identifying and
claiming disavowed parts of ourselves that we have to make peace with as
part of the journey.
In a world that is often divided into the haves and have nots, the valued
and devalued, finding a sense of home can be a relentless and often futile
endeavor. The chapters in this section highlight how home, homelessness,
and trauma are intricately interwoven. As we pulled together our ideas for
this book, issues of immigration dominated the national news and raised an
array of thorny clinical issues regarding family therapy with populations who
are increasingly non–U.S. born, non–English speaking, non-white,1 and from
countries often considered “Third World” or whose citizenry is believed to
have little to offer this country. We have also been ever more conscious of the
xiv Preface

sense of anomie of those pushed to the margins of our society because of race,
gender, sexual orientation, religion, poverty, disability, and other disadvan-
tages. I (MM) have told aspects of my own story (Chapter 6), trying to sepa-
rate out some of the threads of privilege from those of oppression in my jour-
ney trying to dissect the complexities of racial and class privilege in relation
to a history of gender and ethnic oppression. This section includes a rich and
thoughtful chapter (Chapter 7) by Celia Jaes Falicov on issues of culture and
cultural identity in relation to migration and the complexities of transnational
families, including issues of loss, adaptation, and network reconstruction. The
ideas discussed by Falicov will be enormously helpful to all who work with
immigrant families, both documented and nondocumented.
Even though Obama made concerted efforts to avoid mentioning race,
it was still an integral part of our nation’s discourse and reality, sometimes
overtly but mostly by innuendo and the use of code words. Race is a prime
definer of all interactions in our society, with sharp differences that often exist
between the racially based perceptions of whites and African Americans. In
Chapter 9, I (KVH) remind us that race and other manifestations of oppres-
sion are always, at every moment, influencing our perceptions and ultimately
our relationships, both in and outside of the family.
In Chapter 8, Paulette Moore Hines discusses hope as a critical tool of
assessment and intervention. She examines issues of transcendence, spiritual-
ity, hope, and resilience, which have long been eschewed in our theory and
practice. For thousands of years such ideas have been the primary resources
for people in emotional distress. It is high time we reintegrate this dimension
into our conceptual formulations. The belief in something beyond our indi-
viduality and our personal self-interest is our only hope to have a future. We
trust that in the future this area will begin to receive the attention it deserves,
as more therapy incorporates transcendent ideas into our clinical assessment
of families under stress and in our approaches to healing.

PART III. RACIAL IDENTITY

Typically, discussions of culture and racism focus on the marginalized group as

the “other.” Whiteness, and the multitudinous ways in which it shapes interac-
tions, both inside and outside of families, almost always remains invisible. Re-
visioning our field requires that we explore most carefully and explicitly those
who see themselves as the norm and those who have established the norms.
The chapters included in this section are attempts to deconstruct race both for
those who have been historically subjugated and for the dominant group.
Rockey and Sharla Robbins’s discussion of Native American families and
culture is an eye-opening perspective on trauma, healing, and the meaning of
belonging and home. Their chapter (Chapter 10) reminds us how easy it is to “for-
get” and define people by their DSM numbers rather than by whom they belong
to. Instead, we should all be dedicated to remembering, and “re-membering,”
 Preface xv

shattered communities and bearing witness. Their illustrations offer invaluable

suggestions on possibilities for working with Native American families.
Peggy McIntosh’s classic challenge to our “invisible knapsack of white
privilege” is part of her crucial series of articles that have helped us to begin
re-visioning race as well as gender in the field of education. In Chapter 15,
McIntosh takes the lofty, virtually abstract concept of white privilege and
makes its impact visible through the most mundane everyday experiences.
Ken Dolan-Del Vecchio (Chapter 16) offers a critique of white male domi-
nance and considers what must change so that white men can be collaborative
partners with everyone else in families and communities in the 21st century.
In Chapter 17, Jodie Kliman, Hinda Winawer, and David Trimble examine
“the inevitable whiteness of being (white)” in family therapy training. These
authors make the pervasive invisibility of whiteness visible.
Nydia Garcia Preto, in Chapter 11, explores her own and her family’s
complex and multiple identities as they evolved over time and through the life
cycle. She illustrates, with her broad and inclusive perspective, a profound
openness to the complexity of building bridges to hold the sense of belonging
to what came before and building connections to what lies ahead of us, which
highlights a significant facet in the transformation of family therapy.
Marlene F. Watson (Chapter 14), Ana M. Hernandez (Chapter 13), and
MaryAnna Domokos-­ Cheng Ham (Chapter 12), each in her unique way,
discuss the powerful connections that exist between race and identity devel-
opment. Watson provides a gripping and heartfelt account of what it means
to grow up as an African American female in an oppressive society where
societal messages regarding race, class, and gender often collide. Ham offers
a critical and insightful examination of the life experiences of a multiracial
person searching for a sense of belonging. In a society that is obsessed with
binary notions of race, this chapter brings much-needed attention to the chal-
lenges of what it means to be a person of mixed-race heritage. Kiran Shahreen
Kaur Arora (Chapter 18) also asserts the importance of thinking about race
beyond the Black–white binary and how the experiences of those who identify
as Brown can be deemed not to belong.
The collective work and wisdom of the authors in this section remind us
how the toxic messages that emanate from racism can leave indelible scars on
the psyches and souls of people of color through the unconscious internaliza-
tion of debilitating negative racial messages.

PART IV. CULTURAL LEGACIES AND STORIES: THERAPISTS’ EXPERIENCES

Personal narratives are a major part of our attempt to shift our paradigm to
re-vision families and family therapy. From Murray Bowen’s first account of
his own family at a 1967 research meeting, which stunned the field by break-
ing the rules of academic and professional discourse, we have gradually been
stretching and transforming the boundaries of our dialogues to create more
xvi Preface

inclusive ways of thinking about our work. The individualistic models of “sci-
entific” discourse have proven inadequate to the realm of healing and therapy.
These linear models are of limited relevance in a world where our lives are
so profoundly interconnected. It is often through personal narratives that we
learn most about those aspects of our experience that do not fit into our theo-
retical and clinical models. These stories may be key to liberating us toward
new visions of our work.
Elaine Pinderhughes’s classic chapter (Chapter 19) describing her research
on her own family explores the silenced history of white exploitation and
internalized racism in her Black and white ancestors. Her story is a remark-
able unpacking of the multigenerational traumatic impact of racism on a fam-
ily. Fernando Colón-López’s narrative in Chapter 21 about his search for his
past and his identity in his lost mother’s story is a remarkable example of the
hidden oppressions of colonized groups and of the power of uncovering the
submerged cultural dimensions of one’s history. It is also a striking example of
the interface of racial and cultural oppression and mental illness.
John D. Folwarski’s personal recollection (Chapter 22) of a childhood in
a Polish orphanage is a profound reflection of the effects of Polish subordina-
tion in European history, as well as a story of the impact of immigrant cultural
disruption. Folwarski’s narrative is also an indirect testimonial to other salient
themes that are replete in many of the stories told in this volume: stories of
belonging and disconnection, stories of home and homelessness, and stories
of suffering and survival.
The other authors in this section—Linda Stone Fish, Donna Dallal-
Ferne, Saliha Bava, Robert Shelby, and Elijah C. Nealy—all share stories of
cultural legacies and of their recurring efforts to integrate the frayed threads
of their histories into their contemporary lives. Shelby’s pathway to finding
home (Chapter 20) required him to come to terms with the white privilege,
pathological shame and guilt, and the perversion of morality often associated
with whiteness. Acknowledging and claiming this ugly part of his past was
in many ways a necessary precursor to the modern-day clarity that he brings
to his antiracism work. His story, along with other authors’ accounts of what
it meant to grow up in a racist family, should provide inspiration to other
white and majority-group therapists regarding how the process of embracing
disavowed parts of our cultural legacies can liberate and motivate us to be
advocates for social justice.
Linda Stone Fish, a gifted teacher and therapist, provides an in-depth
look at how issues associated with her Jewish identity and that of a Palestinian
graduate student, Donna Dallal-Ferne, managed to creep into the sacred space
of the classroom and graduate education. Their chapter (Chapter 24) provides
a poignant discussion of the importance of being able to see the world through
the eyes of those we consider “other.”
Elijah Nealy, in Chapter 25, examines the complexity of identity transi-
tions and transformations across the life cycle with a provocatively insightful
and transformative discussion.
 Preface xvii

All of the chapters in Part IV center the cultural experiences and legacies
of therapists who challenge the dominant narrative that suggests that their
stories are insignificant. Through the telling of their personal stories and hon-
oring the ways in which they are embedded in cultural legacies, the authors
help to shift the core values of our field away from “objectivity” and “profes-
sional distance” to values that acknowledge the role and significance of the
self-of-the-therapist.

PART V. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

The chapters in this section focus on specific clinical issues for particular
cultural groups. They are meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive,
indicating the subtlety and complexity of our cases when considered through
a cultural filter. Each of the chapters in this section offers a re-visioning per-
spective by moving the subject under consideration “from margin to center,”
in bell hooks’s phrase. They use the group’s own frame of reference for assess-
ment and intervention, challenging our field’s dominant notions of clinical
practice. We believe the process of locating oneself and using one’s personal
story as a frame of reference for our clinical work is essential to the re-vision-
ing process.
In Chapter 26, Elijah C. Nealy examines the much-neglected area of les-
bian and gay family life and the need for therapists to understand the par-
ticular challenges facing those who live within a novel or marginalized family
configuration. Nealy invites the reader to see how critical it is for us as a field
and for society to rethink our traditional notions of family with questions
of who is included in such definitions and who remains invisible and mar-
ginalized. Robert-Jay Green, in Chapter 27 on gay and lesbian couples, also
provides a great deal of practical information that will be helpful for working
more effectively with lesbian and gay couples.
Chapter 28, by Hugo Kamya and Marsha Pravder Mirkin, addresses the
profound disruptions of migration when families belong to more than one cul-
ture, as most families in the United States do. They suggest some of the larger
implications of the complexity of biculturality, difference, and acculturation.
They can help all of us rethink the very nature of our identity. Instead of mea-
suring immigrants as “others,” we can use Kamya and Mirkin’s discussion to
re-vision our very notions of assessment and intervention.
We must also develop transformative intervention models based on a re-
visioning of families from a contextual perspective. Imelda Colgan McCarthy
and Nollaig Byrne have been developing their Fifth Province model for many
years. In Chapter 30, they illustrate their model and the creativity of their
thinking and work with a complex and tragic case example.
Tazuko Shibusawa’s chapter (Chapter 32), along with several others in
this section, encourage us to think more broadly about race as an integral
part of the re-visioning process. Her examination of biracial couples moves
xviii Preface

the discussion of race beyond the normal binary notions of Black and white
and provides an in-depth discussion of the salient factors to consider and to
challenge when providing couple treatment across racial boundaries. Her
discussion of biracial couples of Asian descent sheds light on a group that
is often invisible in conversations regarding race. She also raises important
issues about couple therapy in general, bringing light to the invisible, which
has to be a hallmark of the re-visioning of family therapy.
Salome Raheim, Christiana Awosan, and I (KVH) focus our attention
on the experiences of African Americans. Raheim (Chapter 31) delves into
the rich African American history with music to provide a poignant look at
the power of song as an instrument for promoting healing, hope, and justice.
Awosan and I (Chapter 29) examine the invisible wounds of racial trauma that
often underpins the day-to-day interactions of Black heterosexual couples,
offering an array of hands-on, step-by-step strategies that couple therapists
can employ with Black couples to enhance their clinical effectiveness.

PART VI. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING

The chapters in this section are devoted to providing cutting-edge ideas for
what graduate programs and training institutes must do to prepare the next
generation of family therapists, with an eye toward cultural competency. The
re-visioning of family therapy requires programs, faculty, and supervisors to
reject long-practiced training that has been ostensibly color blind, gender free,
classless, and oblivious to sexual orientation.
Evan Imber-Black, a masterful clinical educator and supervisor, exam-
ines the challenges, changes, certainties, and uncertainties that confront train-
ing family therapists in the 21st century in Chapter 36.
The chapters by N. Norma Akamatsu (Chapter 35) and Matthew R.
Mock (Chapter 34) both provide state-of-the-art strategies to invite trainees
to think critically about issues of social justice, power, and multiculturalism.
Our chapter in this section (Chapter 33) provides an overview of the
program and institutional domains that must be considered if we are going
to incorporate understanding of contextual issues and overcome the current
biases of our field. If our vision for the field is ever to be actualized, the train-
ing of the next generation of family therapists will be crucial.
In many respects, this book represents our concerted effort to practice
what we preach. Critical to the re-visioning process we envision is paying
acute attention to who is included and who isn’t. We appeal to our better
selves to be mindful and respectful of who is at the metaphorical table and
what is needed to keep us all actively engaged once we are there. Both our
hope and our renewed vision for the field rest on our optimism that each of us
will actively resist the “business as usual” mentality that has too often been
guiding the thinking and practice of our field. This book is very much about
such resistance. It is dedicated to recognition of our unique, culturally based
stories of suffering and survival, as well as our common humanity and the
 Preface xix

systemic connection of all human beings to each other and to our planet. We
hope you will share our belief that re-visioning of family therapy is ultimately
about the true inclusion of everyone in the definitions of “family,” “home,”
and the healing possibilities of therapy. We hope that you will read, reflect,
and heed our call to join us in the struggle to re-vision family therapy.

PART VII. IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

The chapters in this section expand notions of what constitutes good research.
The authors encourage new ways of thinking about research that challenge
the dominant order. Sarita Kaya Davis, in Chapter 37, tackles the taboo topic
of cultural bias in research and describes a number of pitfalls to avoid when
using research to inform clinical practice. Ken Epstein’s chapter (Chapter 38)
integrates principles of relational healing and a trauma-informed paradigm to
conduct a critical examination of organizational change in the era of evidence-­
based practices.

PART VIII. LARGER SYSTEMS WORK:

HOW TO BUILD BRIDGES ACROSS THE DIVIDE

The chapters in this section highlight our belief regarding the inextricable
connection between our psychology (individually oriented human system) and
ecology, how the number of larger systems within which we are embedded
profoundly shape our lives. Joanne Bowen (Chapter 39) encourages us to con-
sider our human connection with the environment. We believe the re-visioning
of family therapy requires all of us to be concerned about the environment
and our relationship to each other within the context of our connection to the
earth and to nature around us. In Chapter 40, Walter Howard Smith, Jr., an
experienced and gifted therapist and systems thinker, applies microlevel and
macrolevel family systems theory to a large, bureaucratic child welfare system
as an act of activism and transformation. Each of the authors in this section
reinforce our fundamental belief that the healing and transformation of the
human spirit cannot be achieved unless the lenses we use to understand com-
plex human problems are universally broad and systemic. Our vision, scope,
and reach must move well beyond the limits of our offices or of any individual
to include history, the societal and local context of our current world, and our
hopes for the future of our children and our universe.

NOTE
1. We have capitalized “Black” and lowercased “white,” in spite of the convention to
do the reverse, because it seems to us that “Black” is a word which at least to some
extent was chosen by African Americans to refer to themselves, while “white” does
not deserve the “specialness” of capitalization as an honor to the distinction.
 Acknowledgments

My deepest thanks go to my coeditor and coauthor, Ken Hardy, for his wis-
dom, dedication, creativity, and humor in working on this book. We have
been having deeply meaningful conversations for more than 35 years. Our
collaboration on this book for the past two editions has given us the chance to
push our thinking forward in ways I hope we can keep expanding. His ideas
and moral compass have been a profound inspiration to me. I thank him for
wonderful times we have had (not as many as I had hoped!) working through
the ideas and details and laughing together over the problems along the way
and at times arguing fiercely, as we are both strong-minded and do not give
up our positions lightly. I am in awe of his brilliance, creativity, and deep com-
mitment to the endeavor of re-visioning family therapy.
I am also in awe of the contributors to this volume who have found the
courage to write about their most painful life experiences and the wisdom
of their deepest ideas with trust that the readers will bring empathy to their
reading. For the pain and courage of so many whose experiences are acknowl-
edged in this book, I am profoundly grateful.
I thank also my mentor and companion Scott Joplin, whose music saw
me through the work on this book and through so many other endeavors in
my life. His magnificent music and the effort of his life to voice his intuitions,
love, and hope in his compositions have been an ongoing inspiration to me for
many years.
At The Guilford Press, Seymour Weingarten supported this book from
its first inception, Jim Nageotte offered good counsel and support throughout
the development of the last two editions, and Jeannie Tang has been a most
gracious, prompt, conscientious, and thoughtful production editor.

xx
 Acknowledgments xxi

I thank my life-mates: Nydia Garcia Preto, Paulette Moore Hines, Jayne

Mahboubi, Nollaig and Henry Byrne, Imelda McCarthy, Roberto Font, John
Folwarski, Fernando Colón-López, Robert-Jay Green, Froma Walsh, Elaine
Pinderhughes, Barbara Petkov, Charlee and Alex Sutton, Sueli Petry, Eliana
Gil, Nancy Boyd-Franklin, and A. J. Franklin have all offered help and inspi-
ration when needed. Their support is an ongoing richness to me every day.
And to my dearest colleagues and friends who have gone before, but who
live on always in my heart: Betty Carter, Carol Anderson, Evelyn Lee, and
Michael White.
My sisters, Morna Livingston and Neale McGoldrick, have been through-
out my life a major source of support and inspiration, both creative teachers
and authors in their own right. I feel I am never alone when I connect with
their belief in me and their efforts to promote the same kinds of cultural trans-
formation in their own lives and work.
My husband, another creative teacher and writer, supports me every
day in more ways than he realizes (and surely more ways than I fully real-
ize myself!). I am very grateful. I thank him for the many wonderful days we
worked in parallel on our books and for all that he has given me for so many
years. And I thank my son, John, for doing his thing and for expanding our
family with his wonderful and creative wife, Anna, their magnificent son,
Owen, and our creative and dedicated in-laws, Renee and Bill De Palma, who
have also pursued creativity and education in their own careers. I hope that
John, Anna, and Owen will have many life endeavors as gratifying as I have
had. My nephews, Guy and Hugh Livingston, have also inspired me with their
efforts to build cultural bridges in their music and artistic creativity, and I
thank them for their support and for what they are doing along similar lines in
their worlds to promote cultural understanding and transformation. I am also
grateful for my talented niece-in-law, Maria Sperling, whose work embraces a
similar effort to build cultural bridges. And I thank my grandnephew, Renzo
Robert Livingston, for having become such a wonderful part of my life for the
past 8 years.
Thanks also to Dan Morin for his creativity and dedication to develop-
ing genograms, including in this edition. Ken and I were committed to having
genograms included wherever possible in the text to illustrate our basic idea
that mapping out the cultural context, best done with genograms, is essential
for the work we believe in.
I thank my parents, Margaret Bush, and my Aunt Mamie Cahalane
for giving me the courage to face truths about our family and about myself,
which their strength helped me to acknowledge. They live in my heart and
make me stronger every day. They have made this book possible. Finally, I
want to thank my students and clients, who challenge and inspire me every
day.

—Monica McG oldrick

xxii Acknowledgments

My involvement in this important body of work would not have been possible
without the generosity, commitment, and dedication of my beloved friend,
colleague, and soul sister Monica McGoldrick. Whether on the streets of
Amsterdam, New York City, or Anaheim, I have appreciated immensely the
intense, vein-protruding conversations that we have had over the years about
matters of human indignities and social justice. As we both are well aware,
we have not always agreed with each other’s positions, yet we have always
genuinely respected each other. Thank you in the most heartfelt way for invit-
ing me to work with you on the third edition of Re-Visioning Family Therapy.
Our many conversations, collaborations, and brainstorming sessions regard-
ing this issue have been inspirational and life transforming. Thank you for
believing in me and for your foresight in using the collaborative spirit of our
relationship to demonstrate that working across vast cultural divides is pos-
sible.
I would like to thank Jim Nageotte of The Guilford Press for his guid-
ance, support, and sage advice throughout every phase of this project. I would
also like to thank Dhara Mehta-Desai for the tireless and dedicated assistance
she provided to this project throughout the entire process from start to finish.
A special thanks is also extended to our many friends, colleagues, and broth-
ers and sisters of the struggle who have contributed to the book. We thank you
for your tireless efforts, patience with short turnaround times, and willingness
to “go there with and for us” in the telling of your stories for the book. Obvi-
ously, without your contributions we have no book.
And, finally but not insignificantly, I would like to thank my family for
their unrelenting support and for being a tremendous source of inspiration,
motivation, and resolve in my life. I am so painfully aware virtually every day
of my life that every single accomplishment, accolade, and particle of privilege
that I enjoy has been achieved by standing firmly on your tired, weary, but
omnipresent shoulders. Please know that it is permanently etched in the walls
of my psyche and soul that your individual and collective sacrifices and suf-
fering have provided the pathway to my opportunities. I will never forget . . .
and I am eternally grateful. One of the reasons why this book has been so
important to me personally is because of the possibility that it promises for
the emergence of a new world order—an invitation for us to think differently
about each other, and because we think differently, to be able to act differ-
ently with each other. It is my hope and desire that the next generation of
Hardys and McGoldricks, as well as the descendants of the many others who
have contributed to this book, will inherit a different world where skin color,
the shape of one’s eyes, whom one loves romantically, or where one’s ances-
tral roots are buried will not determine access to opportunity, dignity, and
respect. This is the re-visioning that we envision with this book.

—K enneth V. H ardy
 Contents

I. THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES

1. The Power of Naming 3

Monica McGoldrick and Kenneth V. Hardy

2. Re‑Visioning Gender, Re‑Visioning Power: Equity, Accountability, 28

and Refusing to Silo
Deidre Ashton and Christian Jordal

3. Social Class, Rising Inequality, and the American Dream 37

Froma Walsh

4. The Sociocultural Trauma of Poverty: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations 57

for Working with Poor Families
Kenneth V. Hardy

5. Spirituality, Suffering, and Resilience 73

Froma Walsh

II. SOCIOCULTURAL TRAUMA AND HOMELESSNESS

6. Homelessness and the Spiritual Meaning of Home 93

Monica McGoldrick

7. Transnational Journeys 108

Celia Jaes Falicov

8. Climbing Up the Rough Side of the Mountain: Hope, Culture, and Therapy 123
Paulette Moore Hines

xxiii
xxiv Contents

9. Toward a Psychology of the Oppressed: 133

Understanding the Invisible Wounds of Trauma
Kenneth V. Hardy

III. RACIAL IDENTITY

10. Native American Identity Transformation: 151

Integrating a Naming Ceremony with Family Therapy
Rockey Robbins and Sharla Robbins

11. Letting My Spirits Guide Me: Multicultural and Multiracial Legacies 168
Nydia Garcia Preto

12. Moving toward Multiracial Legitimacy: A Personal Reflection 176

MaryAnna Domokos‑Cheng Ham

13. On Being a Black Dominican 191

Ana M. Hernandez

14. Facing the Black Shadow: Power from the Inside Out 200
Marlene F. Watson

15. White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming 215
to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies
Peggy McIntosh

16. Dismantling White Male Privilege within Family Therapy 226

Ken Dolan‑Del Vecchio

17. The Inevitable Whiteness of Being (White): Whiteness and Intersectionality 236
in Family Therapy Practice and Training
Jodie Kliman, Hinda Winawer, and David Trimble

18. Brown in America: Living with Racial and Religious Bias 251
Kiran Shahreen Kaur Arora

IV. CULTURAL LEGACIES AND STORIES:

THERAPISTS’ EXPERIENCES
19. Black Genealogy Revisited: Restorying an African American Family 261
Elaine Pinderhughes

20. White Privilege, Pathological Shame and Guilt, 283

and the Perversion of Morality
Robert Shelby

21. The Discovery of My Multicultural Identity 298

Fernando Colón‑López

22. Going Home: One Orphan’s Journey from Chicago to Poland and Back 308
John D. Folwarski
 Contents xxv

23. Hyperlinked Identity: A Generative Resource in a Divisive World 318

Saliha Bava

24. The Semitism Schism, Revisited: Jewish–Palestinian Legacies 336

in a Family Therapy Training Context
Linda Stone Fish and Donna Dallal‑Ferne

25. No Single‑Issue Lives: Identity Transitions and Transformations 348

across the Life Cycle
Elijah C. Nealy

V. IMPLICATIONS FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

26. Working with LGBT Families 363

Elijah C. Nealy

27. Same‑Sex Couples: Successful Coping with Minority Stress 388

Robert‑Jay Green

28. Working with Immigrant and Refugee Families 403

Hugo Kamya and Marsha Pravder Mirkin

29. Therapy with Heterosexual Black Couples through a Racial Lens 419
Kenneth V. Hardy and Christiana I. Awosan

30. A Fifth‑Province Approach to Intracultural Issues in an Irish Context: 433

Marginal Illuminations
Imelda Colgan McCarthy and Nollaig Byrne

31. The Power of Song to Promote Healing, Hope, and Justice: 449
Lessons from the African American Experience
Salome Raheim

32. Interracial Asian Couples: Beyond Black and White 464

Tazuko Shibusawa

VI. IMPLICATIONS FOR TRAINING

33. Re‑Visioning Family Therapy Training 477

Kenneth V. Hardy and Monica McGoldrick

34. Social Justice in Family Therapy Training: The Power of Personal 496
and Family Narratives
Matthew R. Mock

35. Teaching about Racism and the Implications for Practice 512
N. Norma Akamatsu

36. A Letter to Family Therapists in the 21st Century 526

Evan Imber‑Black
xxvi Contents

VII. IMPLICATIONS OF RESEARCH FOR CLINICAL PRACTICE

37. Ways of Knowing: Cultural Bias Pitfalls to Avoid 539

When Using Research to Inform Practice
Sarita Kaya Davis

38. Relational Healing and Organizational Change in the Time of Evidence 553
Ken Epstein

VIII. LARGER SYSTEMS WORK:

HOW TO BUILD BRIDGES ACROSS THE DIVIDE
39. Expanding Bowen’s Concept of Societal Emotional Processes 569
through Historic Ethnography: An Anthropological Exploration
of the Human Connection with the Environment
Joanne Bowen

40. An Application of Bowen Family Systems Theory in Child Welfare 588

Walter Howard Smith, Jr.

Index 597
 PA RT I

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES
 CHAPTER 1

The Power of Naming

Monica McGoldrick
Kenneth V. Hardy

Treasure the approaches and ways of thinking that you have learned more
than the facts you have accumulated. . . . Facts will be presented in such
a way as to veil the ways of thinking embedded in them. And so to reveal
these hidden ways of thinking, to suggest alternate frameworks, to imagine
better ways of living in evolving worlds, to imagine new human relations
that are freed from persisting hierarchies, whether they be racial or sexual
or geopolitical—­yes, I think this is the work of educated human beings. I
might then ask you to think about education as the practice of freedom.
—A ngela Davis , Grinnell College Graduation (2007, p. 34)

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?

—L in-­M anuel M iranda , Hamilton (2016, p. 180)

Please call me by my true names,

so I can wake up
and so the door of my heart can be left open.
—Thich Nhat H anh , “Please Call Me by My True Names”
(1991, pp. 123–124)

We have recently received the shock of major backlash (or should we use
Van Jones’s term and call it “whitelash”) to what had just begun to seem
like an emerging appreciation of our nation’s diversity. The dramatic increase
of immigrants in the United States and of nonwhite1, non-­European citizens
altogether, has been forcing us to come to terms with our multiculturality.
We have always been a nation of immigrants, but never before, despite previ-
ous waves of immigration and increasing rates of cultural intermarriage, has
our nation been as diverse as it is today. Our diversity is expanding expo-
nentially, although the change is much more apparent on the coasts and the
southern border of the United States than in the large but less populated areas
of the interior of the country. The population changes of the past 50 years,
along with the communication revolution with the Internet and social media,
have been changing our nation dramatically and forcing us to challenge our
unquestioned assumptions about who we are and what our values should be.

3
4 T heoretical P erspectives

The true multicultural richness and complexity of our nation offer us

the greatest possibilities for re-­visioning who we are and who we can be. Our
diversity can become our greatest strength. On the other hand, when we fear
our diversity, our prejudices and rigidities as a nation are highlighted, and our
systemic appreciation and potential to lead the way toward a future for our
planet disappear. Our fears can bring out a pernicious ability to exclude and
dehumanize those who are considered not to belong. Ultimately, this dehu-
manization would mean death to our civilization. As Bryan Stevenson (2015)
so touchingly puts it:

We are all implicated when we allow other people to be mistreated. An

absence of compassion can corrupt the decency of a community, a state,
a nation. Fear and anger can make us vindictive and abusive, unjust and
unfair, until we all suffer from the absence of mercy and we condemn our-
selves as much as we victimize others. The closer we get to mass incarcera-
tion and extreme levels of punishment, the more I believe it is necessary to
recognize that we all need mercy, we all need justice, and—­perhaps—­we all
need some measure of unmerited grace. (p. 18)

Those who are not of the dominant culture have always tended to experi-
ence our society from a multicultural perspective, which more easily appreci-
ates the need for mercy and compassion. But the dominant culture, from the
inception of our nation, has tended to deny and mystify our multiculturalism,
articulating the magnificent promise of “liberty and justice for all” only for a
very strict minority—­white men—and obscuring at every level the insidious
hidden misrepresentations of whom “all” would include.
But a multicultural lens can be the model for the ideals our forefathers set
out, the model for the cultural flexibility we require as systemic therapists in
this, the most culturally diverse society that has ever existed, for times when
vindictiveness and cutoff are increasingly coming to the fore and trampling
the ideals of democracy.
Appreciating our diversity as a nation transforms our awareness of what
it means to be American. Except for Native Americans who immigrated here
thousands of years before the thoughts of our nation began, the rest of us are
all relatively recent immigrants. But the ideology put forth by all our govern-
mental institutions has generally included a denial of our more complex heri-
tage of injustice to those not part of the dominant group. To appreciate who
we really are requires expanding our awareness of the truths of our heritage.
As Sanford Ungar (1995) wrote about becoming conscious of the meaning
of his family’s migration for him, a third-­generation grandchild of Eastern
European Jewish immigrant ancestors, “I was no less American than ever
before, of course, but now, in middle age, I had discovered my own immi-
grant consciousness. Indeed, in that sense, I could now feel more authentically
American” (p. 18).
Only by attending to the multiplicitous voices that have until now been
silenced in the dominant story of who we are as a nation can we become
 The Power of Naming 5

“more authentically American.” Although African Americans, Hmong refu-

gees, and recent immigrants from Sri Lanka or Syria have their own cultures
of origin and particular experiences of migration and dislocation, they need
equally to feel themselves included in the definition of “American.”
But our clinical models, training, and practice have ignored this multi-
cultural dimension of our society. We have developed theories and conducted
research to define working models for intervention without accounting for
their cultural limitations. We have done research on the absurd assumption
that we could manualize intervention and apply it to any clients, no matter
what their history or context, on the assumption that everyone should be able
to fit into the universalized category of middle-­class white people (primarily
men) in the United States. That is the standard by which we measure all oth-
ers and usually find them failing. We have not even noticed that families from
many cultural groups rarely come to our therapy and that, if they do, they
do not find our techniques helpful. It is we who must change and expand to
include them, not they who must learn to fit into our schemas.
The failure of our society to embrace and respect diversity is the great-
est single threat to the survival of our civilization. We must break the con-
straints of our traditional monocular vision of families as white, heterosex-
ual, and middle class. The boundaries of our field must be redefined to take
into account our country’s ever-­expanding diversity and the way that societal
oppression has silenced the voices and constrained the lives of individuals,
families, and whole communities since our nation was founded. Racist, sex-
ist, ethnocentric, classist, and heterosexist power hierarchies constrain our
clients’ lives and determine what gets defined as a problem and what services
our society will support in response.
Systemic practice, like any set of ideas and practices, is always evolving,
but it originally developed mostly in reaction to Freudian psychology, which
had focused primarily on intrapsychic processes as the core of human psy-
chology. Systemic theory and practice provided a kind of corrective perspec-
tive, focusing attention on interpersonal processes among family members as
central to understanding psychological functioning. Although some family
therapists eschewed any other level of analysis than the interpersonal/fam-
ily level, most came to think in terms of multiple systemic levels, from the
biological to the familial to the cultural and societal. However, it has been
difficult to shift our thinking about therapy beyond the family to consider the
therapeutic implications of the cultural context in which families are embed-
ded, given that our dominant ideology about who defines the parameters of
conversation in our society has not been seriously open to challenge or revi-
sion.
This third edition of this book continues our attempt to re-­vision the
dominant discourses within family therapy. We must examine the ways in
which we have organized our theory and practice and analyze how they rep-
licate the dominant value systems of our society. Such re-­visioning will be a
slow and difficult evolution and will not take place without a backlash.
6 T heoretical P erspectives

In this introductory chapter, we want to map out a series of phases that

describe both the past and the possible future of family therapy, a framework
we hope will contribute to the transformation of theory and practice.
Our society is still organized to accommodate a type of family struc-
ture that represents a very small percentage of U.S. households—­ nuclear
family units with employed fathers and homemaker mothers who devote
themselves to the care of husbands and children. Family therapy, like our
dominant social ideology in general, has tended toward a view of families as
self-­sufficient, nuclear units. However, our definition that two parents are
critical for child development has always been a euphemism for a mother who
is perpetually on call for everyone emotionally and physically and a distant,
money-­providing father. Families with such a structure cannot help being
problematic.
Although poor families are the only ones seen as deficient, because of
their obvious and critical dependence on systems beyond themselves for their
survival, the reality is that all families are dependent for their survival on sys-
tems beyond themselves.
But those of us who are of the dominant groups fail to realize this because
of the unseen ways the government and others support us. Our needs are
met and taken for granted and thus rendered invisible to us (Coontz, 2016).
Schools, courts, the police, and all other institutions of the society operate
for the protection and benefit of the dominant groups. Thus those of us who
make the rules and definitions are kept blind to our privilege (see McIntosh,
Chapter 15, this volume) and to our dependence on those who take care of us.
The problem is not the dependence of certain people on the society, but the
delusion of autonomy of the rest of us.
The dominant groups are using up the world’s resources with no aware-
ness or accountability (Worldwatch Institute, 2017). The economic system,
the prison system, the drug rehabilitation industry, the gun industry, and the
legal and governmental systems make money for the dominant groups of our
society on the backs of the poor and the disenfranchised, who serve us in
our homes and factories, making our clothing and supplies, while we remain
blind to our connection to them, not seeing our exploitation or the bias in
our behavior. We seldom recognize the invisible workforce of the poor toil-
ing tirelessly for our comfort. They come at night to hospitals, hotels, and the
halls of academia. They are commissioned essentially to be our caretakers
and to “keep America clean.” We never even notice that they, like us, are par-
ents, grandparents, beloved children, aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews; they
remain objectified, invisible, and known only by the services that they provide
for us, such as “the janitor” or “the maid.”
Paradoxically, the ideals stated, but not meant, in our Constitution could
be the foundation of a truly egalitarian society, perhaps the first in human
history, but only if we acknowledge the pernicious, unspoken exclusions on
which it was founded. To do this, we must admit that our founders built
slavery and the disenfranchisement of people of color and women into the
 The Power of Naming 7

system and that these inequities remain in place today. Our history books
still brag about the foundation of our nation, minimizing the slaughter, slav-
ery, and forced invisibility of more than two-­thirds of the population. This is
hard to see, because what we espouse overtly mystifies the underlying facts of
exclusion. Our society makes it difficult to notice the intersection between the
spoken and the unspoken. So we continue to invest in the ideal that we are
“the land of the free,” even though some of us are and have always been free
on the backs of others. We continue to believe that escaping the walls of pov-
erty is simply a matter of personal will and hard work, denying that wealth
and class are well-­elaborated systems that negate the individual efforts of the
poor while inflating the opportunities of the structurally, economically, and
racially privileged.
We therapists need to revise our books to take into account the unspoken
structures, the cultural, racial, and class- and gender-­biased hierarchies that
limit the lives of many of our potential or real clients and are the underpin-
nings of our society. It goes unacknowledged that African Americans, Latinos,
Asians, and other racially oppressed people do not have the same entitlements
to participate in our institutions, including in our world of family therapy.
Just as our history books have told primarily the history of heterosexual white
men, our family therapy models have been researched and developed by and
for therapy primarily addressed to families of the dominant groups. Thera-
pists must begin to think of families in terms of the communities they live in.
We have ignored community, focusing on the interior of the nuclear family,
while ignoring the larger context, as well as all the history of social exclu-
sion of whole groups from participation in our institutions. It is impossible
to understand or treat poor families without a comprehensive understanding
of how stigma and limited access to resources affect their symptoms and pre-
sentation. We continually turn a blind eye to the pervasive impact of oppres-
sion on the poor, the racially subjugated, and other marginalized groups who
behave in predictable ways, not because of who they are but because they
have been forced to live in a context of ongoing devaluation and discrimina-
tion. Delivering more culturally competent services will require our field to
consider the broader ecology in which families are embedded. Widening our
lenses to take history, context, and community into account will require us to
reconsider many of our assumptions.
Children need more than one or even two adults to raise them, and adults
need more than one or two close relationships to get them through life. As
therapists, we need to encourage our clients to go beyond the dominant cul-
ture’s definitions of family, to pay attention to relationships with siblings,
nieces and nephews, grandchildren, aunts, and uncles. And beyond this we
must attend to friendships and to the health and safety of neighborhoods and
community contexts in which families live. We need to consider the role of
caretakers, housekeepers, maids, and nannies, as well as godparents, teachers,
and other mentors, in the rearing of children and the care of the disabled and
the elderly.
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Now here was the young wife’s grief, that though she had been wed
near upon five years she had no child yet and not a sign of one, and
she had gone secretly to a temple to pray and had done all she knew
and still her body stayed as barren as it had been. But she was too
proud to show how grieved she was and now she said, calmly, “I will
have sons in time, doubtless.”
“Aye, but it is time,” the mother said pettishly. “I never heard of any
women in our hamlet who had not babes if they had husbands. Our
men are fathers as soon as they mate themselves and the women
always fertile—good seed, good soil. It must be you have some
hidden illness in you somewhere to make you barren and unnatural.
I made you those clothes full and big, and what use has it been!”
And to the cousin’s wife the mother complained, and she said,
leaning to put her mouth against the other’s ear, “I know very well
what is wrong—there are no heats in that son’s wife of mine. She is
a pale and yellow thing and one day is like the next and there is
never any good flush in her from within, and all your luck in cutting
her wedding garments cannot prevail against her coldness.”
And the cousin’s wife nodded and laughed and said, “It is true
enough that such pale and bloodless women are very slow to bear.”
Then her little laughing eyes grew meaningful and she laughed again
and said, “But not every woman can be so full of heats as you were
in your time, good sister, and well you know it is not always a good
thing in a woman!”
Then the mother answered hastily, “Oh, aye, I know that—” and fell
silent for a time and then after a while she said unwillingly, “It is true
she is a careful woman, clean and almost too clean and scraping out
the pot so often I swear she wastes the food with so much washing
of the oil jar and the like. And she washes herself every little time or
so, and it may be this is why she goes barren. Too much washing is
not always well.”
But she spoke no more of heats, for she feared to have the cousin’s
wife bring up again that old ill done, although the cousin’s wife was
the kindest soul and never all these years had made a difference of
it, and if she had even told her man then the mother never knew she
did. If it had not been for these two sorrows that she had, the blind
maid and that her son had no sons, she might have forgotten it
herself, so far away the days of her flesh seemed now. Yes, she
might have forgotten it if she had not feared it had been sin and
these two sorrows the punishment for it.
But there her life was, and the maid was blind and gone now and
there was no child, and only the beasts about and the dog and even
these she dared not feed.
There was only this good thing nowadays, she thought, and it was
that her two sons did not quarrel so much. The elder was satisfied
and master in the house, and the younger had his own place
somewhere, and when he came home and went away again, the
most the elder son did was to say with feeble scorn, “I wonder where
my brother gets those good clothes he wears and what the work is
that he does. I cannot wear clothes like his and I work bitterly. He
seems to have money somehow. I hope he is not in some band of
town thieves or something that will drag us into trouble if he is
caught.”
Then the mother flew up bravely as she always did for her little son
and she said, “A very good younger brother, my son, and you should
praise him and be glad he has gone and found a thing to do for
himself and not stayed here to share the land with you!”
And the elder son said sneeringly, “Oh, aye, he would do anything I
swear to keep from labor on the land.”
But the son’s wife said nothing. She was pleased these days
because the house was all her own and it was naught to her what
the young man did, and she did not complain because he bought his
clothes elsewhere now and she needed not to make them for him.

So the time went on and spring came and passed and early summer
came and still the mother never could forget her maid. One day she
sat counting on her fingers the days since that one when she saw
the hill cut the maid off from her sight, and it was more than twelve
times all the fingers on her hands and then she lost the count, and
so she thought sadly, “I must go to her. I have let this old heaviness
weigh on me and I ought to have gone before. If she had been a
sound maid she would have come by now to pay the visit that wives
do to their old homes, and I could have asked her how she did and
felt her hands and arms and cheeks and seen the color of her face.”
And the mother sat and looked at those hills around and saw how
the summer came on to its full height and every hillside was green
and all the grain high in the fields, and she forced her body that was
weary always now even though she was idle all the livelong day, and
she thought, “I must go and see my maid and I will go at once,
seeing I am not needed on the land and here I sit idle. I will go and
before the great heat comes, lest my flux drop on me again unaware.
Yes—I will go this very tomorrow since there is no sign of cloud in
this fair sky—this blue sky—” she looked up at the sky and saw how
blue it was and remembered suddenly as she did nowadays some
bit of her life long gone, and she remembered the blue robe her man
had bought once and that he wore away and she sighed and thought
with some dim old pang, “On such a day as this he bought the robe
and we quarreled—on just such a fair day, for I remember the robe
was the color of the sky that day.” She sighed and rose to drive the
thought away and when her elder son came she said restlessly, “I
think to go and see your sister tomorrow, and how she does in the
house where she was wed, seeing she cannot come to me.”
Then the son said, anxiously, “Mother, I cannot go with you now, for
there is work to do tomorrow. Wait until the harvest is over and the
grain threshed and measured, and I have a little free time.”
But suddenly the mother could not wait. There was strength in her a
plenty yet when she had something she set her mind to do, and she
was weary of her idleness and sitting and she said, “No, I will go
tomorrow!”
And the son said, worried still and he was always easily worried if
aught came that was sudden and out of the common and he could
not think what to do quickly, “But how will you go, mother?”
She said, “Why, I will ride my cousin’s ass if he will lend it, and do
you bid a lad of his to go and call your brother to walk beside and
lead the ass, and we will go safe enough, the two of us, for there are
no robbers near these days that I have heard tell of, except that new
kind in the town they call the communists, who do not harm the poor,
they say—”
At last the son was willing, though not too easily and not until his wife
said quietly, “It is true I cannot see any great danger if the younger
one goes with her.”
So they let the mother have her way at last, and the cousin’s lad was
sent to town to search until he found the younger son and so he did
and came back wide-eyed and said, “My cousin and your second
son will come, aunt.” And then he thought a while and twisted the
button on his coat and said again, “I swear it is a strange and secret
place where he lives and a hard place to find. He lives in a long room
full of beds, some twenty beds or so above a shop, and the room is
filled with books and papers. But he does not work in the shop for I
asked him. I did not know my cousin could read, aunt. If he reads
those books he must be very learned.”
“He cannot read,” the mother said astonished. “He never told me that
he lived by books, a very strange odd thing, I swear! I must ask him
of it.”
The next day when she was on the ass and they went winding
through the valleys she took the chance of being alone with him and
she did ask her son, “What are those books and papers that my
cousin’s son says you have in that room where you all live? You
never told me you could read or that you live by books. I never saw
you read a word, my son.”
Then the young man stopped the little song he had been singing as
they went for he had a good voice to sing and loved to sing, and he
said, “Aye, I have learned a little.” And when she pressed him further
he said, evading her, “Mother, do not ask me now, for some day you
will know everything and when the hour comes. A great day, mother,
and I was singing of it just now, a song we sing together where I
work, and on that day we shall all be eased, and there shall be no
more rich and no more poor and all of us shall have the same.”
Now this was the wildest talk the mother had ever heard, for well she
knew heaven wills who shall be rich and who shall be poor, and men
have naught to say but take their destiny and bear it, and she cried
out afraid, “I hope you are not in some wicked company, my son, not
with thieves or some such company! It sounds the way robbers talk,
my son! There is no other way for poor to be rich than that, and it is
ill to be rich and lose your life if you be caught at it!”
But the young man grew angry at this and said, “Mother, you do not
understand at all! I am sworn to silence now, but some day you shall
know. Yes, I shall not forget you on that day. But only you. I will not
share with any who have not shared with me.” This last he said so
loudly that she knew he felt against his brother and so she was silent
for a while, fearing to rouse his wrath.
But she could not let him be. She sat as bid upon the ass and clung
to the beast’s hairy skin and thought about this son and looked at
him secretly. There he walked ahead of her, the beast’s halter in his
hand, and now he was singing again, some song she had never
heard, some beating fiery song whose words she could not catch,
and she thought to herself that she must know more of his life. Yes,
and she must bind him somehow more closely to his home and to
them all. She would wed him and have his wife there in the house.
Then would he often come and even live there, perhaps, for the
wife’s sake. She would seek and find a pretty, touching maid whom
he could love, for the elder son’s wife could do the work, and she
would find another sort for this son. And as she thought of this her
heart was eased because it seemed a good way and she could not
keep it back and so she said, “Son, you are more than twenty now,
and near to twenty-one, and I think to wed you soon. How is that for
a merry thing?”
But who can tell what a young man’s heart will be? Instead of smiling
silence, half pleased and half ashamed, he stopped and turned and
said to her most wilfully, “I have been waiting for you to say some
such thing—it is all that mothers’ heads run upon, I do believe! My
comrades tell me it is the chiefest thing their parents say—wed—
wed—wed! Well then, mother, I will not wed! And if you wed me
against my will, then shall you never see my face again! I never will
come home again!”
He turned and went on more quickly and she dared not say a word,
but only sat amazed and frightened at his anger and that he did not
sing again.
Yet she forgot all this now in what was to come. The path along
which they had come since early dawn grew narrower and more
narrow toward noon, and those hills which around their own valleys
were so gently shaped, so mild in their round curves against the sky
and so green with grass and bamboo, rose now as they went among
them into sharper, bolder lines. At last when noon was full and the
sun poured its heat down straight the gentle hills were gone, and in
their place rose a range of mountains bare and rocky and cruelly
pointed against the sky. They seemed the sharper too because the
sky that day was so cloudless, bright and hard and blue, above the
sand color of the bare mountains.
Beneath great pale cliffs the path wound, the stones not black and
dark, but pale as light in hue and very strange, and nothing grew
there, for there was no water anywhere. So the path wound up and
yet more up and when noon was passed an hour or two, they came
suddenly into a round deep valley in the mountain tops, and there
some water was, for there was a small square village enclosed about
with a rocky wall, and about it the green of a few fields. But when the
mother and her son stopped at the gate to that village and asked of
the place they sought, one who stood there pointed yet higher to a
ridge and said, “There where the green ends on that lower edge
there are the two houses. It is the last edge of green, and above it
there are only rocks and sky.”
Now all this time the mother had stared astonished at these
mountains and at their strange wild shapes and paleness, and at the
scanty green. She had spent her life in the midst of valleys, and now
as the path wound up from the enclosed village she stared about
aghast to see how mortally poor the land was here and how shallow
on the pale rocks the soil was and how scanty all the crops, even
now when harvest drew on, and she cried out to the youth, “I do not
like the looks of this place, son! I doubt it is too hard a place for your
sister. Well, we will take her home, then. Yes, if it is too hard for her
here I can walk and we will put her on the ass, and let them say what
they will. They paid nothing for her, and I will ask nothing but her
back again.”
But the young man did not answer. He was weary and hungry, for
they had eaten but a bit of cold food they had brought with them, and
he longed to reach his sister’s house, for there they thought to spend
the night. He pulled at the ass’s bridle until the mother could not bear
it and was about to brave his anger and reprove him.
Suddenly they came upon that house. Yes, there the two houses
were, caught upon the side of the ridge and stuck there somehow to
the rocks, and the mother knew this was where her maid was, for
there the ill-looking old man stood at the door of one of the two
houses, and when he saw her he stared as if he could not believe it
was she, and then he ran in and out came more people, another
man, dark and lean and wild in looks, and two women and a slack-
hung youth, but not her blind maid.
The mother came down from her ass then and went near, and all
these stared at her in silence, and she looked back and was afraid.
Never had she seen such looks as these, the women’s hair
uncombed and full of burrs and their faces withered and blackened
with the sun, their garments never washed, and so were they all.
They gathered there and out of the other house came a sickly child
or two, yellowed with some fever, their lips parched and broken, and
their bodies foul with filth, and they all stared silently, and gave no
greeting, their eyes as wild and reasonless as beasts’ eyes are.
Then did the mother’s heart break suddenly with fear and she ran
forward crying, “Where is my maid? Where have you hid my maid?”
And she ran into their midst, but the young man stood doubting and
holding to the ass.
Then a woman spoke sullenly, and her speech was not easily
understood, some rude northern speech it was, and the sounds
caught between her broken teeth and nothing came out clear and
she said, “You have come well, goodwife. She has just died today.”
“Died!” the mother whispered and said no more. Her heart stopped,
her breath was gone, she had no voice. But she pushed into the
nearest hut and there upon a bed of reeds thrown on the ground her
blind maid lay. Aye, there the maid was lying quietly and dead,
dressed in the same clothes she had when she left her home, but
not clean now nor mended. Of those new things there was no trace,
for the room was empty save for the heap of rushes and a rude stool
or two.
Then the mother ran and knelt beside her maid and stared down at
the still face and sunken eyes and at the patient little mouth and all
the face she knew so well. And suddenly she burst out crying and
she fell upon the maid and seized her hands and pushed the ragged
sleeves back and looked at her little arms and drew the trousers up
her legs and looked to see if they were bruised or beaten or harmed
in any way.
But there was nothing. No, the maid’s soft skin was all unbroken, the
slender bones whole, and there was nothing to be seen. She was
pale and piteously thin, but she was thin always and death is pale.
Then did the mother stoop and smell at the child’s lips to see if there
was any smell of poison, but there was no smell, nothing now except
the faint sad scent of death.
Yet somehow the mother could not believe that this was any good
and usual death. She turned on those who stood about the door
watching her in silence, and she looked at them and saw their wild
rude faces, not one of which she knew, and she shouted at them
through sudden great weeping, “You have killed her—well I know
you have—if you did not, then tell me how did my maid die so soon,
and she left me sound and well!”
Then the evil old man whom she had hated from the first time she
saw him grinned and said, “Be careful how you speak, goodwife! It is
not a small thing to say we killed her and—”
But the sullen, rough-haired woman broke in screaming, “How did
she die? She died of a cold she caught, being so puny, and that is
how she died!” And she spat upon the ground and said again,
screeching as she said, “A useless maid she was, too, if there was
one, and knowing nothing—no, she could not even learn to fetch the
water from the spring and not stumble and fall or lose her way!”
Then the mother looked and saw a narrow stony path leading down
the mountain to a small pool and she groaned and cried, “Is that the
way you mean?” But no one answered her and she cried out in
further agony, “You beat her—doubtless every day my maid was
beaten!”
But the woman answered quickly, “Search and see if there be
bruises on her! Once my son did beat her for she came to him too
slowly, but that is all!”
The mother looked up then and said faintly, “Where is your son?”
And they pushed him forward, that son they had, and there he stood,
a gangling, staring lad, and the mother saw he was nearly witless.
Then did the mother lay her head down upon her dead maid and
weep and weep most wildly, and more wildly still she wept when she
thought of what the maid had suffered, must have suffered, at such
hands as these. And while she wept the anger grew about her in
those who watched her. At last she felt a touch upon her and looking
up she saw it was her son, and he bent and whispered to her
urgently, “Mother, we are in danger here—I am afraid—we must not
stay. Mother, she is dead now and what more can you do? But they
look so evil I do not know what they will do to us. Come and let us
hasten to the village and buy a little food and then press on home
tonight!”
The mother rose then unwillingly, but as she looked she saw it was
true those people stood together close, and there was that about
them to make her fear, too, and she did not like their muttering nor
the looks they cast at her and at the youth. Yes, she must think of
him. Let them kill her if they would, but there was her son.
She turned and looked down once more at her dead maid and put
her garments neat and laid her hands to her side. She went out into
the late afternoon. When they saw her calmer and that she made
ready to mount the ass again, the man, who had not spoken yet, and
who was father to the witless son, said, “Look you, goodwife, if you
do not think us honest folk, look at the coffin we have bought your
child. Ten pieces of silver did it cost us, and all we had, and do you
think we would have bought a coffin if we had not valued her?”
The mother looked then, and there beside the door a coffin truly was,
but well she knew there were not ten pieces of silver in it, for it was
but the rudest box of unpainted board, and thin well-nigh as paper
and such a box as any pauper has. She opened her lips to make
angry answer and to say, “That box? But my maid’s own silver that I
gave her would have paid for that!”
But she did not say the words. It came upon her like a chill cloud
across the day that she had need to fear these people. Yes, these
two evil men, these wild women—but there her son was tugging at
her sleeve to hasten her and so she answered steadily, “I will say
nothing now. The maid is dead and not all the angers in the world
nor any words can bring her back again.” She paused and looked at
this one and at that and then she said again, “Before heaven do you
stand and all the gods, and let them judge you, whatever you have
done!”
She looked at this one and that, but no one answered, and she
turned then and climbed upon the ass and the son made haste and
led the ass down the rocky path and turned shivering to see if they
were followed and he said, “I shall not rest until we are near that
village once again and where many people are, I am so fearful.”
But the mother answered nothing. What need to answer anything?
Her maid was dead.
 XVII
CRAZED with her weariness was the mother when she came down
from the halting gray ass that night before her own door. She had
wept all the way home, now aloud and now softly, and the young
man had been beside himself again and again with his mother’s
weeping. He cried out in an agony at last, “Cease your wailing,
mother, or I shall not be able to bear it!”
But when she calmed herself a little for his sake she broke forth
again and at last the young man ground his teeth together and he
muttered wildly, “If the day were come, if we were not so miserably
poor, if the poor were given their share and could defend
themselves, then might we sue for my sister’s life! But what use
when we are so poor and there is no justice in the land?”
And the mother sobbed out, “It is true there is no use in going to law
since we have no money to pay our way in to justice,” and then she
wept afresh and cried, “But all the money and the justice under
heaven would not bring my blind maid back again.”
At last the young man wept too, not so much for his sister nor even
for his mother, but because he was so footsore and so worn and his
world awry.
Thus they came at last to their own door and when she was down
from the ass the mother called her elder son piercingly and so
sharply that he came running out and she cried, “Son, your sister is
dead!” And while he stared at her scarcely comprehending, she
poured out the tale, and at the sound of her voice others came
quickly to hear the tale until there in the dusk of night nearly all the
hamlet stood to hear it. The younger son stood there half fainting,
leaning on the ass, and when his mother talked on he went and
threw himself upon the ground and lay there dazed with what had
come about this day, and he lay silent while his mother wept and
cried aloud and in her weeping said, looking with her streaming eyes
to this face and to that, “There my little maid was, dead and gone,
and I hate myself I ever let her go, and I would not have let her go if
it had not been for this cold-hearted son’s wife of mine who
begrudged the little maid a bit of meat and a little flower on her shoe
and so I was fearful if I died and the maid was afraid, too—a little
tender child who never would have left me of her own will! What
cared she for man or marriage and a child’s heart in her always,
clinging to her home and me? Oh, son, it is your wife who has
brought this on me—I curse the day she came and no wonder she is
childless with so hard a heart!”
So on and on the mother cried and at first they all listened in silence
or exclaiming something when they had pieced the tale from what
she said between her weeping, and then they tried to comfort her,
but she would not let herself be comforted. The eldest son said
nothing but stood with downcast head until she cursed his wife and
spoke against her child-bearing, and then he said in a reasonable
and quiet voice, “No, mother, she did not bid you send my sister to
that place. You sent her so quickly and did not say a word to anyone
but fixed it so and we wondered even that you did not go and see
how it was there for yourself,” and he turned to his father’s cousin
and he said, “Did you not think so, cousin? Do you remember how I
said we were surprised my mother was so quick in the matter?”
And the cousin turned his eyes away and muttered unwillingly,
chewing a bit of straw, “Oh, aye, a little quick,” and his wife who
stood holding a grandchild in her arms said mournfully to the mother,
“Yes, it is true, sister, you be a very quick woman always, and never
asking anyone if this or that is well to be done. No, before any of us
know it or guess what it is you are about you have done all and it is
finished, and you only want us to say you have done well. It is your
nature all your life to be like this.”
But the mother could not bear blame this night and she cried out in
anger, and so turned her working angry face upon her cousin’s wife,
“You—you are used to that slow man of yours, and if we must be all
judged too quick by such as he—”
And it looked for a time as though these two women who had been
friends all their lives would fall to bitter words now, except that the
cousin was so good and peaceable a man that when he saw his
wife’s great face grow red and that she was gathering up her wits to
make a very biting answer he called out, “Let be, mother of my sons!
She is sore with sorrow tonight and well beside herself.” And after he
had chewed a while upon his straw, he added mildly, “It is true that I
am a very slow man and I have heard it many times since I was
born, and you have told me so, too, mother of my sons.... Aye, I be
slow.” And he looked around upon his neighbors and one called out
earnestly, “Aye, goodman, you are a very slow-moving man for sure,
and slow in wits and slow to speak!”
“Aye,” said the cousin sighing a little and spitting out the shattered
straw he chewed and plucking out a fresh one from the stack of rice
straw near which he stood.
So was the quarrel averted. But the mother was not eased and
suddenly her eye fell on the old gossip standing in the crowd, her
mouth ajar and eyes staring and all her old hanging face listening to
what went on. Seeing her the mother’s anger and pain broke out
afresh and it all came out mingled with her agony and she rushed at
the gossip and fell on her and tore at her large fat face and snatched
at her hair and screamed at her and said, “Yes, and you knew what
those folk were and you knew the son was witless, and you never
said a word of it but told a tale of how they were plain country folk
like us, and you never said my maid must go up and down that rocky
path to fetch water for them all—it is all on you and I swear I shall not
rest myself until I have made you pay for it somehow—”
And she belabored the gossip who was no match for the distraught
mother even at the best of times and there is no knowing how it
might have come about at the end if the son had not flown to part
them and if the younger son had not risen too and with his elder
brother held their mother so that the old gossip could make haste
away, although she must needs stand, too, for honor’s sake when
she had gone a distance and far enough so there were those who
stood between them, and then she stopped and cried, “Yes, but your
maid was blind and what proper man would have her? I did you a
very good turn, goodwife, and here be all the thanks I get for it.” And
she beat her own breast and pointed to the scratches on her face
and fell to weeping and working herself up for a better quarrel.
But the crowd hastened her away, and the sons urged the mother
into the house and they forced her gently in and led her there, she
weeping still. But she was spent at last and let them lead her to her
room, and when she was come and they had sat her down, the son’s
wife fetched her a bowl of water very hot and soothing and she had
been heating it while the quarrel went on. Now she dipped a towel in
it and wiped the mother’s face and hands and poured hot tea out
and set food ready.
Then little by little the mother let herself be calmed and she wept
more silently and sighed a while and drank a little tea and supped
her food and at last she looked about and said, “Where is my little
son?”
The young man came forward then and she saw how deathly pale
he was and weary and all his merry looks gone for the time, and she
pressed him down beside her on the bench and held his hand and
urged him to eat and rest himself and she said, “Sleep here beside
me tonight, my little son, and on the pallet where your sister used to
lie. I cannot have it empty this night, my son.” And so the lad did and
he slept heavily the moment that he laid himself down.
But even when the house was quiet the mother could not sleep for
long. She was spent to her core, her body spent with the long ride
and all her heart’s weariness, and the only thing that comforted her
was to hear the lad’s deep breathing as he lay there. And she
thought of him then with new love and thought, “I must do more for
him. He is the last I have. I must wed him and we will build a new
room on the house. He shall have a room for himself and his woman,
and then when children come—yes, I must find a good, lusty wife for
him so that somehow we shall have children in the house.”
And this thought of little children yet to come was the only comfort
she could see in her whole life ahead of her.
But doubtless even this comfort might not have lasted except that
her old flux laid hold on her again and made her weak as death, too
weak to mourn. She lay there on her bed for many days, purged
body and heart, and all her sorrow and her comfort too in abeyance
because she was not strong enough to mourn or hope. Many there
were who came to exhort her, her neighbors and her cousin’s wife
and they said, “Goodwife, after all the child was blind,” and they said,
“Goodwife, what heaven has made for us we cannot change and it is
useless to mourn for anything in this life.” And they said, “Remember
your good sons,” and one day when the cousin’s wife said this the
mother answered faintly, “Yes, but my elder son’s wife she does not
bear, and my younger son he will not wed.” And the cousin’s wife
answered heartily, “Give the elder son’s wife a year or two, cousin,
for sometimes when seven years are passed barren, a woman will
come to her true nature and bear a harvest of good children, for I
have seen it so, and as for the lad’s saying he will not wed, why then
he has a love somewhere, and we must find out who she is, and if
she is fit for him to wed or not. Yes, truly has he found a love, as
young folks will these days, for never was there a man in all the
world, I swear, who would not wed!”
But the mother whispered, “Bend down your ear, sister, and put it
against my lips,” and when the cousin’s wife had done this the
mother whispered, “Since sorrow follows me and everything goes
wrong with me, I fear sometimes it is that old sin of mine that the
gods know about—perhaps heaven will not give me grandsons!” And
when she thought of this she closed her eyes and two great tears
came out from under her closed lids. She thought of all her sins, not
only the one the cousin’s wife knew of, but all the many times she
had said she was widow and the letters that she wrote and all the
lies. Not that she held the lies pure sin, since all must lie a little now
and then for honor’s sake, but here the sin was, that she had lied
and said her man was dead. Almost was it now when she thought of
it as if she had put her hand forth and brought his death on him, and
she had used this lie of death to hope another man would have her.
So all these sins of hers, so old she could forget them many days
together when she was well, came back fresh and now when she
was weak and sorrowful, the heavier because she could not tell them
all but must carry them in herself, and heaviest because she was a
woman held in good repute among her fellows.
She grew so low in mind that nothing cheered her much except to
have her younger son about her. Yes, although the elder son’s wife
tended her most carefully and brought her food ready and hot when
she would have it and even walked a mile or two to another village to
fetch a certain sort of dried curd they made there from beans, and
although the mother leaned on her in every sort of way and called to
her if she would so much as turn herself in her bed, yet the son’s
wife was no comfort to her, and often when she did her most careful
best the mother would scold her that her hands were cold or her face
so yellow and stare at her in some half hostile, childish way. But still
the older woman never blamed the son’s wife any more that she was
childless. No, she said no more of that, believing somehow dimly
that her own sins might be the cause.
But she rose from her bed at last, and when the autumn was well
gone the sharpness of her pain had ebbed with it and she was
dreary all day long but not frantic, and she could think of her maid,
but the edge of pain was gone. At last she even said to her own
heart, “Aye, perhaps even what they say is true, perhaps it is better
that my maid is dead. There are so many things worse than death.”
And she held fast to this one thought.
And all the hamlet helped her. No one ever spoke of the maid again
before her, nor doubtless anywhere, since there is nothing to be
remembered in a blind maid and there are many like her
everywhere. First they did not speak of her where the mother was, to
spare the mother pain, and then they did not speak because there
was naught new to tell of it, and because other news came of other
things and people, and the maid’s little life was ended.
For a while the gossip went carefully where the mother was and took
thought not to be alone with her, but when she saw how feeble the
mother was when she rose up from her bed, she grew cheerful then
and called out greeting as she ever had.
And the mother let the past be silent, except sometimes in her own
heart.
 XVIII
THEN did it seem as though the mother’s heart might have some
comfort, for in the springtime of that year the younger son came
home and he said, “I am come home to stay a while, mother, how
long I do not know, but at least until I am bid to go again.”
But when she rejoiced he made little answer and scarcely seemed
himself. He was so quiet, never singing or playing his capers or
talking in any reckless way as he was used to do, that the mother’s
heart wondered if he might be ill or troubled with some secret thing.
But when she spoke this fear to the cousin’s wife that one said,
mildly, “Well, it may be he is passing out of his childhood. How many
are his years, now? The same I think as my fifth child, and she is
twenty now and nearly twenty-one and wed four years. Yes, twenty-
one is out of childhood, and men should not caper then as once they
did, although I remember that man of yours could caper even to that
last day I saw him.”
“Aye,” said the mother, sighing. Very dim in her now was the memory
of the man, and mingled somehow with this younger son of hers, and
sometimes when she remembered she could not think how her man
had looked alone, because the son’s face rose there in his stead.
But at the end of nine days the younger son went as quickly as he
came and almost secretly, though how he had his message he must
go none knew. But go he did, putting his few garments in a little
leathern box he had. His mother grieved to see him go and cried, “I
thought you were come to stay, my son,” but the son replied, “Oh, I
shall be back again, my mother,” and he seemed secretly gay again
somehow, and eager to be gone.
Thereafter was he always gay. He came and went without warning.
He would come in perhaps one day, his roll of clothing under his arm
and there he was. And for a day or two he would idle about the little
hamlet and sit in the teashop and make great talk of how ill the times
were and how uneven justice was and how some great day all this
would be made better, and men listened staring at each other, not
knowing what to make of it, and the innkeeper scratched his greasy
head and cried, “I do swear it sounds like robbers’ talk to me,
neighbors!” But for the mother’s sake and for the good elder son’s
sake they let him be, thinking him but childish still and to be wiser
when he was wed and had a man’s life.
Yet when he came home this younger son still sat idle, or else he
made as if to help his brother at some light task, although when he
did this the brother said scornfully always, “I thank you, brother, but I
am used to doing work without you.”
Then the youth looked at him in his impudent way, for he grew a very
impudent eye these last days, and he would not quarrel but he
laughed coolly and he said, and spat in the dust while he said it, “As
you will, my elder brother,” and he was so cool his elder brother well-
nigh burst with hatred of him and gladly would have told him to stay
away forever except that a man may not tell his brother this and still
be righteous in his neighbors’ eyes.
But the mother saw no fault in him at all. Even when he talked his big
talk with her and said against his elder brother, “I swear these little
landowners that must even rent before they can live, these little men,
they are so small and proud that they deserve what shall befall them
one day when all the land is made common and no one may have it
for his own.”
The mother understood no word of this except the first and she said
plaintively, “Aye, I do think, too, your brother is over proud
sometimes, and his wife barren, too.”
For everything this younger son said seemed wise to the mother,
now she clung to him so fast. To her when he came home it made a
festival, and she would have made each day that he was there a
holiday if she could have done it and would have killed a fowl for him
and made better food than usual. But this she could not do. The
fowls were her elder son’s now, and she could not do better than to
steal an egg or two from some nest she found and keep them for her
younger son, and when he came pour them into boiling water
secretly for him to sup and add to the dish a little sugar that she had
saved somehow.
It came to be that whenever any little dainty fell to her or if she went
into a house in the hamlet for a visit with a neighbor, since she was
so idle now in her age and nothing she must do, and if someone
gave her a peach or a dried persimmon or a little cake or some such
thing for kindness, she saved it for her younger son. Much time she
spent in watching these small bits to see they did not mold, and she
kept them as long as she could, and when he put off coming home
and she was forced to eat them lest they spoil she felt it no pleasure
and scarcely could she enjoy the dainty, although she loved food,
too. Often would she open the drawer she kept them in and turn the
little store over with her fingers and think to herself, “He does not
come. He is not here. If I had a little grandson I could give them to
him when my son does not come. I have no one, if my son does not
come.”
And many hours of each day she sat and looked down the road to
catch a glimpse of him as he came and when she saw the glint of a
man’s robe she would run forward as best she could and when she
saw it was her son come home she took his warm smooth hand in
her old dry one and she pulled him into her own room and poured
out for him the tea the careful son’s wife kept there for her and then
with pleasure would she bring out the little store she had for him.
And she sat down and watched him lovingly while he picked about
among the bits and chose the best. Sometimes he turned his dainty
nose aside and said, “That cake is mildewed, mother,” or he said, “I
never liked a rice flour cake so dry.”
Then she would answer sorrowfully, “Is it too dry, my son? Well, and
I thought you would still like it maybe,” and when he would not have
it she ate it up herself to keep from wasting it, grieving that it was not
good enough for him.
Then when he had eaten what he wished she sat to hear what he
would say. Never would he answer all her questions freely as she
wished he would and when she pressed him closely he seemed to
be in haste to go away, and when she saw this was so, she learned