PASADENA, Calif. – “So love your neck," Carolyn Ratteray read from the pages of Toni Morrison's Beloved, adding, "I can’t believe a more true statement for this time."
Books have always been central to Ratteray’s life, woven into her being as they are woven into a quilt her mother-in-law gave her and her wife as a wedding gift. “She spent six months hand-quilting it," Ratteray said, calling it one of their most prized possessions.
Growing up, she said her parents deliberately exposed her to all types of reading material. “We had Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon and we also had Shelley and Shakespeare on the same bookshelf," she recalled. She also remembered her mother offering her this bit of insight, “The content of what you learn in the history books in school is usually full of BS.”
That's particularly true, she says, when it comes to the history of Blacks in America. “Those records were destroyed on purpose," Ratteray said, "and so in that case how do we recover our sense of self and where we are standing in the world?”
One way, she says, is by researching and reclaiming that history. It's something her father, Oswald Ratteray, did meticulously, cataloging belongings from generations. “It feels like a treasure box," Ratteray said as she carefully picked up labeled accessories that date back decades.
Her father, she said, also wrote extensively about one ancestor in particular: Charles Roach Ratteray, her great-great-great-grandfather. Born around 1799, Ratteray was a master shipbuilder who would sail between Bermuda and the US in the mid 1800’s, a time when there weren’t many Black sea captains. When his ship, the Rose of Sharon, would dock in New York, he’d have a white crew member assume his role. “And then when he sailed back to Bermuda he could resume being the captain of his own ship," his great-great-great-granddaughter explained.
Ratteray doesn’t presume to know how that might have felt as her ancestor tried to navigate that place and time, but she knows how she feels as she navigates this one. “As a Black queer woman moving through a white supremacist society, I am at all times navigating the space," she said. "I‘m navigating white fragility. I’m navigating power dynamics.”
She navigates it in her work as an actress too, because of outside perceptions that follow her into the audition room. “There’s been a systematic resistance to seeing Black people as whole human beings," she explained, "and if that’s fundamental, then of course it’s going to affect what roles we can be seen as right for.
But she also feels the strength of her ancestry – of the great-great-great-grandfather who charted a bold course and of all those before and after. “I like to think that I am walking with them, that I stand on their shoulders," Ratteray said. "Even non-family ancestors but just Africans in the Americas that have lived and loved and struggled for so long and so continuously."
"It allows me to walk with gratitude and a lot of empathy," she added.