The Healing Art of Storytelling

Elaine Blanchard shares lessons from her life as a pastor, activist, and “gangsta grammie” in a new memoir.

by

“I believe that love has the power to heal us all.” — Elaine Blanchard

A Memphis-based, “sort of retired” pastor, Elaine Blanchard is also an activist, author, former nurse, playwright, and “gangsta grammie” (more on that last descriptor later).

Blanchard now teaches memoir-writing workshops with Creative Aging, an arts-focused social group for seniors. She’s also teaching a class called Sacred Ground, an 11-week series of videos and literature, with weekly meetings for discussion. Recently, she went with a group from First Congregational Church in Cooper-Young to Montgomery, Alabama, to see Brian Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative and other important sites. Later, the group met and reflected on their experiences. Given the depth of community involvement on display, the “sort of” in “sort of retired” begins to make sense.

“My wife laughs at me when I say that I’m retired,” Blanchard says, her own voice bright with laughter and affection. “I’m just not serving a church right now.”

When she’s not teaching, protesting, or supervising field trips to civil rights sites, she writes. Blanchard, also the author of Help Me Remember: Bible Stories for Children, recently released her memoir, I Remember You: The Making of an Activist (Bohannon Hall Press).

I’ll Remember You

Blanchard moved to Memphis to work as a nurse in 1994, but she grew up in Gainesville, Florida, in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Down the street from our house, Ms. Haige had a boarding house, and in the evenings people would gather on her porch and tell stories,” she remembers. “I, as a child, used to sit on Ms. Haige’s porch and listen to people tell stories. Then, of course, my dad was a preacher, so I heard him tell stories every Sunday from the pulpit. I just got immersed in the art of storytelling.” It was the best of two worlds, the physical and the metaphysical, and it set Blanchard on a path to her own kind of storytelling.

First, though, a traumatic event planted the seeds for Blanchard’s fruitful passion for justice. It was a time, she remembers, when children wandered at will, as long as they were home in time for supper. She was too young to understand that there were people she wasn’t supposed to speak to — or rather, people who could be hurt for the so-called “crime” of speaking to her.

“There was a Black boy who spoke to me, and as a result of that, my father, my brother, and a police officer in our church went over to the little boy’s house, dragged him out of the house, beat him, yanked him across the ground, and threw him in the back of the police car. I watched that from home,” she says, somber. She remembers her family’s phone ringing that night.

“I heard my mother say, ‘Yes. Well, they took him down to the city jail. No, none of this would have happened if Elaine weren’t so friendly.’ So, I understood what had happened as being my fault. Nobody said we’re racists, we’re white supremacists, we live in a segregated, hateful town.

“At the time, I knew that there were white and Black water fountains. When I was four there was very little I understood about racism.” As an introduction to America’s tragic and disturbing history with racial violence, it was an eye-opening, if devastating, experience.

Some months later, her father took her to the police station, where she was instructed to identify the boy who had spoken to her. It would have been easier to do what she was told, to follow the instructions of the authority figures, even if she privately felt it was wrong. It would have been easier, but she refused. After a tense stalemate, her father spoke to the police, and he and his young daughter left the station.

“He put his hands on the steering wheel, and he said, ‘Elaine, don’t you remember this. Don’t you ever think about any of this,’” Blanchard says. That time, she did as she was told, and did her best to forget. When she had a child and her child turned four years old, the memories resurfaced.

“I thought, ‘Well, surely, it didn’t. I’m making this up,’” she remembers. Hard work in therapy and conversations with loved ones told her that, no, the event that had so shaken her as a child had in fact happened.

“In the healing of that is when I started really coming to terms with what had happened to that Black boy and what I wanted to do in this world to make amends for that,” she says.

What Happened at Graceland

In 2016, when the local chapter of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement blocked the Hernando de Soto Bridge in an hours-long peaceful demonstration, Blanchard was home with her wife watching it all on the news.

“I didn’t get up, and I didn’t go downtown, and I didn’t stand with the people there,” she says.

Not long after the protest, Blanchard attended a gathering of Memphis clergy organized by BLM. “Floridia Jackson, a Black pastor here in town, said, ‘The problem with you white liberals is, you stand up for us in your own pulpit when you’re feeling safe. But when it comes to standing up with us out in the street, you won’t come. You think we’re dangerous,’” Blanchard remembers. “I felt convicted by that. And I told myself, ‘The next time BLM does anything, I’m going to be there.’”

It would not be long before Blanchard got her chance to make good on her promise to herself. The next local BLM protest took place at Graceland, when BLM got together on Elvis’ death day, the day of the vigil, to draw attention to continuing issues of racial injustice. So Blanchard went down to Graceland to join the protest.

“They had a tank set up. I walked along and saw a black SUV, and an officer in a SWAT uniform opened the back of it, and there were boxes that said ‘AMMUNITION,’” Blanchard remembers. “I couldn’t see any of my BLM friends until I got all the way past Graceland to the next street. There I saw that the police had set up a corral, like you would put cattle in, and I saw some of my BLM friends in there.”

Blanchard was told that she had found the protest, so she joined her friends, and more people gathered, until Blanchard estimated there were about 80 BLM protestors.

“The police had made a rope of themselves. They had covered Elvis Presley Boulevard locking arms,” Blanchard says. “Mostly it was just a futile kind of situation. I said to Pearl Walker, ‘I’m going home. I’m hungry, and there’s nothing going to happen here.’ I went back to that corral the police had set up and hoisted myself up and threw my leg over the corral. I expected to be yelled at and followed, but the funny part is a security guard from Graceland happened to be walking by and said, ‘Can I help you, ma’am?’ He gave me a hand and helped me over it.”

“I think in this country too many of us are living out of a narrative of fear and anger, and we need to retell that story. It’s separating us. It’s keeping us from living in a world that’s safe for our children and our grandchildren.” — Elaine Blanchard

She posted on Facebook about the situation, including the blatant racism on display, when a white woman could be helped over the barrier a Black person would not have been allowed to cross.

The incident — and Blanchard’s open discussion of it — was the first domino in a series of events that included police observation of her home, a press conference in which she and Walker both spoke, and even her being included on the city hall’s black list.

“The police could clearly see that a white woman who had been with the protesters was climbing over the barricade, and no one stopped me,” Blanchard told The Commercial Appeal in a 2017 story titled, “Why did this ‘gangsta grammie’ make the City Hall escort list?” by David Waters.

“That really fired my activism,” Blanchard says.

Hope and Healing

Blanchard is startlingly open in the memoir about both the highs and lows of her story. Not everyone would admit to potentially embarrassing moments, like staying home during the bridge protest, or feeling “convicted” by the scolding words of fellow clergy members. That she is so candid speaks to Blanchard’s faith in the healing power of sharing one’s story.

“I think in this country too many of us are living out of a narrative of fear and anger, and we need to retell that story,” she says. “It’s separating us. It’s keeping us from living in a world that’s safe for our children and our grandchildren.”

From the pulpit, from her spot in the protest march, and from her authorial keyboard, Blanchard is fighting against the division she sees among her neighbors and her nation. As conflicts go, it demands determination and constantly renewed efforts. To that end, Blanchard does work in other ways as well. For seven years, she led a program called “Prison Stories” to give women in the county jail the opportunity to tell their stories.

“I feel like change is possible because of the change that has happened in me. I think of myself as a recovering racist because I grew up in a racist culture. It took time for me to learn. I’m still learning.” — Elaine Blanchard

She recruited local theater actresses, as well as a director, stage manager, and musicians, to dramatize the scenes that came from the “Prison Stories” project. The theater crew performed the scenes in the jail for the incarcerated women, and they also put on showings for the public at TheatreSouth. “I’m thinking about doing that again, now that I’ve retired,” she says. “What I’ve learned from that is that all of us are so much more than the worst moments in our life.”

Blanchard has seen both progress and backsliding on the long road to social justice. When asked how she maintains the strength to keep moving forward, Blanchard’s message is equal parts confessional and inspirational.

“I feel like change is possible because of the change that has happened in me,” she confesses. “I think of myself as a recovering racist because I grew up in a racist culture. It took time for me to learn. I’m still learning.”

Most of Blanchard’s work as a nurse was with alcohol and drug treatment, and for her, it was another chance to learn. “I have watched people come into treatment as kind of a mess, in every sense of the word,” she says, “and they begin to tell their story to other people who are alcoholics and somehow that sharing of stories heals people.”

People rarely thrive in isolation. Blanchard saw that sad fact play out in various permutations, but she also saw the infusion of strength a person gains by sharing their story with others.

The simple fact of the matter, as Blanchard sees it, is this: “We need each other.”