Welcome To
Emma's Rocking ChairWelcome To
Emma's Rocking Chair
Meet Emma
My great-great grandmother, Emma, was a healer and midwife in Grenada, Mississippi. She provided health care for blacks and poor whites who did not have equal access to doctors or hospitals. After she delivered babies she would rock each one in her hand-carved rocking chair as a part of the birthing ritual. From the Rocking Chair carries on the traditions of midwives, healers, and activists like Emma who work in solidarity with community members to generate and apply strategies, prescriptions, and practices that enable individuals to give birth to present and future possibilities; engender collective, systemic change; and bring about intergenerational healing and wholeness to the planet and its inhabitants.
About The Author
Emma Joy is a scholar, activist and ordained minister. She teaches and writes in areas related to the arts, religion and transformative justice.
From The Rocking Chair
“The work of community building, justice, and restoration begins with both personal and collective self-reflection and accountability.”
Social Witnessing and Mental Health
Some of what we are witnessing is the fallout from what it means to be expected and to expect oneself to operate at high levels of excellence and achievement, while at the same time contending with the constant public scrutiny of those who play out their lives through...
A Love Story
My mother has frontal lobe dementia. Recently, I took her in to see her neurologist at her Elder Care Center to discuss changes in her behavior. Her neurologist, Dr. Lerner, introduced us to a young doctor who was assisting him. As he reviewed Mom’s case history with...
Emma’s Rocking Chair
My paternal grandfather’s family is from Grenada, Mississippi. My grandfather left the South in his late teens and never talked about his years growing up there. Years after my grandfather died, I reconnected with one of his cousins.