DEAD WOMAN: sacred teaching

Natalie Wood

Today it was announced that actress Natalie Wood's suspicious death in 1981 would be re-examined. She was found in the water her body bruised, but no one aboard the boat she had been on (her husband Robert Wagner, and a friend and fellow actor Christopher Walken) was charged with any misconduct. But these many years since 1981 have been a gory trail and tale of death.


In 1981 my first son, Lemuel, was born as violence grew alongside the introduction and distribution of crack cocaine on streets all across the United States. Gangs of boys and men with guns, and grudges began to kill each other over territory, and whatever sense of gallantry, or responsibility gangsters used to shield people with, as they did for me as a teenager, from a life of crime went up in a proverbial cloud of cocaine smoke, and angel dust. It was a bewildering time that no was prepared for. Black Americans watched and sensed the momentum and the fruits of the Civil Rights movement dissipated into a scramble for the dollar by any means necessary by 13 and 14 year olds who adapted quickly to the game, and became killers by default.

In Washington DC the Southern custom of standing at attention for passing funeral cars succumbed to the emotional and psychological fatigue of watching hundreds into the thousands of funeral processionals careening through the streets to a handful of cemeteries. Adults began to not tell the stories that held each generation against a common foe; slavery and Jim Crow, or the stories that cemented the idea of progress and change into their children's blood. Instead they began to build defenses against the terror of their own children making money from quick drug sales, or using the drugs.

Guns and shed blood flowed into the streets, and blood became a gang, and cribs were birthing Crips, and aspirants to the bloody Los Angeles gang. Haitian, Jamaican, El Salvadorian, Mexican, and Black neighborhoods were becoming the center pieces of their neighborhoods, and prime time television news, and shows. Each ethnic group developed a signature way of bringing death to their foes, and neighborhoods. At the time the Federal government was brokering deals with Islamic fundamentalists, and training soldiers from Central American countries, the Middle East, and other African countries in their countries or in the state of Georgia, and came up with a lame slogan: Just Say No, and a solution to the drug problem in America: increased police forces, and 3-strikes.

Lorton prison in Lorton, Virginia had too many men incarcerated, but kept the population growth swelling above its capacity. Violence grew inside prisons, as did the rise of a new virus, HIV, that terrified us all. HIV had a face and it was white and gay, but suddenly near the middle of the 1980's it was suddenly in Washington DC like black magic and black men in and out of prison were dropping dead, and their relatives were making up causes of death to put in their church programs.

In northeast Washington DC the spirit of death, and in its accompanying gloom looms DC jail. In a brutally drawn circle a hospital, two mortuaries, and the medical examiners office where dead bodies piled up on slabs shapes the mood of the surrounding community the Amory and the Stadium stare at each other. A subway was built there, and around the corner sits Eastern High school, and a few blocks further an elementary school.

DC and the surrounding suburbs were swelling with 13 and 14 year old girls pregnant attending the funerals of their children's fathers. The wise caring counsel of a community did not fill the blank look on their faces. They were judged and ignored, and these young women made deals with the Federal government that permanently distanced fathers from the rearing of children, and developed a mentality that served, not the communities they lived in, but themselves. The selfishness, and their need for self-preservation created a hardness that in later years hurt because these girls became women incapable of being the wives their heart songs told them they could be. Boys reared thus grew into men incapable of bearing the weight of the responsibilities of deepening the codes of manhood beyond a superficial level, and a concept of the ‘absent father’ took root in the cultural.

There were no Elders in the communities anymore just old people. The years recycled myths, and dumb bravado within boys initiated into manhood in youth centers, jails, and prisons. If they lived they became crippled gangsters, or rotting corpses of 40 year old junkies in recovery who used to be something for a minute back in the day. They are the grandchildren of girls who never will birth to who they are; whose children visit their fathers at Lincoln cemetery.

actress Natalie Wood in a scene of 1961 film Splendor in the Grass !!!!

Natalie Wood died with the gifts of society and the esteem of a nation, and the privilege of being a white women during a time when women could not have their own bank account, and were pretty much un-adult in one sense because women were still emerging from the cultural design that regulated them as chattel. This European paradigm was a destructive set of energies for women and children, and Natalie Wood's death, I suspect, reflected the attitudes and beliefs of an upper class of white men who needed to use beautiful women of substance and cast them aside when expedient. Something about that upper class mentality reeks within the police's inability to solve her death. Something about the vagueness and the defensive tone surrounding the perception of the last men to see her alive is related today’s news of Penn States' cover up of the predatorial homosexuality among the upper tiers of their ranks.

A man, such as I, would pose these questions, and come to understand these issues to better protect his children. During these times my children were raised in a sacred manner to the best of our abilities. The insistence on truth, and the capacity of the mothers' of my children to nurture, and their killer instincts required a man of depth to perceive the energies necessary to guide them through the turbulence of those times. The connection between father and Spirit reflects a relationship with Death, and Life, and the principles governing both that intersect and ignite genius, and fire up the emotional side of imagination affected the neighborhood, the gangs surrounding us, and other people's children because, as a man; a Black man, an Absaroka, and Muskogee man, nothing was disconnected from my family. Everything was related, and the how of those relationships, good or evil, operating in my children's lives was dependent upon the covering, and I was the covering!

The Priestcraft of fatherhood, and the ability of the Womb are the unseen parents of my children, and their connection to the Creator was born from this union. This is a Mystery teaching, and a Revelation. – Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

Natalie Wood at 51st Academy awards show in LA