The Yellow Bus to Healing
Jul 15, 2025
By: Donna Lawson
"The effects of trauma can be passed down through generations, but so can resilience and healing."
~ Dr. Soma Ganesan
Ordinarily, an alarm clock is designed to alert someone at a specific time. But that morning, we didn’t need one. My mother’s voice—urgent and repetitive—echoed through the house:
“Wake up!” “Get up!” “It’s the first day of school!”
“You’re gonna ride the yellow school bus!”
“You can’t be late!”
But none of us had slept anyway.
My brothers and I hadn’t spoken during the night, but we communicated in rustles—our small bodies turning over and over beneath the sheets. We were restless, anxious, and too young to understand all that we were feeling. It wasn’t just first-day-of-school nerves. It was something deeper. Something inherited.
That was the year we were bused out of our familiar neighborhood in New York City to integrate another school. No one said the word “integration” to us. But we knew this wasn’t just any school. We felt the weight of something bigger—something historical—pressing down on our tiny shoulders.
Our parents got us dressed, packed our bags, and zipped our coats. My mother brushed my hair and whispered a prayer under her breath. She was nervous too, though she tried not to show it. Her decision to send us to that school was filled with hope, but also fear. She wanted more opportunity for her children, just like the mothers who marched with Dr. King, who sent their kids into schools that had once shut them out.
We didn’t know the names of the civil rights cases. We didn’t understand the politics. But we knew we were Black children being sent into unfamiliar spaces where we weren’t sure we’d be welcome.
But trauma doesn’t begin or end with a brave decision. It lingers.
Generational trauma isn’t always spoken. It’s felt. It’s in the silence, in the trembling hands, in the way your body remembers even when your mind tries to forget.
Now, as an adult, I look back and wonder: Was our family making history, or were we being pulled along by its tide? Did my mother know the cost of that choice—the splintering of our community, the anxiety in our little bodies, the way we held our breath in silence?
Still, we got on the bus.
Not out of excitement. Not out of choice. But out of obedience and hope, and maybe a bit of courage.
We rode forward into the unknown, carrying our ancestors’ dreams—and their unspoken grief—inside us.
Unbeknownst to me, the yellow school bus carried me to a field of learning and sacred spaces beyond my own culture and ethnicity. The bus was my time capsule, a container on wheels, divinely marinating me in the complex narratives of faith, education, and radical social change buried for discovery in the future. The lessons and experiences set the precedent for the rest of my life.
