“The longing for home never ceased, and the sojourn Down South would develop into a summer tradition.”

For most of my young life I was denied the truth about my southern Black heritage, and the urbanized Americanized culture around me was teaching me to be ashamed. Of course, this dark skin, these pronounced and molded features, resemble some of the most ornate ceremonial masks of the old world, and the desire to adorn myself is an ancestral call I answer every day. Now, I take pride in that lineage, the heritage that is often siloed into the sole narrative of the cross-dimensional sufferings of those who experienced and survived the middle passage and those dozens of generations that endured indentured subjugation, followed by legislated terrorism in the southeastern regions of the United States. The latter fact, I think, is what my immediate ancestors impressed on my psyche, these myths about the South being a place one needed to escape from, one that needed to be modernized, minimized, and forgotten.