“Tell your story.” What an impossible prospect!
I am a historian, writer, researcher, and feral artist, who is also a professor (Ph.D., University of Maryland), a director of antiracist and decolonial labs and projects (LifexCode), a teacher and a mentor. I’m a Momi of two, a daughter of one, a wife, a boyfriend, a sister-lover-friend. My Capricorn-Aquarius-Virgo placements mean it is always “get in babes, we’re going shopping for freedom,” but with rigor, ferocity, long walks in the archive, and excruciating attention to historical detail. I read the footnotes and I love a document. I am annoying.
But when I write, research, teach, create, or guide and mentor, I try to do it from the sternum–full bodied, effervescent, holding me and you accountable to a higher purpose.
Studying Black life during the period of slavery is that higher purpose. It continues to be the greatest privilege of my life. I remember doing it before I became a professor, asking pointed questions about our family history at my aunt’s kitchen table in Chicago, in the car with my grandmother on the way to family events. Years later, I have taught at small liberal arts colleges, large state universities, and am currently an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins University in the great city of Baltimore. Somewhere along the way, I decided to marry the love of my life and have two feral children. Now, between chasing the Sky Babies, I spend my time reading, writing, teaching and speaking about slavery, about West Africa during the era of the slave trade, about Africans in the Americas (especially Louisiana, the U.S. South, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean), and about what we can learn from their testimony.
I write for my mother and her sister, my grandmothers and great-grandmothers, their mothers and mothers’ mothers, a line stretching from Chicago and the Bronx, to Alabama and Puerto Rico, to the islands beneath the sea and the continent across the ocean. I write for the Sky Babies and for myself, to lance the wounds of the past, to relearn the magic and pain of this world, a world that has tried, but failed to extinguish Black spirit, joy, and creativity.
I write to know what cannot be known. I drive myself mad with it and then do what I can with the archive we have. The archive may never be enough, but it will have to do. And because I am an 80s baby who wrote her first novel in WordPerfect and started her first blog on Blogger, I study the digital for all it can reveal (and obfuscate) about the Black experience. Some call me a digital humanist. I write about that too.
There is so much more I could say here–about community, my obsession with kinship, the tangle of academia, pedagogy, Black feminist thought, and activism. But already, there is too much EYE here and not enough WE. Single-author chit chat makes me uncomfortable. I believe in collectivity, I breed collaboration. We need each other to survive and always have. I need you.
If there’s a tale to be told about me, maybe that is the one worth telling: That I trusted Black people, in bondage and in freedom, to tell their own tales. That I tried to tell their story–the story of us–and serve them faithfully, until the day I died. That my story is our story, and there will never be enough space to tell it all, but we can try. That our story is a story of Black life against death.