heritage
migration makes us human; community feeds our souls
Welcome to my virtual garden. I hope you will rest here for a while. In this garden, we plant daydreams and harvest stories ~ nourishment comes in oh so many forms:
“I'd like to dedicate this to all the creative, righteous children/
I have some food in my bag for you/
Not that edible food, the food you eat, no/
Perhaps some food for thought/
Since knowledge is infinite/
It has infinitely fell on me so um....” - Erykah Badu, “Appletree”As always, I like to begin things with a poem. Last fall I facilitated a Mythmaking and the Environment workshop with FEMS Tournament where we discussed Ntozake Shange’s “senses of heritage” to explore the connection between environment, culture & family lineage:
“i got talked to abt the race & achievement
bout color & propriety/
nobody spoke to me about the moon” - Ntozake Shange I envision the liminal space between imagination & ancestral memory is one of our most powerful tools against despair. Though I do not reside in the South my lineage is there, in the damp grass, stuck to the bark of Mississippi cypress, tittering in the coos of the eastern screech owl. My father was ____. My uncle was _____. Lots of family history I am still piecing together. Surviving while Black is no easy feat; this is where memory gets tricky. My family tells me to take creative license in lieu of silence. When I turn the recorder on my aunt looks at me sheepishly and says “I’d like to start over.” Some things we keep to ourselves.
Though I didn’t grow up in the South, I spent a lot of time there visiting my kinfolk: smelling the sweat and perfume of my late auntie’s bosom, trying and failing many times to put flame to my uncle’s cigarette because my little fingers couldn’t get the hang of a bic lighter, wondering why my freshly pressed hair would never stay down in the wet air of Pelahatchie.
After around age 10, the regular trips down South are put on pause. I’m back in Denver, learning how to navigate my own sense of heritage. I don’t return to Mississippi until I am road tripping my way to college all the way on the East Coast, I am confronted with a very different environment, a very different biome, a very different history. My mom and I are the only ones of her bloodline who live out this way. After completing her residency at Tulane, my mom took an interview in Denver. Kaiser flew her out, hoping to convince her that this was the city (and the job) for her.
“I’m out here walking around and people are wearing light jackets and cardigans. In February! February!” That’s Momma’s favorite part: in FEBRUARY. After that, it was a wrap. She canceled all her other interviews, broke the news to my grandmother (who eventually moved to Denver after I was born then returned to Detroit when her arthritis got too bad. She and her husband hitchhiked there in the early 1940s and eventually placed roots, avoiding the terror of the South, taking part in the Great Migration that brought some nearly 2 million Black people Northward during the first half of the 20th century), packed her bags and started her new life in the Mile High City. Migration has always been in our blood.
Denver is a sprawling city, filled with outdoorsmen and urban artists alike. It is also a very Black city, though you gotta know where to look to find us. In Curtis Park, on the corner of California St. and 31st St., sits the Black American West Museum and Heritage Center. It’s a tall but unassuming building, built of brick, an enduring symbol of the April 1863 ordinance that required all new buildings be constructed with fire-proof materials such as stone, brick or heavy wood timbers after a fire spread across the city and leveled most of historic Denver. I think of this fact every time I’m back home in Denver, Queen City of the Plains, especially now during the climate crisis, where a fire and its smoke can further impact the breathing of those already affected by the high altitude and increasing air pollution in a rapidly developing city. But this is enduring illusion of the West, tabula rasa: a clean slate where one’s wildest fantasies can come to fruition. If it burns down? Rebuild it better. If the wells run dry? Keep moving further West. Run too fast and you may reach another chasm. Mourning is just a piece of the wildness that pushes the West forward to the future. We are at once arrested in history and the product of it.
The Black American West Museum and Heritage Center is one of the few standing historic buildings in Five Points, once known as the “Harlem of the West,” a neighborhood that has been rapidly gentrified and now dons the alias “RiNo.” The center tells the story of Black cattlemen and settlers, such as the Buffalo Soldiers and Black cowboys who sought refuge in the newly pillaged lands of the American West. The building, like most of Denver, sits on stolen Ute, Arapahoe and Cheyenne territory, and these layers of dispossession are colorfully rewritten in the street names that don different tribal titles: Zuni, Wyandot, Arapahoe.
To this day, people are still surprised when they learn that I’m from Denver: most people just know it as a city that is less than 10 percent Black and one of the most segregated cities in the United States, if anything. To be fair, when I was younger, I had a lot of disdain for my “boring” city until I began to dive into the rich Black history that it possessed. One in three cowboys/vaqueros in the American West were Black. I remember showing this picture to a classmate with pride after my mom and I visited Rocky Mountain National Park, my face growing hot with embarrassment when he said “cowboys aren’t Black.”
Nevertheless, we are everywhere, and that’s part of our revenge. This Black mischief, this insurgency, our marronage, this refusal to be categorized or restricted in any way. This ability to retreat into the archive and the forest alike. Actress Pam Grier (whose Blaxploitation movies I grew up watching, much to my mother’s chagrin), graduated from my alma mater, Denver East High School. Denver saw a boom of Black migrants in the 1970s and 80s as an emergent Black middle class found possibility in employment opportunities and affordable housing. I love watching the mist dissipate over the Rocky Mountains in the morning, I love the crisp 5280 air that makes you slow your gait and appreciate the pine, I love the 300 days of sunshine; I love the annual Rock and Gem Show, the queer dance parties that spawn across gardens and backyards, the dark cafes where strange and eclectic, often transient creatives gather, the way historic buildings somehow always find a way to keep on keeping on.
It is in this conflicting spirit that I tell people my “environmental story,” a story I’ve been asked to tell on many occasions in many different settings: summer camp, teach-ins, lecture halls, between a lit joint & a damp redwood after reluctantly kissing a banana slug. I am both grateful to and burdened by Denver for sparking my love of nature: I lived by a canal that carried water fowl and the occasional amphibian, my cousins and I would play fairies in my grandmother’s sloping backyard where there was a hump I always tripped over, no matter how many times one of them warned me I was running too fast, we swung on the swings and chased squirrels, picked flowers, skinned knees, ate crab apples until our stomachs hurt.
So naturally, when I encountered my hippie scientist teacher in 7th grade, I was curious about this so-called environmentalism. At first I wasn’t convinced: we live, we die, how does what we do on this planet affect anybody else? Then I went to Yellowstone on a multi-day field trip. Though I complained the entire time because my fingers were freezing and I couldn’t hold my pencil right even though I was the designated note taker, I was bewitched by the meeting of snow and steam at the hot springs that stunk of sulfur, of the grandeur of the moose, and the juiciness of foraged berries. Still I wondered: where are all the Black people?
As I grew older and participated in camping excursions, protests against gentrification, Doris Duke Conservation Scholars and family road trips, the outdoors too symbolized a place of white vigilantism, of violence, of seizure and bare protections. My young body was fighting to hold all the contradictions I felt walking into a wooded area: I became hyper aware of my own smallness, my own vulnerability. Scrolling through old archived Instagram posts I found this one, recounting my experience as the only Black member of an anadromous fish migration lab:
“Today I packed one of my favorite drinks from my childhood: mango jumex and felt the summer begin to take its place in the year. I went sampling (for my job) in a few Connecticut lakes- one of them right next to a women's penitentiary (not pictured). I couldn't help but reflect on freedom, incarceration, privilege and fear: how many of these women (the majority of them probably Black and brown) look out onto this lake and ache for the freedom it brings?
There is something to be said about the resilience of Black bodies existing outdoors, our right to take up space and be out in nature, unabashedly, to enjoy the air and the feel of lake water against our brown palms and not fear for our lives. This is one of the reasons I committed to environmental studies and reclaiming Black and brown ancestral knowledge of the land. We were deep in Connecticut Trump supporter territory. I thought of prison abolition, of Mother's Day that had recently passed, of the women who looked like me but weren't me and that was the difference: being out on this lake was a privilege for me granted through my status as a Yale student.”
These are things I do not take lightly: shelter, clean water and safety, though afro-pessimists would consider that one an illusion (and at times I find myself inclined to agree). It is a steady tension, loving the outdoors and desiring a place away from the specter of anti-blackness, which always seems to find us, one way or another. But the trees? The trees and I have an understanding. The bullfrog speaks to me in cryptic language. Even the mosquitoes and their greedy feast make magic from my blood.
The point of me writing this story and sharing it with you all is to prompt others to think of their own environmental stories. What drew you to nature? What separates us from it? Occasionally when I work with young people, especially those who grew up in dense city areas with little canopy cover, a lot of them are confused by the prospect that we all have environmental narratives. But that is the point of sharing these narratives, to discover whimsy in the smallest of ants, to work through our lack of regular access to nature, to cultivate joy in the outdoors, even if the joy is in an imagined landscape of a future we are collectively working towards.
More than anything I want the moon to still surprise me.
~ griot