Special Audio: Reflections
Reflections on a year after the start of my journey.
June 29, 2019
I am coming up over the fall-line, coming celebratorily home into the Virginia Piedmont. I-66 West passing Manassas is where the Blue Ridge mountains first come into view and it has become my personal marker in this year long journey that sacred lands are coming - that soon my Monday-Friday suburban life will give way to historic and pastoral beauty framed by mountains at each unsuspecting turn - that soon the manicured ways of Monday-Friday will give way to gratuitous views which lay plain why my family has made this their home for nearly two centuries. The true green Virginia landscape that house the bones of family members long gone, and cradle generations of my family’s history and continue to nourish my eldest family members down to the newest babies is erect and alert and in season. Sometimes, it is my music that I bring with me on the journey - Afrobeat, reggae, trap as I pass the line from Prince William into Fauquier County. When I hit Fauquier County, it is like my Spirit alerts me that this is holy ground for me, that the past is ushering me to come back and revisit and to mine its lessons, its glory, and its tears. I am the constant miner. The old burnt mill on my right-hand side just as I pass into Fauquier County remind me that I am truly in the land of my ancestors.
What started out as an idea, fertilized by some very inspirational friends, most notably my friend Corinna Moeibus, a Florida based anthropologist - encouraged me to think of a podcast versus a written account of me mining myf family history. It turned into a year-long Path Foundation funded journey as a part of a large oral histories project: Listen the Community Speaks- tracing my family over 9 generations from enslavement in Stafford County to migration, settlement and thrival in the community of Waterloo in Fauquier County, Virginia.
The journey has been lush, delicious, energizing and life-altering. I walked in with my passion for learning and understanding more and the Afro-American Historical Association of Fauquier County at the helm of Karen White and at the coordination of Angela Davidson, and Norma Logan and an equally dedicated board anchored me with their decades of personal knowledge, connection and love for Fauquier County and the Piedmont and their impressive and I believe unprecedented holdings of primary documents that illuminate Black history that include photographs from the late 1800s and early 1900s of Black families, collections of abstacted primary source documents such as Colored School attendance and roll books, Free Negro Registers, family files, deeds and wills, marriage documents and much more.
Prior to this journey, I had no real picture of what Black heritage looked like, but a year later I have a very nuanced image of extreme beauty, cultivation, pride and relevance. Black rural communities are not often represented in the national conversation - but Black rural communities are the bloodlines and the vessels of any Black urban center.
It is my most beautiful year yet - to pair historic stories with contemporary ones - to present the past as it is -crucial to now.
It is an ongoing poem and an ode to the multiple lived experiences of Blackness.
I dedicate this reflections episodes to Karen White, Angela Davidson and my cousin whom I didn’t know who picked up my initial call - Norma Logan. I dedicate it to their decades of work and the beauty in which they do the work. With the honor of getting to know them professionally, I had the honor of getting to know them as family. The first time I had the opportunity to step into their childhood home, I knew that if I could ever connect to the word “heritage” it would be because they represented Black heritage in its fullness. Their ancestral home was and is a museum and montage of Beauty.
The lessons
There were many lessons in creating Perpetual Blackness from the outset. Aside from the technical considerations which were numerous in themselves, I was both an insider and outsider in many ways coming into Fauquier County. Prior to beginning this work, I had come once as a teenager in 1996. The first step was really embedding myself and building relationships with family members in which I really knew in a surface way. It was the gardening of the family relationships, showing up for family events and learning the feeling of my family’s home community and expanding with that piece that was most significant. It was learning the reservations and learning who held what knowledge and what should become a part of the public domain through this project. The questions I had at the beginning of the project were not necessarily the important questions in the middle or impetus for the answers at the end. They changed as information allowed me to see what was necessary organically. Pictures that I held as definitive as I got information transformed- I had to be as organic as the uncovering.
The Method
The method was to learn Fauquier first, to embed to have context. It was coming out at least 2-3 times monthly from my home in Severn, Maryland on the weekends driving its roads. It was learning its connections and junctures, its continuity with other counties. In my family’s case that was Stafford, Rappahannock, and Culpeper counties. My first exercise for the grant, I stayed in a slave cabin at the Clifton Institute during the Slave Dwelling Project. This powerful tour and night gave me an immediate ancestral connection in the sacred places that once would have been the home of my family members.
