October is Hoodoo Heritage Month and Gullah Geechee Heritage Month. They’re two observances rooted (in different ways) in the preservation of memory, tradition, ancestry, spirituality, foodways and the stories Black people have carried forward when nobody else considered them worth recording. This year, they arrive as I am becoming increasingly certain of something about my own work. I have spent most of my life telling stories, but I am beginning to understand that the assignment has always been bigger than writing them. I am trying to help keep the record.

---

Before we get any further, yes, the piece about my nuptials is coming. There are simply several other stories demanding to come out of me first. If patience is not your ministry, Greg and I are on TikTok and Instagram at @atraintogalleryplace for now. A name change is coming very soon.

---

Before I Knew the Word Applied to Me

The title griot has always sounded grand to me. The first time I remember hearing it, I was a little girl in Harlem, mesmerized by storytellers who would spread blankets, play djembes, dance, and tell stories. Griot might as well have meant king or queen. To my child mind, these were people who had been trusted with something important. They knew the stories, and because they knew them, the rest of us could know them too.

Storytelling had already begun shaping my understanding of remembrance. One of my grandmothers once told me the story of Adam and Eve not simply as a Bible story, but as a story about people everyone came from. More importantly, she connected it to the importance of telling stories about the people who came before us so they would not be forgotten. Long before I understood archives, attribution, oral history or documentation, I understood the charge to tell the story so we remember the people, the time, the way they lived, and the small details someone else might decide were too ordinary to save.

That instinct has followed me everywhere. I read encyclopedias for fun. My favorite genres became biographies, memoirs, historical fiction and science fiction. I fell in love with Octavia Butler because imagined worlds could still reveal something brutally true about this one. I obsessed over song lyrics and the stories behind them, magazines, family histories, and grown-folks’ conversations I was technically not supposed to be listening to. I loved library storytimes where Anansi might appear, neighborhood elders might talk about the Harlem Renaissance, or someone might explain the origin of a nickname I had heard my whole life.

My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Hammond, saw the writer in me early. I started writing poetry around 10. By high school, I was being paid to write. At Bowie State University, I worked my way through the student newspaper and launched our campus chapter of Her Campus before graduating. I have written fiction under pseudonyms, studied communications with plans to become a publicist, spent several years teaching English, and eventually found my way to Black media.

The titles changed, but the assignment did not. I have always wanted to tell the story and make sure people understand what it means.

The Interview That Changed the Assignment

A conversation with Gullah chef BJ Dennis during a previous Hoodoo Heritage Month clarified that responsibility for me.

We talked about Gullah foodways and the knowledge that disappears when elders die before someone thinks to record what they know. Recipes and techniques can vanish. The story behind why a family cooks something a particular way can disappear so completely that the next generation does not even know there was something to ask about. Dennis also spoke about what happens when Black people are not positioned to create the record ourselves. Other people document our traditions inaccurately, strip them of their origin, or receive credit for preserving what we had already been doing.

That interview changed the trajectory of my work and, in ways I did not fully understand at the time, my spiritual practice. I left it more committed to writing things down, giving them somewhere to live unadulterated, and amplifying them whenever I have access to a platform.

My connection to Gullah Geechee history had been sitting in my family story the entire time. My nana always said our family was Geechee. She never called it Gullah or Gullah Geechee. She simply said Geechee. I knew her parents had migrated from South Carolina to Harlem, but so many of my childhood friends had family somewhere in the Carolinas or farther South that it barely registered as unusual. That is one of the afterlives of the Great Migration. Sometimes, a massive historical movement can look like everybody on your block having a grandmother “down South.”

It took adulthood for me to recognize what I had been hearing. Even watching Gullah Gullah Island teach children about Gullah culture as a child, I did not understand that some of those lessons concerned ancestors who were mine too.

Hoodoo brought another layer of that recognition. Remembrance is central to my spiritual practice. The people who came before us matter, and so do their names, their habits, their prayers, their recipes, their work and the things they knew how to do with their hands. My own ancestry research has shown me how devastating absence can be. My family lost a generation’s worth of maternal information, and genealogy has helped us recover some of those names and begin reconstructing lives that should never have become mysteries.

We can ask what foods they might have eaten, what crafts they practiced, which prayers may still be carrying us, and what magic moves through a family–even after nobody remembers its first name. I know the story of my own name because someone bothered to tell it. I was named for an ancestor with a distinctive name, which means I carry evidence of her every day. That is what preservation can do. It makes absence less complete.

We Have More Storytellers Than Ever

There has never been an easier time for ordinary people to distribute information. That has brought enormous good. Stories that once could have been suppressed can travel before someone powerful decides whether they deserve publication. Communities no longer have to exist in informational silos. People can document what is happening to them in real time. However, the same ecosystem has also produced a problem. We increasingly confuse the ability to publish with the responsibility to inform.

Media literacy has suffered. People do not always stop to ask who is making a claim, where the information originated, what agenda may be shaping it, or whether the person presenting themselves as a source has any obligation to correct the record. Influencers and celebrities can build “news” platforms without inheriting the standards traditionally associated with reporting. Ideas move without attribution. Someone else’s reporting becomes a viral post with the original source stripped away. Context disappears because nuance rarely performs as well as certainty. The stories least likely to go viral are often the ones that disappear first.

This is an especially strange time to be doing this work in Black media. The business itself is in crisis. Money is tight. Newsrooms are expected to create more with fewer people. Some operations are substituting generative AI for experienced editorial staffs, while asking what remains of those staffs to compete with creators whose value is measured largely by the size of their personal audiences.

That tension is personal for me. There are moments when writers and reporters who have spent years developing the skills required to contextualize major cultural events watch opportunities go instead to people whose coverage of those same moments may amount to little more than a ‘fit check and proof that they were in the room. My objection is not that influencers have no place in cultural storytelling. Democratized media is part of what has allowed so many voices into the conversation. My concern is what happens when reach becomes interchangeable with rigor.

I still believe there is a difference between content and a record. A trustworthy record cares about getting something right even when nobody is checking. It requires research. It requires identifying where information came from. It requires resisting the temptation to repeat something simply because it is moving quickly. It requires being willing to correct what was wrong.

Content primarily needs attention. Those are different jobs.

Citation Is Veneration

Attribution matters to me for reasons that stretch beyond professional etiquette. Citation, to me, is a form of veneration. It is one of the ways we leave future generations an accurate path back to the people whose ideas, language and work shaped the world they inherit.

Another conversation that sharpened that understanding for me was one I had with Sara Makeba Daise for MadameNoire during Hoodoo Heritage Month last year. I had already been following Sara for a while by then, learning things from her that I might not have encountered otherwise. She is also, quite simply, one of those people whose work makes you want to pay closer attention. At some point, she shared a reflection on Threads that gave language to something I had already been feeling about the responsibility of naming our sources.

“Citation as a Hoodoo Ethic as in we have an ancestral and communal responsibility to name names, honor, and point others to those who’ve given us language, frameworks, foundations, & models of possibility. As in ‘what I know and how I know it’ is influenced and informed by a multitude of voices. Living and dead. And I must name those names in reverence, and with intention that others will be uniquely activated by that which has activated me.”

When a Black thinker creates an idea, a phrase, a joke, a recipe, a sound, or some other cultural contribution and their name is separated from it, we the path back to the person. Future generations lose the opportunity to understand what kind of mind produced that idea, what kind of life informed it, what world surrounded the person when they created it, and what other work they may have left behind.

I think about that often when something distinctly Black American is stripped of origin and reintroduced as though someone else recently discovered it. Someone cooks kale down with smoked meat and announces that they have found a great new way to prepare it, and somewhere generations of Black cooks are looking around like, Now, who exactly discovered what? The same thing happens with language. Ebonics becomes “internet slang,” as though Black American English does not have grammar, history, and regional variation. Black musical traditions become simply American music. Our style becomes streetwear. Our innovations become trends.

There is a reason Black Americans have become increasingly insistent about specificity. Naming where something came from is part of keeping the record straight. When we name the person, the community, the tradition and the lineage, we preserve the trail that allows somebody else to find their way back.

Black Americans Made Culture Anyway

Black American culture exists because people whose connection to specific African nations, ethnic groups and traditions was violently disrupted made culture anyway.

That fact alone should end the occasional argument over whether Black Americans “have” culture.

We built traditions from what survived, what we remembered, what we created here and what we exchanged with other people throughout the African diaspora. Our foodways, spirituality, language, fashion, humor, literature, dance, church traditions, funeral rituals, HBCU culture and music carry histories that are both distinctly ours and part of a much larger diasporic conversation.

Hip-hop may be one of the clearest modern examples. It became music, a language, visual aesthetic, dance culture, fashion influence and global way of making sense of multi-faceted identities.

Black Americans have influenced the diaspora just as the diaspora has influenced us. Those truths do not have to compete.

The shared inheritance is often hiding in plain sight. Someone from elsewhere in the diaspora will occasionally begin a sentence with, “Well, back home we…” before describing something Black Americans also do. Washing chicken with citrus is one of those examples. Those moments make me want to interrupt with some version of, “Exactly. Look at us.”

Geography changed us. Time changed us. Still, certain rhythms, flavors, spiritual impulses and ways of moving through the world remained recognizable. We all got the same roots.

The Stories I Still Want to Find

The stories that have mattered most to me are not necessarily the ones with the biggest names attached.

BJ Dennis remains one. So do Fox and Rob Rich. Tank Ball shortly before her Grammy win. Pierce Freelon talking about how children can understand ancestor veneration. So many of the local stories I wrote while working at Because of Them We Can were, in retrospect, acts of remembrance. This person did this thing, in this place, at this time. Do not lose them.

There is a feeling I get in interviews when somebody says something and I immediately recognize that it needs to enter the record. It feels like magic moving through me because I am receiving information while simultaneously understanding that I am responsible for carrying it somewhere else. The story will still pass through me. The questions I ask are informed by Harlem, Bowie State, the classrooms where I taught, my ancestors, my spiritual practice, the books I read, and every conversation. It’s my understanding that multiple realities can exist beside one another. I am usually interested in the rising action, or the part of the story that helps us understand how someone arrived at the moment everybody else wants to discuss.

That interpretive work is part of the gift. Two writers can receive the same transcript and produce entirely different stories because a writer is not simply a machine arranging quotes. We bring a lifetime of ourselves to the page.

I Love Us Is Becoming the Archive I Need It to Be

My original vision for I Love Us was different. I am comfortable admitting that because the evolution has been useful.

This publication helped me create opportunities to tell Black stories in spaces with larger audiences. In those spaces, I have become increasingly niched into the subjects I care most about. That allowed me to reconsider what this piece of digital real estate should be.

I Love Us is becoming my personal archive of Black life as I encounter it.

I do not need to chase every story here. I can write about what I am discovering about myself among other Black people, what I am learning about other Black people, and what those discoveries make me reconsider about us. I can document the things that might otherwise feel too small for a traditional assignment. I can tell someone to call their grandmother, ask about the recipe, label the photograph, save the magazine, or write down the story behind the nickname.

I also want to take that work into more rooms.

Art Basel Miami Beach returns Dec. 4–6, bringing galleries and contemporary art from around the world to Miami Beach. I am calling in work there this year because Black visual and performing art belongs inside this same conversation about story, record, and cultural memory. I want to talk to the artists. I want to understand what they were trying to preserve, interrogate, or imagine. I want to write about the Black people creating work that someone may encounter decades from now and wonder about the world that produced it.

Writing It Down

I used to think becoming a griot would require somebody to identify me as one. Now, I think recognition works differently. Sometimes you spend years doing the work before realizing the name for it has been following you since childhood.

My job is not to tell every Black story. I could not if I tried. I want to tell as many as this life allows me to encounter and tell them with enough care that somebody can find them later. I want my children to see that legacy, too. For my sons, this is our family history to preserve and eventually add their own entries to. For my bonus daughter, with whom I now share a last name, I want her to see an example of that name walking into rooms and leaving the door open.

When I think about the scale of legacy, my imagination becomes almost absurdly large. I want people living a millennium after me to be able to know something about people who lived a millennium before me. That only happens because, somewhere in between, somebody cared enough to write something down.

If one of my ancestors could ask me what I am doing with all these words they gave me, I already know what I would tell them. I am writing them down every day—in articles, interviews, fiction, journals, and the Notes app on my phone. I am trying to preserve names, details, arguments, ideas, memories, and magic while I still have access to them.

I want the record to show that I was here, that I was gifted, that I used my life to connect people to spirit and that Black Americans were dope and here, too.

Most importantly, I want it to show that I cared enough to get the story right.