before i knew my self, i knew my ancestry.. the black women who came before me made their presence known in me.. at age thirteen, for my eighth grade project on black women poets of the past / present / future, nzadi told her story through me.. that’s when i knew that she and her forgotten daughters were with me.. 

 

at age thirteen, i sat on the edge of my bed and transitioned beyond the edge of an astral plane between a present pennsylvania and a west african past.. for twenty three minutes i wrote from that place.. like a well of water flowing from the fountain of my foremothers, i wrote.. like a child with a woman inside her, i wrote.. like a little old soul seeking language untold, i wrote and i wrote and i wrote.. revealing a revolution inside me.. reliving a ritualistic rites of passage that birthed itself inside the slave ship.. this pen and pad a spaceship of site and sound that transported me back in time to see motions of oceans that drowned nzadi’s first born baby girl.. gone too soon, grown too soon, like me.. saw the sun in the moon until the morning after her rape forced her astray, like me.. until her black girlhood made her black woman, like me.. 

 

uprooted by intrusions of the truest form of life known to humankind.. the black woman’s mind and memory of a time that was taken from us.. a time we now reclaim.. at thirteen i reclaimed a recollection of a reflection of my self.. unaware of what words had come from some deep source in me, i followed the orders of those foremothers and let the paper and pen be the archive for the pouring out of their memory.. thus, nzadi became my entry to self knowing.. 

 

at age twenty three i looked out over cape coast and cradled my own wounds.. west africa no longer a distant memory, but a part of me.. a home that engulfed me physically.. it hurt and healed and hurt and healed.. the deep drowning i felt after placing one foot before the other beneath the dungeon of darkness where they held my dearest nzadi.. the haunted history of these heinous crimes against the black women who birthed me.. in ghana, i gained clarity of this fact - that my people were never ‘pose to go back.. but there i was, returning, for all nzadi’s daughters who never could.. //

 

today, i sit beneath georgia oak trees.. making meaning of my existence.. connecting with ancestors whose spirits sing my sorrows.. they continue to guide my quest through the universe.. i trace my mama all the way back to ghana in my imagination.. mama, whose mama was creole and cajun.. geechee and gulluh.. south carolina and louisiana.. enslaved and free.. whose mama’s mama survived for the possibility of me.. the women who lived and died to imagine me care free.. the women whose torture and triumph paved the way for my own.. the memory of mamie and nana mae jolt me back to a day when women who were black and bold faced death.. feared life.. yet lived, still, unashamed of all god made them..