Today is Juneteenth. It’s also the anniversary of my mother’s death.
That has always made June 19th a complicated day for me. It’s a day of hope, memory, and legacy.
I think about people whose plight must have seemed to doom them to being chattel forever. But that isn’t what happened. From the moment their story changed, I believe they adjusted to their new situation while planning how to get their lives back.
How am I so confident?
It’s evident in how we move in a world that still believes our well-being and humanity are up for debate. It’s that legacy that sustains us.
And then I think about my mother.
The kind of legacy a mother’s love leaves behind simply by existing in your life settles deep into your soul and holds you close. Stories, joy, perseverance, and resilience are handed down like family jewels.
My mother taught me things without sitting me down and calling them lessons. Her actions taught how to love and respect family and others. She also taught me how to walk away if a situation or person no longer supported my mental health.
She showed me how love can be practical. That family and history mattered. She showed me that women carry stories in their bodies, in their choices, in what they say, and in what they never say.
I think about what she gave me and what I still reach for as needed. Proof that a person can be gone and still be very present in your life.
On Juneteenth, I also think about the ancestors who did not have the luxury of being remembered fully. Women and men whose names were changed or never recorded. They loved children they couldn’t protect, but still built families under impossible conditions. Ancestors who made a way when the world insisted there wasn’t a place for them.
That is where the Legacy series began for me.
A search for my lost ancestors to fill a family tree for a book to celebrate my grandfather’s 100th birthday. Pouring through record after record, resilience permeated each page. Without these brave women and men, I would not exist.
They were farmers, laborers, tailors, midwives, and small business owners. Not just captives in a heinous trade.
They all mattered. Not because they were perfect. Because they endured. They loved. They made decisions. Created family traditions. They carried pain and hope and yet made room for the next generation to persevere and go where they could not.
This eventually led me to Liz.
What do we inherit from the women before us? And what do we choose to do with it?
Sometimes inheritance is land. Sometimes it is a letter. Mine was a kind of strength I didn’t ask for but needed.
And then there was the joy.
Pure joy.
The family reunions. Sunday dinners. Game nights. You and your siblings dancing with full abandon when that favorite song comes on.
Black joy matters in my stories because joy is also part of our legacy. Our ancestors were not their suffering or pain. They laughed. They gathered. They loved. They made food, homes, music, beauty, and families. They created moments of tenderness in a world that didn't make softness or tenderness easy.
I don’t write women as monoliths. I write them as whole living beings. Imperfectly perfect, learning and loving.
That’s what my mother’s life gave me. Not a theory of legacy, but the lived truth of it.
A woman does not have to explain her importance to become essential. She simply lives, loves, teaches, and remains.
That is my mother’s legacy.
Even after death.
Especially after death.
So today, I am thinking about that wonderful soul that is my beautiful mom and how my family’s legacy was shaped by her existence. I am thinking about ancestors whose names I know and those whose names I may never recover. I am thinking about the women and men who came before me.
I exist because of them.
I write because they made a way for me.
KITT