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ages. Both of my parents are from South Carolina’s Lowcountry and so were their parents, and so

were their parents.

I am the only girl and the middle child out of six boys. I suppose you could say that I was a tomboy
but really, I was just being myself, whatever that happened to be from one moment to the next.
There was always plenty to do. Getting lost in the woods and eating muscadines and blackberries as
I wandered along. Swimming like a fish. Riding my bike all over creation. Making go-carts with my
brothers and the neighbourhood kids and racing them on a hilly dead-end street. Looking for frogs
and snakes in a nearby creek at the bottom of a 50-foot ditch. Reading books all the time. Catching
fireflies at dusk and putting them in Mason jars to make lanterns and setting them free before we

had to go inside. Learning how to make family recipes, learning how to knit and sew and make
things with my hands. I knew how to put on a dress and behave like a girl when I had to, which is
still my M.O. pretty much. I’d rather be in a library reading a book, doing research, or wandering
through a museum, letting something majestic and brilliant overwhelm me.

Thank God my mother taught me how to read. What a great grand leap that was, to be able to
disappear into a book, and let my mind wander while my kindergarten compatriots were placed on
a rug and had books read to them. They would sit there transfixed while I was in the stacks, leafing
through encyclopaedias. Not that there’s anything wrong with someone reading a book to you. I had

other things to do.

I suppose what I just said sounds like everyone’s
Southern childhood but probably unlike your favourite
Southerner, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia -- a place that
can only be described as Wakanda. Atlanta is The
Blackest Place on Earth. I know people who think they
live in The Blackest Place on Earth and then they come to
Atlanta, and it slowly dawns on them that what they live

in is a Black neighbourhood. Atlanta is an ever-
sprawling ever-increasing Black city with white
neighbourhoods that are shrinking. There’s Blackness,
Blackness everywhere you look. It is tribal. It is
relentless. It is historical. It is full of joy. Thanks to my
upbringing, I have an exceptionally high level of
unforgivable unapologetic Blackness of Jack Johnson

proportions. Thank God I grew up there.

Remember, Atlanta is the birthplace of the Civil Rights
Movement and home to just about every significant
Black leader of the 20th century -- Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr, Hosea Williams, Julian Bond, John Lewis,
Andrew Young, Ralph Abernathy, Rev. C.T. Vivian,
Coretta Scott King, Joseph Lowery and so many more.
Atlanta has Atlanta University Center Consortium, the

oldest and largest contiguous collective of Black
American higher education institutions in the United States. This includes Morehouse, Spellman,
Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse School of Medicine. Dr. King graduated from Morehouse.
So did Senator Raphael Warnock, visual artist Sanford Biggers, Sam Jackson, and Spike Lee.
Spelman graduates include Esther Rolle, Pearl Cleage, Alice Walker -- and yes, Stacey Abrams. Clark