Black History Month in a Place That Doesn’t Celebrate
Can I really complain about being away from home?
Rome slowly enters my heart, but those who came before me,
with skin the sweetest juice you’ve ever had didn’t have that luxury.
Ripped away from their lives, stripped of their identity
forced to assume a life so far from the freedom they once knew.
The firsts clinging to the remnants, a life never to be had again.
Some, the strong, the enlightened, the accepting, chose death
a better home than the one they were headed to.
Those who chose to persevere, never again knowing the peace
of roots holding them firm– this one’s for you.
Lifetime after lifetime like driftwood at sea,
they are lost.
The only place these generations have ever known
feels foreign.
A strange pull, a beacon to a place unknown.
And those who braved that savage, diabolical, ruthless, barbaric, sadistic thing
and chose to find love, friends, happiness, family, faith, daring to believe in a future were cut short.
Watching wives and children and husbands purloined
the home they’d managed to build annihilated.
Hundreds of years in the not-so-distant future,
that same gut-wrenching feeling of missing something attacks a generation.
One who’s known home, who has an identity on this foreign land, who despite hardships contribute to build a future worthy of the next generation.
In a time when those separated can reach in their pocket and discover the world. Their world.
Like the north star leading our ancestors to freedom,
that pull leads us to yearn not for the future, but for the past.
One where we understood liberation. Not in the way they tell us
yet still hold us back, but in the way those first “African-Americans” felt.
Before the chains, before the oceans, before all they had were memories.
So yes, being in Rome, this city unlike any other,
has caused my heart a pain that I never knew.
But it’s also a scene in my movie that I wouldn’t skip.
And yet, during this month,
there’s a yearning in my gut calling me home.
Calling me to celebrate every life that came before mine.
Calling me to celebrate the greatness of my people.
Carver, Chisholm, King, Douglas, Truth, Tubman, Wells,
Kobe, Jordan, Davis, Davis, Obama, Harris, Rhimes.
And to those whose names are lost to time, but whose lives allow me
to drink the same water, eat at the same table,
sit in the same classes, speak the same words,
walk through the same doors.
To be in the presence of the ones who truly understand
the essence and the lifeblood of home.