Most people love a good story – one that draws us in and keeps us on the edge of our chairs. One that is relatable – speaks to our imagination and touches our hearts. It may be fiction or non-fiction. It may be suspense or thriller. Whatever the genre, a good story successfully reels us in and takes us to another space and time.
A good story also leaves us wanting more. We connect with it and want to stay engaged until the story’s end. Remember television cliff-hangers? They were designed to keep us tuned in, wanting more! From Star Trek to the Sopranos to Scandal – stories with a good cliffhanger that kept us wondering and talking until the next season will long be remembered. In fact, episode 25 of Season 3 of the TV show, Dallas, is rated as the biggest cliffhanger in television history. That summer everyone was asking, “Who killed JR?”
Intriguing stories are not just those told in made-for-television shows or fiction books. Real, factual history offers intriguing stories that will keep readers wanting more—even if they’re not history buffs.
But what happens when parts of the story are missing?
What happens when the people who lived the story were not the people who preserved it, interpreted it, or decided which parts were worthy of remembering?
For people of the African Diaspora, those questions matter.
Our Story Did Not Begin With Enslavement
Too often, Black history is introduced with chains—as though millions of people suddenly appeared on the shores of the Americas without languages, cultures, technologies, spiritual systems, families, histories or memories of their own.
But our story has a before.
Before the slave ship, there were African civilizations, kingdoms and communities. There were scholars, farmers, builders, healers, artisans, metallurgists, merchants and spiritual leaders. There were sophisticated systems of governance and trade. There were families raising children and elders passing knowledge from one generation to the next.
Then came one of history’s most devastating disruptions: the transatlantic trafficking of African people.
People were scattered throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. Families were torn apart. Names were changed. Languages were suppressed. Histories were disrupted.
But the story did not end.
The people were scattered and the culture traveled with them. It traveled in foodways and agricultural knowledge. It traveled in spiritual traditions, in music and rhythm, in craftsmanship, in language, in resistance, and in storytelling. And, sometimes, it traveled in a song.
Sometimes the Archive Is a Song
One of my favorite examples comes from the Georgia coast.
In the 1930s, pioneering African American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner traveled through Gullah Geechee communities documenting African retentions in their language and culture. In Harris Neck, Georgia, he recorded Amelia Dawley singing a five-line song that had been passed through her family.
Dawley did not know what the words meant. But she knew the song had been given to her by her grandmother, who told her not to forget it because it connected the family to their ancestors. Think about that.
Don’t forget the song.
Turner preserved it. The words were later identified as Mende, a language spoken in Sierra Leone. Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala—whom I have had the privilege of working with—along with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and linguist Tazieff Koroma, continued searching for the song’s origins in Sierra Leone. Eventually, a woman in the village of Senehun Ngola recognized a closely related song that had also survived through generations.
On one side of the Atlantic, a Black family in Georgia had carried the song.
On the other side, people in Sierra Leone had carried it too.
People had been captured. An ocean had been crossed. Enslavement happened. Emancipation happened. Generations were born and died. Memories faded.
But somebody kept singing the song.
Imagine if one generation had decided, “We don’t even know what these words mean. Why are we still singing this old song?”
An extraordinary thread connecting a Black family in Georgia to Africa might have disappeared. That is the power of preservation.
And that story reminds us of something important: Our families are archives.
Sometimes the Archive Is a Tattered Bible
I was reminded of this recently in a way I never expected.
A Savannah woman purchased my GriotSpeaks board game and took it home with her to Iowa. Her family gathered around the table to play. During the game, someone drew a card asking a question about the origins of the Church of God in Christ—COGIC.
The player didn’t know the answer. But an aunt did. And then something remarkable happened.
The aunt went and retrieved an old, tattered Bible that had belonged to the woman’s great-grandmother. Inside that Bible was her great-grandmother’s identification badge from a 1978 COGIC Convocation in Memphis.
No one knew it was there. A question about Black history had unlocked a piece of their history.
The woman later texted me to tell me that the game was teaching her things about her own family that she had never known. There were other discoveries as they continued playing.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that.
What began as a family sitting around a table playing a board game became an intergenerational history lesson. A question caused someone to remember. Remembering caused someone to search. Searching uncovered an artifact. And that artifact revealed a piece of family history that had been sitting quietly inside an old Bible.
The game didn’t create their history. It opened the door to it.
Our Families Are Archives
We tend to hear the word archive and imagine climate-controlled rooms filled with carefully catalogued documents. But Black people have always archived ourselves.
Sometimes the archive is an old Bible. Sometimes it is a song. Sometimes it is a photograph with names scribbled on the back. Sometimes it is a funeral program tucked into a drawer, a church anniversary booklet, a recipe written in someone’s handwriting, a quilt, a letter, a land deed, a military record, a newspaper clipping or a box nobody has opened in 30 years.
And sometimes the archive isn’t an object at all.
Sometimes it is Grandma. It is the elder who remembers who lived in that house and who married whom – why the family left Mississippi; where Great-Granddaddy worked; who owned the land; and why everybody in the family has the same middle name.
We may smile when our elders begin telling that same story for the fifteenth time.
Perhaps we should listen for the sixteenth. Because when that storyteller is gone, an entire library can disappear with them. History does not always disappear because someone deliberately destroys it. Sometimes history disappears because no one thought to save it.
Go Back and Fetch It
This is why the West African principle of Sankofa resonates so deeply with me. Sankofa does not tell us to become trapped in the past. It reminds us that sometimes we must return to the past to retrieve what we need for the future.
There are things our ancestors left for us: knowledge, warnings, traditions, evidence, courage, creativity, resistance – GENIUS!
Some of it is preserved in museums and archives. But some of it may be sitting in your house right now. So I challenge you to look.
Whose photographs need names written on the back? Which elder needs to be recorded?
What family recipe exists only in someone’s memory? What is tucked inside the family Bible? Who knows the story behind that piece of land?
What church program, letter, newspaper clipping or funeral program have you considered throwing away? Is there a song your family still sings without knowing why?
Ask the question. Open the box. Write down the name. Record the story. Preserve the Bible. Learn the song. Listen to the elder. Tell the children.
Because what looks ordinary today may be the very thing that allows someone generations from now to find their way home.
The Mende song survived because somebody kept singing it. A 1978 church badge survived because somebody kept the Bible. Our history survives because somebody decides it is worth carrying.
There is an African proverb that anchors much of the work I do: “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.”
We must tell our stories. We must preserve our stories. We must pass our stories forward.
Because we are not simply descendants of history.
We are its custodians. We are the witnesses. We are the preservationists. We are the griots.
And perhaps that is one of our greatest responsibilities to those who came before us—and to those who will come after us.
The lion cannot tell the story if the story has not been preserved.
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