Beneath the Concrete: Notes on Unseen Routes and the Maps We Make
(watch the film “Unseen Routes: Mapping Black Albany’s Past, Present, and Possible Futures”)
This past summer I created a short film map called Unseen Routes for Compass Roses, a project hosted at Opalka Gallery in Albany, New York—all of the exhibition maps can be viewed on the website. The piece blends archival fragments, speculative storytelling, and the BaKongo cosmogram—a visual philosophy of cycles and crossings. It moves through Albany’s hidden Black histories: the neighborhoods erased by the construction of 787, the docks where enslaved and free Black people once worked, the homes and libraries that vanished, the ghosts that never left.
What I learned from making this piece wasn’t only about Albany. It was about how we locate ourselves in the places we call home—how we listen, how we care, how we return.
Here’s what I’ve been thinking since the film went out into the world…
Unseen Routes, Everywhere
When I said yes to making a map, I thought I knew what that meant. Denim, indigo, South Carolina blue—my people’s cloth. I planned it all out, but it felt wrong in my hands. I had just moved back to Albany after years of visiting like a tourist of my own memories. So I stopped. I let the city breathe through me before I tried to name it. Once I paused, the form arrived. The film wasn’t just a format, it was a way of listening and being. The BaKongo cosmogram gave me a rhythm: birth, life, death, renewal.
When I look back, I realize I didn’t set out to “cover ground.” I was called to certain places. Spirit led me. Each event, each invitation, carried me to a location that would later find its way into the film. I attended a gathering near where the Pruyn Library once stood—right near the Hudson. I found myself at an event at Cherry Hill, and more than once at the Empire State Plaza. My father’s home sits in the South End. None of it was planned, yet every site that appeared in the film had already touched my life. My mother’s stories had drawn the map long before the camera did. Her memory was my first archive.
Listening as Method
Returning to Albany required a new kind of attention. My grandparents’ former house, a tall 1880s Italianate row home often mistaken for a brownstone, became my anchor. It had a broad stoop, a massive cherry-wood outer door, and behind that, another door etched with stained glass. That double doorway is how I think of return now: one door to history, another to spirit. My grandparents guided this work—not through language but through permission: move slower, refuse neatness, let the images breathe. My mother’s recollections became coordinates. Even without the buildings, the ground remembered.
Lineage, I learned, isn’t a list. It’s adjacency. It’s standing next to what remains, what’s missing, what’s still unfolding. My daughter’s piece, Loved Here, is a digitally illustrated, more traditional map of the places where she’s felt love in Albany—first as a visitor, and now as a resident. Two generations mapping the same city through different eyes.
Speculation and Responsibility
For me, speculative work isn’t about escaping what was; it’s about listening more closely to what still is. Imagination is a way of coming home. Truth and imagination walk together—one hand on the heart, one hand on the archive. Feeling calls the fact forward, and the fact opens new feeling. Every time I imagined a scene, I could feel someone tugging at me—an ancestor, a place, a memory that refused to stay quiet. The BaKongo cosmogram kept me oriented: nothing imagined without a return, nothing taken that won’t be given back.
The stories that surfaced were already braided into my own life. Israel AME Church, my family’s church, kept showing up in the work. It’s where both of my maternal grandparents’ funerals were held, where my aunt was married, where my grandmother founded the Martin Luther King Child Care Center in 1968, just after his assassination. That center became a model for other AME churches. I’ve continued to circle that space my entire life—sometimes literally, driving by, other times standing still. Although it isn’t featured in the film, it is/was an anchor.
The same is true of the Stephen and Harriet Myers Residence, whose walls still breathe freedom and it’s only six doors down from my paternal grandmother’s former home. That proximity feels less like coincidence and more like inheritance. The past keeps positioning itself beside me. The responsibility of reimagining is to stay faithful to those connections—to let spirit, memory, and fact guide each other. I’m not inventing a city; I’m remembering one.
Rooted in Place
I live right on the edge of New England, and I believe it’s imperative that we tell our stories wherever we stand. There are unseen routes everywhere. People like to imagine there are blank places on the map—Idaho, Montana—but they forget the western migrations, the small Black towns, the hotel workers, the teachers, the preachers, the dreamers who passed through and sometimes stayed.
Everywhere has a Black story, whether the markers exist or not. The work is to uncover it. To understand how the place we live in became possible.
For me, Albany is no longer just the backdrop of my childhood—it’s a living archive, a teacher, and a collaborator. When I came back, I thought I was returning to a city. Instead, I found myself in conversation with memory, spirit, and geography all at once. Every building, every block, every stretch of water has something to say if you approach it with care. To be rooted in place isn’t about staying still. It’s about knowing where you are and recognizing what had to happen for you to stand there. It’s about remembering who dreamed the ground you walk on into being, and what debts we owe to their dreaming.
Albany keeps teaching me that belonging isn’t ownership, it’s attention. When we practice that kind of attention, when we build generative cartographies that honor both what is seen and unseen, we begin to understand how the local is always linked to the cosmic. The routes we trace here are connected to routes everywhere else. If we practiced that kind of noticing, if we honored the crossings that brought us here, we might finally see the world as a web of continuities instead of broken plots.
The Humanities as a Practice of Return
Honestly, if we had more generative cartographies, and more people willing to make them, the world might remember itself better. Not just maps on paper, but maps made of language, sound, movement, and color.
A poem can be a map.
An eight-minute film can be a map.
A dance, a mural, a quilt, a sermon whispered on a stoop—maps too.
This is what the humanities do when we let them breathe. They remind us that creation is a kind of care. They keep us rooted in our humanity, in our places, in each other. The humanities are the practice of return; of circling back to what was almost forgotten and asking what it still has to teach.
When I look at Unseen Routes, I see more than a film. I see a map of crossings: art and scholarship, ancestor and descendant, Albany and the Atlantic, seen and unseen. It taught me that to imagine is not to escape…it’s to tend. Art helps us feel where we are so we can decide how to stay, how to care for what’s beneath us, and how to cross back when it’s time. That’s what I want for all of us: a practice of noticing, a willingness to trace the unseen routes that keep us alive to one another.
More to come.
Short Site Index
Hudson River waterfront: the Kalunga line made visible; site of arrival, departure, and memory.
South End: family ground; everyday survival under layers of policy and neglect.
Former Pruyn Library site / 787 entrance: erased locus of Black learning; remembered through maternal story.
Historic Cherry Hill: colonial mansion turned palimpsest; proximity to freedom routes.
Stephen & Harriet Myers Residence: Underground Railroad home; six doors from my paternal grandmother’s house; living testimony of freedom work.
Israel AME Church (Hamilton Street): family church and spiritual center; founded Martin Luther King Child Care Center in 1968.
Empire State Plaza: civic heart built over displacement; site of contemporary gatherings and memory.
Grandparents’ House: 1880s Italianate row home with cherry doors and stained glass; threshold between history and spirit.
Arbor Hill – present absence; voice waiting for its next telling.
Author’s Note
The BaKongo cosmogram, also called the Dikenga or Yowa Cross, is a sacred symbol from Central Africa that charts the cycle of existence: dawn (birth), noon (life), sunset (death), and midnight (renewal). I used it as the structural backbone of Unseen Routes—a reminder that every crossing contains a return.