On Return

Photo by Anna Jiménez Calaf on Unsplash

Approximately one year ago, I returned to the city of my birth. It’s where both sides of my family migrated to at different times—my maternal side in the 1930s and paternal side in the 1950s. My mother was born here. My father arrived when he was 10, several years after his mother and aunt made their way here to work as domestics. He was left in rural South Carolina with his grandmother, the woman who told my mother I would be born on her birthday and I would be a girl child. Both true.

I have not lived here since the beginning of Reagan’s first term. Before GRID. Before crack. Before. My mother, often an outlier (Black sheep, if you will), migrated across the state, to colder climates, to new beginnings, just two days after I completed first-grade. She did it to save herself and me. It worked. And it didn’t. I would eventually leave her the way she left her mother. Patterns repeat.

I have visited this city often because of family. My father, grandparents, and lots of extended family live here. We came for holidays. I came for school breaks, taking either Greyhound or Trailways across the state solo by the time I was 9, sitting behind the driver until I was a tween and beginning to untether myself from childhood. I have never really been away from this place but now I am both in and of this place. My family has a legacy here. Initiatives that became national models and buildings that still stand. And now, I am here. My daughter is here.

I’ve gone from living in the concrete jungle where dreams (and nightmares) are made of to much greener pastures where deer, chipmunks, and assorted birds are part of my daily life. I wanted to leave the city much earlier but I knew it was the best place for my daughter to get all that she needed and deserved. Pattern disrupted.

I also got what I needed and deserved. There, got me back here.

This past year has been one of reclamation—of my mind, body, and spirit. I am more connected to my SELF and myself than I have been in a very long time. I get the privilege of being able to reorient myself to my self in ways that I never imagined. That’s a good thing. I hadn’t intended to come here, just out of the city to someplace north, with access to nature, art, and good food. But my immediate ancestors—all of whom are buried here—had other plans. I’m back in the place where they made home and I am home.

My good sis, Sara Daise, reminds us all that “the south is a portal.” I believe that those southerners, who migrated north, west, and all points in between and beyond brought those portals with them. And sometimes we are called to return, to close loops, to shift timelines and narratives—to go home.