And I cling to the stories that my long-gone grandpa told me about coming to Gary, Indiana, from the South and building a life for his family. Whenever I make Sunday dinner, it is the voice of my long-gone grandmother whispering all her stories in my ear. I began to see that I had the beginnings of the seed to tell my own stories and those of my family. It never occurred to me that, as a young black girl, I was a student and a witness to the way to be a storyteller. I didn’t know what voice was, and I didn’t know where to find it. I was looking for what the pros call my “voice.” I struggled with shaping my own stories the best they could be, but I felt like I had no roadmap, because I didn’t have the storyteller’s voice, or so I thought.

I wanted to be a storyteller all my life, but I didn’t know how. There is no question that storytelling for black America is a way of saying I am here and I matter. So are the stories of being brought up in segregated neighborhoods, traveling through the South knowing where you could and couldn’t go. Stories, including the razor-edged ones of lynchings and segregation, are the ties that bind us. It is peppered with jokes and gospel and jazz and Aretha.įrom the GGSC to your bookshelf: 30 science-backed tools for well-being. It came with us from the islands and with the Great Migration. We have learned how to tell the story as it came from Africa to Opelika, Alabama from Commerce, Georgia and even from a reservation in Oklahoma. As Congressman John Lewis, a standard bearer of the civil rights movement and equity in this country, says, “The movement without storytelling, is like birds without wings.”īlack folks come from a long line of storytellers, and we seek out the stories that shed light on who we are in this country. The late Virginia Hamilton, the author of The People Could Fly-a revered children’s book of African American storytelling-said that storytelling was the first opportunity for black folks to represent themselves as anything other than property. While story means so much in every culture and ethnicity, I know that black folk, no matter how they got here, are planted in story and shared lived experience. No matter who you are or where you come from, the human spirit wants-no, needs-to be validated.

Black storytellers: Author Toni Morrison, Congressman John Lewis, and Senator Kamala Harris © IIP Photo Archive / CC BY-NC 2.0

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