I wrote my first book when I was 14 in a youth detention center. I’d read all of the books offered in the library so I decided to write my own. My loose leaf, college-ruled, numbered at the top right corner of the page life story (with all of the proper nouns changed for privacy) circled the facility. The girls and the guards all loved it. A few girls asked if I’d write their story and I did. I’d completely forgotten about this era of storytelling until I went through the K-Swiss shoebox that my stepdad stored all of my YDC letters and other belongings in.
Initially, I wanted to be a veterinarian then a computer software engineer then a criminal prosecutor (with the understanding that “we needed more we” on that side of justice) then a writer. While working full-time as a 911 dispatcher and studying full-time as an undergrad student, I wrote and self-published my first novel. I fell in love with the entire process. People asking me to help them write their stories and me being able to successfully do that is why I launched So Fundamental Content Writing Agency.
The best storytellers are avid researchers. They don’t just do it because they have to, but because they love finding a rabbit hole and getting lost. Zora Neale Hurston said, “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.” After poking around former plantation sites in the Low Country and prying through every collection of slave narratives I got my hands on, I realized how paramount the Federal’s Writer Project was. It was a way for the federal government to get unemployed writers and librarians working again. They were sent to former plantation sites to interview formerly enslaved people. Because of that project, we aren’t limited to stories of Harriet, Sojourner, Frederick, and Booker T. to hear firsthand about those days. There are 2300 accounts!
Reading those straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth stories made me curious as to who’s recording our elders’ stories today. This question is why I became an oral historian. I interviewed more than 21 Gullah Geechee elders about life in Savannah between 1920-1970. Their stories were the basis for my latest book, Krak Teet, a catalog of Black Savannah biographies. I later expanded Krak Teet into a nonprofit organization aimed at getting more people telling their own stories and recording those of their elders.
As a teaching artist and speaker, I use Krak Teet, and my first nonfiction work which is centered on self-expression and spirituality—Women Who Ain’t Afraid to Curse When Communicating with God—to guide children and grown folk in poking and prying into their personal, family, and community histories to find meaning, impact, and connection.
