Finding the Glorious Ones – That four letter word.

Whenever my Elders started a sentence with the word…

“Shit.”

I’d sit up in rapt attention.

In retrospect it was this word that would usually serve as a segue to something powerful that would echo when I needed it the most.

When I received one of the first sparks to begin tracing the roots of my Family Tree, it came by way of my Bigmama telling me:

“Shit, scared for what?!”
And… I haven’t been scared since.

When I debated stopping my genealogy research because I didn’t think that it mattered.

My Uncle Calvin grew frustrated and snapped at me one afternoon, telling me:

“Shit nephew, what you got hands for if you ain’t gon’ take the torch?”
I ended up taking on the role he had in telling the history of our folk.

When I entertained the thought of dropping out of college and forgoing my aspirations of becoming a journalist.

My Aunt Lillian told me:

“Shit nephew… If you got a story to tell you’d better tell it, you don’t got no time to be sitting around like a bump on the log. We only here for a lil’ bit!”
I ended up getting my undergraduate degree in Journalism: became a Journalist, a Writer, an Author, Blogger and serial doubter of the goodness of humanity.