black history/futures: the prick
03 Feb 2024just yesterday i had done the prick and here i was, less than 24 hours later, about to buy my first plane ticket.
it was going to be a financial stretch for a couple of weeks but thankfully the agency was getting faster and faster at processing the reimbursements. hopefully, i’d still be able to make rent on time.
i clicked around looking for the cheapest flights to charleston. south carolina wasn’t as easily accessible as it used to be but a few airlines still went there from boston. i found a flight for $750 and thought that was cheap enough for these days.
i booked my ticket, closed my laptop, closed my eyes, and sat back on the couch. i took a deep breath. it was really happening. i was going to go where my great-great-great-great grandfather had lived his life on this soil. we’re not sure exactly how charles maynor made it to charleston but, just given the statistics, he probably was stolen from somewhere in africa and brought against his will.
what made the pain of looking at that history bearable was the federal healing and reparations program. not only did the government do dna mapping (after we all voted to nationalize all the private dna companies who were up to no good) but they started using the reparations fund to connect descendants back to the lands of their ancestors. based on the specifics of your lineage, you got between $1,000 and $5,000 a year to go do research relevant to your lineage.
all this happened after we realized that so much of government spending was really trying to deal with the untended to ruptures and ripples from being disconnected from your people(s) and the lands that your people(s) belonged to. all of the trauma discoursed had finally bubbled up to the federal level and was really starting to have an impact.
now all i had to do was wait two weeks to go on my first reclamation trip…
words / writing / post-processing
319w / 20min / 3min