The Ashes Still Glow
"Memory is not history. It is the fire that refuses to go out."
I was born into neighborhoods where the ground itself whispered what it had once held. My grandmother would walk me past empty lots, and though my eyes saw weeds and beer bottles, hers saw timber and laughter. "A church used to stand here," she'd say. Or, "That used to be the Johnsons' house, before…" She never finished the sentence. She didn't have to. The sentence ended in smoke.
Every Black family has its version of this: the place that once was, the space erased. It could be Tulsa, 1921, when the bombs fell on Greenwood and a Black Wall Street turned to char. It could be Philadelphia, 1985, when police dropped fire from the sky on MOVE and the block where children played became rubble. It could be the small, unnamed street in your own city where a house fire claimed four siblings and no one ever built again. To be Black in America is to live among ashes, to inherit landscapes where what once flourished was made to disappear.
And yet, here is the miracle: the ashes still glow.
