Writer
Marlanda Dekine-Sapient Soul is a poet, social worker, and fourth-generation descendant of Black land stewards living on family land in Plantersville, South Carolina. She is the author and recording artist of i am from a punch & a kiss. Marlanda is the founder of Speaking Down Barriers, co-founder of Writers Well Youth Fellowship for Black femmes, and has served communities as a child therapist, crisis therapist, community trainer, and as a child abuse forensic evaluator. Currently, Marlanda is pursuing her MFA in poetry and is serving as the 2020 Healing Justice Fellow with Gender Benders.
Artist
Jess Hill received her BFA in Printmaking, with a minor in Art History, at the University of West Georgia in 2016. She is a recipient of the 2018 Heinmark Artist in Residence at Brown University and the 2017 Emerging Artist Residency from Atlanta Printmakers Studio. Jess Hill’s art explores the resilience of Black Womanhood/Motherhood, African folklore, quilted patterns, and symbolisms.
For the descendants of Africans living in the USA pursuing justice for 1.5 million acres of Black-owned land.
As long as I have a pig and garden, no one can tell me what to do.
— Fannie Lou Hamer
Mine our lineages
You will find fortitude and insistence
I grew up on Heirs Property
A family blessing and a United States problem
Took 15 years for me to come back down
My granddaddy’s dirt road and see
His wild green field free
And Black like me
Secretly purchased marshland
From his father who was born a sharecropper
My daddy tells me how my grandma and granddaddy
Turned a swamp into firm land for a house
Hogs, cows, vegetables, broom grass, and chickens
How Granddaddy Silas did this with mental
And soul injuries on brown and Pall Mall since age 13
How Grandma Lizzie listened to neighbor stories on the porch
How her children and granddaddy watched fields reap
How she prayed over our family
How they knew the land like God
Now
I’m thinking about the Combahee River Raid and Ma Tubman
How she kept saying:
My people ARE free
Now
My mind is jumping loops of Grandma Thelma boiling pine
“Trust a doctor for who?”
How one day the police pulled up the drive and I watched
With eight-year-old eyes as granddaddy said, “Get the Hell
Off this land” No blink
How my kin and the Earth ground me
Make me ask what’s 12
When I’m seeing 20/20
And the neon sign of stars read:
Sankofa: The Land says return to me
Sankofa: The Land says return to me
Sankofa: Mine your lineage for fortitude
I insist
Ain’t nothing wrong with us
But we been contortin’ and bendin’ Black
To earn our way to freedom
But these days
The little one and I are outside
Growing squash and sage in grandma and granddaddy’s field
We watch the birds
We sway with the pine
Seem like every time
I go outside I find
An artifact
Smooth blue glass, oyster shells, and brick
The USDA got rules and regulations
We mine our lineages for fortitude and insistence
In this place of European land grants
Black codes and unjust generational wealth
We are a listening people
Who know without having to speak
And we don’t mind watching the wind do work
Clear as day, in a vision, my Granddaddy Silas comes to me:
Chile, who you asking for freedom?
Don’t you know how to aim?
How to grow?
Don’t you know you Black as God
As the dirt all green grows up out of?
Don’t you know buildings go up and down every day?
Nature can takeover all dem ting dem folk
Worshippin’ and you ain’t a thing beggin’ to be seen, chile, BREATHE
You was born free
Written for Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund
