Between Two Truths
In Touch With My Ancestry: The Parts of Me That Speak There’s a sentence I’ve been learning to say out loud without judgement: I am not Black and I am not white. I am mixed—Afro-American father, Irish mother and both of them live in me. Not just in a family-tree kind of way. In a daily-life kind of way. They show up when I’m making coffee and listening to music. When I’m driving. When I’m painting. When I’m sitting with a question I didn’t know I needed to ask. Or when my son calls to talk. They speak sometimes softly, sometimes like they’ve been waiting their turn, it seems I am hearing them for the first time. This newest body of work has been a discovery beyond words. It has taken me into places I didn’t expect to go. There are dark corners. There are lights at the end of tunnels. And there are moments where I’ve had to admit: I don’t know as much as I thought I should. That “should” has been heavy. Researching Black history in America really researching it, not s...