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 skimming past it has taken me on a rollercoaster of emotion. Grief. Anger. Pride. Confusion. A kind of aching tenderness that hits out of nowhere. I’ve felt the weight of stories that aren’t just “history,” but lived experience passed down, generational trama, moments withheld, erased, rewritten, survived.

There were days I felt embarrassed that I didn’t already know. Like I should have been born with the full map. But then I had to ask myself: Why did I feel that way?

Because mixed identity can do that. It can make you feel like you’re behind in a race you didn’t know you were running. Like you’re expected to have answers when you’re still learning the language of your own story.

And on the other side of my bloodline, I found a different kind of fire.

My Irish heritage wasn’t only about the country or the traditions it became, unexpectedly, a doorway into my mother’s experience as a woman in the 50s and 60s. A time when “being a woman” came with rules you didn’t write and consequences you didn’t choose. And then she married my father an act of love that, in many places at that time, was literally against the law.

I still sit with that sometimes and think: Wow. That is the fire I feel in my soul. 

Because it wasn’t just romance. It was defiance. It was bravery. It was two lives saying, “We will not ask permission to love.” And while the world debated their right to exist as a couple, they were building a family, building me to think deeper.

I have stories and stories. I have questions and questions.

And I’m realizing something that might be the truest thing about this season: at some point, you become the one who has to go looking. No more waiting for someone to hand you the missing pieces. No more hoping the answers will arrive fully formed.

Now I am on my own discovering, researching, listening, and filling in the places where naivety lived.

Not because I was careless. Because I was surviving. Because life gets loud. Because ancestry isn’t always offered in neat paragraphs. Sometimes it’s fragmented. Sometimes it’s protected. Sometimes it’s painful. Sometimes it’s complicated by silence.

And still… it calls.

This series has become more than art. It has become a conversation. A reaching. A bridge. A reckoning. A return.

I’m learning that being mixed isn’t a “between” space it’s a whole space. A full space. A sacred space. It means I can hold more than one truth at a time. It means I can honor where I come from without forcing myself into a box that was never made for me. 

And maybe that’s the real work: not choosing one side, but becoming brave enough to belong to myself.

I don’t have all the answers yet.

But I’m listening now.

And that’s how discovery begins.