As guest editors of Mn Artists, Junauda Petrus and Erin Sharkey, who make up the artistic partnership of Free Black Dirt, commissioned a suite of writings on the themes of Black joy, Afrofuturism, and transformation.
In each piece, the writer was invited to excavate the forces shaping their own creative practice—including influences by trailblazing artists, family members, pop stars, classic novels, Hollywood films, fashion, cuisine, and more. Because creative production does not occur in isolation, these first-person narratives were often evocatively located, imbuing not just cultural connections but a deep sense of place. Though the terrain of these pieces ranged from familiar homes in the Twin Cites to the speculative landscapes of outer space, each writer turned an autoethnographic lens on their own process of artmaking.
To conclude their editorial term, Petrus and Sharkey engage this method through creative prose, in the form of a chain of dispatches from their respective summer research trips. Petrus reflects on family, ancestry, and geography throughout her travels in Cameroon, and Sharkey writes from a Jerome Foundation–funded research trip to study urban farming and African American migration in Buffalo, New York.
Dear Erin,
On the plane from Brussels to Douala, I went into the airplane bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.
You ever just got to see what you look like sometimes? Going to Africa for the first time ever had me looking in the mirror and wanting to see a bud of transformation. I reapply red to my lips and look closer, trying to see the Africanness in me.
My gap and wide nose and large eyes.
The ache and cry on the inside of my belly.
These certain African traits betrothed to me via blood and DNA and despair stretched across generations. I’m contained eruption and whisper and mumble and smile and shudder and erotic. I’m openly crazy to myself in the mirror, in the coffin of bathroom, in the middle passage of plane. How else do you return but in pieces of collected and repressed madness?
I’m laughing and exhausting the nebulous feeling of returning to something I never left. I’m almost 37 years old and Black and giddy and flying over France and Italy and the Mediterranean and Mali and maybe the bones of things that belonged to me. My period is only slightly gone, and I wish I had more blood and moon of sacrifice to return with.
I was wondering if you were ever ashamed to be from Africa, like most of us Black kids was taught to be?
As a child, in the ‘hood where I grew up, the white kids, black kids, and native kids used to run around on the playground and call each other “African Booty Scratchers” as a dis. Dark-skinned kids were teased for being the shade of God and night, even though their beauty was a truth.
All us kids believed something about this continent of Eden and Black Madonna, something inferior and wanting and hungry and broken and poor and useless about it.
As I sit in my seat, no position will let me rest in this reverse middle passage flight, and I’m fidgeting and sleepless in a plane full of mostly Cameroonians returning to their more certain home, and Ngowo is perfect peace in her sleep. I wonder at the unceremonial journey back to an ambiguous loss. A returning child of stolen ancestors.
Remember when Auntie Alexis DeVeaux said we must queer the middle passage in our imaginations? She told us to imagine that in the bottom of a boat men nurtured and loved each other in the midst of an unthinkable living nightmare. That women shackled together sweetened and comforted each other through endless night.
This thought comes when I listen to Ngowo snore next to me, looking pretty and soft lipped and secure. There is an urge to rustle her awake and tongue kiss her, real slow. I hold her hand instead. We are secret Sankofa lovers snuggled like sisters under a cheap navy nylon blanket.
I still can’t sleep, so I watch Black Panther for the fourth time and imagine snuggling with the Dora Milaje, in a pile of shaved heads and spears. I disappear into my imaginary baptism of Africans from an imaginary African land.
The flight moves through night and towards some kind of home.
I think if there was any kind of justice at all, I would be traveling free of charge to Cameroon in a backwards and inversed slaveship. An Afro-steam-punk-starship that traverses water and cosmos. With rooms of Florida water baths made for crying and laughing out all of the feelings. And of course all you can eat lemon pepper wings, roti, collard greens, yams, mangoes, plantains, and pecan pie and peach cobbler and whiskey and trees.
Thank you for dropping us off at the airport and offering to do so for this particular trip. I was really, very, deeply glad you did. I think ‘cause you is my real friend. A real friend who I miss all the time. I had to hug you, three times, ‘cause I want to bring as much of you with me as possible. All of your mountain and fire and future and comfort and side eye. But I guess this is the summer we are learning how to travel together, apart. Or remember that we are always a/part of each other. Like Africa and blood and memory.
Your weird and wildly devoted friend,
Junauda Juanita Petrus, first of her name
Beloved,
Before we landed we searched out the window, me leaning over my love, fearing the inevitable motion sickness but mesmerized by the darkness and the lights making the shape of town, marking shoreline, marking life persisting through the night. Eager, Zoe said, Oh is that it? No, Detroit, I think. Is that it? No, not big enough. There?
We landed in darkness and made our way past the glassed-in waiting area. Do you remember that the Buffalo airport has that bubble of expectant faces and balloons and an occasional hand-drawn sign? People on their toes waiting for their loves? I thought as we passed the bubble, I have never arrived here to that kind of expectation. This time included. And maybe by design.
There are people we are eager to see, people eager to see us, but distance between that last visit three years ago and this one makes this arrival different. We are not returning from a journey but from our lives, rooted in another place.
Buffalo is an airport I know better than any other. I know it because it is small and because it was my home base in the time I traveled the most. Buffalo was a place I left many times. I left to return home to Minneapolis. Left to meet my father after 22 years apart from one another. This is the airport where I greeted many visitors. You, once or twice. Remember that Cancer season visit, all berry-stained fingertips and birthday cake, fireworks by the canal?
We drove streets forming in my memory moments before they formed in front of us. Instinct and confirmation, instinct and recollection. Hunger propelled us.
The draw of ravenous memories, late-night inebriated fillings. An all-night place called Jim’s Steak Out in Allentown, the neighborhood still stumbling and belligerent.
I think every city has its own indigent personality. And Allentown’s characters were out, storytelling on the corner, the same stories a decade on. As we waited for our food, a man, slurry and worn waited near me. Swaying, a smile bloomed on his face and he proudly announced he’d finished the semester strong, had earned a little fun, a trip back to his wilder self, a vacation. And I felt like an auntie. Proud, restrained, back from away.
We ate the subs in a hotel bed, near the slumbering city. Arrival delayed ‘til light.
In the morning my research began. First day’s goal: to learn the underground railroad route through the Westside neighborhood where we had lived.
Zoe and I travel to the Foot of Ferry. A place I had been many times before, it’s strange to visit a familiar place as a researcher. How places can reveal themselves anew. Ferry, a street I traveled nearly every day when we lived here, but I had never considered its namesake. So obvious. We travel over the Black Rock Channel of the Niagara River on the steel bascule lift bridge to the island that used to be named Squaw, for the slur for a Native American woman and the people displaced to build the ferry landing. They recently renamed this tiny strip of land Unity Island. Who was united? So many questions about reparations, returnings. I am always thinking of names, how our discoveries, our violences, our misunderstandings, our hopes and assumptions and utility are recorded there, in our monikers.
Seagulls float and call to us from above on the wind off of Erie. People are fishing. The water is whirling and there is wild surf and placid flatness that might indicate a danger below the surface. The placard marker reads that after a boat powered by four rowmen, a horse boat traveled this route across the dangerous mouth of the river that flows north out of Erie. And I think of the hoofs and their thunder rumbling above their heads. The party smuggled across on Christmas 1857 wanting that shore to come on quicker. Their own reverse middle passage.
I have loved imagining you in that garden in Cameroon—hot like you like it, slow and unhurried, which I know can be hard for you, but so, so sweet. I am already being blessed by this homegoing you are on. And I know that it will feed and color our work going forward in exciting, unexpected ways.
Blessings,
Erin
Erin,
There has to be a word in some language for when your soulmate’s parents embrace you in a hug for the first time after lifetimes. The night we arrived, Ngowo’s parents were awake past their bedtime and they pulled Ngowo, their daughter, my beloved, into a moaning embrace, and then they pulled me into their arms with Ngowo.
This hug made me feel like crying all over them.
Her parents, being Catholic, being elders, being Cameroonian and knowing I was her lover held us so tight and sweet. They didn’t hesitate about me and so I melted into them. Her parents are love dressed in cozy, vibrant patterned and cotton light-weight fabric to sleep in, and each had a halo of gray Afro. Yes, angels, they are.
I wake up in Buea, on the mountain that Ngowo’s parents live on, and I wonder who I would’ve been if there had never been no slavery and middle passage or migrations in my lineage. It’s an impossible Black diaspora thought, since my existence is a mixture of all of these things and the people who survived lives that yielded to the materialization of mine.
But that is just one way of being Black, I am being reminded.
Ngowo’s parents tell me stories of growing up in the villages their ancestors are from. Ngowo’s mama is Bakweri from the rainforest, and her father is Bemileke from the grasslands. They grew up with traditions, languages, dances, spiritual beliefs and attire specific to their tribe, and broke with tradition when they fell in love.
Your research in Buffalo sounds like a found and slight string that you must trace into a tapestry of meaning of tender receiving, which is also how being in Cameroon feels like. Like you feel your ancestors breathing. I have never known Africa’s dirt or its touch or wet or breeze but I wanted to know it beginning when I was 15. I stopped killing my naps and they began channeling old dreams and other worlds, and I was reading books by Black folks who loved the Africa in their own soul.
On arrival in Cameroon, my body became an antenna, my eyes a cup, my soul a sponge. Ngowo is already home and moves us through Broken English and French. It still feels surreal that I am where I am. Everyone and everything is Black, the billboards, the government, the doctors, the lawyers.
My favorite is to see all of the Black people on motorcycle-taxis. I love seeing three beautiful brothers riding casually on a motorcycle, crotch to ass, without shame or self-consciousness. Or a mama with her toddler between the driver’s legs and a baby in her arms. Seeing Black people being free, on the block, in the street, is an epiphany, and my heart gets sad when I contemplate how policed and programmed and captive my Blackness feels.
Being in Cameroon makes me think of being born on Dakota land. I think of the feelings I had as a kid at school assemblies, when they would have the native elders and kids play the drums in the gym and sing for all the students. We all would sit in silence as the men and boys would sit spiraling sticks to a drum and singing sacred falsetto to a room of everyone’s children. I can still recall how my stomach would fill with butterflies and water, when I would hear the drums rain gentle on us, many of us uprooted from any drum that may have existed in our own cultures.
One more thing I gotta tell you about is Bimbia, the fortress where ancestors were held before they were forced into slavery. We walked through a bamboo forest and traced invisible footsteps and were mostly silent until we got to the site and explored it. We then stepped into the edge of water close by where the slave ships docked at the “point of no return” for our ancestors. Except I did return, and I’m holding hands with Ngowo and we are both crying, and in love, which is what makes the moment sweet in the sad.
Miss you, boo,
Junauda
Beloved,
They gave out little souvenir bales of cotton to folks who visited the Ol’ Plantation exhibit on the midway at the 1901 Pan Am Expo. Ain’t that some shit? Little bales of cotton. I guess it makes sense, they couldn’t give out human limbs or chains or anything like that.
I’ve been spending my days in the archives at the Buffalo History Museum with a bunch of white guys looking at maps and yellow brittle paper. One guy is trying to find record of his grandfather’s baseball fame. Another is tracking the contract history of the Pan Am. Still another is looking into the Erie Canal, I think.
I have spent enough time here to feel its rhythms, hear the historian repeat herself when reciting the rules of the place. Copies are 15 cents a page. The lockers are for your things, and each is named for a Buffalo park. My stuff is in Cazenovia. I want to ask her a question she hasn’t been asked a bunch of times. That’s the teacher’s pet in me, I guess.
Today in the windowless archive room, I read about a cakewalk in the Ol’ Plantation exhibit. Oh the dance it is, a performance mocking a performance mocking a performance. It reminds me that we been reclaiming and clowning on them. One of this articles said the “coons danced because the music was so ‘temptatious’ they couldn’t keep their feet still,” and that though most didn’t agree with the judges’ choice of winner, none of the participants “attempted to send the judges aloft by the razor route” (“Cakewalk in ‘Old Plantation,'” Buffalo Courier, June 2, 1901). Oh how we find joy and a way to move together under their noses and oh how they want our joy and can’t comprehend it.
I keep dreaming of a novel, the plot born from the curiosity of a hole in the ground in the hood. Kids exploring a cavern of earth, emerging a century earlier in the midst of a world’s fair. Encountering the folks acting as slaves on the imitation plantation, and the folks carnaval-ed here like performers in a circus for the Darkest Africa exhibit. I keep dreaming of a protagonist, a twin, a tomboy, an intense introvert trying to differentiate herself from her mirror image and the expectations that come from having a you confidently navigating a world you are challenged to.
* * *
I woke up this morning at the haunted hotel—that’s the shorthand we’ve given Hotel Henry where we’re staying, the reimagined former Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane, even though I ain’t seen one ghost or even felt a little creepy. Still I suppose, in a way, so much of this town is ghosted, buildings with deep history, vacant shells of their former glory. But on this trip I have been feeling that gentrification feeling. Buildings in the hipster hermit dance. I even had conversations with the young adults, graduates from the program we ran those years here at the Growing Green Youth Farm reunion we had over the weekend, reflecting on the ways they are being priced out the neighborhoods they grew up in, that they are thinking about how to protect their mamas from losing their houses.
Despite a fear that it might sound corny, I think Buffalo is a city that taught me how to live among ghosts. To not fear the signals of history. Memories not mine. To hold them too.
Here’s looking forward to reuniting with you in Minneapolis, in its prettiest sundress.
Blessings,
Erin
Get Walker Reader in your inbox. Sign up to receive first word about our original videos, commissioned essays, curatorial perspectives, and artist interviews.
)
)
)
)
)
)