When you were 8, you could control the wind. The trees would listen, waving their long branches at you. The leaves would applaud as you made your way down Marcus Street. That was when the birds called your name and the squirrels followed you.
Back then, imagining was easy. Secret hidden treehouse sanctuaries that rivaled Peter Pan and the crew. The red wagon that could take you far, far away. That was when you still carried around that white stuffed dog, a bit nappy and dingy. You took him everywhere but don’t recall his name.
I can tie my earliest days of imagining to my time spent growing up and playing in the woods. Crowns made of the twigs from privets. Mud pies made with hose water in rusty pans, baked in old broken ovens behind the house.
I was molded from the clay soil in Deep East Texas, in the small city of Lufkin. This region has an antebellum history shrouded in violence, mystery, and resilience—much like the ecosystem of the Big Thicket, which is arguably the most diverse in the world.
By total population, Texas is the Blackest state in the country and home to over 500 Freedom Colonies—Black townships founded after Emancipation—because of the large plantation economy that depended on slave labor. But we are not equally distributed. East Texas, where I’m from, is the beating heart of Black Texas. It’s a place where the majority of enslaved people were concentrated, and it’s where 90 percent of cotton was grown in the state.
From very early on, the Black women around me drew the maps that guide my life’s trajectory. I have had the privilege of growing up under their watchful eyes. My earliest memories of Black womanhood were not only of my young mother, aunties, and cousins, but my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmothers, and grandmothers.
The author with her mom in San Augustine
When I wasn’t at school or with my cousins, I was with my Ain’ B—my aunt. She was an English teacher in the Houston area at the time. When she visited her small East Texas hometown, I would eagerly jump in her car to ride along. During her college years—in the early 2000s, when I was still in elementary school—I would go with her to classes at Jarvis Christian University, an HBCU tucked away about 20 miles north of Tyler.
I would take those trips with my older cousin. When we weren’t at my aunt’s lectures, we would participate in praise dance performances with her and her Delta Sigma Theta line sisters. My aunt was the perfect picture of beauty. Clear and dark skin, high cheekbones with long straight hair, beady piercing eyes like my great-grandmother’s. She always smelled of perfume and Chi hair oil. She would play songs like “The Battle Is the Lord’s” by Yolanda Adams.
It was my Ain’ B who introduced me to the Rev. Bettie Kennedy. I remember sitting on the floor of Rev. Kennedy, whose house was located off Paul Avenue in the historic and predominantly Black Lufkin Land portion of the city, which today includes sizable Latino and white populations as well.
It was from the Rev. Kennedy’s petite, light-skinned body sitting in a rocking chair that I would hear stories about the African masks and spears on her cluttered walls. It was the first place where I learned about cowrie shells being used as money and for religious rituals. In the early 2000s, it was at her feet that pride in my Blackness was cemented. I found the language to recall a home within myself.
These stories of my matrilineal line have been whispered to me since childhood, coalescing and engulfing me like kudzu vines—forming along the roadsides of my own journey.
It was on Marcus Street that you remember no longer being a young girl, when you had to come into yourself. It was around the age of 8.
That nameless stuffed dog, you gave to a real rescued hound your grandfather and stepfather brought home one night. The rescue was flea-ridden and sad, so after they washed him, you snuck into the backyard and into the doghouse. You sang to him and left your gift. The next morning, both were gone. One was sick, and the other was no longer yours to hold onto.
I remember crying the first day of first grade. That was when I discovered there was no nap time like there’d been the year before. That was important because I wasn’t getting adequate sleep at night. Like far too many Black and brown girls, I was living with the ramifications of a broken system under capitalism.
That year, I went to Brookhollow Elementary, in what was once a more affluent neighborhood of Lufkin. This year was memorable because it was the first time I remember being targeted by my teacher. There was a petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed girl who would pester me. One particular day, she kept putting her nails in my face and telling me to call them pretty. After I ignored her, my teacher put her hand in my face and forced me to call both her and the girl’s nails beautiful.
For me, my memory will always call me back to the Thicket.
Around this time, I began to form an opinion of myself from the lens of the outside world. My self-perception was being forcibly remolded.
According to a 2017 report from Georgetown University, adults view Black girls as less innocent than white ones. That was true for me in that class. I got in trouble not for talking but just for being a child who was curious about the world.
Once, my backpack fell on the floor. At the time, my family was living in a low-income housing complex that, like others, had roaches. I reached inside my backpack to grab my winter cap before we left to go outside, and two small ones crawled out. In disgust, the teacher made me stand outside with my cap in hand upside-down, held by two fingers in case more roaches emerged.
You were 8 when the suicidal ideation began. You would have daydreams about running your forehead into a giant rusty nail sticking out of your grandfather’s wood-chipped wall, there in the room where you spent your infant and toddler years after your mom had you young.
You weren’t afraid of death. In fact, it was your first memory.
When you were around 1 or 2, you swallowed a quarter from a swept-up pile your mother made in the middle of the floor. You blacked out and remember floating in a bright white light. You were weightless and had no worries. Your mother said she remembers screaming while she hit your back until the coin came up. She claims you were too young to remember. But you do.
“Survival is the greatest gift of love,” wrote Black feminist author Audre Lorde. “Sometimes, for Black mothers, it is the only gift possible, and tenderness gets lost.”
The women I grew up with are backwoods women. Women who come from a tradition of both nurturing to survive and knowing how to navigate the land with their guns and knives.
My grandmother talks of my great-grandmother as a tough woman. She was a cigarette-smoking Aries I remember from my childhood and family photos of her on a couch, laughing with a Budweiser in hand. She made cracklin’ cornbread and held long dinner-table conversations.
(Top) The author’s grandmother on a motorcycle. (Middle- left) The author’s great-grandmother. (Middle-right) The author’s great- grandmother handled payments for sharecropping jobs. (Bottom) The author’s grandmother on a cruise (Scan from photo album)
My own mother describes her grandmother as observant. She could be seen frequently taking walks on our family land, surveying the plants closely because she knew something we didn’t. Like many Afro-Texans, the women in my family come from hunters and farmers who had an advanced understanding of the local ecology.
My great-grandmother worked for a white family down the street as a housemaid. She began having kids when she was around 14, and she eventually had 13 children. My grandmother said her mother became a bit more discontent by the end of her life.
I can only imagine the sacrifices she had to make for her and our family’s survival.
You remember reading Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. You were an avid reader then, hiding from the rest of your family in backrooms.
You were around 9. Your aunt had fed you Maya, as she usually did with books back then. In that book, you found the language for what had happened to you. You didn’t know it was bad, but you knew it wasn’t good. You had questions about your body parts. Once, your mama told you to never let anyone touch you, but you were too young to understand. All you knew then was that you found the language.
Those nights on Marcus Street were heavy. Waking up to the yelling, your stepfather and your mother, pregnant with your youngest sister. Back then, you still believed you could fly far, far away.
During this time, I was babysitting my siblings and cousins while our parents were away for work. My starkest memories of having to take care of others began then. When my middle sister or cousins made a mess, I was responsible for cleaning it up. When the younger kids got into trouble, it was my responsibility to get them out of it or risk being punished myself. This, researchers have also found, is another way that childhood is cut short for Black girls.
Maya’s work gave me the gift of story. But the love for storytelling had been planted already. Much of this was learned listening to my grandparents. They were and are my solace. They were where I could be in my girlhood, unbothered and protected.
My fondest moments were spent outside with my grandfather, walking the land with his Black Mouth Cur hunting dogs and driving along backroads. My time with my grandmother was spent looking over the counter as she kneaded dough for dumplings, cleaned greens for Sunday meals, or patted hot-water cornbread into shape before frying the dough. When she wasn’t in the kitchen, she was in the garden planting tulip bulbs or mowing her lawn, which she’s still able to do. With a Budweiser in hand like her own mother, she still plays us under the table at dominoes.
She grew up as a backwoods woman, raised off-grid in nearby San Augustine along with 12 other siblings. She still shares memories of hunting blackbirds with her brothers, which they’d pluck for their parents to fry. She resisted and resented being forced to wear dresses. Instead, she wanted to hunt and roam the woods.
She met my grandfather through her brothers, who were his hunting buddies. He was a tall, dark, and handsome woodsman from Woodville. They met after they’d each had two children—she had her first at 17—and after his first wife passed. They lived on land bought and cultivated by my grandfather’s family. For Black Americans, stories like this are increasingly rare—as 90 percent of agricultural land for Black farmers has been lost since 1910, in part due to forced property sales, intimidation, and limited access to financing.
My grandmother talks begrudgingly about this time. She speaks of how my grandpa’s family despised and mistreated her. She didn’t have a job; she was a stay-at-home wife.
She later found work after my mother left the house. The independence enabled her to get a divorce, over her mother’s objections, and rent out a trailer. By happenstance, the owner of the trailer was selling the property. After some negotiation, she was able to get her own land and settle in the woods alone—an achievement in a country where Black women have long been denied ownership through discriminatory lending.
There, on her land, she could care for herself. It was a place where she would find her freedom, not subject to rules like wearing a dress. A place to be with the trees.
In fifth grade, you wrote an essay titled “Rigamortis.” It was the description of a black, gooey blob that had been following you everywhere. Sitting in your gut. She filled you with lies about yourself, and the only time you could quiet her was when you read or wrote in your journal—lying under the same trees as your ancestors.
Back then, you were beginning your ascent into your matriarchal role.
One time, when you were hanging in the garage with the men, you got a whoopin’. Your mom had told you about it before, but you just wanted to spend time with your grandfather—away from the gendered expectations. It was your mother trying to protect you from what you faced as a young girl, but she didn’t realize she was too late.
My mom was the youngest child. As a kid, she would sometimes sneak off to steal and, in one case, crash my uncle’s motorbike. She would trudge through what were still the forests of Lufkin Land to sneak behind the nearby chip factory and take from the dumpster. She and her siblings would even go cow-tipping—a practice I scold them for today.
Much of her childhood was also spent with my grandfather. She was a daddy’s girl, which is a privilege I’ve been afforded in short supply. She remembers back-road rides down tributaries of Highway 59 as well as hunting and fishing trips.
My mother was a star basketball and volleyball player who got in trouble in practice and on the school bus for joking and talking. Once, she made the whole team have to take laps. She’s always been the funny, goofy, quick-tempered cousin. A bit calmer these days, in her late 40s, she is still as spirited and free as she was when she was younger, which I know because I saw my mother become a woman.
She was only 17 when she became pregnant with me. It was the first time she’d had sex, she would tell me when we talked about the subject, which she hadn’t discussed with her own mother. During that time, her greatest shame was walking down the hallways of her school with her belly her senior year.
Today, Texas is home to some of the strictest abortion laws in the country. Teen births remain high, as sex education programs often rely on an abstinence-only approach. Reproductive health disparities hit Black and rural women the hardest. Oftentimes, when young parents must come into themselves, it’s the eldest children who witness and experience the ramifications of that learning.
The author at her third birthday party at a Lufkin Burger King
Early on, my mother was intentional about making sure her three girls knew about sex, even answering the questions of friends whose parents weren’t as open.
After experiencing a torrential relationship with my birth father, she later married my stepfather. Although he made sure we kids were able to experience the fun parts of childhood, he had a temper. Some nights, my middle sister and I would stand in the doorway of our living room, hoping our crying would silence their yelling.
During those years, my mom’s disposition was a bit rough toward me. Often, the survivors of domestic violence, physical or verbal, take some measure of their pain out on their children. As much as I love and respect my mother, and as much as we get along today, it took a toll on me, just as a similar roughness took its toll on her own mother and her grandmother before.
“I know the anger that lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit,” wrote Lorde. “It is easier to be angry than to hurt.”
Today, my mom talks about how much she loves her solitude. Seeing her take back parts of her life with no kids at home defines for me the womanhood that has now been passed through generations.
Driving on Highway 59, you know you’re home when chills come over you like a wave grabbing and settling the floating parts of your body into itself. The trees grow thicker. The air smells emptier. The familiar sounds of truck engines, busy streets, and nosy people turn into the sounds of warblers, chichi birds, crickets, and cicadas. Here, your heart doesn’t race. Your body knows where home is. You don’t want to be far, far away.
Since I was a kid, my mother told me and my sisters to leave our hometown. If we didn’t, we would be stuck. So, for a long time, I didn’t return. Just an occasional visit during the holidays or to pick up urgent mail.
“All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was,” writes Toni Morrison in a 1987 essay. “Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”
For me, my memory will always call me back to the Thicket.
Where I’m from, backwoods women learn the truth that our lives are entangled in the ecology of the land. We are the children of maroons and Freedmen who knew which crushed plants stopped bleeding and how cobwebs in the dusty corner of a room could sanitize wounds, who opened their windows during storms to spiritually cleanse their homes and sat on porches observing the animals to foresee the incoming season.
As time moves on, we lose the language of our ancestors, but our bodies will always know the technologies of the land. And even when the names of the terrain no longer lie on our tongues, we’ll always know it by heart—even when we fly far, far away.
The post A Love Letter to the Black Woodswomen of Deep East Texas appeared first on The Texas Observer.
