This begins before 1896. This begins before Arkansas. But “this can't be right grandmother. who are our Ancestors! she said, shit gal, i don't know” (Bridgforth Reference Bridgforth2012). One of my ancestors walks toward me. She be Gertrude. Gertrude Grant. I have no pictures of her. I have no living memories of her. Yet I remember. Her. My Nana's mama, born around 1890 in the lumber town of Canfield in southern Arkansas.

I learn about the Canfield Race War of 1896 through online searches, old newspaper clippings, doctoral dissertations. Great-Grandma Gertrude would have been around six when the rioting happened, when white laborers became jealous of Black laborers and tried to push them, beat them, burn them out of town. Free library access to census documents and land deeds tells me that Gertrude's daddy, James W. Grant, purchased eighty acres of land in Canfield on February 1, 1893, perhaps thanks to the Southern Homestead Act, which made millions of acres of land available to homesteaders, including migrating and free Negroes. James and his wife, Susie A. Lewis, raised their children on their land in Canfield. How did the riots affect them, their land, their kin, their safety, their daily lives? I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. I ask all the questions before I'm trained in the academy to ask all the questions.

I don't know much about Gertrude's childhood or adolescence. Or how Canfield shifted after the Race War. Or how Gertrude came to find love once, twice, three times over. What I do know is that by 1922, Gertrude had had three children of her own, and had made her way twenty miles south of Canfield to Plain Dealing, Louisiana, where my Nana Susie was born. Gertrude had another baby after my Nana, but legend has it that she knew she wasn't going to be around to raise her babies. She knew that she was going to die soon. She worried who was gonna take care of her babies. This be a conjure. This knowing. This worry. This possible preparation with limited resources. Maybe this prayer be the only preparation. Be enough. Who knows what ailment or oppressive condition or stressors or heartache killed Gertrude, but my Nana didn't get to know her own mama, didn't have memories of her. Yet somehow I remember Gertrude. Or I am coming to know Gertrude. And although my Nana never spoke to me about her mama, “the holy mother visits me in my dreams. sometimes with aunt marie always smiling/they talk to me. and i don't know how i understand them but i do” (Bridgforth Reference Christina2012).

Gertrude's parents Susie and James ended up raising her children back in Canfield. Susie Lewis doesn't visit me in my dreams (yet), but perhaps she's the first Conjure Woman of this story, my story, giving birth to Gertrude's conjure ways. Her ways of knowing. In honor of Susie Lewis, my Nana, born Dottie Sue Layton, changed her name to Susie Mae Layton.

This begins before 1944. This begins before California. By 1944, Nana Susie's grandparents had become Ancestors, and she made her way from Canfield probably to Little Rock, boarded a train, and moved to Los Angeles, California. I'm a proud #CaliGirl because of my Nana (and my other Nana and my Papas). The Second Wave of the Great Migration moves from the bookshelf, from a map; it moves within me. Nana Susie never talked to me about Canfield. I know that I asked her. I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions. All Nana ever said was, “we had a hard way to go.”

Nana Susie was my first Black feminist theorist and practitioner, even if she didn't know or claim or use such labels. In her garden, on the couch, in the kitchen, and at the dining room table, she cooked, ate, braided hair, played cards, drank tea, spilled the tea, read, did crossword puzzles, wrote, and talked politics. She was critically literate and critically analytical, even if Black women like her—working class, fifth-grade educated—are not documented and read as such (Haddix et al. Reference Hill2016; Baker-Bell Reference Baker-Bell2017). Talks “across the kitchen table” (Smith and Smith Reference Taaffe1981) became a form of sisterhood that my Nana was practicing (Haddix et al. Reference Hill2016). She was also practicing conjure. Nana Susie literally and figuratively made space for this BlackgirlFootnote ¹ to gather, to be seen, to be heard, to witness, to heal, and to simply be (Haddix et al. Reference Hill2016; Taaffe Reference Taaffe2018).

This begins before 1965. This begins before Watts. By the 1960s, Nana Susie had seen the Black population in LA quadruple since the time that she had arrived there. By the 1960s, she was navigating the working-class economy and home-ownership. She was navigating a sprawling car culture of LA on public transportation. She was navigating domestic violence, on the brink of divorce. She was raising her four children, including my mom, Debra Sterling.

Like her grandmother Gertrude before her, my Mom experienced a riot during her childhood in her hometown—the Watts Riot in August 1965. After this civil uprising, South Central experienced the demise of the local Black Panther Party, the emergence of the Bloods and Crips gangs and gang-related violence, the crack epidemic, increased surveillance and state-sanctioned violence by the LA Police Department, and a mass out-migration of many middle- and upper-class Black residents outside of LA to emerging neighborhoods some sixty miles east in the Inland Empire. These social and cultural geopolitics of 1960s–1990s South Central Los Angeles (Coleman Reference Coleman1996; Reference Coleman2001; Reference Dill2004) urge me to acknowledge that, in addition to my Nanas and our foremothers and othermothers, my own Mom was theorizing her own form of urban contemporary Black Conjure Feminism. I name and claim this “Hooptie Feminism” (Debra Sterling, pers. comm.; Dill Reference Dill2017), recognizing that there is a generation of women who were not conjuring at the kitchen table, dining-room table, garden, or couch. Instead, these women spent most of their time teaching lessons, telling stories, performing, and were able to just be in their “hoopties”Footnote ² as they navigated the inner city by car. Specifically, my Mom's hooptie was a dark blue 1981 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.

Also driving around South Central LA, poet Wanda Coleman (1985) said:

In mom's “struggle buggy” or “hooptie,” I always had a notebook, a tape recorder, a book of poetry or fiction, just because I wanted to. I later learned, or remembered, that I was learning and conducting ethnography, that I was an ethnographer from an early age. Mom's Hooptie Feminism had a soundtrack of R&B and Soul music—it was Big and Little Luther, Anita Baker, Whitney Houston, Karyn White, and Freddie Jackson. It was the longing and demanding and hoping and loving embedded in the lyrics. In mom's Oldsmobile I listened, I shared, I sang, I committed to memory, I worried, I cried, I wrote. Mom told stories of intergenerational trauma, the lingering silences of domestic violence, the Jackson 5 transferring to Fairfax High School near West Hollywood and her wanting to transfer there, too, her adorning halter tops to hang out with prettyboys, her situationships with fckbois. Mom conjured. I first learned about the regime of apartheid and anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa from Mom's community college research paper about Mandela—both Nelson and Winnie—which she shared with me during our drives in her hooptie.

Although the whitestream canon of literature was pervasive in my seventh- to twelfth-grade prep-school classrooms, I knew of another canon that existed on the bookshelves and coffee tables and closet shelves and Oldsmobile seats at home—Giovanni and Morrison and Walker and Angelou. Through Hooptie Feminism (Mom remarks, Who knew there would be a term for these interactions?), I was learning about, witnessing, analyzing, and practicing self-determination, empowerment, agency, resilience, and healing (Sterling 1978). Mom says, “do your best,” “love yourself,” and “keep it movin.”

This begins before 1992. This begins before South Central. Like my Mom, and my Great-Grandma Gertrude, I also experienced a riot during my childhood in my hometown—the LA Uprising in April 1992. The civil unrest came on the heels of the murder of LaTasha Harlins, the brutal beating of Rodney King, surging gang violence, mounting racial tensions, and persistent, decades-long police brutality by the LAPD.

Some rappers, journalists, and social scientists say that Gangsta rappers narrated these oppressions from the ground up. Gangsta rap poured from the radio as Mom drove me and my carpool from South Central to our prep school in the beachfront suburb where we were able to attend on scholarship. Therefore, Hooptie Feminisms are not all Southern California sunshine and palm trees and passed-down recipes of Down South sweet-potato pie and hot-water cornbread. You can catch my Mom calling any person, classmate, or colleague who would do me harm a “trick-ass biaaaaatch”—her care also embedded with this 1990s Gangsta rap, all Compton and Watts and South Central and hypermasculinity and bravado.

Nana Susie knew she was sick but didn't tell nobody until it was too late. Ain't that what her mama did? I traveled 2200 miles to school and back again before I found out. She waited to leave until I finished my first year of college and had returned home to LA in May 1997. A few weeks later, she was gone. Poet Dominique Christina says, and I agree, “I believe that people don't really leave. They leave things for us to find. We bump into those things without knowing what we are seeing. Yielding to ancestral logic is the only way I am able to write anything at all” (Christina Reference Colemann.d.).

This begins before 2011. This begins before academia. By now, I have three degrees. I am Nana Susie's and Gertrude's and Susie Lewis's wildest dreams. I am about to enter the academy as a professor. Hopefully as a decolonizing disruptor. But the academy is a hostile place that continues to marginalize and oppress Black women. Black women are concentrated among the lowest professional ranks, are promoted at a slower rate, receive the lowest salaries (Generett and Cozart, Reference Haddix, McArthur, Muhammad, Price-Dennis and Sealey-Ruiz2011). I am beginning to enact a refusal of my/our erasure, as a naming and claiming of myself/ourselves and my/our multiple roles inside and outside of the academy, and as a clapback to the master narrative of ivory experts in too-tall inaccessible towers. This be a conjure. My Mom now tells me, “don't lick nobody's ass!” as I recount her stories from life as an instructor, assistant professor, associate professor. This reminds me of when Black feminist scholar, activist, writer, filmmaker, and teacher Toni Cade Bambara wrote and mailed a postcard from her hospice bed in Philadelphia in 1995 to poet Nikky Finney. On it, she wrote, “Do not leave the arena to the fools” (Finney Reference Generett and Cozart2009). Bambara passed away just a few months later. My Mom, Bambara, and even Saint Paul to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 11:19) remind me/us not to suffer fools gladly. Academia enables me to have a playground for discovery. A place to ask all the questions. But it is not my only playground in which to practice conjure.

This begins before 2018. This begins before Canfield. “i carry those tears too. i call them exile blues/which is what you have/when home is a place you feel but have never seen. saddness burns in you a hole that can't be filled” (Bridgforth Reference Christina2012). In April 2018, I traveled to land originally inhabited and stewarded by the Caddo Tribe, now known as northern Louisiana and southern Arkansas, in which my family has histories of family-making, placemaking, farming, wounds and secrets, and departures. I had never been to Arkansas, had never been to this part of Louisiana. My Mom didn't tell me to go. She didn't even want to go with me. “We don't know anyone there. No one is left,” she said.

I journeyed to Canfield anyway. Great-Great-Grandma Susie was calling me there. And Great-Grandma Gertrude. And even Nana Susie was calling me back to her homeland. From Suzan-Lori Parks I learned, “locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down” (Parks Reference Smith and Smith1995). I learn more about my Conjure Feminist lineage from this trip. From my meditation time there. From my time on the land. I ask all the questions. I was raised with the permission to ask all the questions.

After my time in Canfield, I begin to not just ask questions, but to offer some answers. I can now articulate that I express spirit and work toward social justice through interrogating and honoring these lineages. I realize and recognize that I am:

I now identify as a healer. I now believe that my practices of play are healing. I now remember that my breath, my connection with breath, holds more answers.

I now know that this remembering is healing. This healing is a spiritual practice. This spiritual practice is Black feminism. This Black feminism is conjure.

This begins before 2019. This begins before motherhood.