It's a strange thing to take sudden stewardship of a home in which you were always a “guest.” When the hosts leave the walls, corridors, treasured mementos, and trappings suddenly feel ephemeral. History whispers and echoes. Recent memories begin to vanish around the edges as new realities settle.

I am the rootwork of the everyday admonitions: Don’t let your feet get swept. Keep your purse off the floor. Make sure you burn that hair if you gon’ cut it.

I was my Mississippi-born grandmother, serenely beautiful and pregnant, majestically appointed in satin and sable, who was forced to urinate behind a White-owned gas station after being denied use of the restroom inside.

I was the anguish of a Black ancestor, who lived relatively free as the son of a White enslaver and enslaved Black woman when he was kidnapped during a Choctaw raid in Kentucky and sold for guns and whiskey to a plantation in the Mississippi Delta.

I was a little girl sweating through my hijab in New Medinah, Mississippi, a small Muslim town in the heart of the Bible Belt — my tender voice joining the chorus of community prayers echoing in the dusk.

In one particularly euphoric dance scene, Black and Brown bodies of past, present, and future moved in transcendent communion. Long-buried memories from decades past came rushing back in breathtaking clarity.