I want to express my eternal gratitude for being selected as the first Storyteller in Residence for the The Land, Food, and Freedom Journal. This opportunity is not just a professional milestone for me, but a deeply personal achievement that resonates with my familial legacy.
Both of my grandmothers created beautiful gardens, each in their unique way. My mother’s mother, Elizabeth Anderson Boddie, tended a community garden plot in rural Alabama, and dedicated two patches of grass just beyond her front porch to dahlias, daisies, and handfuls of kitchen scraps. Hattie Mae Manning, my father’s mother, grew up on a farm in Central Florida but chose to raise her family in Newark, New Jersey. Instead of planting seeds, she cultivated her version of a garden with family photos preserved in albums lining the bookshelves in her den.
I remember sitting at the small round table in Elizabeth’s kitchen, filling bowls of snapped green beans after harvest. I remember sitting on the floor surrounded by tattered binders full of photographs curated by Hattie Mae, whispers of grown folks’ business and laughter echoed down the hall. The remembrances span more than peaches or Polaroids, my grandmothers instilled in me the significance of preservation.
As a self-taught photographer, I’ve learned that storytelling is a sustainable resource used to connect preservation with the present and the possible. That is, storytelling is a practice. Transformative narratives require stewardship, just like land, and they endow us with agency to counter systems that aim to reduce our stories, like structural racism. As I step into my residency, I am humbled and profoundly thankful for the opportunity to curate works that affirm the fullness of our stories; emphasizing land, food, culture, and imagination as tools along the path of Black Liberation.
This is sacred work, thank you for trusting me.
