When southern black folks seek each other out, the quickest way to size someone up is some iteration of the question “Who your people?” This question initiates conversations among many southerners, but the simple question is one of the heaviest a black southerner can ask. It bridges southern black folks from the past to the present, beckoning forth people who have been lost on the ancestral and historical plains to take a step closer to being seen and remembered. I think about the newly emancipated black folks passing each other by searching for loved ones; the folks coming South for the first time and being checked out by the local people to invest or reject the stock of the newcomer; the need to identify a body or a soul taken away too soon. In being asked “Who your people?,” the weight of historically and culturally being seen pivots off the need to be rooted in a community. For me, when I was asked who my people were, the answer to the question always rolled off my tongue like well-seasoned pot liquor: “My folks is the Barnetts from Albany and the Barkleys and Joneses from Leary.” Most of my people were well loved and accounted for because I spoke their names fervently, often drawing on the stories my Nana Boo and Paw Paw told me.
From this perspective, I often think about the question “Who your people?” as a testament to the hard-fought ties of family and community that are the lynchpin for understanding the Black South. Additionally, the gatekeepers and legacy makers of the Black South are black women. Black women often passed down what they could—whether a name, a song, or a piece of something like an Indian Head penny—to preserve a little bit of themselves for future generations to see and know them. I learned at an early age about the difficulties of sustaining a legacy for black southerners. It is a strong held belief that the crux of southern blackness is trauma as a residual action and as memory. However, southern black folks’ legacies hide in our hearts, our laughter, our rituals, our kitchens, and in our hope for ourselves and each other. Southern black people spoke and conjured themselves into existence and spaces where white folks wished we crawled under rocks and porches and shrank ourselves out of a complicated existence. Even if it was bit by bit, fragmented memory by fragmented memory, I would snatch Phill Barkley back from the dried-out jaws of an unknown past and get to know him better. To borrow from and remix a well-worn African proverb, I wanted to tell the lion’s side of the story now lost to history, un-glorifying the white man who peacefully and quietly lived his life after violently ripping apart the lives of Phill’s family—my family. Me, the lion’s great-grand cub, determined to reshape Phill Barkley’s story nearly a century after his death.