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National Geographic

I took a leap of faith—and it led me in search of history's lost slave ships

It transports me back to a place of remembrance—back to the 1970s. To my childhood. To Wells Drive in Atlanta, Georgia. To the apartment on the top floor of a two-story walk-up where I lived with my mother—just the two of us in five rooms. How does the universe match parents and children? I don't know. But I do know that my mother was the perfect parent for me. She was a reading teacher. I loved to read. And my mom had access to books. She used to bring home boxes and boxes of them from her reading conferences and conventions. The joy I felt opening those boxes, pulling out the crisp packaged pages, smelling their woody scent, cracking open their spines, and disappearing into other worlds. I could spend all day with a book and all night long reading it under the covers with my flashlight. I loved fantasy books the most. Magic. Quests. Dragons. Unicorns. Outer space. Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time series was one of my favorites. I yearned for Mrs. Who, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Which to tap outside my window and charge me with helping to save the universe. I so wanted to be Charles Wallace—not Meg, mind you—anointed with a big life purpose. Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain was another favorite; I would reread the entire series each year. I wanted to be Taran, discover that I had a hidden birthright and set out with a sword on a magical adventure. I would close my eyes and wish hard for the universe to name me as worthy and call on me to do something big to help the world. Back then, my imagination was big, broad, deep. No limits. But as I grew up, I began to notice that Black girls were never at the heart of these stories. And the books that did have Black girls in them were often focused on tragedy and pain, based in the grimmest of realities. I came to understand that there was a prevailing narrative about Black people—a narrative created through a distorted lens that emphasized, to the exclusion of much else, our struggle, our pain, our trauma. From my front window, I could see a big hill that curved upward between the buildings in my apartment complex. When my mom got home from work, I would ride my bike up and down that hill. I remember huffing up and then soaring down with my legs out to the side, hands off the handlebars, the beads at the end of my braids clacking in the wind.