Field Notes

A family story can leave you with a name and no place to put it. A photograph can tell you who stood beside whom and leave you wondering what they called each other. And sometimes the person you most want to ask is the person the story is about.

That’s what I mean by the gap in family history. You can inherit enough to know that something belongs to you and still have questions about how it got to you. Sometimes what’s missing is a name or a place. Sometimes it’s the explanation for something your family still does. And sometimes you have the facts and what you really want to know is what it felt like to be there. Other times, it’s the entire cultural context that’s missing: what your tribe, clan, and neighbors believed, and how those beliefs shaped the world around them. Stories that aren’t passed on become wisdom that is never shared and is lost to the winds of time.

I come to that gap as someone who is Ghanaian-American, with Caribbean, European, and unknown ancestry, who was raised in the rural South and very happily a Black Southern Woman – proper nouns and capital letters! I wanted to understand how those parts of my life met, and that curiosity helped lead me to sociology and anthropology. When I declared my majors, my Da asked me, “Why do you have to study what you are?” Apparently, being myself came with a research assignment. But that was precisely the issue: I didn’t know how to frame my own understanding, and so I sought help in academia and books. But then I discovered some of the best research was gathered outside of the societies it discussed, and I wanted to tell my own story and hear the stories of others. The part I’m still working on is how to talk about all that I’ve inherited when some of the people who could explain it to me are beyond the reach of my questions.

That’s where the NÜNATIVE Archive lives. It’s a living collection of stories, conversations, and research about what we inherit and how we carry it forward. A family history asks, Who were my people? I’m also interested in what my people had access to, what they carried with them, and what they made where they landed. A written record can get me part of the way. Then I might have to listen to a story, sit with a symbol, or ask someone to show me how a thing is done. That’s when we, the people, become living artifacts, vessels that hold the fragments of our lineage in one place.

“That’s when we, the people, become living artifacts, vessels that hold the fragments of our lineage in one place.”

I also want to be careful about what silence means. A story might go quiet because somebody chose to keep it private. It might go quiet because the people keeping the official records cared about a whole different set of questions. Or the person who knew it might have thought everybody already knew. From where I’m standing, those silences can look exactly alike. Part of the work is leaving room for the difference.

Let me give you an example. In my Anansi research, I’m looking at two tellings: an illustrated Ghanaian folktale and a Jamaican family recollection. I want to know what each telling carries, who passed it on, and what changed along the way. A story can help me understand the worlds my family history sits within while a question about my own lineage stays open. And when a telling changes, I’m curious about what the person telling it was doing for the people in front of them. They might have been teaching a child something. They might have been trying to make that child laugh. Either way, somebody remembered enough to tell it again.

When I visited Adinkra makers in Ghana, I brought a book about the history of the Adinkra, one written by outsiders, and asked whether what people were writing about their work matched what they knew. They told me university visitors came often. As they remembered it, nobody had asked them that question; they’d simply decided that the contents of that book were the truth (I’m assuming this). So what did I do? I left them my highlighted notes written in the margin copy of that book. I intuitively knew it was more important for them to know their ancestral work was being discussed in domains they had no access to. My dream is that the next batch of university students, or curious tourists who arrive in Kumasi, will find themselves engaging in dynamic dialogue that changes how they see the Adinkra themselves. I think about that when I consider what belongs in the Archive. A book can outlast a conversation, and that gives it a kind of authority. So when I record a story, I want someone coming to it later to know whose account they’re hearing, how it reached me, and where my own interpretation begins. I want the people whose knowledge I’m learning from to have room to say, “There’s more to it than that.”

I think about the person who might come looking after me. Maybe they’ll know a name I couldn’t place. Maybe they’ll have heard another version of a story I wrote down. I’d like them to see where I left off and have enough to ask their next question. And if I write down a story about my own life, I hope I remember to include some of the things I assume everybody knows. Those might be the very things somebody needs to know.