On My God, My Ancestors, & My Future. We Outchea.

The church my great-great uncle founded in Somerville, NJ after fleeing Georgia with his brothers. They’d had a run-in with the Klan. This church and the community the built around it is a symbol of dignity, faith, and future-making.

I've been thinking and reading and discussing a LOT about the intersection of the Christian faith, creativity, and Afrofuturism.

I'm a Christ-follower doing my best to follow them words in red, y’all. And I’m a storyteller in all the different ways I've had the good fortune and opportunity to be one over the past 8 years.

I see Black people in the future.

And it's not the desolate, wilderness that a lot of White-imagined post-apocalyptic stories have in mind. I imagine and create and live toward a future that's prodigal in joy, community and health. And I don’t believe we have to wait until death to see it. I believe we can see it on this side of heaven.

We, as Black folks, have known desolation deeply. We have scratched and survived and, as Zora Neale Hurston said, "have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots."

I refuse to let any worse iteration of the future creep into my imagination to take up residence. How can I, when I think of my ancestors who lived and died enslaved, praying and daydreaming and singing and dancing and drumming and stomping and clapping a future into the existence that I live now?

Ancestors who subverted the slave masters’ story of Jesus with what they knew at a bone-deep, soul-deep level, and stole away to hush harbors to worship and commune? Ancestors who chose to risk everything to get free? Ancestors who created joy over and over again in the midst of suffering?

What a bridge. And my God…how we got over.

It's actually cowardly and lame to do less with my faith and imagination than they did.

I reject anything less than joy and health, and community pressed down, shaken together, and running over for our collective future.

We will more than survive all of this. *waves around at literally everything*

We got too many fan line dances, family reunions, graduation parties, film premieres, church pageants, movie nights, housewarmings, cookouts, baby dedications, seed and harvest times, long walks and peaceful sleeps to have together, y’all.