Home is Where the [insert cliche] is.

I’ve been sad recently.

Sad is the easiest and most accessible word for me to describe what I’ve been feeling, but I know that it is more complex than sadness; maybe a mixture of grief and isolation - longing and rage.

A few months ago, I wrote a piece titled What Happens After We Walk Away from Omelas?. I talk through the short story by Ursula K. Le Guin about a utopian town that has a secret of human cruelty (that is an extremely simply and slightly reductive synopsis of the story, I know). The ending of the short story talks about the people who find out this sinister secret and decide to walk away from their home, leaving behind everything they’ve known and love. And then it ends. The story ends. We don’t know what happens to the ones that walk away, we just know that they leave never to return.

On a personal level, I’m starting to understand what happened to those who leave Omelas. My family and I left the United States roughly nine months ago (I literally could have had a baby that no one knows about at this point). And while we left for many of the same reasons as those in Le Guin’s short story - the injustice, abject cruelty, and all around lack of humanity that the U.S has displayed throughout history and (somehow, what feels like) more so in recent years - my family and I are having the first hand experiences of what happens when you choose to leave.

There are a lot of complex and complicated feelings that are wrapped up in this decision and this new way of life. There’s so much beauty in exploring the world. In understanding the nuance of culture, shared and gatekept. Watching our children be immersed in language and daily life of multiple countries for months on end and how that has impacted their outlook on humanity and what it means to be human (something I will soon write about). We’ve found belonging and joy and peace and liberation since leaving the Untied States. As a Black American family, it has felt freeing in ways that are wildly indescribable.

So, why am I feeling sad recently? Well, I think the grief is setting in. We can never return ‘home’. Not because we don’t want to (though, I’m not sure we do), but because ‘home’ as we’ve known it for all our lives no longer exists. I’m not going to sit here and reminisce about the ‘good ole days’ of being in America; that’s just not a thing for so many of us in our identities. But I wouldn’t be being truthful if I didn’t acknowledge that home had a sense of safety and comfort. I understand and recognize that sense of comfort and safety always came at the expense of some other group of people (at least I understand that now, I didn’t fully get that before the age of 30), and often times that group of people was MY very own in-group. Regardless, the familiar is comforting.

Now, everyday that passes, I look around and realize that there is no more ‘home’. For better and for worst, the United States has been my family’s home for many generations. My bloodlines can be traced back around five or six generations on that land. When people ask, ‘where are from? no, where are you really from?’ The answer is always the United States, because for generations that’s where my family has been, has suffered and thrived and built and bled. Because of the kidnapping and trafficking of Africans during the trans-Atlantic slave trade, I, like so many others, do not have a good understanding of where my ancestral home is. Nor do I have ties to that land in a way that feels meaningful. And while that is certainly a loss - a different type of grief - because that has always been, that grief found its way into the acceptance stage many years ago.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m molded of Georgia red clay and was laid to dry under a South Carolina palmetto, like all of my recent ancestors. I can throw and read bones like my grandfather learned in the early 1900’s in Arkansas, while cooking you a pot of collard greens, with pot liquor and cornbread that’ll make you want to slap ya mama.

But now, while the culture remains (the culture always remains), the home, the land has changed. Looking around and knowing what I now know and seeing what I now see, the home that raised me on thick sweet tea, peach cobbler, crunk music, drill teams, and finger waves is no more. My family and friends who are there are these beautiful reminders of what ‘home’ once felt like, but I’m afraid that the larger structures of the United States are morphing into something completely different. Something more sinister. Something that is irreparable in my lifetime. And in honestly, I’m unsure if it were ever reparable, maybe the distance and time has given me a clearer and fuller picture.

“When I think of home, I think of a place with love overflowing. I wish I was home, I wish I was back there with the things I’ve been knowing.” - Home, The Wiz

So, I think my sadness, is a mixture of a lot of feelings, most of which being the knowledge that the ‘home’ that I’ve known is gone. And, I’m finally starting to process through the grief of that loss. I miss my friends and family. I miss my mom and dad. I miss Tina (East coast and West coast) and Genia. I miss my Aunt Yvette and my cousin Dawn. I miss Omega Psi Phi cookouts and gumbo on holidays. And, while I deeply miss those things, like those who left Omelas I know that I can never return. I may be able to return to the physical land, but I can never return to ‘home’. And without an understanding of my ancestral home in Africa, that leaves me as a wanderer. A sojourner. A traveler moving through the world, leaving behind the atrocities that my ‘home’ was built upon, while trying to find and understand what ‘home’ means now.

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