“History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.” - James Baldwin

I have completed the spiritual task of reading The Warmth of Other Suns, an exploration of our collective history as African Americans that reflects the evolving story of my own family: Black people on the move.

Through 500 pages of narrative nonfiction, author Isabel Wilkerson illuminates the story of the Great Migration, a little-understood chapter in American history. Wilkerson leads us to explore the first self-determined steps of America’s formerly enslaved people as they departed their only known home, the American South, for the New World of the North and West.

I get emotional thinking about the evolving nature of our lives. I found myself teary eyed on the train, looking up from this very same book, realizing that I too had transformed into one of these everyday people sipping coffee on the 2 train from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

I was in New England when I first began reading the book. I was there visiting my parents and helping them move yet again. New England is now a place in which my southern family has become rooted. There in the house, I sat in the parlor chatting with my “favorite auntie”, Aunt Joan. ‘Moses' as my mother calls her. Our favorite New Yorker.

Aunt Joan and I talked about all the different buses and trains and routes and places in the city. She told me a story about her Uncle Joe, who was a minister back home in Alabama. During one of his sermons, somebody in the congregation caught the holy ghost and made such a commotion that a man came up and slapped him, right there in the middle of the church. Aunt Joan and I laughed and hollered. She said her cousin Helen could tell the story better, but she passed away.

I mentioned the Great Migration to Aunt Joan, noting that she moved to New York in the 70s. She replied, “Boy, I wasn't a part of no Great Migration.” As Wilkerson attests, one seldom knows that they are making history. Often, they are only living their individual lives, seeking to exercise their freedom, hoping to make good on the promise of life.

In the text, a quote from my hometown newspaper caught my eye.

Everybody seems to be asleep about what is going on right under our noses. That is, everybody but those farmers who have wakened up on mornings recently to find every Negro over 21 on his place gone— to Cleveland, to Pittsburgh, to Chicago, to Indianapolis.… And while our very solvency is being sucked out beneath us, we go about our affairs as usual. — EDITORIAL, The Macon Telegraph, September 1916

Macon, Georgia is home, but my parents, my brother, and I have now left. My grandmother stayed, now in the twilight of her life. After a recent visit to Macon, my father quoted my grandmother saying ‘I’m getting old.’

“You should call,” he said. “That’s what phones are for”.

My brother called me to report that he was setting his sights on moving from Indianapolis to Philadelphia. Our migration continues. We’ve gone from our ancestral lands of the South to our current lives in what were once receiving stations of the Great Migration: Los Angeles, Boston, Philadelphia, New York. Cities where our forebears once took their first free steps.

Wilkerson’s documentation of the funeral arrangements of the characters in her book makes me think about my own arrangements, whenever they may be. Robert Joseph Pershing Foster was interred in Inglewood Cemetery, right down the street from where I once lived. He was laid to rest not in his ancestral land of Monroe, Louisiana, but in his promised land of California. His beloved Los Angeles, where he moved to pursue dreams not possible in the Jim Crow South.

Where is my promised land? What do I dream of? Not one place in particular. I dream of weaving a quilt of all the best that life has to offer. Soaking in the knowledge and perspective of all the corners of the world. Not a tourist but a student. A scholar. A Cynic, aiming to find a noble truth.

Though I pray for more years to live, where might I be laid to rest? Etched in my soul are those pine trees swaying in the warm breeze in Jones County, Georgia. There in those lands, in the year 1865, Nathan Sands was born a free man. In that Georgia red clay is where my father’s brother, Kenneth Sands, and their father, Tommy Lee Sands, Sr., are laid to rest. I can’t help but to think that when it is all said and done, that is where we will rest. But life is no simple thing, and who knows what the wants of my father might be.

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Wilkerson writes, “The South was still deep within those who left, and the sight of some insignificant thing would take them back and remind them of what they once were.” I know this to be true.

There's something about flying into Atlanta. That blanket of trees conjures a feeling that grows more difficult to capture: Home. The view from the sky reaches down somewhere beneath my chest, dusting off antiques so many years forgotten.

I grew up under pine trees and red clay. To think I’m just passing through, flying from Costa Rica with thousands more miles to go. I couldn’t have predicted this for my life. Not in that landscape below, those hot days in the grass, of football and trampolines and bikes and mischief. Of baseball and recesses and days unknown. Of dusty air in my lungs, of pollen, pine needles, and bright orange dirt; tired legs and stained clothes, irritated sinuses, and a semi-asthmatic chest. That’s how I grew up. That’s the world I knew.- A.D. Sands, The Sands of Time, September 2021

I’m thankful to have been raised in my family’s ancestral lands. Born and bred in the heart of my forebears, raised with a knowledge that our history does not stop in the maw of slavery, but instead connects to a lineage that crosses the Atlantic. I was reared in our ancestral land then shot out into the world, claiming it as my oyster. I stand not unscarred by the world, but unbowed, standing in full glory.

Washington D.C. is where I first launched out of my ancestral land. It’s fitting that D.C., the border of the North and South, was the setting for formative moments of my life. I’m young, but I've been around enough. I’ve impressed myself with, and upon, the world. Years of rapid growth, with scarcely a moment wasted. Seasons spent in motion. The blessed times. The fast times. Hopping, skipping, jumping between cities and countries and cultures and languages. Fluid, like water, weaving through the world.

So there I lay that day on a beach in New England, under the sun and a whipping wind. Back in Georgia I would have said this was cold. But around these parts, it’s beach weather.

“I got to live in a place I never expected,” Dad said. He pedaled on his stationary bike, reflecting on the moment of transition. Later that day, I passed him on the street riding his electric bike.

“Beach?” I called out. He gave his signature head nod with a thumbs up, then headed back to the house to continue packing.