The SHARECROPPERS Granddaughter

On Saturday night, April 19, I went to see Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners, featuring Michael B. Jordan playing twin brothers—Smoke and Stack.

One of the themes in the movie that stuck with me was how Smoke and Stack left the South, went up to Chicago, and eventually came back home. And while the story was fictional, what it stirred in me was very real.

I sat there in the theater watching Black folks on screen portraying life on the plantation—picking cotton in the fields for hours, working hard to meet a daily quota for a fraction of the pay. At night, they went to the juke joint to feel alive again. And on Sundays, they went to church, holding tightly to the faith that had carried them through generations of pain.

And just like that, I was reminded:
This wasn’t just a movie.
This was my family’s story.

That was the exact life my great-grandparents lived as sharecroppers in Mississippi—before they migrated to Chicago.
And it wasn’t just my family.
It was the life of millions of Black people in that era.
Ordinary lives. Extraordinary resilience.
​I am the granddaughter of sharecroppers.
My family’s roots run deep through Mississippi soil land that my great-grandparents worked, but did not own. They were part of the generation that carried the weight of slavery’s aftermath. Though legally “free,” they lived under a system designed to keep them bound.
Sharecropping was a trap.
They worked long days picking cotton and tending land, only to end up indebted to the very people who claimed to pay them. It was slavery repackaged. Oppression dressed as opportunity.
And yet they endured.

When I think about my life now, the freedom I have to travel, to speak, to dream, to own, to rest,I know it is only possible because of them.
Because of what they endured.
Because of what they sacrificed.
Because they believed in something better, even if they wouldn’t live long enough to see it.
I am the great-granddaughter of  sharecroppers.
But I am also the great-granddaughter of an enslaved people.
That is not distant history. That is my direct bloodline.
And that humbles me every single day.

Look at Us Now
My family now?
We are degrees earned.
We are passports stamped.
We are businesses built.
We are my mother, who owns a publishing company.
We are cousins who are college graduates, homeowners, authors, creatives.
We are daughters and sons who still remember where we come from,but aren’t afraid to go somewhere new.
We are living the life our grandparents couldn’t have imagined.
We are their wildest dreams and their answered prayers.
And I carry that truth in everything I do.

I will never fully understand what my ancestors went through.
What it felt like to be forced into bondage.
What it cost them to survive slavery, sharecropping, segregation.
What it took to hold onto their faith, their dignity, their families, and still keep going.
But I am thankful.
To my great-grandparents. To every enslaved African American who endured the darkest systems of oppression this country has ever known.
Your strength lives on in us.
And I will never forget what it cost for me to live the life I live now.

America was built on the backs of Black people.
That’s not an opinion , it’s a fact.
The cotton we picked. The railroads we laid. The babies we raised that weren’t ours. The wealth we built but never owned. The culture we created but rarely got credit for.
We were stolen, stripped, beaten, and broken then told to be grateful.
And yet, we still rose.
We still rise.
We are the most hated group in this country for no other reason than the fact that we are called.
We are loved.
We are favored by God.
They tried to keep us from reading, from writing, from voting, from learning.
Now we’re authors. Directors. Scholars. Billionaires. Presidents.
We’re healing. We’re creating. We’re imagining a future that our ancestors couldn’t.
And I need us to fully grasp that.
Because what happened to our ancestors wasn’t a footnote in history—it was trauma designed to erase us.
And we’re still here.
We’ve taken generational pain and turned it into generational power.
We’ve taken systems built to break us and walked out with legacy.
I am the granddaughter of a sharecropper.
And I walk in freedom because my people fought for it.
I create because they weren’t allowed to.
I speak because they were silenced.
I rest because they never could.
We are not lucky,we are resilient.
We are not lost,we are rooted.
And we owe it to them to never forget what it took for us to be this free.

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