This picture has a special place in my heart.
I am at Fort Fisher, North Carolina in July 2020. Behind me are Confederate cannons and in front of me is the Cape Fear River basin connecting to the Atlantic Ocean.
It’s the height of the pandemic and the middle of summer so it had been quite crowded, but somehow I was completely alone this particular morning while walking the fort.
I understood something in that moment:
I am living my ancestors’ wildest dreams and answered prayers.
There I stood, a FREE black American woman, looking out over the very port my ancestors would have entered in chains, on a monument that was built for a war meant to keep them enslaved.
I stood in defiance of that monument, not in fear of it.
Something told me to take the picture EXACTLY like that. No wig, no nails, no makeup. My kinky, curly hair still drying from swimming in the Atlantic Ocean earlier. No fancy camera setup or cameraman. Just my phone, propped up by the Confederate cannon.
When trying to decide on the album cover for Persona Non Grata, my original concepts were childhood photos where I seemed to be singled out in some way. The album is about how I always have felt deeply singled out and how I have achieved the things that the child in me always knew I would achieve despite of the people around me telling me I was crazy.
But as I prepared for the promotional tour, that just didn’t feel right. I did not achieve my childhood dreams with the intent of proving people wrong, but rather with the intent of proving to myself that I could do it. It wasn’t about how anyone else felt, it was about becoming a better version of myself. How others felt about my achievements was irrelevant to me actually achieving it. My goal was to always live life on my own terms with the universe’s permission and those early covers didn’t truly capture that feeling to me.
When I started going through my photos of my tattoo, this one popped up and I instantly knew that it would be the cover. The symbolism was too great to ignore.
My ancestors were forced into a society that would then tell them that they were unwelcome. They were forced to build that Confederate fort, forced to give their lives for a cause that was actively trying to keep them as less than humans.
Confederate soldiers had lost their lives in the pursuit of keeping them subservient. The blood spilled on that ground was meant to be a sacrifice that kept the likes of my ancestors enslaved.
And there I stood, alone but undeterred, nervous but not afraid, unsure but fully prepared for destiny. But most importantly:
FREE AND UNBOUND
The perfect summary for this album.