Seven years after my dad died, I went to the place he was born for the first time.

My dad was born on a cotton plantation in Greenwood, Mississippi, where his family were

sharecroppers in the same field that enslaved people had picked cotton for generations and

generations before.

Every year our family would go on family vacations and we would go on family reunions, but we would

never go to the place of my dad's birth.

It wasn't a place that he really wanted to take us to or a place that he wanted to return.

It just all happened that my great aunt Charlotte, my grandmother's sister, was visiting nearby

at the time that I went down.

And it's strange because I'm 38 years old, but I'm so relieved to have this elderly woman

with me because for some reason I'm just a little afraid.

It's just kind of weird where really was.

I grown up with Aunt Charlotte my whole life.

She's the one who taught me how to make e-strolls in her kitchen and she was this woman who wore

heels until she was in her 90s who when you would go on her house, everything was always

very neat.

It was plastic over the furniture.

It was very important for her at all times to appear respectable and I understood that so

much of that was because in her formative years she was not treated with respect in the

places she was born.

So we get in the car and I try as I had done several times through the years to get my

great aunt Charlotte to open up about what it was like to live down there.

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