I think I heard of something.

I think that you should check.

Because last time I heard something, something bit me in the neck.

You fast over to spooked.

Stay tuned. Some of my extended family, they're amateur genealogists, and I am thankful for them. Grateful, but they've done the work, tracing our lineage.

Sometimes they sent charts and pictures in the mail, detailing where we came from.

Where my grandmother was born, who her mother was,

her father, her father's father, even uncovering long-lost pictures.

Fuzzy, defiant black and white photos with proud people grinning back out at their descendants, at us.

People barely one foot out of slavery, people for whom this photo, decked in their Sunday finest,

would have cost the full week's wages of labor under the hot sun, but they insisted on taking this picture anyway.

That's how important it was that we know.

I stare back at them and see my chin, my eyes, my nose, there, my grandmother,

here my great-great-grandfather, and one single picture of my great-great-great-grandfather.

And then, nothing, everything, every one, lost a time, buried under the middle passage where we have tried to connect the dots to no avail.

I want to know their stories, I do.

I assume they loved, they lost, they had both joy and pain. We certainly

looked the same. I'm guessing they were just like me only in very different circumstances.

I learned very recently. The other people, they don't make this assumption.

In fact, they know, with absolute certainty that their ancestors are something altogether different.

Spook starts.

Now. This book starts now. The

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