Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. and spirituality. Dr. Kenitra Brooks is a writer and teacher and a fellow at the Hutchin Center for African American Research at Harvard University. She specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture.

In her essay, Myrtle's Medicine, Kinneeds reflects on the meaning and beauty of embodied

ways of knowing.

In a world where the cosmologies of black women are continually erased and excluded from

knowledge traditions, Kenitra seeks connection with her late-great-grandmother,

Mama Mert, who first introduced her to root-working traditions

and inspired her life's work.

We are a people, a people who do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away,

it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of

our children and, if necessary, bone by bone, Alice Walker.

Conjure studies are capable of linking magical and supernatural elements, on the one hand,

with medicinal practices and natural processes on the other, the Ophus H. Smith.

Hey, baby, who your people were often the first words out of my great-grandmother Murdo Anderson's mouth whenever she encountered someone new. As a member of our family,

whose traditions of healing go back 12 generations before her, she holds legendary status.

Born Myrtle Carrier in New Orleans on September 17, 1921,

she lost her right leg at the age of 10 when it was crushed under a commercial truck. Her mother,

Julia Edgerson Carrier, was quickly paid a small amount of hush money and left to maneuver how to mother a now

differently able child. I often wonder how much the white trucker and his company thought of the

limb of a little black girl was worth. What actuarial chart was used to monetarily brush off the

...