Hi there, I'm Lale Arakoku, and this is Women Who Travel.

Today, in honour of Juneteenth, we're talking about African Americans travelling and making their homes abroad. This idea of searching for a place where I could be myself and not have to choose between the person I was at school and the person I was at home and just feel like all of my different selves could be fully integrated.

So that was a big part of

the story of travel for me. My guest is Dr. Tamara J. Walker. Her book, Beyond the Shores,

recounts stories of 20th century African Americans who chose to build their lives outside of the

United States. She's everywhere from Paris to a remote village in Soviet Uzbekistan to Nairobi.

But Tamara also weeds reflections on her own travel experiences and her families throughout the book.

I feel like for so many people, and I include myself in this, often a sort of curiosity and travel and hunger for travel comes from a family member or adult in your life when you're a child growing up who was out there in the world or had come back with stories of these places and adventures and it, you know, it like sparks something. And for you,

it sounds like it was your grandfather. And you have a reading that you promised you'd share if you

don't mind. I would love to, yeah. Reading it for us now. I knew my grandpa had joined the army as a

young man in Alabama, lost his right eye on a Normandy

beach during World War II, and eventually settled with his wife and kids in Colorado Springs

near the military base at Fort Carson. Those were basic facts that explained everyday facets of my

life, like the way my grandparents both spoke with a southern twang, why my grandpa had a glass

eye, and how we ended up being among the

small handful of black people to call them out and state our home. But in my self-absorbed youth,

I'd rarely given much thought to his life and career beyond that. I'd always assume that the

knick-knacks on every shelf and in every cabinet around the house, beer steins from Austria,

chinoiserie vases, porcelain dolls dressed in Korean handbox, and stacks of old postcards, had come from friends or flea markets.

It had never occurred to me that my grandpa had been to other parts of the world beyond the battlefields of France, or that my grandma and the eldest of their nine children had also traveled with him.

There was so much, though, that no one ever spoke of.

They never spoke of the beginning of the story, the journey itself, or the early days and months

...