The following is an excerpt from an essay in Cherise Morris’ forthcoming book, Elemental Blackness: Black Liberation and the Natural World (Cassava Republic, 2026). 

IT HAD BEEN FOUR YEARS SINCE MY LAST VISIT TO MY ANCESTRAL HOME IN ESMONT, VIRGINIA. But I couldn’t imagine never going back there. I had spent my childhood resenting that emptying land in the quiet valley between hills. I longed to escape the shadows of its history. But now, I was pregnant with a home of my own, 600 miles away in Detroit, mourning the loss of the home I always knew I’d leave behind. Something had been pulling on my spirit in the weeks leading up to the news, inundating me with memories of my first home. 

The home and that land, named for the plantation that once existed there, had been in our family for more than seven decades. I was born and raised in the same home as my mother, the youngest of eight children, and her siblings. My grandparents had inherited it from my great aunt. The house was uncomplicated, a single-story structure with five rooms, an old tin roof, and a crooked porch. But it was the sort of home with the heft of spirit needed to carry four generations of living. It was the venue for every graduation party, every baby shower, every church revival, every family reunion, and every funeral. It was a site of refuge for single mothers, fleeing abusive homes, a nest where cousins would come to sojourn, and a place that welcomed those down on their luck. I always believed no matter how far away from it I drifted, it would still be there waiting for me whenever I came back. I believed it was my inheritance. 

‍

I found out my family had lost the property from a Facebook message sent by a man named Jesse. The house was beyond repair, “unlivable,” he wrote, and because of this, the land’s new owner had decided there was nothing they could do but tear it down. He had found my college acceptance letter to Brown University in a folder with some other documents he thought

I might want, and a Bible, opened to the 23rd psalm. Things we left behind, assuming no matter what, they would always be there, still, waiting for us. 

‍

“The tax man finally caught up with us,” my mother surmised. She was adamant about not wanting to live there ever again and not really caring about our home’s impending demolition. In the last years she spent alone there, life was hard in an emptying house filled with the consuming loneliness of memories lurking around each corner. The house, and the land it sat on, reminded her of hardship and strife, struggle and burden. It reminded me of those things, too, but I had been far enough away for long enough to see it as something more. It was generational wealth, an archive to our lineage. To her, it was an anchor to a past she wanted to leave behind. 

‍

Jesse called me on FaceTime so I could say my final goodbye to the first home I’d ever known. He walked me through the house as he packed up a box of forlorn belongings to send to me. 

Our first encounters with this land had nothing to do with our ownership over it or even 

our perceived ownership over ourselves. We came to love this land despite the ways the systems and structures of white supremacist, capitalist violence, inequity, and oppression cast themselves across her. We learned this land from the Indigenous protectors with whom she had her own covenants. We saw beauty in ourselves through seeing beauty in the land, and taking pride in the ways we could communicate with her. We reaped her abundance under the strain of cyclical systemic violence, which traumatized her and us. Without the unmoving anchor of my childhood home in Chestnut Grove, in Esmont, in Virginia, I am as dislocated as I’ve ever been. 

‍

I am grounded on this earth, but untethered to the idea of any particular place.The construction of Blackness in the United States and beyond has been a project of dislocation, and in that, it has been framed by a transience as beautiful as it is disheartening. Our beliefs and fables, myths and customs differed, but embedded somewhere in our initial sense of self that cut across time, space, and place was a concept of being and belonging tied to the land, a sacred connection with nature and the characteristics, miracles, blessings, and challenges of the physical landscapes we called home. There was also an understanding that as much as we existed on, with, and among the land, we also existed beyond it. And this transience anchored us through the dislocations that would come to define Blackness. 

For displaced people, home is a distant memory, an intergenerational fathoming, a relative ghost of an ancient past we’ve been separated from for so long it seems unimaginable. 

‍

I asked my ancestors why we lost the land, my ancestral home. They answered by way of my mother a few days later. “That house was just a resting spot,” she told me, “you know, Momma and Poppa figured when they moved on, they moved on. It wasn’t worth worrying about no house. Sure, we had memories and everything, but it was just a place.” It was just a place, after all. 

‍

We are, undoubtedly, embedded in the lands we know and have been assigned to in this lifetime, but our true fullness can never be summarized in the narrow margins of a deed or title or single plot of land. There is a boundlessness in us all, extending far beyond the borders of geographic space and the boundaries of nations. We were created from minerals and dust scattered from sacred lands. This earth lives within us. It was a freedom to know and love and

treat the land as sacred, and, after all was said and done, to understand this land was never ours to “own” to begin with. The land still remembers us. The land will always remember.