No paper trail.
No midwife’s mark.
No certificate to prove the day.
Just Marlboro County fields,
tobacco barns breathing their smoke,
and the cry of the first of twelve —
a Black child under Jim Crow skies.
If he went to school, it was brief.
The rows of cotton and tobacco called louder.
He couldn’t read.
But he could live.
He could hustle.
And he would always say,
“I’d rather have common sense than book sense.”
He joined the tide of the Great Migration.
South to North.
Carolina to Chicago.
He carried only work ethic and will,
and turned them into a life.
He built a Black middle-class life.
He raised his children in a place
where they could thrive.
He stood tall enough
that no white man dared call him boy.
Ninety years on earth.
Nine on the Ancestral Plain.
I see him still —
riding his mower,
cutting grass,
smiling,
because that rhythm
and because tending his land
was his peace.
It brought him joy. Black joy.
I wish he could read these words.
But my mother and sister are with him now,
reading aloud on the other side.
So he knows.
So he hears.
So he feels it.
His story lives on.
Through me.
Through us.
Through these words.
Happy 99th, Dad.
Your life is our lesson.
Your journey, our inheritance.
Your name carried in love —
from here,
to the Ancestral Plain.
