The currency was blood and bondage

My Ancestors Paid Dearly for My Right to Wield the Word

I Will Continue to Honor Them

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock

You can read this article without a subscription

The only time I have seen a reparations check issued by the United States Treasury was at the Japanese Heritage Museum in Los Angeles. It was a $20,000 check made out to a man named Iyo Tamaki, who had been imprisoned with his family for three years in an internment camp during World War II.

I thought about my own family and the decades my grandparents, John and Phenoy, spent trapped as sharecroppers on a farm in Holly Grove, Arkansas where they worked alongside their oldest children, sunup to sundown, for wages they never saw. In fact, at the end of each harvest, they somehow ended up in arrears, going deeper into debt to the white man who owned the acreage.

Image Courtesy of Japanese Heritage Museum, Los Angeles

I searched my heart to determine the compensatory damages due to my grandparents for lost wages, pain, and suffering, wondering if it was even possible to assess repayment for the dismantling of a human spirit.

I imagined asking my grandmother how much they were owed, how much their own grandparents, who were legally enslaved their entire lives, were owed.

“I reckon they cain’t pay me at all,” Grandma would probably say. “ ‘Sides, it ain’t for me to come up with the number. They got the records. The truth is right there.”

The debt America owes to African-Americans is almost incalculable. Until the country can finally atone for its crimes against humanity, Black people will continue to pay our own reparations. For me, that means learning and relearning American history and acknowledging that my ancestors have paid dearly for my right to wield the word.

Writing is my way of communicating my ancestor’s brilliance and resistance. Although millions of enslaved people and later sharecroppers, like my grandparents, had their intellect suppressed and could not learn to read, write, and fully express themselves, their secret yearnings continue to live inside of us waiting to be fulfilled.

Image Courtesy of WWNorton.com

Frederick Douglass paid the price for me to wield the word.

In Douglass’s autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he recalls hearing his captor, Maryland slaveowner, Hugh Auld, argue that literacy made slaves “unmanageable, unhappy, and would spoil the best nig*** in the world.”

Punishment for getting caught reading or writing was often swift and harsh, with well-documented cruelties, such as multiple lashes, branding, blinding with lye, a severed finger or hand, even death.

Nevertheless, Douglass was inspired by his owner’s repudiation. “From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom” (A Narrative of the Life). Douglass secretly taught himself to read using torn, dirty pamphlets and fooling local white children into correcting his mispronunciations.

Image courtesy of plainenglishinc.com

Nat Turner paid the price for me to wield the word.

Nat Turner was a literate preacher whose intelligence elevated him to the status of “prophet” amongst his fellow slaves. Turner’s confidence, likely instilled early in his childhood when he was taught to read the Bible, led to his self-belief and his God-given right to resist his enslavement.

He, like Frederick Douglass and many others, yearned to read because there was freedom in that skill, even if their physical bodies were relegated to bondage.

Image Courtesy of New York Public Library

On August 21, 1831, Turner organized one of the deadliest slave revolts in U.S. history. Two months later, he was captured and sentenced to hanging. Fearing future uprisings, new laws in Virginia were passed to limit the education (and movement) of slaves, but Turner’s rebellion added new fuel to the abolitionist movement in the north.

Susie Taylor King paid the price for me to wield the word.

Susie Taylor King in the 1860s

Susie Taylor King was the first black woman to publish a Civil War memoir. (titled *Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33rd United States Colored Troops, Late 1st S.C. Volunteers)*. In it, she discusses the means of stealth she and her brother used to learn to read in an underground school in Georgia.

The kids wrapped their books in paper so that everyone would think Mrs. Woodhouse, the teacher, was only instructing the children on the proper way to work as domestic help.

After a harrowing escape from slavery in April 1862, Susie married an officer in the 33rd United States Colored Infantry Regiment and began serving as a rifle cleaner, laundress, and nurse — pulling injured men from the battlefield. In every spare moment, she taught the soldiers reading and writing, working more than four years for the union army without pay.

Harriet Jacobs paid the price for me to wield the word.

Harriet Jacobs in 1894 age 80

Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Harriet Jacobs was a fugitive slave for seven years (1835–1842) hiding in a tiny attic crawl space to resist the sexual demands of her owner. Her book, Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl, was the painstaking result of years of writing practice without the benefit of a formal education. For years, her story was deemed as written by a white editor until a Ph.D candidate in the 1970s examined her manuscript to prove that it was authentically written.

Forbidding our ancestors to read and write wasn’t an end to their stories; it was merely a delay, a delay that has been earning interest for more than 400 years.

Image courtesy of Freepik

We may not receive payment for the back-breaking labor and degradation endured by those who came before us, but I consider writing a form of reparations. Each time we uncover the truth about our American history and share it, we not only honor their voices and their stories, but we also collect on the debt owed by the United States government.

I dare say, all of us must wield the word, and wield it righteously, on behalf of our ancestors to continually provide receipts of both their courage and unfathomable pain and suffering until the debt is paid in full.

*An edited version of this article was published in the Los Angeles Sentinel March 21, 2026. Thank you for reading! *❤️✍🏾

Works Cited

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Broadview Press, 2018.

“The Homes of the Writer Harriet Jacobs — Someone Lived Here Podcast.” Someone Lived Here, https://www.facebook.com/pg/someonelivedhere/, 4 May 2020, https://someonelivedhere.com/at-the-corner-of-king-and-broad-street/.