•̀ᴗ-

I am seated.

Which means my grandfather's father was a sharecropper, which is within my family's oral history for why the [surname] family property and farm is the way it is and has been in the family for so long.

My grandfather died at 96 years old at the turn of the century.

Sharecropping as we know it today ended sometime in the 1930s-1950s depending on the state. Not only was my grandfather a sharecropper's son- my grandfather was a sharecropper himself during his early adulthood before he left home to join the military and later became a preacher.

My grandfather marched with Martin Luther Kin Jr and educated my father on black politics and activism. My father just turned 71, the same age as Ruby Bridges, the little girl who sparked the mass desegregation of education. She was born in 1954. There exists a photo somewhere of a little boy on a man's shoulders in the crowd at one of MLK's public events. That's my dad.

That's how close this is to the current era.

I said that once as a teenager on a forum. I was mocked and told that I am either way older than I claimed to be or that I am way off in my estimations because slavery was long ago. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Civil Rights movement itself, that is in recent enough memory to be evident in the lives of those who are alive today. My grandfather's grandfather- I'm just 5 generations removed from slavery.

All That's Left of You (Cherien Dabis, 2025)

cinematography: Christopher Aoun

personally i think everything mashed with 🫩 is a winner