Bob sang to me, “No woman, no cry / Everything’s gonna be alright.” Kendrick said, “All my life I has to fight… / But if God got us then we gon’be alright.” Sasco reminded me, “We feel a whole heap of pain, cah we Black / And man a say that they put me inna chains, cah we Black / Imagine now, big gold chain full of rocks… / Remember this, every race start from the Black.”
After seeing the global Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, these songs provided me comfort. I was comforted by the reminder that there is more to the Caribbean and African diaspora than enslavement-induced generational trauma. While our history — and sometimes our present — is damaging, we have come so far. Black History does not start or end with slavery. We are our ancestors’ wildest dreams.
