(ThySistas.com) There is one photograph on my phone I keep returning to, more often than I would care to admit. My daughter took it a couple summers ago, up on a ridge in the Blue Ridge Mountains, my arms thrown wide and my hair pushed off my face. You can see the sweat on me, and it was the good kind, the kind you have to earn. For the longest time I could not put my finger on what kept snagging my attention. The view was lovely, no denying that. That was not the part that hooked me, though. What got me was being up there at all. My whole self, planted on a patch of the world that history had spent ages hinting was never meant to hold a woman who looked like me.
I came up believing some places wore signs you could not actually see. Not the ones bolted to walls back in Jim Crow, though my grandmother remembered plenty of those firsthand. I mean the sneakier kind, the ones that set up shop in your head. They murmur to a little brown girl that camping is a white folks’ thing. That hiking is a pastime for people with trust funds and four hundred dollar boots. The beach was fine for a cookout, but that wilder stretch of coastline further along? Meant for somebody else to enjoy. Not one soul ever said it to my face. The message reached me all the same, slipped into commercials and glossy magazine spreads where the peaks came pre stocked with families who resembled mine not one bit.
Most of my grown life, I took that setup at face value and never poked at it. A vacation was a city, or a cruise, or the family piling into a rented hall for a reunion. Sleeping in a tent out under some pines? That felt strange to me, almost silly, like squeezing into shoes a size too small and pretending they fit fine. Then everything turned over at once. The marriage ended. My kids grew up and scattered into their own busy lives, and the house went so still it started leaning on me. One afternoon a coworker asked if I wanted to tag along on a hike near a state park. I nearly turned her down. Some worn out corner of me, sick of shrinking, said yes anyway.
That first walk pried me open. My lungs burned. My knees filed complaints. Out there as the only brown face on that entire trail, I felt each glance land on me, real or imagined. By the second mile, though, the self consciousness just lifted off, the way morning fog gives up once the sun climbs, and underneath was something clean. Birdsong I had strolled past my entire life without ever hearing. Moss on a wet rock, greener than I knew that color came. A forest hush so thick it asked nothing of me and still handed over the world. I cried some on the drive home. Could not have told you the reason if you paid me.
Here is the piece I finally worked out. Representation, the word we throw around so loosely, means faces on a screen or bodies filling a boardroom. Hardly ever does it mean who feels at ease beside a mountain lake as dawn breaks. That second sort of belonging sinks just as far into a person, maybe further. My folks go far, far back with the land, a bond that got twisted and stolen and steeped in hurt. People in my bloodline worked soil they had no right to own. They wore their bodies down in fields no human should have to. Then emancipation came, and generations later, even many public parks and recreation spaces were shaped by segregation.
That wound goes down deep, and it never healed on its own. A lot of the national treasures we brag about took shape during years when Black families faced segregated facilities, restricted access, or outright exclusion from public recreation spaces. My grandmother could sit you down with stories. The leftover of that shutting out still hangs in the shared memory, all these years past the laws changing. It turns up as a hesitation, as the hunch that the trail is not really for us, as the quiet choice to just stay home where the welcome is a sure thing.
But the ground is shifting under all of it, and I am glad to be part of the push. Sisters everywhere are lacing up boots and hauling kayaks down to the water and bedding down beneath stars somebody once swore were not theirs to sleep under. Groups have sprung up, names that put us and open country in the same breath. Folks meet for hikes, plan camping trips, take themselves off on slow weekends by the water and dare anybody to say they don’t belong. They post the pictures online with a joy that borders on defiant, and every last shot says the same thing without a caption. We are here. We belong here too. We are through asking permission.
There is a kind of healing I find out there that I have never found anywhere else. Black women haul around a staggering amount. We are meant to keep the family stitched together, fight our corner at work, choke down the little insults and grin through them. Stay strong, forever strong, long past where the strength quits being a gift and hardens into a cage we cannot climb out of. A wild trail could not care less about any of it. The ocean has no clue what your job title is, or which colleague spoiled your Tuesday. I have waded out waist deep into a cold lake, watched the light shatter across the top of it, and felt the entire load slide off me. Rest, at last. Space to go soft. And freedom, that word my ancestors bled over, becomes a thing your own two hands can hold.
Some folks will read all this and wonder why it even needs saying. Just go outside, they figure. If only it worked that easy. Feeling at home in a place gets built across generations, handed down parent to child like somebody’s guarded recipe. When your line got shut out of that handing down, you end up building the ease yourself, brick by brick, hike by hike, telling your daughters and your nieces and every young woman watching you that these mountains belong to them by birthright. Nobody passed us the key. So we are cutting our own.
These days I keep heading back out. Twice now I have caught the sun coming up over sand dunes and slept next to a river loud enough to wash my worries clean out. I have stood at the base of redwoods older than this whole country and, wouldn’t you know it, felt bigger rather than smaller. Each campground I settle into, every peak I reach on these creaky middle aged knees, chips away at an old lie. I am telling the world, and even more the woman in the mirror, that the wild gorgeous corners of this earth were made with me in mind too.
If you are a Sista and your chest leaned toward this while you read, do not let yourself argue out of it. Find a trail near where you live. Bring somebody with you, or head out solo with a full water bottle and plain nerve. Get to the spot where the treetops open onto sky and let yourself take up all the room you want. The wilderness is patient. It has been saving us a place the whole time, and every bit of it is ours to breathe.
Staff Writer; Raven Jones
Raven writes about music, relationships, and the everyday ups and downs of Black women… She keeps it honest, encourages other sistas, and can be reached at RavenJ@ThySistas.com.