For as long as I can remember, words have been how I shaped my world. But last year I went looking and for the first time could find no words to hold or comfort me.
I was pregnant and needed a book to guide me into motherhood, one of the biggest transformations of my life. So I did what I always did as a writer and archival filmmaker. I scoured digital and physical bookshelves for something, anything, to give me what I needed. I didn’t need reference material for my creative life but for the one I was creating. I desperately needed stories, not advice or how-tos—real, earned lived experiences and visuals. The search came up empty. There were no intimate portraits of pregnant and newly postpartum Black bodies or the vulnerable reflections of this time. A literary absence that felt intentional. How could this be? Black women had been birthing, rearing, and mothering for centuries yet documentation of our collective and individual experience couldn’t be found. I was infuriated. I ached. I had hoped that the lives of my foremothers could be a map for the one I was creating.
Like all good books, Sasha Bonét’s The Waterbearers found me exactly when it was supposed to. A literary balm that soothed me during the most tender time. Bonét traces and seamlessly weaves together the matriarchal stories of her own family with those of America’s matriarchs; Black women like Iberia Hampton, Camille Billups and Betty Davis. From the first page Bonét let me know that she was writing for women like me, those who were searching for something but never found what they were looking for. Somehow she knew I needed to feel less alone.
Those three hundred plus pages sat heavy in my hands as I read with the fervor of my adolescence, when I read to better see and understand myself. I had never read anything quite like this before. The words effortlessly built a world that felt dreamlike, yet so familiar. I was escaping and being reflected at once. This wasn’t me on the page, but I was there. Right there, in the way Bonét described her mother, her aunts, and even her daughter. When I asked Bonét about what void she hoped this book would fill, she told me to start writing because what she wanted to read didn’t exist. “The absence [of a book on Black womanhood] felt a lot like what it feels like to be Black in the world—you’re pulling from all these different resources,” she shared. Bonét was frustrated, like me, that our stories exist only in fragments. She wanted “to have all of these things in one place.” This reminded me of something I’d highlighted in her book, “concealing history is another kind of violence that goes unnamed.” This line imprinted itself on my brain and made me even more irate that I couldn’t find a collection of Black motherhood stories. This literary absence hurt me. It hurts all of us. Stories are how we recognize ourselves in the world.
As I made my way through Bonét’s book, her words offered me a type of witness and wisdom I couldn’t quite name or hold. The interpersonal conflicts and joys passed down in her family felt oddly familiar. Not the details—we grew up thousands of miles apart—but the essence of their lives and how they navigated the world. Like her, I wrestled with how the decisions made by my mother, and her mother, lived out through me. I asked Bonét about this. Why literary preservation of her family’s daily experiences was so necessary. She said it was her mentor, artist Camille Billups, who told her archiving is our duty. “Whatever you do, whatever you write, put everyone that you love in it, because they’ll try to tell you that you weren’t here,” Bonét told me. This is exactly why the absence of Black maternal literature cut so deep. Because we were here, we are here, and we do matter.
I spent my whole life finding myself between pages. Now I am putting myself there, so others can find themselves too.
When I read Billups’ story in the book I, too, was struck with her obsession with the seemingly mundane. Her entire apartment was an archive and she kept things that most wouldn’t find interesting. A reminder that the ordinary is just as important as the extraordinary. This is what I was hungry for. The random moments, the quiet and chaotic reflections on motherhood, the photograph that almost didn’t get taken. The in between moments that could offer me a real window into someone’s experience. “She kind of told me in this way that it felt like a responsibility,” Bonét tells me. It was, she says, the most important thing Billups told her. Hearing her speak about how Billups inspired her not only inspired me but instilled in me a sense of obligation. I am a writer and world builder of my own, not just a reader. I must use my words to fill the voids I discover. To make myself on the page. To be a mirror for others. Like Billups was for Bonét and Bonét for me.
Her words gave me that same permission. Not just to feel seen, but to build something. So, I built something: The Black Motherhood Archive, a record of my own experiences as a Black mother today and those of others across generations. I started with informal in-person and text conversations with mothers whose mothering I admired—friend’s moms and their grandmothers. I was curious about how these women balanced raising themselves alongside their children. These conversations, and their answers, provided the framework for a Google Form that I shared on social and with my larger network. Bonét told me that what she’s always felt reading her literary foremothers is that they’re telling her that her life is worthy of witness. “I gather elements of different women’s stories and try to build a life of my own,” she shared. I am building my life and this archive so that others have something to reference and pull from. This experience has illuminated a truth I had nearly forgotten: One of the most profound things we can do is simply ask the question and create space. In the months since starting the archive, and sharing my own story, so many women have vulnerably shared with me. “It hasn’t so much shaped, but more so unearthed me,” one person shared. Bonét’s words play in my head as I ask, gather and record the reflections of my community. “Isn’t it our deepest fear and greatest hope as human beings to be fully seen?” she asked me.
When our stories go unrecorded, especially in books, so much disappears. Not just memories but language. The specific, hard-won language that tells us our lives are worthy of witness. As Bonét put it, “all of us are just the sum of everyone who came before us. How can we know who we are if we don’t look to the past?” I ached deep in my bones when I couldn’t find the stories of Black birth, joy, and tribulation as a mother. Because I knew I would be left without language to describe my experience. Language that could make the experience feel less singular, less alone.
That is my hope with the archive. And what the women who have contributed have already proven is possible. “Motherhood has broken me a million times,” one person shared. “And the breaking has been brilliant, painful, rewarding, and most importantly meaningful. The breakpoint has always been a portal—and as I have come to appreciate it, it has also become a pathway to real peace.” Another mother told me: “It hasn’t so much shaped, but more so unearthed me. It’s like I’ve been broken open, into a smattering of pieces and am reconfiguring myself over and over again.”
This is the language I was looking for. This is what disappears when we don’t ask, don’t record, don’t preserve. Each generation inherits what wasn’t named or recorded by the one before. I want the next generation, and the next, to know and claim their inheritance of wisdom from me and other Black women. Recording these stories, and my own, is not a sentimental or trivial act but an urgent one.
Billups’ archive matters. Bonét’s book matters. My archive matters. Each is a way to remind us that we matter. That our lives are worthy of being wondered about. I hope to create a collection of stories about Black motherhood so rich and diverse that everyone can find a piece of themselves reflected.
I spent my whole life finding myself between pages. Now I am putting myself there, so others can find themselves too. At their best, books give us permission to create what doesn’t exist. They witness us. They show us what’s possible. As Bonét writes in The Waterbearers, “be a woman who chooses.” And that I am. I choose to use my words to create space. Bonét lit the path for me. Now, I am doing that for those who come next. I am building what I could not find. So no one has to search the way I did.
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