Chapter One: Before the Beginning

Before I ever took my first breath, a storm had already torn through the women who came before me.

My mother was born in the early 1950s in Atlanta, a small-framed woman with sharp edges and a fire that could burn through silence. Big black eyes that saw everything, a loud mouth that refused to whisper, and a tongue that cursed like she was daring God Himself to flinch. She was the only child of her parents for a time, though family in those days was a tangled thing. Blood mixed with heartbreak, and promises rarely lasted longer than a summer rain.

Her mother, my grandmother, came from the kind of beauty that made men foolish and women whisper. Slender frame, long legs that could dance the night away in smoky juke joints, hair as black as a crow’s wing, and eyes like polished marble. She didn’t need permission to live loud. She danced, she drank, she lived fast. But fast living in those days came with danger trailing close behind.

Before her was my great-grandmother, born in the early 1900s out of Woodbury, Georgia, a world that didn’t give much and took plenty. She lost her mother the day she was born, and her father raised her and her sister with rough hands and little mercy. She picked cotton under the punishing sun and cleaned other folks’ houses to survive. She didn’t have education, but she had grit. Small, slender, and steel-strong, she didn’t take mess from anybody.

She had three children, two girls and a boy, and each of them carried a piece of her fight. The youngest was my grandmother. The one I never met. The one whose story still haunts the corners of my bloodline.

She was murdered before I was ever born.

The story was told in whispers, the kind that make your chest heavy. My grandmother had been seeing a man, and whatever love existed between them twisted into something violent. One night, neighbors heard a sound, a deep, broken moan rising from beneath a house. Back then, homes were built high on bricks, open enough for stray dogs or dark secrets to hide beneath.

When the neighbor went outside to see, she found a shape, my grandmother, wrapped in a sheet, her body shoved under that house like a sin someone hoped the dirt would swallow. Her face was swollen, unrecognizable. Her head had been beaten so badly that when they pulled her out, even the paramedics turned quiet.

At the hospital, she lingered between this world and the next, her body fighting, her spirit fading. My great-grandmother stayed at her bedside until the doctor called her into that cold, white hallway and told her the words no mother should ever have to hear: “There’s nothing else we can do.”

My grandmother died in her thirties. My mother was only fifteen.

No one ever spoke about what happened after that day, how my mother screamed, or if she did at all. Whether she fell silent, whether she broke, or just buried the pain somewhere deep enough that even she couldn’t find it. Back then, there was no therapy. No justice. No one asking if she was okay. There was just survival.

The man who killed my grandmother was arrested, but not for long. He didn’t rot in a cell. He didn’t pay the price. From what I was told, he went on to become a preacher, a man of God. Can you believe that? A murderer preaching redemption.

And I wonder, did he ever see her in his dreams? Did her spirit haunt him when he tried to close his eyes at night? Did her voice echo through his sermons as he stood behind that pulpit?

My mother was left behind in the wreckage, father gone, mother gone, childhood gone. My great-grandmother, already worn by life, stepped in to raise her. She had already buried too many things, and now she was raising the daughter of her murdered child, while her own heart still bled.

By sixteen, my mother was pregnant. With me.

No high school diploma. No safety net. Just the echo of trauma that passed down like a cursed heirloom, wrapped in silence, survival, and shame.

And me? I came into this world in the early seventies, wide-eyed and unknowing, a child born from tragedy, birthed through brokenness. I never got to meet my grandmother. The only pieces of her that exist in my world are two black-and-white photos, one of her, fierce and beautiful, and one of the man who stole her breath.

She was flawless. Strong jawline, full lips, dark skin that glowed even through the photograph’s grain. You could tell she walked with confidence, the kind of woman who turned heads and demanded space without saying a word.

And him, he looked like a shadow that refused the light. The kind of man who smiled through evil. The kind that left ruin where love should’ve been.

He took her life two years before I ever made my debut into this world.

Sometimes I stare at her photo and wonder if she sees me, if she knows I’ve been trying to tell her story. If she’s proud that the blood she left behind still breathes fire.

And yet, I can’t shake the question that haunts every generation before and after her.

When does the curse end?

Because maybe, just maybe, I was born to be the one who finally breaks it.

To be continued…