I'm Still Here

My family's story does not begin with me.

It begins on a plantation back porch in the Deep South, where a little girl slept in hay with a dog because she belonged to neither world — not the slave quarters, not the big house.

From that back porch, this family has lived through slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, and every hard season in between.

My grandfather ran toward the wounded at the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. My grandmother graduated Spelman College with honors. My mother entered Spelman College at fourteen.

And I am sitting in a dialysis chair in North Metro Atlanta, Georgia — still building, still declaring, still here.

This autobiography is the full story. Thirty-eight chapters across six parts. From the back porch to the chair. From Birmingham to Georgia. From the beginning to right now.

This is the testimony of a life that should have ended — but didn't.

I have been writing it from inside one of the hardest seasons of my life. Which means every word is true in a way that only words written from the middle of the fire can be.

I'm still here.
And now I am going to tell you everything that means.

— Pastor Nicole Washington