Working on my new narrative nonfiction book, tentatively titled Unbroken Ground: Surviving Displacement in Richmond, I plan to include stories of people and communities resisting erasure and displacement in my original hometown of Richmond, Virginia. This necessitates wrestling with ‘how to tell the stories’ of, or rather, how to amplify the stories of people and communities too often silenced and ignored. Formerly enslaved Black people living side-by-side with former Union spies and sympathizers, abolitionists in Richmond refugee camps. Traditionally Black Richmond neighborhoods like Jackson Ward and Fulton, as well as the white working-class neighborhood of Oregon Hill fractured in the name of ‘urban development.’ And the First Virginians, the Powhatan people who first occupied the land, white supremacist and eugenicist (and public health official) Walter Plecker, and the 1924 Racial Integrity Act of 1924, with his ‘one drop rule,’ anti-miscegenation, and no category for Indigenous people.
I know I have to tread carefully. I’ve negotiated ethically fraught territory when, in my book, Skid Road: On the Frontier of Health and Homelessness in an American City, I wrote about Princess Angeline, Kikisoblu, the daughter of Chief Seattle. I made a short video and a voice recording about this, which I share here and return to as I research and write about the First Virginians.