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In this powerful debut memoir, Neesha Powell-Ingabire chips away at coastal Georgia’s facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories.
In May of 2020, Neesha Powell-Ingabire’s hometown became infamous after a viral video spread of white vigilantes killing a Black man named Ahmaud Arbery. The small coastal city of Brunswick, Georgia became synonymous with this tragedy, which, along with the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, spurred an international movement that summer to end white supremacy.
Neesha Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist, and organizer, grew up in Brunswick feeling alienated as a Black queer and disabled girl in a fraught racial and political environment. Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast traces the genealogy of systemic racial violence while paying homage to the area’s long history of Black resistance and culture keeping. Powell-Ingabire probes her personal connection to past and present: the victorious campaign to remove Brunswick’s Confederate monument out of a public park, modern echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing, and basket weaving, the fight for Geechee land in Sapelo Island, and the mass suicide of the Igbo people, who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than be enslaved.
In Come By Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire reckons with their home’s collective history and their own history as a truth-telling exercise in line with Audre Lorde’s advice: “It is better to speak.”
"'Come by Here' is both reminder and invitation. By bringing readers home with them to the Geechee Coast, Neesha Powell-Ingabire's essays show us that where we come from is powerful magic, strong enough that there are forces at work to keep us from our personal and collective histories. And that you have never ventured too far to lay claim to your roots. This book is Black. Queer. Southern. And unapologetic in its insistence that we serve as witness." —Minda Honey, author of The Heartbreak Years
“In Come by Here, Neesha Powell-Ingabire explores both a family history she knows well, and a Gullah Geechee cultural history she is only just learning, asking some of the same questions that haunt so many of us who hail from small places: What do we carry with us? What do we leave behind? What do we owe to the people and places who shape us? Powell-Ingabire interrogates the impacts of systemic and environmental racism on her part of coastal Georgia in clear, incisive prose. What's more, she offers us a path to healing by modeling her own journey of learning and claiming her history, grounding herself in the land and the practices of her ancestors, and fighting to preserve their legacies.” —Neema Avashia, author of Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place
"Part storytelling, part truth-seeking, Neesha Powell-Ingabire is a dynamic voice who offers a unique understanding of the contemporary Black South through Gullah culture. A mesmerizing read." —Regina N. Bradley, author of Chronicling Stankonia: the Rise of the Hip Hop South
Neesha Powell-Ingabire (she/they) is a coastal Georgia-born-and-raised movement journalist, essayist, grant writer, cat parent, spouse, and auntie living in Atlanta/occupied Creek territory. Neesha’s writing has been published in various publications, including online on Autostraddle, B*tch, Black Girl Dangerous Blog, Black Youth Project, Everyday Feminism, Harper’s Bazaar, Prism, RaceBaitr, Rewire.News, Scalawag, TheBody, The Counter, VICE, Xtra, YES! Magazine and in print in A Blade of Grass, the Grassroots Fundraising Journal, Hexing the Patriarchy, Monday (the journal of the Jacob Lawrence Gallery), and the Oxford American. They graduated cum laude from the University of Georgia with a B.A. in Journalism & Mass Communication and is currently finishing a MFA in Creative Writing at Georgia College & State University. They currently live in Fairburn, GA.
Contents
KINDRED
Hometown Memories
Finding Grandma
A Treatise On Black Women’s Tears
Water Is Life
September
A Rolling Stone/Papa Was
A Brush With Magic Or An Ode To Mrs. Cornelia
Baskets
BLOODY MARSHES
How To Divide A Coastal Georgia Town
The Power Of Hate
The Confederate’s Son
Running On King Cotton Row
RELIGION & RESISTANCE
Reproduction
Trouble The Water The Curse Reclamation
Stealing Sheetrock
Facts Of A Black Girl’s Life
Dancing In The Wind
References
Acknowledgements