There she was dressed in a houndstooth suit jacket that fell just above her knees, standing there looking at little me.
“Irene,” a woman behind the camcorder calls for her attention. My grandmother turns around. Now she’s looking into the camera, straight into the eyes of 34-year-old me.
“Wait just a minute, you all,” she said. Tears welled in my eyes. I hadn’t heard her voice in over 16 years.
My grandmother turned her watchful eyes back to little me, the girl with messy pigtails ripping open one of her birthday cards.
This long-lost home video found its way into my life in January 2023, a few weeks after my Uncle Michael passed away. Feeling adrift from the loss of another cornerstone of my childhood home, I’d gone over to Auntie Lee Etta’s house to pick up some vinyls she’d been wanting to give me since Uncle Sunny passed in 2017. Once there, she mentioned she had my granny’s mink coat, some of her cast iron cookware and this VHS tape of her birthday party. My sister and I believe the recording may be from her 73rd birthday party at my mom’s Fifth Avenue place in North Lawndale. It must’ve been April 1994. In the video, Uncle Billy playfully calls me “Little Miss 6 going on 60,” though I would’ve been 4 then.
I played a clip for Mr. Harris as we sat in my rental car at a gas station in Shelby, Mississippi, next to Deeson, the even-smaller Delta town my granny grew up in. We met through his granddaughter, WLBT Multimedia Sales Manager Kayla Turner Thomas, who pinged me online in 2020 after reading the second installment of this Out West series.
“I came across your article on Deeson while researching my own family,” she wrote. Since then, she’s released an educational feature-length documentary called Farming Freedom about her family’s story of Black land ownership in the Delta. In it, she learns about her great-grandfather, John Harris, who bought 120 acres in Deeson in the 1940s, and her grandfather Henry L. Harris’ challenges to keep the land in the family. She grew up on the family farm, too.
“You was her boss, huh?” Mr. Harris said with laughter. He watched the video of little me opening Granny’s card and listened to her react to my audacity: “Tiffany ain’t gon’ let me do nothing,” she said. “Tiffany, who asked you to open up my stuff?”
Strong-Arm Tactics and Whooping You with the Pencil
Mr. Harris sat shotgun as I drove along Shelby-Deeson Road. Take a left right here, baby. Take a right. Directions served as commas in retelling his family’s move from a Perthshire plantation to Deeson in 1949. He was about 2 years old then. I asked him why his family chose Deeson. It didn’t seem like a notable Black place like the historic Mound Bayou or the “Birthplace of Blues” Clarksdale or even a town like Shelby.
“We weren’t coming to town. We were coming to the country,” he said.
Shelby is easily found on a map. Although its town center is in disrepair, it has gas stations, homes and about 1,700 people. There’s a train track that runs straight through it.
Deeson is mostly fields, other than the yellow farm house with the words “Deeson, MS” painted on the front, and three grain silos with the words “Old Delta Farms” plastered on them. There are an estimated 40 to 120 residents in Deeson today, according to the Bolivar County administrator’s office.
An unincorporated rural place in Bolivar County, Deeson was first settled in the 1880s and named for one of its landowners Sidney T. Deeson. By July 1927, the British-owned Delta & Pine Land Company operated 40,000 acres in nearby Scott, its headquarters; an 8,000-acre plantation of the Delta Farms Company (which later became Delta Planting Company) at Deeson; and 5,000 acres of the Empire Plantation in another county, according to The Clarksdale Press Register. Mississippi native Oscar Goodbar Johnston served as president of Delta & Pine Land Company, the largest cotton plantation in the world worked mostly by Black sharecroppers.
“Sharecropper was the main thing going; it was next to slavery. They wasn’t beatin’ ya, but they was whooping you with the pencil,” Mr. Harris said.
His daddy was a sharecropper in Perthshire before buying land in Deeson in the late 1940s. In the 1930 Census, my great-grandmother Nancy Johnson is listed as a laborer living on a farm with my 8-year-old grandmother, Irene, and her two younger siblings, Katherine and Oscar. My grandmother was born in Deeson in 1921, and she said they “lived on the farm that we picked cotton on.”
“At the end of the year,” Mr. Harris explained, “whatever monies you made, they would give you half of it, but you had to pay for all expenses.”
Most importantly, Mr. Harris said, sharecroppers couldn’t question the white man about the figures he came up with.
“Well, actually, a lot of them couldn’t even read or write, and they didn’t know if the figure was wrong or right,” he said, “and so they would always break you even or bring you out behind, because they didn’t want you to have no money because they figured if you had money …”
He paused to give another direction. You keep straight ahead.
“If you had money, you would leave,” he picked back up. “Everybody left at night. You couldn’t leave in the daytime. When you was on the plantation, you was nothing but property.”
I thought he was beginning to mix up slavery times with the 1940s. So I cut in to ask, even in the 1940s?
“Yeah… that’s right,” Mr. Harris said. “You know what? We didn’t get no, really no break until after the civil rights bill was passed, everything was under Jim Crow then.” The U.S. Congress has passed quite a few civil rights bills throughout history. Though Mr. Harris didn’t specify which one he’s referring to, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is heralded as the most sweeping, outlawing segregation in businesses and public places, and banning discriminatory employment practices. The 1968 law prohibited housing discrimination.
It began to look like we were leaving Shelby for the countryside. On one side of the road was a row of homes, and the other side was what seemed to be endless miles of fields.
“[There’s] a kid now, slow down real slow,” Mr. Harris cautioned.
A few young Black kids played near a ditch across from the homes. Mr. Harris likened them to chickens; at any moment, they can pop into the road.
“That’s dangerous, could be a snake or something in that ditch. Oh, my goodness, grass all around it,” Mr. Harris said. “When you a kid like that, you are crazy. You don’t even know danger. You don’t think about that.”
I thought of my reason for this self-funded trip to Mississippi, the desire to maintain an ancestral connection to my grandmother through this search for home, the unanswered curiosity about this place that birthed her. There’s so much unknown. As Mr. Harris spoke, I imagine the 1920s and ’30s. Being sharecroppers, renting the land they were on. Were these fields once filled with homes and Black families? Did kids walk the miles upon miles I’m driving to get from one town to the next?
Mr. Harris’ father heard there was land for sale in Deeson and soon bought 120 acres in 1949 from two brothers who “got tired of foolin’ with it, and they chopped it up, starting selling.” An advertisement in a September 1946 copy of The Clarksdale Press Register listed 11,000 acres in Deeson, “formerly owned and operated by an English Syndicate” and divided into small tracts, for sale for $80 to $150 per acre.
After his father purchased property in Deeson, Mr. Harris noted all the land around the riverside from Deeson to Rosedale was owned by Black people. But they couldn’t keep it up, he said, because they couldn’t get any help from the government to grow crops. Mr. Harris said they did that on purpose.
“The government will take it back and give [it to] the white people. Not only government – I’ve had a white farmer farming next to me,” Mr. Harris said, setting up a common scenario of the time. “He would give me so much problem, I’ll just move. Burnin’ crosses in your yard and shootin’ in the air and ridin’ around your house like that. You get tired of that. A lot of people went off and left the land. That what you call strong arm.”
You keep straight on.
The more Mr. Harris spoke, I could hear my granny’s Mississippi Delta accent and vernacular. Phrases like “the thang is,” and stretching words like “land” into two blended syllables “lay-and” with a softened -d. He shared the memory of the moment his dad got a gun to protect their Deeson home from threats by white supremacists and klansmen. One time, two white men came to their home and told his father he was on the wrong property. Mr. Harris said they’d been living there for about five years at that point.
“And some white people had some land down ’joining us,” Mr. Harris said, leaving the ad- off the word adjoining, “but it wasn’t good as our land, OK? Our land was, what ’cha call that? ‘Loom land.’” His Delta accent chooses the long -oo sound over the -oh in “loam,” an agricultural term for ideal soil. “They told daddy that he was on the wrong property, that was they property. He said, ‘OK, let me go check my deed,’ and daddy came up with that gun.”
Mr. Harris reminisced about his father with laughter and pride. “Daddy said, ‘This my deed here.’ They took off.” He continued: “You had to do that ‘cause they would strongarm you. If you was weak, they just take, push you on off your land, wouldn’t give you nothin’.”
For Black people in Mississippi, owning the land was freedom. Mr. Harris’ father built him a two-room house on his 120 acres, and Mr. Harris stayed, raised his own family and farmed even after his siblings left. Back then, the younger generation didn’t want to farm; it was hard work, he said. In 1972, Mr. Harris’ father sold 60 acres, and gave him the remaining 60. Mr. Harris moved to Shelby in 2019. The Harris Estate is owned today by the family under an LLC.
You’re in Deeson now.
I’d been looking for the old yellow barn I’d seen during my first visit to Deeson in 2018, but Mr. Harris brought me through the backroad behind the barn. It unlocked a new part of my imagination. Deeson may be a teeny-tiny dot on the map, but it was once brimming with people.
He painted a picture of what Deeson used to be. These were a row of businesses: a grocery store. A furniture store. A burial store; Hank Funeral Home, he said.
“All of this is Deeson,” Mr. Harris said. “Ain’t nobody here but a couple of white people now.”
There were picture shows, live shows, houses and a church: “Deeson had about 3,000 people during that time,” Mr. Harris reminisced. “Every plantation had a church … .”
OK, go on down further.
We parked and got out of the car right behind the silos with the words “Old Delta Farms” painted on them; those used to hold grain, he said. Shelby-Deeson Road curled around to reveal a few homes; some new, some old. Trying to imagine the world Mr. Harris described, I thought about the 2017 film Mudbound, set in rural Mississippi Delta. So many films center slavery; it’s one of the only ones that depicts daily life within the confines of Jim Crow.
I asked what happened to Deeson.
“That’s when people was living off picking cotton. So, when no more cotton to pick, they had to leave. Some went to town, different places,” Mr. Harris said. “And in the fall of the year, they would drive buses, come back to the country to pick cotton. But the houses started running down and they would not repair them. And people never came back.”
You want to see my plantation?
Mr. Harris showed me the road named after his father, John Harris Road, where their plot lies. Although it doesn’t show on Google Maps, the Harris family worked to get proper street signage put in place to honor their patriarch.
I didn’t realize the southeast side of US-1 was Deeson, too. There aren’t any structures on that side that I can see from the highway, just land. Fields and fields of corn.
I’m brought back to reality by flashes of headlights behind our car. I figured the person wanted me to speed up. I was driving pretty slowly out of respect and care for Mr. Harris being in the car. I let Mr. Harris know there’s a pickup truck behind me flashing his lights.
Don’t pay no attention. Keep driving.
The truck tailed us for about five minutes. I turned right onto another dirt road. The truck turned, too. Then, it sped around me and braked hard. A white man in a baseball cap and shades jumped out of the driver’s seat. A German Shepherd perched in the backseat.
“Are y’all with the county?”
After some back and forth with Mr. Harris running point, we learned the man owns the fields we’re driving through. We also learned his name and that he’s been waiting for someone from Bolivar County government to come by so they can give his property an address.
“Y’all were on my place back there.”
“Her grandma used to live here. She’s just taking pictures,” Mr. Harris said. “I know you were concerned about who we was. Well, we ain’t gon’ do you no harm.”
After the guy pulled off, Mr. Harris and I laughed it off. I quietly assessed my nerves. I thought to pull out my phone to record video but didn’t. I didn’t want the guy to mistake my phone for a weapon. I also placed myself in the 1920s and ’30s, when my granny would have lived here, before she left for Clarksdale and then on up to Memphis and Cleveland and eventually to Chicago. Had she experienced something like this? I’ve been pulled over by police at home, but this felt different. I thought of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, fatally accosted by a white-adjacent Hispanic man with no legal authority whatsoever who nonetheless commanded that level of supremacy.
“Well, I figured he wasn’t gonna do nothin’ too radical. I knew that. I figured it was going to go like it did, talk, see who we was,” Mr. Harris said.
Take a right turn here.
There and Back: A Birthright Trip of Sorts
I traveled to Mississippi for the first time in 2018. My Uncle Sunny once told me a story about how Granny Irene used to take them down there to visit family, but that tradition ended after the murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in summer 1955. My uncle was about two years younger than Emmett. I don’t think my granny ever mentioned traveling back to Mississippi in any capacity while I was young. I later learned in 2022 that extended cousins I never met were still hosting family reunions in the 1990s.
After my grandmother passed in 2006, I grew more and more curious about her birthplace. More and more curious about the life she and her family lived there. Soon, I began my own search for an ancestral home, hoping to restore a tangible connection to the person I lost. Six years into that search, a 2018 opportunity to teach a summer storytelling workshop at the Rosedale Freedom Project in Bolivar County turned into a birthright trip of sorts for myself and TRiiBE co-founder Morgan Elise Johnson, whose great-grandmother, Josephine Brown, was buried in nearby Alligator.
As we took in the Delta, dreaming and hypothesizing about life there, we saw remnants of this Southern culture in Chicago. There were no grocery stores in Deeson or even Alligator. That explained the tradition of our grandmothers treating a weekly trip to the grocery store in Chicago as a full-day excursion, even purchasing months’ worth of food in one trip. Not to mention, where I grew up in North Lawndale, there were no quality grocery stores within walking distance.
In summer 2025, I flew down to Mississippi for a second time to catch the tail-end of a Deep South Sankofa trip led by Jim Webb, a longtime West Sider, and a troubled kid-turned-businessman who eventually graduated from Northwestern University’s design and construction master’s program and became the managing partner at TruDelta LLC, a real-estate development firm dedicated to revitalizing Chicago’s West Side. Jim was in the pilot year of his new workforce development incubator, Shule Ya Wajenzi, Swahili for “the Builders School.” “Shul” also is the Jewish word for synagogue, and derives from the German word “shule” for school.
Jim’s school grabbed my attention as soon as I learned about it. It’s a year-long program teaching construction, financial and life skills and Black liberation history to Black men looking to get back on the right path. The Builders School is inspired by the teachings of the late Baba Hannibal Afrik, who co-founded Shule Ya Watoto (school for children) on Chicago’s West Side in the 1970s. Jim’s Builders School, also based on the West Side, leans on various African teachings, including Sankofa (Akan for “go back and get it”), Kujichagulia (Swahili for “self-determination”) and Fawohodie (Akan for “emancipation”). As I planned my own pilgrimage to do more research on my family’s history, I coordinated with Jim to chronicle their Sankofa trip.
The guys spent two weeks on the trip, learning about the history of the Black liberation struggle. The goal is to reconnect with their ancestral home — what Jim refers to as the American South for African Americans, particularly those of us who descended from Southerners who fled Jim Crow for refuge in Chicago during the Great Migration. It’s something like a birthright trip to Israel or the ancestral journey to Ghana that has grown in popularity since 2019’s Year of Return. Chicago is widely considered an extension of Mississippi within Black America.
“It’s just to really awaken some type of ancestral memory in folks here,” Jim said during our meet-up in Chicago a month or so before the July 2025 trip.
“Chicago is awesome, but at the same time, when I look at Chicago, I don’t see a city that we built,” Jim said. “Maybe part of the issues that we have up here got something to do with the fact that we didn’t actually build a lot of the neighborhoods that we live in. Somebody else built them.”
The West Side wasn’t always Black. Most everybody out West either migrated from the South or was raised by somebody from down there. My family came to Chicago from the Delta as a unit, building a compound in North Lawndale with two two-flat buildings linked together by a gated backyard. Not only did my granny — the matriarch — live there, but so did my uncles, me, my mom, a revolving community of extended family and even tenants who might as well had been blood.
Before my time, my great-aunt Katherine and her daughter occupied the building on Fifth Avenue and my grandmother the one on Lexington Street, the latter built around 1909. Both Auntie Katherine and her daughter, Johnnye Mae, died in the 1960s and ’70s, a few years apart from each other. Granny Irene went to court to take control of the building, fighting to keep the compound her family built. My mom later raised me in the first-floor apartment on Fifth Avenue.
K-Town holds the stories of those who built the West Side. Pulaski Road is named after a Polish soldier from the Revolutionary War; in the 1910s, the street initially was named after Peter Crawford, a Scotch-born landowner. Kostner is Czech. When real estate developers Alden C. Millard and Edwin J. Decker created Lawndale in 1871, they dreamed of a subdivision of houses, stores, churches and meeting places on the western outskirts of the city, solely for affluent Anglo-Saxons, according to the 2017 book Within Walking Distance: Creating Livable Communities for All by urban critic Philip Langdon. Once the upper-middle class Anglo-Saxons left, Czech immigrants moved in followed by an abrupt surge in African Americans in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s.
“What we do well is bring our culture into theirs, into their spaces,” Jim said. “They built this. They built the space. All we did was occupy space.”
Imagining a Black Utopia
A mound of red bricks lie on the unkept lawn outside of 1415 Central in a West Jackson neighborhood Black feminist activist Sacajawea “Saki” Hall calls “Eversville,” named for the civil rights hero Medgar Evers, assassinated at the young age of 37.
Inside the house, Jim’s Builders School is installing drywall. Gerald McQuirter, an instructor from the Sankofa trip, takes some sort of heavy drill gun and shoots into the studs. Shule student Colbey Friend, 25, follows behind him, grabbing a smaller cordless drill. He drills the screws into the drywall holes, fastening it to the home’s foundation. The rest of the cohort looks on.
Shule Ya Wajenzi is working on this service project for Cooperation Jackson, a network of cooperatives striving to build solidarity economies and community ownership. Saki is one of its co-founders. The home on 1415 Central is one of 40 properties within Cooperation Jackson’s Fannie Lou Hamer Community Land Trust.
Jim learned about Cooperation Jackson through one of his best friends from the former Cabrini-Green public housing project who does human rights work with the City of Chicago. The friend told him about Kali Akuno, another Cooperation Jackson co-founder, who, with Saki, hosted Jim in Jackson, Mississippi, for a weekend about five years ago and he stayed in contact.
“This is the first time I’ve actually been able to do service with them, but we have been building in other types of capacities for years,” Jim said.
Saki admired Jim’s Builders School. She sees the idea of a construction co-op fitting into the vision for solidarity economy. Through cooperatives and the land trust, Saki’s goal is to build an ecosystem of solidarity economies, or liberated zones.
“How do we use the talent and skills that are around and available in order to create the kind of work that then can feed into our community and circulate the resources?” Saki said. “Our goal long-term is to make sure that land and housing as a human right is available and not seen as something that’s a profit. We’re trying to decommodify the land, but we’re also trying to make sure that folks in the neighborhood, in the city and Black folks who, right now, are the majority get to stay in this neighborhood.”
The 1415 Central home is foundational to Cooperation Jackson’s plan to build sustainable cooperative communities modeling self-governance and self-determination. Their renovated homes become transitional living spaces for people in need, and guest housing for volunteers and others visiting the cooperative. By purchasing abandoned homes, vacant lots and commercial properties once owned by the state, city or private owners, the idea is to be completely removed from the speculative market and provide permanently affordable cooperative housing for the working-class Black people of Jackson, Mississippi’s capital city.
“Solidarity economy, along with looking at and employing cooperatives, is really a tried and true way of being able to shift,” Saki explained. “We want to be able to transition away from the exploitative, oppressive burn, dig, dump, consume capitalist economic system into a more caring, more sharing, more cooperative, or really more humane way of being able to take care of our needs and exchange goods and services.”
Before the Sankofa trip, Shule Ya Wajenzi — a cohort of five men — spent six weeks researching, and learning the names of various tools and how they work. Now in Jackson, they have to put what they’ve learned to the test, building a home with their hands.
Shaquile “Duck” Rodgers, 22, came into the Builders School by way of a mentor at the Firehouse Academy on Chicago’s West Side. He wanted to get his life together after going to jail three different times — each time being right at the precipice of an opportunity to “do something that was so great,” he said.
Although an honor roll student from grammar school to high school, Duck stayed in trouble. Some of the things his teachers taught didn’t make sense to him, such as the Big Bang Theory and human evolution from monkeys: “I started doing my own research, and I started figuring out a lot of things on my own,” Duck explained.
“It drove me away from what they normally teach us in school. It just drove me to want to learn things on my own, what our history really is about, what we were before slaves,” Duck said.
His mom put him in summer jobs as a teenager. In between jobs, he’d get arrested for one thing or another. When he lost his two best friends to drug overdoses, Duck knew he had to do something productive.
Duck promised his mentor — and his friends’ moms — that he was going to do something good. He joined the Builders School for its 2025 pilot.
“Ever since day one, I showed up. I missed no day. I may have been late a couple days, but I haven’t missed,” Duck said.
The Builders School prepares students by mimicking the demands of a real-life construction gig. Professionally, Jim said, most union construction jobs require workers to be on site around 5:30 a.m. in the summer, and around 7 a.m. in the winter. During the Cooperation Jackson build, the guys clock in at 6 a.m., just like they do in the classroom back on Chicago’s West Side. The long, sweltering hot Mississippi day ends around 3 or 4 in the afternoon.
And Jim runs a strict program. Three strikes, or infractions as he calls it, and the student is out. If they got three infractions at the job, Jim said, the same thing would happen.
Those schedule demands can be the reason why students drop out of Shule Ya Wajenzi. Some have cycled out because of attendance. Some left because they needed to make money fast to support themselves or family.
“That would be people biggest downfall,” Colbey said, “because people ain’t used to going in the house early.”
The Builders School teaches a blend of manifestation, Black history and reclamation. While in Jackson, the cohort met with a guy named Xavier at The Village Kitchen. The group talked about 40 acres and a mule, the federal government’s post-Civil War promise to return land to the formerly enslaved.
“If they owe us this, it’s time to take that. When he said that, I felt so empowered,” Duck said. “When he had that talk about why we always want to do something to people that we are the same color as, or same title as, [in the] same community as, why don’t you attack the people who really taking stuff from you, who really poison you, who really trying to brainwash you, who really get in your head? And I’m like, dang, that would feel way better to chase after that.”
The story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of the 1950s particularly caught Colbey’s attention. He liked the way Black people came together to amass power.
“Before this, I wasn’t really interested in Black history,” Colbey said. “We spend our money on the wrong thing.” He referenced the thousands of dollars spent on a pair of designer jeans or sneakers, for instance. “Man, we used to invest in each other.”
Before the Sankofa trip, Jaqueze Hampton, 37, also didn’t know much about Black liberation history. He and Alfred M. Jackson, the oldest guy in the cohort at age 52, paired together to speak with me.
“I didn’t know there was actually movements happening,” Jaqueze said. “I didn’t know that people thought like me. I felt like an outcast. I felt like my family didn’t understand what I was going through.”
He learned about the Builders School through social media after moving back to Chicago. He’s done some construction work before, and also worked in warehouse management. But at this point in his life, he didn’t know what direction to take.
The school became his safe space.
“Here, I mean, no matter what your walk of life is,” Jaqueze said, “we all fall under the same accord. Once you look at everyone like your brother, your sister, their grandmother [as] your grandmother, their kids [as] your kids, and we all take care of each other, how can it be any problems?”
Within the first couple of weeks, the class learned about mastering their egos as Black men. Breaking down the ego, they said, helped ground them as individuals and then build them up to holistically see their value and responsibilities as Black men in community.
“If we stick together and help each other and look out for each other the way you supposed to, the way we did in the past, it wouldn’t be nowhere near the way it is now,” Alfred said. “It’s, like, ego is getting in the way of a Black man. Ego is almost the worst thing that he can have. Very self destructive.”
At this point in the Sankofa trip, the guys are all excited about starting a construction business together after graduating from the Builders School. They’re inspired by entrepreneurs and other businesspeople they’ve met on the trip. Duck said they plan to build a joint company with each of them being leaders, much like Saki’s cooperative vision — and Jim’s going to walk them through it, Duck added.
Fast forward to fall 2025, all five students graduated from Shule Ya Wajenzi and are launching their own businesses.
“You don’t really see people out here aiming for stuff like [Jim]. He really want to make us govern ourselves because we know we could stop relying on them for everything,” Duck said about the white capitalist society. “It’s so many people in so many different businesses, different trades for us to come together and govern our own self. We don’t need they electricity. We don’t need they water. They can cut all that off and we can just make our own and not have to rely on them.”
In this Black utopia, Duck envisions Black people will be much more empowered and successful.
“Once we reach that goal, and we will, of governing ourselves, it’ll be so much better to be around people just like you, and we’re not struggling no more,” Duck said. “We moving on a cooperative thing, cooperative businesses, a cooperative way of life. It’s a democracy thing. I feel like we’ll be empowered as a people because we already can survive in conditions when we not winning, when we don’t have nothing. So just imagine when we do have something.”
The spirit of Jim’s work with Cooperation Jackson ties back to the work he’s doing on the West Side of Chicago. He’s a founding member of the Garfield Park Rite to Wellness Collaborative and a self-described concerned resident of the 28th Ward, which covers parts of Garfield Park, Douglass Park and Austin. The Wellness Collaborative, along with the Community Builders and the MAAFA Redemption Project, are among the entities behind the new Sankofa Wellness Village that opened in Garfield Park in April 2026.
“The concept of Sankofa is not new. It’s ancient, like, it’s an entire movement across the country,” Jim said. As far as the West Side is concerned, thinking of the pattern of the Great Migration, Chicago’s West Siders are not too far removed from the Deep South.
“We actually did practice cooperative economics,” Jim reminded me. “But I can tell you this, begging for change from somebody else is not sustainable for anybody. And consider the fact that our community has been begging for certain shit over and over and over again for the last 160 years at this point. That’s not to take away the fact that it was stolen from us, but I’m just not a believer in relying on other people.”
Today, my family compound on Chicago’s West Side is no more. My mom sold the Lexington Street building after my grandmother passed away; it is now owned by something called GMO Properties LLC. And the city demolished Fifth Avenue sometime around 2011 without our knowledge. Somehow, the property fell into the name of someone not related to anyone in the family, a mystery I’m still working to figure out. Despite the random man’s name being listed on city paperwork about the demolition, my mom is being fined for not keeping up the vacant lot.
There’s a lengthy court process to sort out the proper ownership, then to decide whether I want to keep the land or sell it. I’m unfamiliar with this process and mostly going through it solo.
The older I get, the more I reminisce about my childhood home. It stretched beyond my family’s compound. Neighbors knew whose kids belonged to whom. Aging matriarchs kept a watchful eye over the block. Handy uncles lent a hand where they could, fixing a neighbor’s car. You could borrow a cup of sugar from next door. The block in the 1990s was my Black utopia.
I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since. Mississippi is the only other place I’ve felt a semblance of that ancestral memory.