Come By Here
A Memoir in Essays from Georgia’s Geechee Coast
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Powell-Ingabire debuts with a stirring collection that traces the twin histories of her family and of Black settlement along Georgia's coast. She begins with the personal, sharing recollections of her elegant grandmother and largely absent father, then expands her scope, linking her own sense of connection to Georgia and its coastal islands with that of writer and spiritualist Cornelia Walker Bailey (1944–2017), who served as the "griot," or storyteller, of Sapelo Island. In adulthood, Powell-Ingabire learned—from sources including Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—about Gullah Geechee culture, with its unique hybrid of West African and American traditions, and discovered how its influence, from cuisine to crafting, distinguished her and her maternal family from "Black people raised inland." From there, the collection's brief yet forceful essays deepen common perceptions of local tourist destinations like the Okenfenokee Swamp with research about their rich Geechee histories, drawing on interviews with families who've inhabited the region for generations. Threaded between these sections are pieces in which Powell-Ingabire reflects on contemporary matters including Covid, #MeToo, and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery. Inspiring, informative, and unique, these essays amount to a powerful and elegant probing of the relationship between person and place. Photos.
