WRITING ROOM NOTES

I have been thinking about immortality differently lately.

Not as something grand or impossible. Not as a body that simply refuses to die.

I think I am more interested in what remains after a person is gone—the language they gave you, the things they taught you without realizing it, the stories that keep getting repeated, the expressions you suddenly recognize in your own face.

Some people leave so much of themselves behind that absence does not quite erase them.

That thought has found its way into Young, Black & Immortal. The book is full of bloodlines, ancestors, ancient records, inherited power, and people discovering that history is not always finished simply because the people who lived it are no longer here.

I believe my mother and brother and grandmother’s souls are immortal.

I believe love leaves evidence. I believe people continue in the lives they shaped, in the stories they gave us, in the habits and language and memory that survive them.

I believe my great great grandmother and father’s soul are immortal as well

That belief has become part of the architecture of Young, Black & Immortal.

The mythology may be fantastical. The conviction underneath it is not.

I still feel them.

And in this story, our people live on.

— J.C. Samuels