An Optimistic Quest in Apocalyptic Times

Words by Nylah Iqbal Muhammad
Photos by Jaida Grey Eagle & Camille Farrah Lenain

Navigating an uncertain future by connecting to Mother Earth

My grandfather never wore shorts. One time I saw his legs as he lifted up his jeans cuff to scratch his calf; they were grafted, with a pattern like snakeskin. I knew why. When my mother was maybe 5 years old, my grandfather caught on fire. They had just moved up North to D.C. from Alabama for her father to earn a doctorate in physics at Howard University. 

I can’t remember why or what happened, but a fire started in the house and my grandfather used his body to put it out. He ran outside, everything from his waist down transmogrified into a skirt of flames as he flew in frantic circles. It was the first time my mother ever heard her father scream. It was her first experience bearing witness to terror. And, I suppose, since she told me this story when I was young, it was my first experience of bearing witness to terror, too. 

My great-grandmother Clara had sent them up North with many of her quilts, some I believe were from slavery-times, with symbols of how to escape to freedom, symbols that described the land around them. My grandmother, also named Clara, without thinking, grabbed the quilts and ran outside to my grandfather, beating the flames away with them. After the flames were gone, the quilts were, too. Riddled with burn holes, frayed thread, and turned into ash. Our history, cremated. 

Sometimes, when I think of this story, I go into my mother’s body and see it through her eyes. I see the flames and the quilts burning, centuries of freedom messages stitched into cloth made from cotton we grew with our own blood. This is what we lost when we went up North. The price was too high. 

Land loss is perhaps the biggest reason hunting declined in Black communities. Two traumatic displacements — the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Great Migration — stripped Black people in the so-called United States from ancestral homelands, agricultural practices, and Indigenous reciprocal relationships with the land. Frances’ father, who cultivated a thriving garden of okra, corn, tomatoes, and other vegetables and fruits, trained his girls to hunt because he grew up going out with his brothers and other men in the community. “They would hunt deer and boar, but also would go out hunting alligators… dangerous species,” she told me. “They’d get the meat, sell the meat. They’d get the hide, sell the hide.” 

I don’t know what land my ancestors had in Africa, how the insects keened at high noon, what they grew, or what they hunted there. But I do know what the soil is like in Camden, and the noise the night makes. I know what I lost there. 

Brea Baker, author of Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership, points out that both cataclysmic displacements were used to erode Black sovereignty. With the Great Migration, “there was a coordinated attempt to push Black people out of the South, especially when white growers realized they could still grow without us, and technology was advancing. There was a big effort to make us landless,” she told me in an interview. 

When one is landless, one loses the ability to feed and defend one’s self. One loses, in essence, their sovereignty. American capitalism coerced a people — for whom freedom was always the only goal — to believe that wealth lay in urban and suburban houses and not in land, that we should plant our future in concrete and not in rich soil. 

Because of our depth of alienation from the earth, I think many find it strange that I, a Black Muslim woman, have chosen hunting as the vehicle for my spiritual and physical survival. In the United States, hunting has symbolized white patriarchal racial dominance and national mythmaking, wherein Black and Indigenous people are either excluded altogether, romanticized, or turned into servants. 

Post-Emancipation, our land knowledge was no longer a resource for capitalism, but rather an existential threat. So it had to be eradicated by removing us from our land and demonizing our land-based practices — traumatizing us so intensely that we craved escape. But instead of liberating us, urban lives that were so detached from nature  became another kind of prison. “Now there’s young Black people who don’t know how to read signs in nature or grow things or hunt or fish. And I think the ancestors are like, What?,” says Baker. “But we thought that was progress. We equated wealth and success with being as far away from the plantation as we could. And those two things are not the same.”

“Saladelle,” 2020. Photo by Camille Farrah Lenain.

Simone is Black and Choctaw, from Oklahoma, but she lives in Minneapolis. She is estranged from her mother just like I am, and her father is dead. As we prepared to hunt together, we talked for hours about how the world was ending, how we could reclaim what we’d lost — land, family, sovereignty. Hunting was part of the solution for us both. 

The night before we went out, Simone handed me a book from 1939 with yellowing pages called Fine Old Dixie Recipes. Her white ex-husband Chris’ mother — a Trump supporter but an otherwise sweet woman, I was told —  had given it to her as a gift. It had been in their family for generations, and she thought Simone might like it. Simone thought it would be of better use in my hands than hers. 

The pages were littered with minstrel illustrations of Black mammies and gluttonous Black men lazily smoking pipes underneath trees. The book also contained our ancestral game and offal recipes for dishes like frog legs, sweetbreads, roast squab and partridge, pigeon pie, fried rabbit, turtle soup — and yes, roast opossum with stuffing — which the editors claimed weren’t ours. “It should be remembered that not all the good cooks of the Southland were colored mammies or folks who lived on plantations,” they wrote, claiming that Southern gastronomy often had “nothing to do with racial origin” and that “classy,” white Southern city dwellers were equals in creating the cuisine. Yet, they also, in mocking faux dialect, wrote: 

Undoubtedly in many cases [the recipes] owe their origin to the colored mammies who rarely bothered to write down their recipes … for they were good cooks who most often could neither read nor write … didn’t have to … you just put ’em in front of a stove with the fixin’s and they created something grand … even if they couldn’t always ’splain to you jus’ how.

I held the fragile book in my hands, filled with rage and gratitude. I had ancestral knowledge returned to me, but the way it was returned was so violent. And, to make matters worse, the family that possessed the book was the family I was going hunting with the next day.

Simone’s ex-husband Chris took us on a grouse hunt on his family’s land three hours north of Minneapolis. (Simone and Chris are pseudonyms.) Chris’ maternal uncle and his father were there to help. And Jaida Grey Eagle, an Oglala Lakota photographer, was there to document the trip. 

Chris handed me a 20-gauge Remington 870 shotgun, and we descended into the woods. The men were patient teachers, excited to share knowledge, full of camaraderie and humor; I had fun. But my feelings were complex, especially after seeing the cookbook. Chris’ family were white; the system had made it easier for them to steal, acquire, and hold land. For Simone, Jaida, and myself, our ancestors’ connections to land had been twisted. 

As a child, Jaida had left Pine Ridge Reservation with her family for Minneapolis, and they stopped hunting. “My dad and my uncles used to hunt on the rez — deer and rabbit. I remember going out with them,” Jaida said. “When we moved to the city, we didn’t have access to land. Hunting in Minnesota seemed like a largely white thing.”

In Idabel, a tiny Oklahoma town in the Choctaw Nation, Simone’s Black and Choctaw family still hunts. Deer mostly, but they also catch crawfish and frogs, rabbits and squirrels. She wouldn’t touch it herself, but Simone’s Aunt Dee Dee says she knows a lot of people who have eaten racoon. Ancestral practices are still alive there, but Simone’s relatives are struggling to hold onto their ancestral land. The street signs are  in English and Choctaw, but on the reservation, the line between apartheid and sovereignty isn’t just blurred, it merges and welds together. For Freedmen like Simone’s family — both blood descendants and former property of Choctaw slaveowners, who struggle to face recognition from the Choctaw Nation as well as systemic anti-Blackness from the U.S. government — justice feels even further away.

Chris’ family only possessed this land because Jaida’s people had had their land stolen. Chris’ family only had that cookbook because Simone’s and my people had had their recipes stolen. The gun suddenly felt dangerous in my hands, as rage creeped up my throat. I tried to push the feeling away. I didn’t want to feel rage while hunting on the land. It felt profane. 

But before I could steady myself, a grouse flapped into my line of sight. In one movement, I shot, with fury instead of gratitude. There was a boom and the Remington slammed its butt into the pocket of my shoulder as the hunting dog barked and rushed into the trees to retrieve the felled bird. Behind me, I heard a quiet click — Jaida’s camera, capturing the moment I’d lost control. Seeing me in a way no one else there could. 

The men told me to save only the breast and throw everything else away. I was shocked but should have expected it. David Blanchett Sr., the Black father of my Black and Yup’ik friend Charity Blanchett, who hunts moose and fishes in Alaskan Native villages, had once told me this was a distinctly white problem in Alaskan hunting culture. “It’s a trophy thing for them,” Mr. Blanchett had said. “They want the antlers. They want the head. Sometimes, we come upon something somebody’s killed which is not salvageable anymore. It’s missing the head and maybe one rump.” 

Chris’ father and uncle looked at me like I was crazy for saving the tiny grouse legs and kept urging me to take just the good parts. But I refused, determined to process everything I could, out of both spite and atonement for my spite. As they drank beer, Jaida and I knelt on the ground, me cutting out livers and hearts. “I have this deep reverence for animals; an empathy and love for them,” Jaida said. “We should hold them close in our hearts, because they gave their life for us to access their meat and this material.”

The difference was stark, in how Jaida and I saw these birds and how our hosts saw them. Jaida connected to land by brain tanning deer hides — a practice the Oglala Lakota and tribes across North America have been doing for millennia.  “Hide tanning wasn't something that I was born into,” Jaida said. “It’s something that I fell back into.” 

“There’s such a disconnect between people and their food,” Jaida reflected, the unspoken so heavy. “Processing animals reconnects us.” I looked at the men on the porch and had this sudden realization. They would not be with me in this new world that was to come. 

I got home late, tired and stinking, angry and confused. Stripping off my camo, I sat on the shower floor, muscles aching and the scent of jasmine shampoo supplanting the smell of bird shit as water streamed down my hair. When I came out, I started planning my next hunt.

A tornado siren wailed somewhere in Iowa, the entire train car filling with the flash, illuminating us all, rendering the prairie visible again in the dark. 

It was a few days before the 2024 election. I was on a train to Wyoming for an elk hunt at a luxury resort. But I hadn’t thought about the timing until the day I left. “Wyoming? Hunting? Around all those rich, white Trump supporters? Right before the election?” a friend said incredulously over the phone. I stopped packing, holding my snakebite protection Vivobarefoot boots in my hand. I had remembered the rattlesnakes. I had forgotten about the election. 

But I would go anyway, just as I had in Minneapolis. It seemed counterintuitive to my own survival to let the demographic facts of the state — so white, so Republican, so rural — keep me from learning a skill that could save my life. After all, everyone kept telling me Trump would kill us all if he won. 

My hunting weekend would be deep in the Medicine Bow Mountains. Before the Arapaho’s land was stolen and they were forced onto Wind River Reservation, they called this place 3ooxone’ — or, “At the (Woman’s Stone) Hammer.” This whole continent is full of names we choose to ignore, stolen land, graveyards of broken treaties and murdered people. Could I learn to hunt ethically in such a place? I wasn’t sure of the answer, but I knew to humble myself anyway. 

I came to these mountains and declared myself as one who intended to take life, and as one who hoped to give, to figure out my place on this Earth outside of a relationship of domination. I could see the peak of 3ooxone’ from the car as if we were eye level with each other. Lightheaded, I felt the altitude rise in my bones, the mountains announcing themselves through my blood. I was equal with every nonhuman, every living thing out here. I was owed nothing. 

Where I was headed was not humble, though. The 30,000 acre Lodge and Spa at Brush Creek Ranch is one of the most expensive resorts in the West. Guests wore Lucchese cowboy boots, Stetson cowboy hats, and Louis Vuitton purses. Wagyu was served constantly — wagyu jerky, wagyu tartare with caviar, wagyu roasted on hot coals with a wasabi sauce, wagyu steaks, wagyu hash with over-easy eggs for breakfast. And I was one of three Black people there that I could see. 

But I hadn’t come to Brush Creek Ranch for the luxury or for any kind of racial validation; I’d come to learn.

The stars were visible when I met the hunters and wranglers that would teach me. Matt Anderson, the Senior Director of Operations and Recreation at Brush Creek, and Jake Keller, the Assistant Ranch Manager, had both been hunting since they were children. They told stories about hunting wolves in the mountains and living from the land. Matt’s 12-year-old son Bode had hunted his first cow elk mere weeks before, along with antelope and whitetail bucks. 

Mike Rosen, an ex-Marine from Idaho and avid hunter, was also part of our party. I wondered if the men I would hunt with — trust my life with, really — had views so divergent from mine about the world, even though we shared the same views about the land, speaking about it with the same reverence and need to protect and preserve it. I didn’t ask them, but my admittedly prejudiced or at least hasty assumptions told me they probably didn’t share my decolonial politics or racial analysis or “radical” opinions on international affairs. And yet, I trusted them without needing to know where they stood on the election. The way they moved on the land made me trust them. To this day, I don’t understand what made me see them in the new world but not Chris’ family.

None of the men were shooting, though. Today, the sole shooter — and only possesser of a cow elk tag — was Nat Rosen, Mike’s 24-year-old daughter and the Little Wranglers supervisor. She’d spent her childhood with Mike and her siblings, coming on hunts but never wanting to shoot or kill. Until one day, she changed her mind. “Why?” I asked as we drove up the mountains. She laughed and replied, “My freezer was empty.” Doesn’t it always come down to that? 

Nat used the gun her grandfather bought in the ’70s, a Ruger M77, 30-06 Springfield, with a Leupold Scope, which made Mike proud. “I love the way my grandpa’s gun shoots,” Nat said. Antelope sprinted across the mountains and the skyline, their white bellies streaking across the landscape. Mike told me antelope must be processed in the field immediately, before their intestines heat up, infusing the meat with a horrible odor and making the meat inedible, one last act of resistance. 

We stalked our game, trying to get close without scaring them, throwing sagebrush leaves  — as well as the modern solution of Dead Down Wind wind detector — to figure out where the wind was blowing. In the distant mountains, we could see all the way to Colorado. 

From a pile of elk scat, Anderson and Mike found the herd we would go after. We ran after them quietly and swiftly through the sagebrush, the scent wafting as we bloomed the leaves with our boots. The herd from which we’d harvest had gathered in a valley, grazing. 

Nat set up her rifle for the shot; she hesitated for a long time. Keller and I watched from our hiding place; all I could see was Nat’s blaze orange hat. But I knew why she was waiting. I knew her heart was beating like crazy, so fast she thought she might die or be born again from the adrenaline. I knew she was scared of missing and injuring the elk, resulting in a painful death and a waste of life because a bad shot can ruin most of the meat, turning it into goopy bloodshot and bombed-out muscles. I knew too, that she knew she’d be a different person after this kill. I knew all that because I thought about it myself, before every hunt. 

Then, Nat took her shot.

When he’d tracked down the dead elk, Mike sliced open her belly and pulled out the intestines and organs, dipping his finger into the blood, marking Nat’s forehead with it. I just put a hand over the elk’s body, whispering Allahu Akbar, God is Great. We began to butcher, leaving nothing for the coyotes and the carrion eaters. Mike was damn near militant about not leaving waste, even though carrying all the meat up the mountains would mean a grueling hike. 

Inside the elk’s cut-open belly was a pool of steaming blood. Milk from her mammary glands swam into the red, swirling a pattern. Mike instructed me to feel the elk’s birth canal. He was insistent about making us face the reality of what we were doing, of killing, so we recognized the responsibility we held, how our actions could destroy this Earth or help manage it. It was the first time in a long time I’d been afraid of anything while hunting — this gesture, a raw acknowledgement that we had taken life from one who had so recently given it. I felt like I was touching the beginning and the end of the whole world, looking at that milk and blood mixing together. My arm was swallowed by darkness. I was humbled and awed by the life and the death on my skin, in my hair.

The next day, I climbed the mountains on horseback, grasping for juniper berries as we passed by. I planned to use the leaves for tea and to cook the elk with the berries. My guide said there were mountain lions here but not to worry, we wouldn’t see them. I was not worried. True fear had been taken from me. 

There is a difference, I know now, between fear and anxiety. I feel plenty of the latter, but almost none of the former. What has replaced fear is acceptance. 

I closed my eyes, which found the sun, the flesh on the inside of my eyelids turning golden and then blood-orange, strains of thin veins darting like organisms under a microscope. I opened my eyes and looked down, saw how far I had climbed, and once again, marveled at the absence of fear. 

This world is ending. We can feel it everywhere, the heat choking us, the waves coming and sweeping away our children, the firmament cracking open and embracing us in death. Everywhere on this Earth, the land says that it will not carry us any longer if we keep at it like this. But I don’t believe it wants to move on without us. So I will learn. I will learn, and hopefully I can follow this Earth wherever it is going next, even if that is into the flames. I am reshaping myself into the human that I will need to be to die in this world and be reborn in the next.

When I got back home, Trump had won the election, just as I’d known he would.

“Lucky Feather,” 2024. Photo by Camille Farrah Lenain.

Sixty percent of white men and 53 percent of white women had voted for Trump, while 77 percent of Black men had voted for Kamala Harris and 92 percent of Black women had voted for Harris. Dubbing themselves on social media as the “92 percent,” many Black women announced they’d no longer be participating in any kind of collective reform or resistance. It was their time to rest, and they felt betrayed and angry. 

I was not angry, but I turned inward. Heading north to Minneapolis to hunker down there for the winter, I tended to my body as if it were a precious thing; a visit to Anda Spa for a massage to heal the damage the shotguns and about a hundred pounds of dead elk had done to my back and shoulder. 

I went to the Indigenous Food Labs and stocked up on manoomin (wild rice), blue cornmeal, and juniper ash and transformed the fruits of my hunts into meals — pan-seared grouse with manoomin and lion’s mane and red cap mushrooms I’d grown myself, maple syrup, and a serrano-cranberry sauce. Grouse livers and onions with potatoes. Fried woodcock tossed in chaat masala, with Diné-style blue cornbread. I made elk backstrap from the Wyoming trip crusted with the juniper berries I’d foraged and some sumac, with more homegrown mushrooms and sage. I gathered skills: clothes mending, navigation, herbalism, butchery. 

And, like Jaida had suggested, I learned how to tan hides, making the long drive up a snowy road to North House Folk School, a mere hour from the Canadian border, to take a class taught by Eric Edgin. For five days, I immersed myself in the art of wasting nothing: my boots slipping on floors slick with sheep tallow, swiping my fleshing knife down in singular motions to remove all the fat and gristle, churning the hides in a vat of tannins like a demented flesh potion, stretching and drying them, sanding off piles of skin to finish, and cleaning and carding the shit-filled wool to make slippers. 

I spent nights reading by the fire in my cabin, especially Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. I wanted to understand the dying of my world, and the birth of my new one. Butler offered a repetitive lesson, embrace change:

God is Change. … God is your first and your last teacher. God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.

Trump’s America was accelerating; the horrific change he had promised was coming fast and hard. Public education and federal funding were slashed. Immigrants and dissidents were sent to a concentration camp in El Salvador. ICE stalked college campuses deporting international students who had protested against the genocide in Gaza. Our forests lost what little protections they had.

I had to prepare, I had to learn, and I had to be quicker about it. During my first hunting season, all my mentors had been white. I had to use their land, their weapons, their ammunition, and even during spiritual experiences with people I respected like in Wyoming, I felt like I was entreating white people to let me into an inheritance that was already mine. I needed to learn from Black people, on Black land. I called Brea and told her I thought the world was ending, and I needed to learn how to survive it to make it to the next one. She had a plan. 

“I tell my siblings that if shit goes down, you just got to find your way to Georgia.” Both her maternal Aunt Lee and her husband Uncle Rico, along with her father-in-law Uncle Tony, live in suburbs outside of Atlanta, and are avid hunters. Brea has nicknames for both their houses; Uncle Rico’s is called The Retreat and Uncle Tony’s is called The Haven. “We just got to get to Georgia and then get to either The Haven or The Retreat,” Brea said. “And we’ll be good once we’re there.” 

When I pulled up to The Retreat, it was dark. The feeling of dawn in the South has this distinct hold on me. I had never been to this home before, but familiarity and longing  set in; I wished I had a home like this, a place to escape to. I wished I had my own Black family to teach me to hunt, instead of what I had been doing this season, piecing together an education from people who were not my own. 

Brea’s Uncle Rico, his wife Aunt Lee, and their son, Rico Jr. greeted me by the roaring fireplace. We would go out in the dark, ready to meet the deer in the morning twilight, looking for their shadows amongst the trees, concealing our scent and our voices in a camo blind, the rifle peeking out from the tent. Today would be an exercise in stillness — in trust. 

Uncle Rico and I shared a blind, and his hand was steady and strong, holding the rifle in place for hours, whispering lessons to me. He asked me, as everyone always does, what made me want to learn how to hunt. “I felt useless,” I admitted. “I wanted to learn how to feed myself, and I wanted to be like my ancestors.” A pause. “Also, I think the world is ending.” Gesturing out to the forest, encroached upon by development, Uncle Rico nodded in assent. “Who knows how much of this will be left soon?” he said. 

Something about his response, his acceptance of the end, made me rephrase my answer. “Nah,” I replied. “I think the world is gonna last, or at least some version of it. Not what we have now though, this can’t last. But I think people like you are going to make it, because you know how to live with the land.” Uncle Rico looked at me and said, “You’ll make it too, because you’re out here learning.” I want to believe him. 

The dark turned into light, and we hadn’t seen or shot a single deer. But those three hours sitting in a blind with Uncle Rico remain my favorite hunt.

We descended back into the armory and Uncle Rico gave Brea and me some shooting lessons with various types of guns, and Rico Jr. hollered out a window and asked us when we were coming in to eat. In the kitchen, Uncle Tony — Aunt Lee’s brother and Brea’s father in law — had arrived. We ate his homemade venison sausage with Aunt Lee’s spread of halal bacon, fried potatoes, fluffy eggs, grits, and some chestnuts that Uncle Tony cracked in his palm like my Alabama uncles used to do.

When I tasted the venison sausage, I almost began to cry, remembering my own family. Alabama and sausage with homemade biscuits from Aunt Hattie B., Alabama and the grits my grandmother used to put sausage on, Alabama and my mother slapping sausage on white bread with hot sauce. I missed home. I loathed home. 

Brea’s family and I spent the morning speaking of land and our histories. “It’s so close to heaven, watching the forest come alive,” Uncle Tony said, telling us what he loved about hunting. He belonged to a hunting club made entirely of Black men — Uncle Rico was a member — and he had plenty of stories. We were in a trance, his words speaking to something old within us, something old we were all waking up to. 

Aunt Lee told us darker stories in her family; at 12, her grandmother had been raped by a close kinsman of George Wallace — the infamous white Alabama governor who had terrorized Black people by encouraging lychings and calling for segregation — and this rape had led to a child, Aunt Lee’s mother. 

There were countless stories like that in my own family, which is why we had left our land. It was also why we wanted to come back but had so much trouble doing so. “White people did their worst crimes on land,” Brea said. “But the land and white people are not the same.” 

At the table, they talked about their family land in West Virginia near Harper’s Ferry, how Brea’s wife Mariah — Uncle Tony’s daughter — wanted them to all move together on one plot, and maybe Uncle Rico and Aunt Lee’s daughter would be the teacher. It all sounded beautiful, and I wanted it. But who was my family now? Who would survive this cosmic resettling of this land with me, a shift so powerful that it would shake off the old world like a horse shakes a fly off its back?

In the evening twilight, I went riding at a Black-owned horse stable called Bella’s Barn, and our horses chased each other through barely illuminated Georgia woods. When my horse ran into a vine, it wrapped around my neck and torso, and my spooked horse tried to bolt, which could have killed me or at least caused serious injury. A voice inside of me told me to speak, and, without thinking, I commanded the horse. Obey me! I shouted and the horse stilled, allowing herself to remain in the tangled vine with me, trusting me. 

“That’s some real cowgirl shit,” the guide said after helping cut me loose. “Most people would have just fallen off.” I felt this chill, a sense that I knew these woods and they’d kept me safe. When you’re Black, every place here might be where you’re from, a forgotten ancestor beneath the soil, all of them pulling on you: Come to us. So, I listened. 

If the sun rises and things begin in the East, then West is where things end. I drove West to die. The road to Camden was the same as I remembered it, about 70 miles of a whole lot of nothing, barely anywhere to pee or get gas. But it was beautiful, the sun shining through the clouds and spreading its rays all over the fields. I’d thought so much about what Camden had done to us — to me — that I’d forgotten that Camden was also beautiful.

I’ve never had time to settle into a self, to live in it and know it, before either trauma or God told me to move on. Each time you leave a version of yourself behind, a life you thought you’d live, there is a death. Sometimes an earth-shattering death, sometimes a whimpering one. Behind you, there is a trail of your corpses. And with every hunt, I changed too. But if you stay still, you die. 

I have died and been resurrected so many times. I’ve left a slaughter of selves in my wake, piles of either rotting flesh or flesh preserved, my mouths open in horror, waiting for me to come back for them. Which corpse of mine lay here in Camden? 

I idled the car outside my great-grandmother’s home, which looked the same as I’d remembered it from when I was a kid and we visited often, even lived here for seven months after my cousin Anthony got shot. All around me, I saw people I didn’t know but whose faces I did know, a shadow of a cousin or an aunt everywhere, reminding me of the blood ties that rooted me to this land and to the people on it. Everyone Black — and some of the white  — in this town was my kin. And inside that little house, my family was there. But I didn’t get out. I didn’t knock.

Some things end and you cannot resurrect them, but you can give their ghosts some peace. I cannot wait to bleed out this old world, to groan as it slips away into nothing. I cannot wait to catch the new one in my hands, swaddle it, and give it to my future  children to hold, as I too slip away into nothing. I think I might live to see the end of this empire, but I do not know if I will live to see what the world after it will become. So, I entrust it — this fetus of a new world — into the care of those not yet born. 

Back on the road, heading North, I felt the dead self that had waited for me in Camden all these years drift away to her rest. Ahead of me was my future. I had a family of my own to build, a family that would know how to survive.  ◊

Nylah Iqbal Muhammad is a James Beard-nominated food and travel writer with bylines in Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and Eater. Her work focuses on food sovereignty and justice. 

Jaida Grey Eagle is an Oglala Lakota freelance documentary photographer currently located in St. Paul, MN. She is a member of the Women’s Photograph, Indigenous Photograph, and 400 Years Project. She holds her Bachelor of Fine Arts, emphasizing Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has recently contributed to the New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, ProPublica, Fujifilm, The Urban Institute, The Wall Street Journal and Netflix.

Camille Farrah Lenain is a French-Algerian fine art and documentary photographer who grew up in Paris, studied Photography at l’ESA in Brussels and at ICP in New York City (virtual). She relocated to New Orleans, where she teaches at Tulane University. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Arab World Institute, the Contemporary Arts Center, Incadaqués Photo Festival, Photoville, and PhotoVogue Festival.

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Top Photo: “It Is Not About Killing,” 2024. Photo from the “Sisters of the Hunt” series by Camille Farrah Lenain.

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