Ancestral Intervention

The Ancestors Came To Visit Us, While We Sat In A Cafe

These days, I exist primarily in a quad. My four intergenerational friends and I, all Harvard graduate students, can be found in a café, speaking about womanism, love, or politics over matcha. We get irritated easily by the word “rigor” and are excited about transforming theory into praxis.

Anna* is a playwright, beautician, and scholar raised on Black feminists of the ’70s. She always reminds us that we live in a quilt—patterns of yesterday—and our ancestors have left fabric for us to continue the work. Fatou* is a Generation X wellness practitioner whose yoga therapy and reiki are coated in cultural relevance and Black power. Dante* is a Gen Z veteran, passionate about change by any means necessary. You often find him disrupting the status quo championed by those drenched in survival respectability politics.

To say the least, we are an interesting bunch brought together by an amalgamation of needing room and board, stimulating conversation, and a mirror. Through this entire experience, we’ve stuck together, so it’s no surprise that we’d be in a café unpacking dreams.

All day, we’d been humming about the color blue. Our professor, Dr. Imani Perry, was releasing a book called “Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People” on the day of our first class. The night before, I laid out my blue coat and outfit like a kid on the first day of school. I wanted to celebrate Dr. Perry’s release day in style!

That night, the color entered my dreams without warning. I was in a blue dress, walking through a church-like space adorned in sandstone and dark oak. A Black man in a priest’s collar played the piano, and I suddenly felt I had to get to class. I rushed past the man toward a flight of steps, like I knew the way. A girl joined me on the staircase and asked, “Are you trying to get to class, too?”