Turtle Riding

I was a Black Girl Scout. Though that term carries inherent contradictions, at the time, all I knew was that Girl Scouts was the thing for Black girls in my church to do. So I did it,and I loved it. On one trip, we went to Sapelo Island off the coast of Georgia.

Sapelo is an unapologetically Black place where some of the first slaves to free themselves settled hundreds of years ago.
My Godfather, Big Harding, went with us because he grew up in Brunswick, GA not too far away.

Sapelo was magic. We farmed for conch and swam and played all day.

Big Harding told us that, when he was a boy, all the kids would wait until the sea turtles laid their eggs and ride them back into the ocean.

Another Black elder told us that sea turtles always...always come to the same beach to lay their eggs. They always come home.

”But lately,” the elder said, “these men with their bulldozers and buildings were destroying the sand dunes where the turtles laid their eggs.” And, without a safe place to put their babies—the whole species was slowly dying. Without the sand dunes, the turtles could never come home again.
It was the saddest thing I’d heard in my young life.

The journey to my adult life taught me to be ashamed of that sadness.
I was mis-educated into believing that environmental justice was a white, hippie issue and that the plight of the sea turtle was not interrelated with my own.

I became a lawyer.
When I had a chance to be a public defender, I chose instead to provide reentry legal services; to make a path home for formerly incarcerated people.

In law, I learned that these men with their violence and virulence were using the law to destroy Black families and homes. And, without a community to receive and love and wrap around someone returning from jail or prison, they could never go home again.

I decided to change the legal system and keep changing it until we can all go home and be at home in the places we live.

They say home is where the heart is. A piece of my heart is with that Beautifully Black, hippie dippie girl scout—

and the turtles—

and the sea.