The Kongo cosmogram is a diagram that describes the passage of time as understood by the BaKongo people of Central Africa. This circle, or dikenga, outlines the turning of the universe, the passage of time and the cycles humans move through as they move through their evolutions on Earth. Starting with the rising of the sun and birth in the East, the dikenga moves through stages of growth, becoming fully realized in the universe, aging and growing wiser, eventually ending with death and ancestral transformation. The dikenga is not a simple relic of the past, but an understanding that many Black people share about the concept of time.

Sayings such as “that baby’s been here before,” decorating the graves of the dead with cigars, food, and liquor, and cultural traditions such as family Bibles and packed attics full of ephemera show that time is a circle and a cycle—where the impacts continue to reverberate. The dikenga does not end, but continues on, showing up in our lives as we move through our cycles and seasons, connecting us to our dearly departed dead through our stories, histories, and traditions.

And while it is represented as a circle, the dikenga can be found in many places: a church sanctuary filled with saints singing hymns, a dance floor in a disco filled with happy queer folks, a cemetery where the living come to commune with their dearly departed. The dikenga is an embodied part of not only how Black people approach time, but history as well.

As a budding historian, my time as the editorial fellow for the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund was marked with this understanding. Through the interviews I was able to do with community culture keepers, staff at historic sites, and family members of historic Black figures, the understanding that we are connected to not just our past, but our future through our histories in a temporal, metaphysical way was clear. This was a throughline not only with my Action Fund work, but also while working on my own project, my Master’s thesis, on the history of D.C. Black Pride.

Thus began a scavenger hunt for other places where Clifton’s spirit lived in Baltimore: The Enoch Pratt Free Library, a demolished dive bar called Angel’s where she read poems, and the home she made for her family in Baltimore. This led me to another part of Clifton’s spirit that stewards her work now—her daughter, Sidney Clifton, who not only gave me insight into the process of preserving the home and greater understanding of the Clifton family’s life in Baltimore, but her potent and open connection to the spirit world that informed her writing and her life in the Clifton House.

In our interview, Sidney Clifton spoke of her mother’s gifts of intuition building connection with Lucille Clifton’s extended conversations with a group of spirits called The Ones, her communication with past selves and departed people who spoke through her writing. As I wrote my first story, replaying Sidney Clifton’s words and pouring over archival finding aids, the connectivity of Black people’s spirits through our histories became a flame that I returned to each time I wrote a new piece.

I wanted to hear stories and travel with people back to a moment in time as they discussed their memories, their losses, their joys, and triumphs where D.C. Black Pride served as a container their histories. I wanted to use oral histories to time travel with narrators creating a space for others where they can be present with moments and memories that have passed, even if those memories are not ones we have directly experienced.

As I worked on my study of D.C. Black Pride, following its spread from Washington, D.C. to Charlotte, North Carolina, parts of my process in my writing for the National Trust and my writing for my thesis blended, the flame nurtured by the spark of my curiosities. For each of my oral histories, it was the voices of narrators that wrote the story, I was merely the scribe to organize it. As questions led to follow-up questions, opening the floor for connecting stories and sweet nostalgia to become necessary knowledge. It is because of these foundational conversations that I was able to build out the stories I sought to write about.

In Jafari Allen’s book, "There’s A Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life,” he views the lives of Black LGBTQ folks through the metaphor of a disco ball, a place where ”...time and space collapses…where the dead are present, family is not bound by blood, community is connected even if they have never physically shared space.”

The disco ball is the dikenga, connecting us through time and space and raising the dead to dance with us once more. Oral history is another space where this becomes possible. Oral history becomes the dikenga—we move through the cycle of our lives and the impact of our movements leaves a path, where others follow the worn path, expanding its reach across generations. As Anderson Flen said to me when I interviewed him about his work with preserving Africatown, he shared that when he returns, he goes to the cemetery first because “...those people are speaking to me.” Following the path that has been set in motion for him, Anderson’s words exemplify the ancestral spirit of our connections found in our history.

It’s something more than simply hearing the stories of our community: we are able to see our lives in the larger context of history and connect our past to our present circumstances and hopes for our future. We are able to travel back to a moment in time, even if we weren’t alive for its original execution. Most importantly, oral history allows us to leave evidence of our existence.

In a world that seeks to render us extinct, invisible, and silent, documenting Black history, and Black LGBTQ history in particular, becomes an imperative. In recording the fullness of our stories and experiences as a community, we are not to prove our worth to others, but preserving our stories for our community first.