Come by Here

Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast is Neesha Powell-Ingabire's first book. It looks past the beaches and golden marshes of coastal Georgia to recover Black history that is rarely told, and weaves it together with the author's own story and her family's.

In May 2020, a video of white vigilantes killing a Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, spread widely online, and the author's hometown of Brunswick, Georgia, became known around the world for it. That summer, Arbery's death, along with the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, fed an international movement against white supremacy. Powell-Ingabire, a millennial journalist, essayist and organizer, grew up in Brunswick as a Black, queer and disabled girl and often felt like an outsider in a tense racial and political climate.

The essays trace the roots of systemic racial violence in the region while honoring the long local tradition of Black resistance and of keeping culture alive. Topics include the successful campaign to take a Confederate monument out of a public park, present-day echoes of ancestral practices such as farming, fishing and basket weaving, and the fight for Geechee land on Sapelo Island. They also cover the Igbo people who drowned themselves in Dunbar Creek rather than submit to slavery. By setting her home's shared history beside her own, the author practices the kind of truth-telling Audre Lorde urged when she wrote that it is better to speak.