Rufus, 

I don’t know how, but I have traveled to the year of 2020. I remember feeling betrayed, running up the stairs, prepared to end my own life. Yet just as I felt my last breath of air escape my throat, I suddenly awoke on the floor, in the middle of an empty room, two hundred years into the future. I was lost and scared, but with no way to get back, I did what I did best, which is survive. Now that it’s November, I have spent almost five months in this anomalous world.

These past five months, I have sought out education. Compared to home, the opportunity here seems to be limitless. Not only do I have access to information, but I now understand and know how to use it. While I am nowhere near as far advanced as Dana, I see myself making the same amount of progress that Nigel made when Dana began teaching him how to read. I’m sure that if Nigel had continued to learn, he would know even more than I do now. 

This new world is phenomenal for so many reasons, the greatest reason being that I don’t have to be near you. When I look back on all those years we spent together, I was so occupied with your acts of cruelty, that I never thought of a future beyond those of our own two children. Everyday I lived in anger and fear; you stripped me of my freedom, killed the man that I love, and then manipulated me to think that what you did to me was love. I am resentful to you for exploiting me, resentful to Dana for convincing me that it was okay for you to exploit me, and most of all, regretful and resentful of myself that I let you exploit me, hurt me, rape me, and deceive me. 

I’ve learned so much about the world and the way things function. After learning to read, I began exploring my feelings of anger, sadness, hopelessness, dejection. I began asking myself the question, “Why do I feel this way? Why was I experiencing this treatment?” Through this questioning, I realized just how much of the feelings I experience are due to the intersectionality of my experience not just as a black slave, but as a black woman. Why did you think my skin color made it okay to treat me the way you did? Why did my womanhood look like an opportunity for manipulation? 

I read about Afrofuturism, and while I learned about an entire fantastical culture, I simultaneously gained insight into why these subjects were never available to black folks and black women like me in the first place. In this book, Ytasha Womack exclaims that slavery came before racism. Racism was created to justify the ill treatment of others. She states, “Blackness is a technology. It’s not real.”

I realized, all of these things that I am—the labels put on my race, the labels put on my class, and the labels put on my gender—are just technologies. And while technology in this modern world differs from the type of technology at home, I see that these labels, a technology that has existed from the very start, is what makes you feel that you can abuse me and have power over me. 

It’s peculiar to learn about enslavement in such a disconnected way, as if it’s something that our society is not deeply rooted in every day. Although the people in this new world live knowing that slavery is a truth, they don’t seem to accept that it is their truth. This detachment is probably a blessing; it’s something you simply must acknowledge to be accepted in this society. But for me, slavery is personal experience that I must haul around as baggage. As I indulge myself to learn more about the ways of why you and your family have damaged me, I am deeper engrossed into the memories and details, making it inescapable. There is no detachment. There is no escape from the evocations of your abuse that consciously enter my mine, which is why I never plan on returning to you. I need this time, and perhaps the rest of time, to heal. And I have found healing in the Love Ethic, a concept of which you will never have, as you have neither love nor ethic in your heart. I came across one piece of work that I found particularly inspiring. In this, a young artist and activist is interviewed, and she states, “The people in my community need to and should feel loved and safe.” My family and loved ones served you for years. You were nothing without us, yet you treated us like nothing. We were your community, but rather than giving us love and safety, you controlled us with violence and fear. 

I think that back home, I was afraid of being alone. Perhaps that’s why I could never bring myself to hate you; your company and your presence made me feel some sort of security. But now that I am separated from you, completely alone in this world, I recognize that, just as Ms. Bell Hooks says, I have the right to be free, to live fully and well. With this freedom I now have, I will do what you never did for me—I will look after my own people. There are still ones like you in the modern world. I have observed it, and I will make it my duty that those that they oppress and mistreat will know that they can find love and safety where I am. It’s something that I wish you had done for me, something I long for you to do for the others, and something that I recognize you will never be capable of.