I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a house so full of old folks you could hear history breathing before anybody said a word. Most of the people who shaped me were already in their eighties when I was still learning my ABCs men and women who had lived through wars, slavery, Jim Crow, Black Codes, heartbreaks, revivals, and dished out more prayers than I can count.

I didn’t know it then, but I was being raised inside a living archive.

There was always somebody on the porch in the red and white sliding chair, humming a hymn older than the floorboards. Somebody shelling peas. Somebody telling a story that started before the street we lived on was even paved. Their hands were wrinkled, but their spirits were sharp, and they carried wisdom the way some folks carry pocket knives always ready, always useful.

My grandmother was the first one to teach me that plants talk if you’re willing to listen. She’d tell me:
“A poke plant’ll kill you if you fix it wrong… but sassafras? Baby, sassafras’ll make your whole inside smile.”

That’s the kind of education you don’t get from books.

Mint grew right up the side of the house like it had claimed the land before we did. Rose bushes stretched across the back yard, blooming whether life was sweet or sour. And along the side were those Sweet Sud bushes smelling like childhood innocence with just a little grown-folk wisdom hiding underneath. The whole yard was a map of medicine, protection, and memory… though I didn’t understand that I was surrounded by conjure till much later.

Back then, it was just home.
Just sweetness.
Just safety.
But now?
Now I see the truth: I was growing up inside a soft circle of quiet rootworkers, healers, quiet conjurers, and praying people who let Spirit weave itself through everyday life.

What I thought was just my childhood was actually my initiation.

The elders who raised me didn’t preach magic they lived it. They brewed it in pots, tucked it away in drawers, planted it in the soil, whispered it in stories, and prayed it into my bones.

Those moments, those hands, that land… that’s how I got my start and is how I learned that conjure isn’t something you do. It’s something you are.