Born Into the Story: My Journey as a Self-Published Author | Rahkia N. | Journalist, Author, Genealogist

My family is full of storytellers. And I was literally born into that tradition one Saturday night in Jackson, Mississippi. Alcorn State was playing Mississippi Valley. My sportswriter dad was facing a deadline when my mom went into labor about a week earlier than expected. And now that I think about it, that was my introduction to the idea that there is always a story to tell. (Daddy told me that he wrote the quickest game story of his life, documenting that the Braves bested the Delta Devils that November night).

Long before I understood what journalism was or imagined that I would become an author, I was making up stories of my own. As a little girl, I wrote stories and plays for my Barbie dolls. I gave them characters, conflicts, dialogue, relationships and elaborate plots. I didn't call it storytelling of course. Child development experts may term it advanced pretend play, but I was just doing what came naturally to me. It was entertaining and I could direct and create to my heart’s content. 

Eventually, my curiosity and creativity led me to pursue a career in journalism—newspaper journalism, specifically. I loved asking questions, finding information, figuring out what happened and, most importantly, telling stories. I told stories about crime in Northern Virginia, higher education trends and local government in upstate New York, K-12 education and local government in the suburbs of Birmingham, Alabama. 

Journalism taught me to pay attention to details, to question assumptions and reaffirmed that who is telling the story influences how the story is told. 

That last part was what drove me to self-publish my first book, which focuses on my Nance ancestors.

For much of my life, I understood my family's history in the way most people understand theirs: through stories passed down by relatives, fragments of information, family names, photographs, handwriting scrawled on ephemera. I loved it all, but was especially drawn to the stories. Each one was fascinating, and I was spellbound by the way they were relayed to me. Whether it was my dad, my aunt, my uncle, one of my myriad cousins or my grandfather’s sisters and brothers, I wanted to know more and more. There were stories in my family that had never been fully explored, questions that had never been answered and, I came to realize, pieces of history that had been overlooked.

I discovered that my ancestors were not just people who lived in Lower Alabama. They were part of the story of how it was built. Their labor, lives and contributions were intertwined with the development of the community, yet they had been largely omitted from the historical narrative.

And that bothered me. It became the driving force behind my first book, Red Dirt, Blue Blood: The Story of the Nances of Lower Alabama.  I didn’t understand how an entire group of people could build a self-reliant community, leave lasting contributions and then largely disappear from most accounts. It was an infuriating reminder about the truth of so much of Black American history. Ours is a story that has been fragmented, distorted or deliberately omitted from the accepted narrative. 

There were two quotes that I found inspiration from while writing: "Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter" and from Toni Morrison, “If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.'

And so I did. Writing this book was a bold remonstrance and my way of correcting the historical record. More than that, I wanted to right a historical wrong. This was more than finding names and dates. It was reconstructing lives and a family legacy from fragments. 

I was also adamant about self-publishing. I wanted to retain control of the narrative in every possible way. I became fiercely protective of my family’s story and knew from the outset I didn’t want to be bothered with the narrow tastes of big publishing houses deciding whether the story of the Nances was worth being told. I didn’t want the value of the story left up to the whims of a culturally disconnected agent. Frankly, I believed no one could tell the story better than I could.

A bearer of the legacy.  I had never written a book, but I knew that I could. And more importantly, I believed that I could. I was researcher, writer, project manager, marketer, publisher and, late-night cheerleader. I enlisted the help of my cousin to provide the cover artwork—a 1957 photograph of one of the first Nance Family reunions, held at my great-grandparents’ home in the Coppinvllle section of Enterprise, Alabama. 

After several years of research—including dozens of U.S. Census records, court documents, death certificates, newspaper articles and interviews—I published Red Dirt, Blue Blood in November 2020. Nearly six years after its release, I still receive encouraging emails about the book. Each message is a confirmation of what I already knew to be true: Ours is a story worth telling and deserves to be heard.

My ancestors deserved to be remembered. They were more than a footnote and certainly more than an afterthought. They deserved to have their lives, labor, resilience and contributions documented. Their descendants deserved to know where they came from. And the broader community deserved a more complete account of the place it calls home. A record of my family’s history now graces shelves in libraries and state archives in Tennessee and Alabama. It was the very least I could do to honor those whose labor and sacrifice made it possible for a for a curious little girl to write her dreams into reality.