Lately I’ve been thinking about my great-grandfather and his little brother. They were enslaved on the Barrow Plantation in Louisiana when they made the decision to run. How they did it, I will never know. At just eighteen and fifteen years old, they chose motion over fear, the unknown over the certainty of chains.

They ran north. They joined the Union Army. They became sharpshooters. And in doing so, they claimed their freedom with their own hands.

I think about the audacity of that choice—the clarity it must have taken to decide that bondage was not the end of their story. Two boys, really, carrying courage far heavier than their bodies, aiming rifles with the same precision they aimed their lives toward something better.

I wonder how they did it. Who helped them. Who whispered directions without moving their lips. Who pretended not to see two boys slipping into the dark with nothing but nerve and desperation stitched into their chests.

I wonder if there was an older woman who looked them dead in the eye and said, go—now, pressing knowledge into them instead of food. If there was a free Black man who walked a little slower so they could follow his shadow. If there was a white abolitionist who risked everything, or more likely, ordinary people whose names history never bothered to learn.

I imagine them moving at night, guided by the moon and rumor. Listening harder than they spoke. Reading the land the way their bodies had been taught to read danger. Sleeping in ditches, barns, woods that didn’t care who you were as long as you stayed quiet. Hunger as a constant companion. Fear riding shotgun.

I wonder how many times they almost turned back. How many times their hearts tried to beat out of their ribs. How many prayers they said without words, just breath and motion and faith disguised as stubbornness.

There had to be help. Freedom has always been communal. Somebody had to open a door, point a way, gave them food and water, and looked the other way. Somebody had to believe two Black boys deserved tomorrow.

What haunts me most is that we’ll never know their helpers’ names. No footnotes. No monuments. Just the outcome: they made it. They lived. They fought. They aimed rifles with the same steady hands they once used to carry hope through the dark.

I’m so grateful for them because they are the reason my bloodline exists. Every breath I take traces back to two boys who decided they would not die owned. Their courage is not abstract to me—it’s cellular. It lives in my bones, in my stubbornness, in my refusal to settle for small or safe when my spirit knows better.

Because they ran, I am here. Because they aimed true, loved hard, and lived long enough to leave descendants, I get to stand in this moment and remember. My life is a continuation of their escape. My joy is part of their victory.

This is what lineage really is—not just names on a tree, but courage passed hand to hand through time. They ran so I could walk. They fought so I could choose. They lived so I could exist. And for that, I will always be grateful.