"I didn’t even realize I had had that training."
Growing up, Teri Williams was in awe of her great-grandmother Annie Coachman, the only Black woman business owner in their segregated Black community Booker Park in Indiantown, Fla.
Williams followed Coachman, affectionately called Ma Honey, to collect rent and to work in the penny candy store.
But those Indiantown roots and the pride Ma Honey instilled in Williams shrank when she went to Brown University, where she was made to feel ashamed of her small-town roots.
She suppressed the memories of her Ma Honey due to “undeserved shame.”
It wasn’t until Miami muralist Addonis Parker asked Williams about her background and how it shaped her that she reconnected with those memories.
“I sort of buried my roots from the first 17 years of my life and that shame,” she said.
Read more at the Miami Herald