Searching for Home: Autoethnographic Reflections of a Black Girl

Stories serve as entry points-bringing us together and bringing us to ourselves. Critical autoethnography bridges the space between scholarship and personal storytelling as a method of theorizing. Holman Jones explains, "The 'critical' in critical autoethnography reminds us that theory is not a static or autonomous set of ideas, objects, or practices. Instead, theorizing is an ongoing process that links the concrete and abstract, thinking and acting, aesthetics, and criticism . . . " Through autoethnography from a critical perspective, I share stories of silence, grief, fear, loss, and rediscovery as a Black woman in a world where the values of White supremacy run rampant. Through narrative performance, I trace my experiences of race, place, gender, childhood, and movement into adulthood. I describe my sense of feeling pulled away from my roots and the beginning of my process of reclamation. Boylorn shares with us, "Our stories are not our own, and we constantly negotiate entrances and exits in the stories of others and in the delicate balance between our public and private lives. Our life stories often mimic the way our lives are lived: layered, complicated, interconnected, with blurred lines of distinction." Without stories, we cannot heal.