I went to NYU to become an archivist because of hip hop journalism.
Here is what got me there. I had been reading about this culture my whole life, and at some point I realized I did not know the names of the people who wrote it down. I knew the artists. I knew the albums, the years, the beefs, the covers. But the writers who documented all of it, who sat in the room and took the notes and filed the story, I could not have told you who most of them were.
That is insane to me. It still is. These people built the record we all use, and the record does not include them.
That is the thing about memory. Somebody has to keep it or it goes. There is a version of the question that people ask in philosophy class. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, did it make a sound. When it comes to us, the answer is basically no. Not because it did not happen. Because nobody kept it. It happened, it mattered, and then everybody who was there got old and it was gone.
I think about this constantly, and it is why I collect stories the way other people collect objects.
Two people can go to the same concert and come home with two different nights. Same
building, same set, same everything, and one of them remembers the sound and one of them remembers who they went with and neither of them is wrong. Memory is not a recording. It is fleeting, it is personal, and it changes shape depending on who is holding it. That is not a flaw. That is the reason you have to collect from more than one person. So when I say we are building an archive, I do not mean we are writing the official version. I mean we are gathering as many real ones as we can before they scatter.
Here is one of mine.
Fourth grade. I was selling popcorn in after school. The snacks they had for us were wack, and I had access to popcorn at the house, so I did what made sense. Supply and demand. My mother came to pick me up one day, and the janitor said to me, Syreeta, don't forget me tomorrow. My mother turned and gave him the face. Every Black mother has this face. It is not a question; it is a warning. Don't forget you what.
The popcorn, he said. The popcorn.
Now let me tell you what my mother did with that information. She could have gone nine
thousand different ways. I was taking popcorn she was buying for our home and running a
business with it in the cafeteria. She could have shut it all the way down.
She encouraged me.
She has been encouraging me ever since. Before the popcorn it was bookmarks. In high school it was clothes. Then it was two way pagers. Now it is bricks. Same person, same posture, every single time. She is the one who keeps the battery in my back. She is also the one who will tell me, the way her mother told her, that a hard head make a soft ass. Both of those things are love. The encouragement and the correction come from the same place.
If I do not write that down, that story dies with the two of us. The janitor is gone from that building. The after school program is not the same program. The only reason you know about it is that I decided to keep it.
That is what I am asking you to do.
Now, why these four pieces.
I never had a traditional pair of DOORKNOCKERS. My aunts did. My cousins did. I grew up
watching what happens to a woman's whole posture when she puts them in. And when I look at the photographs, the Jamel Shabazz photographs, the Janette Beckman photographs, they are right there, on the women who built the aesthetic everybody borrows from now.
DOORKNOCKERS are like the Air Force 1. If you know, you know. You can spend a year
putting a fit together. Sneakers from one place, jeans from another, top from somewhere else. You already decided what your hair is doing and what your nails are doing. Then you put the earrings in, and that is when you are actually saying something. They are what finishes it.
The Crown works the same way. The fitted is the last decision, the one that tells the world where you are from and who you claim.
And The Throne and The Fade are the other side of it. Those are not things you put on. Those are rooms you sit in and let somebody else work. You cannot see what they are doing back there. You sit still and you trust them. People keep the same chair for twenty years and never once call it a relationship, but that is what it is.
So who is this for.
It is for the homegirl who had the DOORKNOCKERS. It is for her granddaughter, who learned the word from her and wears a different version now. It is for the person who had seats to every game at that stadium. It is for the woman who took her son to get his first lineup and stood there while it happened. It is for everybody who has ever sat in that chair and understood that you come out a different person than the one who sat down.
You do not have to buy anything to be in this. I mean that plainly. The archive is separate from the collectibles.
What I want is your story. Where you were. Who was there. What they did for you that you never got around to thanking them for. Write it out if you write, send it as a voice note if you talk. Your name goes on it, credited however you want to be credited.
Because right now it is only in your head. And that is not a safe place to keep it.