Jevon Brown (he/him), 26 

Miami, Florida 

Where are your ancestors from? 

My family's been in Miami since the 1940s, honestly. My mom grew up here, so did my dad. My father’s parents hail from Kingston, Jamaica. But he’s Jamaican American, and my grandmother on my mother’s side was born in Manhattan, New York. But her parents' roots come from Savannah, Georgia, specifically Gullah Geechee people. She moved to Miami when she was about 3 years old. My maternal grandfather, Joseph “Abaco” Sawyer, grew up between Miami, the Abaco Islands, and Nassau, Bahamas. He’s actually the first cousin of Sidney Poitier, the first Black Academy Award winner. So, I either would have been a New Yorker or a Miamian, funny. So, from my grandmother's side of the family, they're from Clarksville, Reedsville, and Savannah, Georgia. My ancestry is the convergence of Black Southern and Caribbean roots.
What has spiritual practice looked like in your family?
I just found out recently that I come from a long line of root workers. A lot of people in Savannah, Georgia practice hoodoo and other forms of spiritual divination. I didn't really know this until now. My mom would tell me stories when I was younger about family things and the women in our family being root workers and putting roots on people in different ways.  

Do you think you have any divine gifts from God?

From the earliest point of growing up, around age eight or nine, I always knew I had some spiritual gifts or talents, obviously, because I grew up as an artist, doing music and doing visual art. My grandfather, my mom's dad, who's Bahamian, was a skilled craftsman. He was a furniture designer and upholsterer. A lot of the spiritual gifts- using your hands, ancestral craftsmanship, divination, and those types of things are from the Caribbean and then also from the South. 

My gift is being a seer and being a truth teller and being a griot and a storyteller. I am able to uncover the truth and piece things together and make really discerning decisions about what's actually true versus what's actually false. It's also a very deep intuitive thing for me. I'll either have a dream about it, or I would just intuitively know or get a feeling in my body that either something's not right or there's something that I should be doing, whether it's a prayer or anointing myself with oil or doing ancestral veneration or visiting my grandfather's grave site in Miami. There's a grave site in North Miami that most of my family's buried in, so it's my Bahamian family and then also my African American family from the South, from Georgia and South Carolina, so it's multiple generations of our families buried in this one grave site. I went a couple days ago trying to find my grandfather's grave and I couldn't find it. His birthday is tomorrow, so I'm probably going to go back and ask the people.

How do spiritual gifts show up in your family?

In my lineage, my root worker family is in the South in Savannah and they use the land as a way to really connect to their ancestors because they lost a lot of their traditions when their ancestors came to the United States.  A lot of the practices are from that family, like using the land, using herbs, using, using different objects for divination. My mom never really told me these things. I would observe. It was always a secret, these secret things, this unkept knowledge that my mom didn't want to tell me, but I intuitively knew. But she would tell me stories about what not to do or who not to trust, as a way to protect me. But, in a way, that also does harm because it's not sharing what could be used to protect and honor the ancestors.

 A lot of people in my family have gifts. My aunt is a dreamer. She doesn't really practice anything. She's christian.  I've gone to many different churches throughout my life and finding a spiritual home, for my mom, has always been something that's been hard for her, but she's always kept in touch with God and faith in different ways. But I think she has a lot of trauma from the lineage, and a lot of trauma from either the generational curses or the roots or things that have been hindrances to her, to her family. I think through that, she doesn't practice as much. I feel like she practices more as a mechanism for protection and honoring her dad who's from the Bahamas. So, there's a lot of complexities with that. I haven't even begun to have those conversations with her. But it's just something I'm observing and seeing how she's been able to move through that.

 Do you have any distinct memories of spirituality growing up?

I know my mom does practice some ancestral veneration and she's really connected to her father who's from the Bahamas. She used to live there when she was younger, but she moved back to the States to be with family. I would say my mom was always speaking in tongues, and I would always like, “How do you do that?” Even when I was asleep, I would say these prayers, and I think that stems from the Hoodoo traditions in the family where we're either Baptist and Episcopalian . So, my mom would always speak in tongues, even when I was asleep late, late in the night. She would anoint my head with oil and pray over me in my sleep. And I never knew why, but I would always wake up in the middle of my sleep. I'm like, “What's going on?” Very confused, like, “What the hell?” As I got older, I started to realize that's a form of protection and sacred anointing over the family and the bloodline and protecting the gifts of the children from harmful experiences or spirits that are not meant to be there. So, for me, those are my earliest memories of spirituality, saying prayers like Psalms 91, Psalms 23. And those are all, basically, in a way, spells.

How would you describe your own practice? It sounds like you've mixed a lot of things. And it sounds like your family has been doing that for a long time.

It's very creolized in a way. For me, I would say I really didn't start using or accessing my gifts until I went to college and I was on my own. I was just searching for something to grab onto, a sense of familiarity or home or connection to my lineage. I became friends with people from Ghana and Nigeria, and they started to teach me about Yoruba religion and Ifa and other forms of divination. It's a funny story because my dad wasn't in my life, my mom and my dad still talk, he's Jamaican, and my dad is actually an Ifa practitioner. He does divination. I learned with my African friends from Ghana and Nigeria who live there but were students in school. We would talk about religion and faith. For me, I started to learn more about the different tribes, like, the Igbo tribe, the Yoruba tribe, and recently I found out, through my Ancestry DNA, I did a 23andMe in 2019, that I'm 49 percent Nigerian, and specifically it connects to the Igbo tribe. I think that makes sense for my ancestors because of the Caribbean and the Southern connection. I'm thinking maybe Igbo connects to my Jamaican ancestors as well, who I never really got to know, but I feel a connection to them. Even with Jamaican elders that I met throughout the past couple years, Jamaicans in my life have really shown up, they love me and have supported me in so many ways, and in my practice.

I'm really able to use my gifts of art, storytelling, and visual aesthetics to really create this world where I feel safe and connected to my ancestors, where I'm connected to African spiritual practices. Even in my textile work, I started to get into that a little bit by looking at textile traditions from Africa and then combining them with more contemporary African American aesthetics and creating this creolized context for what Black masculinity could be in the South, in the Caribbean, and what that looks like through a Queer contemporary lens. So, for me, it's a lot of searching and finding and parsing through all these ideas and parsing through all of this knowledge, because it's things that I'm just learning but also things that I intuitively know for some reason. I might get an idea for a project and it's like, “Where did this come from?” And then when I do further research and I dig into it, it circles back into either Ifa or religion as well. Everything that I think or I feel intuitively, I don't know why, but when I do further research or I ask further questions, I find out the answer that I had was right all along. So, it's, that inner knowing, that inner sense of you're going to be good, you're going to be in the spaces that you need to be in, you're going to find the knowledge that you're meant to get and receive.

Do you feel safe and comfortable engaging in spiritual practices or rituals outside of your home?

 For the most part, I practice inside of my home. I talk to my ancestors or maybe do candle work or prayer or meditation or even visit ancestors’ gravesites just to see and remember. I have a very strong memory of when I went to my grandfather's gravesite with my mom one time. She was changing off flowers and getting some of the dirt to do a ritual, it was something that I connected to. I don’t know what the ritual was specifically, I was too young to even know, but I remember she was changing out the dirt and then putting flowers and then spreading the dirt somewhere else. I didn’t really know what that was about, but it was interesting.