I started herbalism school today...
+ the importance of preserving Black herbalism for our liberation.
As you may notice, I have no set writing plan or marketing plan for this space and honestly that’s kind of the point lol.. But hey yall! Please check in and let me know how you are <3
On the 8th day of Black History School, I started herbalism school! Since last year, I’ve been thinking about what does it mean to be a care practitioner for me at this specific time in my life. I mean I have many things under my belt… full spectrum doula, medium, Reiki practitioner, holistic time coach, human design reader. BIG Manifesting Generator energy!
However, the last couple years have been filled with me asking myself… How can I give back to my community in a way that feels tangible and dare I say it, less offline and more in person?
I kind of left it floating in the air and kept doing what I love to.. learning, refining and adding more tools to my toolbelt than my great great grandparents land came into my hands. I started to come visit my land, talk to town officials to see when and what I could build on the land. I knew the land was no coincidence, especially because I became the owner of the land on the day I was riding from the Georgia mountains wishing I owned land. I was on my way home to virtually celebrate the 1 year anniversary of my book where I dedicate the book to my great great grandma Gladys and right after the event, the words were said “My wife and I prayed about it and the land is yours”. Wild, right?
For years, I told folks I wanted some land. I even looked at some but couldn’t get over the nausea of paying so much for raw land. I’d talked to my partner since 2023 about how much I wanted land (a mini cow) and just like that, I had land. My family’s land. I started to visit the area more to meet our builders and go back and forth about zoning and ordinances (I could write a lot about that!). It took 9 months to finally close on our new home but all things happen at the right time.
Anywho, back to herbalism, specifically Black herbalism. I’m blessed to have known and still know many generations of my family. Receiving the gift of this land has created more dialogue between myself and my great great grandparent’s children (all ranging from 80-90s). They all have shared memories of their childhood growing up on this land. Even Nana (my great grandma), who has dementia still has many memories. One of themes that has been a through line in conversations with my elders has been Black southern life-saving herbalism.
The truth is my family (even the living elders) were sharecroppers in the deep rural South during the time of segregation and inaccessibility to westernized healthcare amongst other things. Like my Aunt Bette said to me, “A doctor? What doctor? A hospital? Where?”, so that meant we relied on ourselves, community midwives and other important community care practitioners for our health. It also meant like my Uncle Bobby said to me, “If we were sick, they’d just go out there in the back and pull something out the ground and we would get better.” so the knowledge of how to care for ourselves as Black people was a piece of vital knowledge passed down from generation to generation.
I’m reading this book called Working Cures: Healing, Health and Power on Southern Slave Plantations by Sharla M. Fett (a white woman btw so choose if you want to read it, of course) and I am appreciating the another example of how Black people being freed from slavery rejected western models of care as a way of staying liberated. We committed to learning our healing through our medicine and did not want to fall into a system that could control us by having our health in it’s hands.
I signed up for herbalism before reading Working Cures and had been practicing herbalism through my doula work and my own self care for years but to go back to that urge of wanting to be in community and how I could do so with the version of myself I am now… herbalism. Growing on my own land, the land of my ancestors, putting my hands in our dirt, providing ancestral medicine to the community my ancestry is rooted in and returning back to the liberation my ancestors created for us in my commitment to living freely under bullshit.
Black herbalism kept my people here when they didn’t want us to survive and now Black herbalism will continue to keep my people here - reclaiming our liberation, our autonomy, our bodies, our minds and remembering the wisdom we were born into.
Black Herbalism books I’m obsessed (with links from my fav Black owned and woman owned book store, Reparations Club):
Working The Roots: Over 400 Years of Traditional African American Healing by Michele Elizabeth Lee
African American Folk Healing by Stephanie Y. Mitchem
African American Herbalism: A Practical Guide to Healing Plants and Folk Traditions by Lucretia VanDyke
Stay Free,
Sabia <3