It's freedom when people'll give you flowers while you can still smell them.
— Lorna Gail Woods2022
Lorna Gail Woods
Lorna Gail Woods was raised in Africantown, Alabama, and is a descendant of the Clotilda survivor Charlie Lewis. In the full interview, Woods discusses her work as a public historian in the Whippets Den mini museum within the Mobile County Training School, her family history, and the transmission of cultural knowledge. This interview was conducted in English in Africatown, Alabama.
Watch the full interviewConversation Transcript
If you not free in your heart to feel that what you doing, you’re trying to help or make a better world, then you will see the difference. Because some people, like you say, live in those other countries have never, never knew what we went through. They’ll never go through that. Look at the Queen, how they buried her and how people stood on the side of the road and threw flowers and waved at her. We don’t get that. We be lucky if a person bought us a flower off the side of the road some time and give it to us. Not that we got to die to get our flowers, but I think it’s freedom when people’ll give you flowers while you can still smell them. I love flowers because they’re freeing. I love butterflies because they free. They not put it in a cage.
