Black storytelling in southside Funky Town, Texas: from the 76104 zip code to the life and legacy work of Atatiana Carr-Jefferson as a mattering of Black life

Abstract

My project situates the rhetorical and compositional dimensions of Black Storytelling among members from the historically and predominately African American neighborhoods in the 76104 zip code in Fort Worth, Texas, along with those who advocate for remembering the life and continuing the legacy work of Atatiana Carr-Jefferson. Black Storytelling is a culturally embedded practice of storying the African American lived experience that both shows and tells the embodiment of the full range of life found in Blackness and within Black people. The historically Black neighborhoods in 76104 are often portrayed negatively as areas of poverty, high crime, homelessness, and detrimental health outcomes. This is the same zip code and area where Atatiana Carr-Jefferson, a resident of the Hillside community, was killed by a (now former) Fort Worth police officer in her home. Using the Afro-isms (Afropessimism, Afrosurrealism, Afrofuturism) as kaleidoscopes of inquiry, I explore the multiple interpretations and imaginings of Black/ness and Black folk in the ways we are “read” and “read” ourselves in the world. From this inquiry, I employ the method|ology of Black Storytelling as an epistemological construct to first bring forth the competing narratives of Fort Worth through the discursive rupture of Black community members vested in the 76104 zip code showing and telling their stories from their experiences. Then I employ Black Storytelling to amplify the life and legacy of Atatiana Carr-Jefferson as a redress to the narrative of her victimhood through the panoply of stories and embodied commemoration that marks her memorial in permanence to the city responsible for her death. To amplify Atatiana through this collective expression of remembrance adds to the demand to “honor the memories and tell the stories of Black women and girls who have been killed by the police” (#SayHerName, aapf.org/our-demands). From these ruptures and acts of permanence, I offer a praxis in Black world-making were Black life matters in abundance and not negation, even from trauma or differences in attitudes from the community. This project is part autoethnography, part multimodal composition, part archive, but it is all love for the ‘hood I was born and raised in and for the family of Atatiana that I have come to know and cherish.