Rooted in the Real
There are things you know before you have the language for them. Gordon Parks taught me that. Interesting enough his surname is mine as well.
I grew up in Algiers, the Westbank of New Orleans. And if you know anything about Algiers or the Westbank, you know the rest of the city treats us–family, but across the river and out the way.
But let somebody else say something to us, they ready to ride.
Still, we share everything New Orleans carries. The beauty and the grief. You learn early how to hold both.
You learn that a second line doesn’t wait for you to finish mourning before it asks you to dance. We dance with grief. We dance with joy. An outsider cannot tell the difference because we just dance.
Every time The Learning Tree came on TV, I had to watch it. There was something in it I understood but couldn’t name.
I didn’t have the biography. I didn’t know Gordon Parks had written the novel, directed the film, and scored it – that the whole thing lived inside one man’s body of memory. I didn’t know he’d become the first Black director to helm a major Hollywood studio in the process. I didn’t know any of that.
I just knew it was familiar.
My mother who has always been a book enthusiast had the novel. I read it. It gave me a better understanding of Newt Winger. What I didn’t realize then, it gave me a better understanding of who I was and who I was becoming.
That kind of familiarity is quiet. The kind that changes the air in the room without announcing itself.
Here’s what I understand now that I couldn’t back then.
Gordon Parks didn’t borrow a story. He told his own, without translation.
Growing up Black in Fort Scott, Kansas in the 1920s meant holding tenderness and violence in the same hand because there was no other way to carry it. No way to separate it. No way to soften it for comfort.
That was the source material.
And here’s the part I understand now. You are the source. There may not be anything completely original, but there is something only you can tell the way you’ve lived it. That’s where authenticity comes from.
He didn’t separate his identity from his craft. His perspective was the strategy.
And his presence in the director’s chair was the argument. Not a speech. Not a platform statement. The work itself. Showing it. Making it. Fully, from the inside out.
Maybe that’s why I connect to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners the way I do. It carries pieces of his uncle. Pieces of his wife’s family. The story may be fictional, but the feeling is real.
That’s what authentic origin does. It doesn’t just communicate. It testifies.
I used to think marketing was about getting anyone to like what I was selling. But even then, I knew that wasn’t right. When I was promoting Jill Scott, I went to the message boards. The conversations. The spaces where people were already speaking their own language.
That always felt closer to the truth.
I would make my way to Philadelphia while visiting family just to experience Black Lily. Jazzyfatnastees created something in that room that you could feel the moment you walked in. I wasn’t just attending. I was witnessing something special. Every time I went, it felt like community. I saw Musiq Soulchild and Kindred the Family Soul there before the world caught on.
And here’s what I understand about being in a room like that. You don’t leave unchanged. You absorb how it’s built. The way artists showed up fully. Not performing for approval, but creating something real enough that the right people would find it.
And we did.
That’s what I mean when I say calling your people home. Black Lily wasn’t trying to cross over. It was a frequency. You either tuned in or you didn’t.
What connects that room to Gordon Parks to everything I’m building now is the same thing.
Authentic origin doesn’t chase. It transmits.
I am a daughter of New Orleans. The Learning Tree was Kansas in the 1920s. A woman from New Orleans finding her way to a room in Philadelphia to witness something real. None of it should connect. And yet it does.
Because truth doesn’t need proximity to travel.
It just needs to be real.
I’m nearly 50. I founded The Curated Misfits deliberately at this point in my life not despite the timing, but because of it. Because I have accumulated enough history, enough relationships, enough perspective to know that lived experience is not a liability in business. It is the actual strategic asset.
That’s not a tagline. It’s a methodology.
The reason The Learning Tree found me across decades is because Parks built it from the inside out. His grief, his community, his love, his growth – that was the structure. You can’t manufacture that. You can’t trend your way into it. You can only do it yourself, from wherever you actually come from.
The brands and founders who understand this who stop performing authenticity and start being the source – those are the ones that last.
Those are the ones that find you before you have the language for what you’re feeling.
Before you even know you’ve been called home.
