The Long Way Home

For Bunk Sterling and Mary Tatum Hilliard (my grea great grandparents)

I don’t know how long I had been staring at the only photograph I have of Bunk Sterling and Mary Tatum. Long enough to wonder what I would say if the Creator of all things, who taught rivers where to run and stars where to wait, ever gave me five minutes with them.

When I looked up, they were there.

Mary saw me first. She grabbed Bunk’s arm and laughed like joy had finally found somewhere to go.

“Lawd, Bunk… look at that boy. I told you we’d get to see one of ’em.”

Bunk took off his hat, looked me up and down, and smiled.

“Boy… you done made it all the way here.”

I laughed too. I don’t know why. It just felt like coming home to a place I had never been.

“I’ve come to thank you,” I said.

Mary shook her head.

“No, baby. We the ones come the long way.”

For a while, nobody said anything. We didn’t need to. Somehow it felt like everybody who had ever carried this family was standing there with us.

Then I asked, “Why Hilliard?”

Bunk started to answer, but Mary touched his arm.

“Tell it right.”

He laughed.

“Go ’head, Mary.”

She looked at me strong and certain.

“When freedom come, we wasn’t waitin’ on nobody to tell us who we was no more. They could tell us where to stand. They could tell us where to work. They wasn’t gon’ tell us who we was.”

She smiled.

“We chose Hilliard. That was ours.”

I looked at my hands and wondered whether they would recognize them.

“I’ve tried to honor your name.”

Bunk chuckled.

“Son, don’t spend your whole life carryin’ a name. Spend it givin’ it away with honor.”

I had carried questions for years, but most of them disappeared the moment I saw their faces. Only one remained.

“I have a little girl. Her name is Asa Pearl.”

Mary froze.

Bunk looked at her, then slowly took off his hat again and looked toward Heaven.

“Well… look what the Creator been doin’.”

Mary laughed through tears.

“He named that baby Asa.”

“She’s the fifth,” I said.

Mary took my hand.

“That name done kept on teachin’.”

Then I asked the only question that still mattered.

“What should I leave behind for Asa Pearl?”

Mary stepped close enough to straighten my collar.

“Baby, leave her enough of yourself that one day your memories answer questions she never knew to ask.”

Bunk nodded.

“Children don’t inherit what we own. They inherit what we practice.”

He started walking away, then stopped without turning around.

“Son, don’t you spend too much time worryin’ ’bout what you gon’ leave that child.

She’ll forget what you had long before she forget how you lived.”

Mary looked back, smiling like she could see every branch of the family tree.

“That little girl’s waitin’ on memories.”

Bunk tipped his hat.

“Go on home.”

They walked away together, not into the distance, but into every prayer that had carried my family before I was born.

I watched until I couldn’t see them anymore.

Then I looked back at their photograph.

It was only a photograph again.

But somehow…

it wasn’t.

I picked it up, smiled, and went home.

When I finished this conversation, I realized it wasn't really about meeting my ancestors. It was about understanding my responsibility to the people who will one day call me theirs. We spend so much of life trying to leave behind something valuable, yet the people who love us rarely remember what we owned. They remember how we listened, how we forgave, how we laughed, how we loved, and how we made them feel when they were with us.

That is the wisdom of the heart. It reminds us that the greatest inheritance is not something we place in another person's hands. It is something we place in their character by the life we live in front of them. Long after our voices are gone, our love, our habits, and our example continue speaking. Perhaps that is how the Creator intended families to endure—not simply through names or blood, but through hearts that quietly teach the next generation how to live.