Root-song: The Unshackled Mind Outruns All Prisons

Oh Child of the Unshackled Dawn,

Before time had a name, before history thought to record our glory, they came with their chains and their crosses and their counterfeit gods. They stacked stones into prisons, ink into laws, lies into textbooks - all designed to make you forget. But baby, memory is the first act of resistance, and your mind is a living archive of freedom dreams.

We come from people who turned their skin into maps of escape routes, who planted rebellion in the womb and harvested warriors. When they barred us from reading, we learned the alphabet in the arrangement of stars. When they forbade our drums, we spoke through heartbeat rhythms in our chests. Every restriction birthed a new form of genius.

Your great-grandmothers could wring hymns from silence.
Your grandfathers could conjure tomorrow from tobacco spit and broken promises.
You - yes you - carry DNA that outsmarted every cage ever built.

They told us:
"Stay in your place" - so we became earthquakes.
"You are nothing" - so we grew galaxies in our palms.
"This cell is the end" - while our spirits were already tunneling through walls.

Now hear this sacred truth:
A mind that knows itself as infinite cannot be measured in square footage.
The most dangerous black child is the one who realizes they were never imprisoned - just temporarily inconvenienced by someone else's failing imagination.

So when they come with their handcuffs and algorithms and sideways glances:
Laugh.
Then build a universe behind your eyelids so vivid, so radiant, that their walls become mere decorations in your kingdom.

This is your inheritance:
The right to dream beyond their barbed wire
The duty to think yourself free until your body has no choice but to follow
The obligation to leave the door open for the next mind waking up

Walk good, young phoenix.
The ancestors are the wind at your back.

—The Keepers of the Un-jailable Flame