✨ Core Memory: The Crown Beneath the Mango Tree

I remember the mango tree.

Not just the taste—sweet and warm like the Caribbean sun—but the stillness beneath it. That’s where Nana Cynthia used to tell me the stories. The ones too old for picture books and too sacred for bedtime. I didn’t know it then, but every syllable held the weight of royalty.

“You are not just from here, Sapphire,” she’d whisper, peeling a Julie mango with her thumb, juice running down her wrist. “You are from queens. From Kush. From Kalasha.”

I was eight, legs caked in sand, curls wild from the beach breeze of Maracas Bay. To me, Kalasha sounded like a fairytale—one of those glittering names from the stories you hold close but don’t quite believe. But Nana was serious. And in Trinidad, we take storytelling seriously. It’s our sacred sport.

She told me Kalasha was a Nubian queen who walked with divinity in her bones. That she wielded a cross like a sword, not just of faith, but of revolution—when Nubia was shifting from the old gods to the teachings of Christ. That Kalasha didn’t surrender—she transformed, and led her people through it.

“She didn’t get erased, Sapphire,” Nana would say. “She got remembered. Through us.”

That day under the mango tree etched itself in my memory like it was branded by ancestral fire.

Years later, I stood in an American classroom, brown and brilliant but never quite belonging. My accent had faded—Trini cadence smoothed into code-switching survival. My hands were full of notebooks instead of mangoes, and my teachers couldn’t pronounce my middle name without flinching.

That’s when the memories started rising like incense. The rhythm of tassa drums during Eid in Trinidad. The smoky scent of oxtail stewing with cloves. The way steelpan notes shimmered through Carnival like a hymn of joy and rebellion. These weren’t random flashes. They were my inheritance.

And Kalasha was no longer just a story. She was a blueprint.

She ruled a kingdom between worlds—between temples and churches, pyramids and palaces, war and worship.

Just like me—between Trinidad and America.

Between softness and strategy.

Between the stories I was told, and the ones I was born to write.

Now, when I speak, I speak with layered tongues.

The sass of Brooklyn.

The rhythm of Palo Seco.

The regal cadence of Kush.

And when I create—whether podcast, pilgrimage, or prayer—I feel Kalasha guiding my pen.

Because I am her.

A Caribbean daughter of an African queen.

Raised in the belly of an empire, but called to re-member the crown.

And when the world asks who I am, I no longer shrink.

I say, “I am Sapphire, daughter of islands and empires. Granddaughter of Kalasha. And I remember everything.”