A Black woman’s guide to Fort Worth, Texas

When you check into Hotel Dryce, a boutique hotel in Fort Worth’s Cultural District, you’re met by Black woman fiber artist Niki Dionne’s “Welcome to Funky Town.” Last month, I spent a week as writer-in-residence at the 21-room property, and much like the front desk experience centers the work of a Black woman artist, my project sought to center the perspective and memories of Black women in Fort Worth.

I was inspired by my guidepost and curatorial collaborator Michelle Lanier, who offered up a concept she calls “womanist cartography.” In “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” Lanier asks, “For the particular experiences and lived dreams, uprisings, and survivals of all Black southern women, how do we reveal the hidden markers of their lives on the land? What are the appropriate monuments? How do we remember—and re-member?”

To answer these questions, I invited four Black women cultural workers—Jessica Lynne, Amarie Cemone Gipson, Gabrielle Ione Hickmon, and Denise Stephanie—down to join me on a journey as I re-mapped my hometown through the presence and contributions of Black women.

EVANS AVENUE PLAZA

Placemaking and storytelling are at the heart of the Evans Avenue Plaza. Located in the Historic Terrell Heights neighborhood, the plaza is adorned with a historical timeline highlighting Afro-Texan history and the stories of Black Fort Worthians including Roberta C. Dickerson, Dr. Vada P. Felder, Manet Harrison Fowler, Lillian B. Horace, Dr. Aurelia I. Harris, Francine Reese Morrison, Hazel Harvey Peace, Viola Pitts, Lenora Rolla, and Lucille Bishop Smith.

MOUNT ZION BAPTIST CHURCH

As a daughter of the Southside, many of my earliest memories are of time spent at Mount Zion Baptist Church on the corner of Evans and Rosedale. Writing this offers me the memory of my first major speaking engagement—delivering the welcome address at Mount Zion’s Centennial Celebration in 1994. Dr. Vada P. Felder was my church mother, the compiler of history for Mount Zion, and the editor of its historical journals. She was my oratory coach, the first Black student to earn a master of religious education from Brite College of the Bible—now Brite Divinity School—at Texas Christian University, and the woman who brought Martin Luther King Jr. to Fort Worth.

LENORA ROLLA HERITAGE CENTER & MUSEUM

In 1977, Lenora Butler Rolla founded the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society. In the lineage of Black women who serve as keepers of culture and memory, she answered the call to recover and preserve Tarrant County’s Afro-Texan artifacts, placing them under the watchful care of the Society. Initially housed at Rolla’s private residence, in the 1980s the Society moved to its permanent home in the historic A. L. Boone house—now The Lenora Rolla Heritage Center Museum stewarded by Executive Director Brenda Sanders-Wise—on East Humboldt Street.

MAMA E’S BBQ & HOME COOKING

Pitmaster Ernestine Edmond holds court at 818 E Rosedale Street where she is known as “Mama E.” While our group came for the chopped beef sandwiches and fried pork chops, we stayed for the stories. Edmond learned about barbeque from her mama, was inspired to open a restaurant in the early 2000s while wrestling with her own worries as the mother of a deployed daughter, and now, in 2022, she is teaching her great-granddaughter La’niyah Reed the craft.

KINFOLK HOUSE

Artists Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby opened the doors of this historic Polytechnic Heights space reimagined on the cornerstone of the creative power of Sedrick’s grandmother and original homeowner, Hallie Beatrice Carpenter, known to her loved ones as “Big Momma.” Though not an artist herself, she expressed her creativity through textiles, fashion, and music. Her legacy and the 100-year-old historic home turned collaborative project space remind us that creative pursuits exist beyond high art and academia, and as Alice Walker declares in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, “To be an artist, and a Black woman, even today, lowers our status in many respects, rather than raises it: and yet, artists we will be.”

Johnica Rivers is a writer, editor, and curator whose work explores race, place, and gender. She is particularly interested in the relationship between peripatetic ways of being and Black women’s cultural and intellectual production. Rivers lives and works itinerantly between Mexico City and her hometown of Fort Worth, Texas. You can find her documenting her creative practice and travels on Twitter and Instagram at @johnica.

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This story was originally published June 15, 2022 at 9:00 AM.