Two sisters pursue travel in search of healing old wounds

My sister Tamara is five years younger than I. That doesn’t matter now, but when we were younger, it was the crux of all of the problems between us. A 15-year-old doesn’t want her 10-year-old sister hanging onto every piece of high school girl gossip she hears. As we grew older, we came together mostly because no one else we knew was walking the same paths as us. Tamara and I are the stereotypical ‘hood kids: We grew up impoverished and completed a subpar education with a home environment that held more trauma than the streets that surrounded it. But, with time, those were circumstances we both overcame. For me, it was to become a writer/film critic, and for Tamara, it was to become the director of public safety for a university.

Escaping this world is a feat in and of itself, one that hardens a person and isolates them from the community they once knew. The drive to escape was so strong that neither of us paused to think about how far we’d come until we were in therapy working through how all that childhood trauma manifested in our adult lives. We were both in our 30s when we realized that celebrating ourselves for reaching milestones was just as important in healing old wounds. However, not just any celebration would do. It would have to be an intentional effort to treat each new achievement like the triumph that it was.

I think it was Tamara who had the idea of celebrating outside the house. We were 30-year-old college graduates, both working toward master’s degrees — hers in criminology and mine in English. Our undergraduate degrees had been collected in silence with only our spouses present (my kids were there as well) for the ceremonies. We had each other, but the affairs were still small and quiet. Not at all what we envisioned. Then, one of my stepmother’s children got released from prison. “Block party” was an understatement for the shindig that rocked that city all weekend long. My dad footed the bill and gave up his house for the fête. Tamara and I took note. They would practically shut down a city block to celebrate a prison release, but a curse-breakingly awesome college degree got nothing.

“We can’t wait for them no more,” she said to me. “We gotta start celebrating ourselves!”

Those first milestones were small but significant. We made good grades for the semester. I had an essay published in Creative Nonfiction. Then we both landed our first college classes as teachers. For those celebrations, we each took $20 and went to the casino across town. It was our way of letting loose, enjoying ourselves and doing something that was completely meaningless. For two women who have always pushed themselves forward, spending money and time on “nothing” was so far out of the ordinary that it was therapeutic, But, we later realized, this was no way to celebrate the larger milestones to come.

I had a paper accepted into a prestigious academic conference, started reporting for an entertainment outlet and was flown to my first set visit ever in Toronto for Shazam. I came back with maple syrup in glass leaf-shaped bottles, and we decided a bigger celebration was needed. That’s when the road trips began. Multiple long hours in a car was more than enough time to share the journey to our big achievements but also to map out the way forward. Both of us had big goals, but our end goal was the same — to break the cycles and generational curses that plagued both sides of our family. By the time we reached our destinations, we were ready to dive into drinks, food and the type of relaxation that girls from the ‘hood always thought was for rich white ladies.

We’ve now been to New Orleans (twice), Houston, Honolulu, Orlando and almost New York City. We’ve been to destinations like Disney World and the Indianapolis 500 race, which Tamara attended alone because I had to stay home with my kids. Each trip involved indulging in food and fun and spending money on souvenirs and other items. The best parts of these trips were always the affirming conversations where we’d share stories and validate the paths that we were on.

These shared moments deepened our bond and made each milestone so much sweeter. The years when my spouse checked out left me without a person to turn to for support, or they would have if not for Tamara. If we didn’t have this ritual, who knows where we would be. Our therapists said that celebrating our achievements would heal us. What we didn’t know was that doing so would literally take us places that we had never been before while also making our sister bond deeper than ever.

Jonita Davis (jonitadavis.com) is a film critic, writer, and pop culture junkie behind the online publication The Black C.A.P.E. Magazine (theblackcape.com, @theblackcapemag). She is also a freelance writer, a published author, an English professor, and a podcaster. She has a master’s degree in English (Literary Criticism Concentration) from Purdue University and teaches writing at Waubonsee Community College. Her previous works include Michigan City’s Marinas (History Press 2009), Michigan City’s Washington Park (History Press 2011), Questioning Cultural Appropriation (Enslow Publishing 2019), and We Gon Be Black Today (Chicago Review Press, 2023).