I Tried to Escape the Present: The Past Had a Passport Too!!

“Well, the present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.”

—Zora Neale Hurston

Every time I booked a getaway, I believed I was leaving something behind.

The stress. The noise. The constant demand to be strong, the backbone.

I remember countless moments sitting by the ocean, watching the waves roll in—steady, rhythmic—allowing my nervous system to soften into something resembling peace. For a brief moment, my body remembered what calm felt like.

But as a Black traveler, rest was only ever part of the journey. Reflection was the other.

No matter where I went—Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, South America, even the polar regions—I encountered echoes of the past. Not in museums or monuments, but in people. In how they moved, how they spoke, how they laughed and danced. At times, some were vaguely remembered distant forgotten figures. Nevertheless, Black presence revealed itself in the flavors of food, the curve of architecture, the rhythms woven into everyday life.

Blackness was everywhere and inescapable.

And yet, acknowledgment was almost nowhere.

There was little recognition of the blood, sweat, sacrifice, courage and brilliance that shaped these places. Little space for the truth that people of African descent had not merely been present, but had built, sustained, imagined, and defended entire worlds. Their contributions existed alongside racism, colorism, sexism, homophobia and classism—embedded in societies that benefitted from us while refusing to fully appreciate us.

It felt hauntingly familiar.

It mirrored my own experience as a Black woman in the United States—where you are often seen as labor, as support, as endurance itself, but rarely celebrated as innovative, resourceful, courageous, or visionary. Where your work fuels progress, yet your efforts do not make you hero nor heroine. Your name is pathologized or simply left absent from the story.

This global erasure—quiet, persistent, and pervasive—is what gave birth to Hurston B. Morrison.

We exist to find those stories.

And to share them with you.

Because travel should not only take you somewhere new—it should return to you what was always yours.