Black Heel Strings

In this lyrical memoir, Robin Michel Caudell meditates on memory and identity as she traces her childhood in a Black family navigating poverty and racism on the Delmarva Peninsula. Many know Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman’s exodus stories out of bondage in rural Maryland, but what about the people who stayed? It is from this place and history that Caudell’s story begins. Growing up in the segregated 1960s, Caudell is the living legacy of the ones who did not run away and of the Free People of Color/Christianized Indians who partnered with their enslaved brethren in a precarious dance of love in Chesapeake Country.

The memoir’s title references a physical anomaly, believed to be indicative of Indigenous ancestry, which skips generations among Caudell’s Kellum kin. This trait is visible as a dark line that extends upward from the Achilles tendon, a visible link to her ancestry. An emotional odyssey, Black Heel Strings weaves Caudell’s adult and childhood memories into a vivid story that honors belonging, resilience, and recovery in her community and in this place.