Opening for business today: an oral history booth at the Sankofa Festival in Oak Bluffs, along with a tour of the African American Heritage Trail. Sankofa is a verb, and useful advice: it teaches us to retrieve what was left behind. Some old ways aren’t just garbage to be thrown out.

Some lost their labels because we had to rush.

They got left in a moving box. How Black people can have a master’s degree and lose a recipe, know who was buried but not who owned the property, display the wedding day photograph but write nothing down about the bakery’s inception. It isn’t always a plot to remove Black history. Sometimes Uncle Mike dies before someone asks him about the loan on the car.

Today, visit your own relative with the sharpest recollections before a tidbit becomes a legend.

Record the story you would rather not repeat if it would help you hear something new.