A few years back, New Orleans-based musician Dusky Waters was sitting with family around her parents’ kitchen table in Arkansas. Extended family had gathered near Little Rock for her grandmother’s funeral, and before long, the cousins and aunts sitting at the table began sharing family stories.
“I took out my phone and started recording because the stories were really, really interesting and I hadn’t heard them before,” Waters says.
One was about the time the Ku Klux Klan showed up to Waters’ great-grandparents’ house in Pine Bluff. Waters’ great-grandfather was a prominent Black pastor in the town just south of Little Rock, and after a man had been lynched, the white supremacist group threatened the pastor that he needed to keep the peace in the local Black community, Waters says…