We Travel is based on two months of oral history and archival work with three families in Lee County, Mississippi. The film unfolds in four chapters, each rendered as a note from a different person and a different generation. The recipient of the notes is unnamed, save the sole mention of “you,” which comes at the end.

 

The film began as the essay, “How We Got Here,” which began:

 

How we got here? We travel. Under no day and cotton in the back of a freight wagon, no different from the tree wood.

 

Pap come first, took his hands but left the gun, said why he needed it ran out.

 

From there, the film moves, from the seventh generation to me, from taste to touch, from the early morning of kill day to the cracklins. It was written and  filmed in the spirit of Afrofuturism, but a Black South way.

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In the 1994 essay "Black to the Future," writer Mark Dery poses a question:

 

“Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” [180] 

 

The last note in the film is from me. In it, I answers Dery's question with a question: how do we imagine ourselves?