Robin Michel Caudell artfully interlaces her memories of lived experiences and of epigenetic ones in “Black Heel Strings: A Choptank Memoir.” Throughout, the author writes about her life in poetic language that catches the reader’s attention. Well-known locally as a Plattsburgh Press-Republican staff writer, Caudell is also a poet, a videographer, a journalist and a U.S. Air Force veteran. She is a founder of the Plattsburgh Air Force Base Museum in Plattsburgh and the North Star Underground Railroad Museum at Ausable Chasm. Set to be published in 2026, “Black Heel Strings” won the Veterans Writing Award in 2023.

In Caudell’s daily life, from birth through adulthood, Lula Annie Thomas Butler (Grand Mom) was a constant presence. She describes herself as “Lula Butler’s granddaughter” and says, “I’ve seen morning halo her hair and fire it like a wahoo bush.” Grand Mom believed that “If there’s a will, there’s a way.” Caudell describes her life with Grand Mom in her hometown this way: “down Choptank” was “a place, a river, an Indian nation, a condition on the Eastern Shore” of Maryland near the Chesapeake Bay. Here, where Ancestors came to her in dreams, she picked buttercups and tasted white pears and picked concord grapes with her cousins. She learned that she was “Colored or Indian, and hush, White.” Later, she learns what black heel strings are, according to the book jacket description, “a physical anomaly, believed to be indicative of Indigenous ancestry, which skips generations … The trait is visible as a dark line that extends upward from the Achilles tendon, a visible link to her ancestry.”

Later still, she learns about the Kellums, her father’s side of the family who trace their ancestry back to Charles Kellum, enslaved on Wye House plantation in Maryland. Great-great grandfather Charles Kellum walked off the plantation to join the United States Colored Troops 19th Regiment, Company C during the Civil War but his name was absent from the National Park Service Soldiers and Sailors database until 2014 after the website was updated. Searching for family connection, Caudell “felt compelled to walk the lands where my Ancestors were enslaved to enhance my understanding of their lives.” Additional information came from family stories about famous ancestors like the “American Revolutionary Insleys of Somerset,” the “feuding McCoys of Appalachia,” and “Cousin Fred” aka Frederick Douglass.

The author recounts memories in a literal re-telling and as “… a stream of ancestral memory [that] flows from the beginning of time and spirals in my mind and ignites the dark strands of my DNA.” She says, “I remember things I never knew” and that she does not want to know things she cannot remember. Yet, no matter where she lives, Caudell’s memories of Grand Mom, her parents, siblings and cousins remind her of living “down Choptank” as “the Atlantic pulls my heel strings.”