During U.S. slavery, African American communities did not have the right to ownership. Not only were they deprived of their own land or homes, but they could also not preserve the objects and heirlooms that were representative of their own lives, family, and culture. They could not be spokespeople of their own experiences in the public discourse and were not allowed to hold on to the heirlooms that represented their experiences (Miles). The few objects that they could keep, or hide, were often small personal items like combs or pieces of cloth, tools related to their work, religious items, and occasionally letters. These limited objects, when preserved and passed down, thus became charged with meaning and history but still lacked the full scope of a family’s history. Stigmata (1998) by Phyllis Alessia Perry rebels against this cultural erasure in the form of a recovery of memory and cultural identity. Perry’s novel presents a matrilineage that finds a way to preserve the identity of Ayo’s family amidst different eras of discrimination in the U.S., managing to allow ownership by the descendants of enslaved people of their own stories and culture.