KIKI’S STORY: PART ONE

BIRTH TO 5 YEARS OLD

OK I guess the best way to start is just to start. I have decided to write my memoirs. I'm 68 years old and I've been thinking about this for some time but had a feeling of impostor’s syndrome. Who am I, an unknown to write my memoirs, and then I thought that's just stinking thinking. Who was Maya Angelou when she wrote “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings”?

In June of 2025 I traveled to St. Petersburg FL to take a course at the Poynter Institute entitled “Breaking into Books” it focused on nonfiction writing and it was there that I thought that I was going to learn how to get a collection of my essays/op eds published and I'm still interested in doing that but I realized that I had a story to tell and I would tell it in the form of a memoir.

So, I'm doing this bit by bit, page by page bird by bird, as Anne Lamont would say. One of the things that I learned at the Poynter Institute workshop was to simply write, if you wrote a page a day in 100 days you would have 100 pages or in a year you would have 365 pages.

I also learned that the word count for the average book is 100,000 words. So, I'm doing this in Word so I can also keep up with the word count.

Let's start at the beginning, first of all my name my name now is Akilah Monifa in some places it is Akilah Bolden- Monifa and in other places it is Akilah Bolden Monifa and in other places on my official government IDs it's Akilah Boldenmonifa.

But of course, as many of you know that wasn't the name that I was born with (I legally changed it in the late 1980s). I was named after my maternal grandmother whose name was Elizabeth Ann Perry, my birth name is Elizabeth Ann Thompson. My father was Robert Eugene Thompson, and my mother Shirley Ann Thompson (nee Perry).

And we aren’t sure that Thompson is our last name. When my paternal grandfather left the plantation in Mississippi to work on the railroad in Kansas he allegedly did not remember whether the plantation owner’s name was Thompson or Smith.

Both of my parents are deceased so part of this memoir I will be dealing with both my mommy and my daddy issues. However, fear not I am also currently in therapy.

I was born on April 3, 1957 in the “little apple”, you know Manhattan Kansas, home of K-State where my father was enrolled in college. Both of my parents were born in Kansas. I lived in Kansas both in Manhattan and in Wichita until I was five years old. I have no recollection of this time but several pictures of when I was a toddler. My mother was 20 years old when she gave birth to me and my father was 25 years old. I have a brother Dennis Thompson who is three years older than I and has not spoken to any family member in more than 13 years.