 Talking of a legacy is a very delicate adventure and can be quite deliberate or unintentional. We think of legacy as inheritance, the passing down of a gift, the bequeathing of something passed through generations. We are a people who have struggled to pass down, who have struggled to pass forward cultural gifts constrained by a past history of enslavement. Each of us, I think, hopes that when we pass from this realm of existence into a new one that we leave behind something. Such was the vision embedded in the making of the edited volume of black feminist anthropology, theory, politics, praxis and poetics. It began quite modestly as a panel. One of those ideas that comes from sitting around and after popping in and out of tons of sessions over the years, realizing that your viewpoint is rarely visible. Such was the brainstorming that Frans Wendens-Twein and I had back in 1995. We envisioned creating a panel for the next year's AAA conference on black feminist anthropology. And I'm not sure how the subtitle emerged in totality, but what I can say is that my experience of asking my chair to teach the graduate seminar that dealt with the history of anthropology and theory at the University of Florida and being told, quote, you cannot teach theory until you've written theory was kind of a blow. Especially upon finding that a junior untenured white male faculty member was handed over that very same course after the senior faculty member teaching it retired. And while I thought that my first ethnography, women of police, gender and change in Central America, was certainly theoretically informed, I mean, isn't that what anthropology is all about, the blending of theory and method? I kept that admonishment in the back of my mind. Fast forward to the AAA conference in 1996. When we convened the panel, we had no idea what the response would be. The large room they had given us was turned out to be packed to the rafters. During the question and answer, several people asked, no, they actually demanded that we do something with what had been presented. Most of the original panelists are in the book, and I think a few will be showing up today, and a few others joined in when I sent out the call. I remember I rushed back to my room, I gathered the abstract, I put together all the bios of the presenters, and I went downstairs to the exhibition.