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Available on Amazon, IngramSparks and Barnes and Nobles
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ROOTED
How a Daughter of the South Traced Her Bloodline Back 44,000 Years—to Remember Who She Really Was
One test. 44,000 years. From East Africa to Eastover.
What if the memory of your ancestors was alive in your blood?
In this stirring memoir, Michell F. Pulliam uncovers a maternal lineage that stretches back more than 44,000 years—one of the oldest known living bloodlines on earth. But Rooted isn’t just about genetic science. It’s about divine design. About the stories that live in our blood. About the power of remembering who—and whose—we really are.
When a maternal DNA test connects Michell’s lineage to the rare L4b2a haplogroup—an ancient East African branch of mitochondrial DNA—she finds herself drawn into a beautiful unfolding. With poetic honesty and spiritual depth, she traces a line from modern-day Eastover, South Carolina, all the way back to East Africa’s earliest daughters. Through slavery, survival, silence, and strength, this maternal thread has endured. And now, it speaks.
Rooted is a journey through blood memory, generational resilience, and the mystery of how a lineage so ancient found its way through history to land in one Southern Black woman—called to remember, reclaim, and write it all down.
Along the way, Michell explores:
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What it means to carry ancestral memory in your cells
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The spiritual weight of maternal inheritance
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The silences and survival strategies of Black women throughout history
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The divine orchestration that preserved this unbroken line
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And how reclaiming our story isn’t just healing—it’s holy
This book is both a personal reckoning and a collective invitation. It’s a love letter to the Black women who came before and a torch passed to those who will come after. It’s about being more than a descendant—it’s about being the bridge. The living thread that carries it all forward.
Rooted speaks to every woman who’s ever felt the call to come home—to herself, to her lineage, and to the God who never forgot her name.
Tender, reverent, and radically hopeful, Rooted is not just Michell’s homecoming. It’s a call to your own.
Available for Purchase September 16th!
Read an excerpt below!
It would’ve been enough to discover that I come from the first mothers. That my DNA stretches back 44,000 years to East Africa. It would’ve been enough to learn that my maternal line is rare, deeply rooted, and remarkably intact. But honestly, that discovery wasn’t the end of the story. It was just the beginning.
Because while the blood carries truth, history carries trauma.
Somewhere between the thriving lands of East Africa and the enslaved fields of the American South, something was violently severed. Slavery didn’t just take people—it took possibility. It took dignity. It stripped names, took away whole families, erased languages, buried stories, and reduced women who carried royal blood to laborers, caregivers, and survivors. Brilliance was silenced. Power was hidden.
And the world kept moving as if nothing had been lost.
They bore burdens that would’ve broken most. Carried children on their hips and entire households on their backs. Worked sunup to sundown, then stayed up through the night—nursing babies, patching clothes already so worn they were falling apart, wiping tears, and praying prayers they weren’t sure anyone heard. They weren’t given a comfortable life. They weren’t handed opportunity. But what they did with what they had?
That’s the part that takes my breath away.
They made legacies out of scraps. Faith out of famine. And strength out of silence. No one gave them rest, so they took refuge in their faith. No one called them powerful, so they became the power—generation after generation.
Many of them witnessed the unthinkable—fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons taken brutally beaten—or worse—lynched right before their eyes. Grief didn’t give them time to fall apart. They had to pick up the pieces of their pain and find a way to go on. To keep their children alive… and their hope.
I come from women who had every reason to give up—but didn’t. Who were told to shrink, but somehow found a way to stretch beyond themselves. They fed whole families with next to nothing. Pressed through sorrow and still stirred joy into a pot of food. And had the insight to whisper encouragement to their children while nobody was encouraging them.
These women weren’t soft in the way the world portrays softness. They were tender in the places that mattered—and tough in the places where it counted. Their lives weren’t perfect, but their love?
It lasted.
They endured the unendurable—and still taught us how to be kind. They kept the family together when everything was trying to pull it apart. And somehow—somehow—they gave us joy. Real joy. The kind that don’t come from circumstances, but from God.
And I now understand—royalty doesn’t die. It hides, not out of fear, but to preserve itself. It endures. And when the time is right—when it senses readiness—it rises again.
When I saw that DNA report showing my maternal line, and realized we had not only survived the unimaginable but originated from the very root of humanity—something changed inside me. It wasn’t just knowledge. It was a calling.
I wasn’t just meant to discover this truth, but called to share it.