West Virginia Route 9 Is a Black Road—and It Leads to Bricktop’s by God Virginia

From Brea Baker’s Rooted to Wick’d Confections is the road to Bricktop’s story—one rooted in Black land and Black enterprise.

 Route 9 in West Virginia is a Black road.

I know this from Brea Baker’s Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership.

Not metaphorically. Not symbolically. Literally.

Out in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, running through places like Martinsburg and Charles Town, Route 9 moves people across state lines every day. People drive it without thinking twice.

And most folks don’t know what they’re riding on.

That road was built from a quarry on Black-owned land. The Walker family’s land. Land that was collectively purchased, tended, and held.

So every time you ride Route 9, you are traveling through Black history. Through Black land. There was a quarry on that family’s land, and the stone from that quarry was used to build the road itself.

And that does something to you once you know it.

In the epilogue of Rooted, Baker comes to West Virginia for a wedding on Black-owned land on Juneteenth carrying what so many people carry about this place: racism, guns, coal mines.

But what she finds here is something else.

The land.

And that is where her story shifts.

Because we do not talk about land like that anymore.

We talk about ownership like it is just paperwork. Just possession.

But land is a relationship. Land is a responsibility. You do not just use land—you tend it, you listen to it, you work with it so it can work with you.

Never trust a farmer without callouses on their hands.

The land will tell on you. It will show who is in a relationship and who is just passing through.

And I have been thinking about that a lot lately, because BBG just had funding cut for our Story Farmers, AgriCULTURE content because of “anti-DEI”. It would be easy to think that means the work stops, but that is not how farming works. The seeds are already in the ground, and nobody who understands land just walks away and leaves them there.

Because this is not about funding.

It is about stewardship.

It is about knowing the land, and knowing the people, well enough to stay in a relationship even when resources get thin.

Baker’s work traces land, loss, and reclamation across the country, but it also opens something up here. It connects to stories that have always been here, even when they were ignored.

And somewhere in that is Bricktop—Ada Beatrice Queen Victoria Louise Virginia Smith—the red-haired girl from West Virginia who became the queen of Paris nightlife, who ran a club where Duke Ellington, Josephine Baker, and Langston Hughes gathered, who fed Martin Luther King Jr., helped shape what became known as Café Society, and carried that Black Appalachian presence across the world.

I found Brea through High Horse: The Black Cowboy, and that’s when I saw she is writing a book about Bricktop too.

And I am so happy she is.

She is an acclaimed writer, political strategist, and national organizer. She is doing the research, the grounding, the work her story requires. Her book will open doors for many more books on Bricktop.

Because there should be many books about Bricktop.

And today, the prompt for this post is Wick’d Confections, whose platform—like Bricktop’s—is rooted in Black wealth and influence through hospitality, culture, and access, taking us to Chez Bricktop’s through her story and French onion soup—gratinée.

Baker is writing toward her. So am I. And may this post inspire you to find Bricktop, make some gratinée, and take a drive down a West Virginia road—you might be riding on more than you think. Or go ahead and Google how cheap land is in West Virginia. Just watch out for deers and data centers.

Because Black stories are not scarce. They have just been buried in the land. And now they are coming back through memory, through places like Route 9, through people who refuse to let stories planted die.

Because the land remembers.

And Bricktop?

I believe she is bringing people home to her West Virginia.

When Wick’d Confections goes viral, reminding the internet—Bricktop was born in West Virginia. She tilts the imagination of West Virginia.

And, Bricktop always claimed she was from West by God Virginia.

Maybe she was planting a seed—one meant to give us access, invitation, and influence in this world.

Because Mountain Mama deserves to be well dressed, well fed, and have a good time just like Bricktop did in her clubs in Paris, in Mexico City, in Rome.

And wherever Bricktop went, by God West Virginia went too.

And I think she is still curating a room right now—bringing people into a story they didn’t know they were already standing in, the same way we didn’t know Route 9 was built from Black land until Brea told it.

Whether building roads or building rooms, shaping land or shaping culture, West Virginia has always produced Black ownership and influence.

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