Why I Wrote The Value of X

Every book begins with a question. The question behind The Value of X was simple, but it would not leave me alone: Who were we before the labels?

I kept returning to the names that appear in American records—Indian, Colored, Negro, Black, African American—and to the power institutions have had to decide which identity would follow a family from one generation to the next. I began thinking about what happens when a name changes on paper while memory continues inside a family.

That tension became the heart of the book.

A Story About the Unknown

In mathematics, X stands for an unknown value. In this story, X represents unknown names, unknown ancestors, missing records, altered classifications, forgotten languages, and histories that remain contested.

The narrator’s search allows the reader to experience the emotional weight of those questions through family stories, archives, museums, ancient sites, maps, language, and the land. He is not a detached observer. He is a person trying to understand why the official story does not seem to explain everything he has inherited.

Narrative storytelling gave me room to bring that search to life. The book draws inspiration from public records, archaeology, oral traditions, alternative historical arguments, and disputed interpretations of the past. Its scenes and discoveries carry the reader through that research trail, while the source notes point toward the records and scholarship behind the questions.

Why Reclassification Matters

A census line may look small, but a category can shape how later generations understand an entire family. A change in classification can affect memory, belonging, legal status, and the way descendants search for themselves.

The book explores the possibility that some identities were not simply lost; they were renamed, absorbed, simplified, or pushed outside the official story. Yamasee, Creek, Chickasaw, and other Indigenous histories appear in the book because the Americas were never empty, culturally simple, or waiting to be defined by outsiders.

The story asks readers to look at classification as an act of power. Who chooses the available categories? What happens when a person’s own identity does not fit the form? What survives after the paperwork changes?

Stone, Land, and Memory

The search expands beyond documents. Ancient mounds, pyramids, monumental cities, stonework, language, and cultural memory become witnesses within the story. They remind the narrator that the Americas held complex civilizations, trade networks, political systems, astronomy, engineering, agriculture, and sacred traditions long before European conquest.

The point is not that every mystery has been solved. The point is that the Americas do not need to borrow their greatness from somewhere else.

That is why the final chapters turn toward land and architecture. Paper can be altered. Labels can be replaced. But earthworks, ruins, and family memory continue to raise questions.

An Invitation, Not an Order

I did not write The Value of X to tell every reader what they must believe. I wrote it to create a serious space for questions that are often dismissed before they are examined.

I want readers to notice where evidence is strong, where interpretation is disputed, and where storytelling gives emotional shape to an unresolved historical question. The book is most powerful when it sends someone back to a family Bible, a census record, an archive, a map, or a conversation with an elder.

The X is not solved by accepting another label without thought. It is solved through research, reflection, and the courage to keep asking.

The Value of X is for readers who have ever felt that the story they inherited was incomplete. It is for people interested in identity, ancestral memory, Indigenous history, reclassification, counter-history, and the hidden architecture of the Americas.

Most of all, it is for anyone willing to ask: What if the missing part of the story is the part that changes everything?