In December 1995, I submitted an English 1101 research paper titled The Road to Independence. It was written under the name Pia Clarke, the name I carried before I became Pia Copeland.
More than thirty years later, I am holding those pages again.
The paper traced Jamaica’s history from its earliest inhabitants through colonization, resistance, political change, and the country’s eventual independence. I prepared an outline, included a map of Jamaica, documented my sources, and tried to understand what a nation and its people had endured on the road to freedom.
Jamaica was not simply a subject I selected for an assignment. It was connected to my heritage and to my understanding of where I came from. I was studying a people who had endured hardship and change while continuing to move toward the right to define their own future.
Some of the language in the paper reflects the historical understanding and academic conventions of that time. What touches me now is not only what I wrote, but what these pages reveal about the woman I was becoming.
At the time, I believed I was simply completing an English assignment. I could not see everything life would ask of me, nor could I have imagined where my own path would lead. Golden Daisy Press™ did not exist. Rooted in Grace™ had not been imagined. I was not calling myself an author.
Still, something was already taking shape.
I was researching. I was asking questions. I was bringing pieces of history together and trying to understand what they meant. I was learning how to give a story structure and how to place my own words on the page.
Life has taught me that God often plants something within us long before we understand what it will become. We may think we are simply completing an assignment, following an interest, or doing the work that is in front of us. Only later do we recognize that a seed was being planted.
There is something especially meaningful about seeing the name “Pia Clarke” beneath the title. She is not separate from the woman I am today. She is part of her. Her curiosity, discipline, heritage, and still-developing voice came with me through every season that followed.
Her voice was not fully formed. Neither was her understanding of all she carried within her. But she was learning. She was growing. She was continuing to move forward, even without knowing what the years ahead would hold.
Writing has since become one of the ways I make sense of what I have lived and learned. It allows me to honor where I come from, preserve what matters, and share the lessons I am prepared to place into the world. It does not require me to separate myself from my history. It gives me the freedom to understand it and speak from it in my own voice.
Finding this paper reminds me that meaningful beginnings do not always announce themselves. Sometimes they appear in an old assignment, a subject that holds our attention, or a piece of work we once considered ordinary. Sometimes we have to look back before we can recognize what was beginning.
The Road to Independence was written about Jamaica. Yet holding it today has allowed me to see something about my own life. The woman I am now did not appear all at once. She was formed through faith, grace, learning, perseverance, and the decision to keep moving forward.
Before I called myself an author, I was already writing.
Perhaps grace was already present in those pages, quietly preparing me for the voice I would one day recognize as my own.