Mitochondrial Eve Is Me

Genesis does not begin with race, hierarchy, or dominance.

It begins with breath.

“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness…”

—Genesis 1:26

Before nations.

Before names.

Before power distorted purpose.

There was image, shared, divine, intentional.

Humanity does not enter Scripture fragmented. It enters whole.

Genesis 2 reveals something intimate and deliberate. God does not form Eve from dust again. He forms her from living life.

“And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam… and he took one of his ribs… and made he a woman.”

—Genesis 2:21–22

Eve is not secondary material.

She is refined life.

Life shaped from life.

Science now speaks in its own language and confirms what Scripture already declared: life continues through the woman.

Mitochondrial DNA is passed only through mothers. Not fathers. Not surnames. Not empires. The mother.

This is not metaphor.

This is biology echoing Genesis.

Genesis names Eve again, not as helper, not as blame but as origin.

“And Adam called his wife’s name Eve; because she was the mother of all living.”

—Genesis 3:20

Science would later call her Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent woman from whom all living humans inherit their mitochondrial DNA. She was not the only woman alive, but her line did not end.

Her daughters lived.

Their daughters lived.

And here we are.

Scripture said it first.

Science caught up later.

Genesis places humanity in a garden, fertile, sun-soaked, alive. A place that required bodies built for light.

Melanin is not social commentary.

It is cellular wisdom.

It protects DNA.

It regulates the body under the sun.

It preserves life where life began.

“I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.”

—Psalm 139:14

Fearfully does not mean fragile.

It means awe-inspiring.

It means intentional.

Melanin is not an afterthought.

It is the template.

After the fall, Genesis does not describe God destroying the body. God covers it.

“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.”

—Genesis 3:21

God does not curse skin.

He protects it.

The body, especially the woman’s body, remains worthy of care.

That matters when history later tries to criminalize, commodify, and exhaust Black bodies while claiming divine justification.

Genesis tells a different story.

Every Black mother who toiled in systems never designed for her body, her children, or her survival carried more than labor. She carried mitochondrial memory.

She carried life through:

• Enslavement

• Jim Crow

• Redlining

• Medical neglect

• Economic extraction

• Educational abandonment

  
  

And still, the line did not break.

“We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.”

—2 Corinthians 4:8–9

Science calls this resilience.

Scripture calls it preservation.

I call it inheritance management under pressure.

Black mothers did not merely survive systems.

They outlived their intentions.

Eve has been blamed, muted, and distorted, but Genesis never removes her authority over life itself.

Without Eve, there is no lineage.

Without women, there is no humanity.

Without Black women, history collapses.

When I say she was me, I am not being poetic. I am being precise.

I carry her in my cells.

I carry her in my mother’s hands.

I carry her in my grandmother’s prayers.

“Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee.”

—Jeremiah 1:5

God did not discover us late.

Creation did not begin elsewhere and arrive here.

We were already here.

I am not an anomaly.

I am not an afterthought.

I am not a footnote.

I am continuation.

Every Black mother is.

From Genesis to mitochondria, from garden to genome, the truth has been consistent, even when the world tried to bury it.

Let it unsettle them.