Add "Angelcestor" to Your Vocabulary

In honor of Juneteenth, author Bernice L. McFadden introduces a new word into the world.

©Bernice L. McFadden

When I was a little girl, I believed that I was surrounded by guardian angels. This belief stemmed from the fact that I had survived a near-fatal car accident.

Over the years, there were countless “near” misses that I attributed to their existence. But not just the near misses—the wins and the extraordinary opportunities that sometimes seemed to fall into my lap as well as the wishes that were granted and the prayers that were answered.

I accredited all of those things to my band of guardian angels.

Sometimes when things weren’t going as I saw fit or I was doubting myself or feeling sad or terrified or abandoned – out of nowhere the room would fill with the most beautiful perfume I’d ever smelled, and with that, my fear, anxiety, or melancholy would dissipate – replaced with a sense of calm and joy.

It still happens now—but not as frequently.

When I began writing seriously, digging deep into my family history and the history of Black people in America - I stopped calling those protective entities my guardian angels and began referring to them as my ancestors or the ancestors.

Bernice L. McFadden

It wasn’t a calculated decision, but one that happened naturally, unconsciously—one day I was using the phrase guardian angels to describe the entities that I felt around me, and then the next day I was saying, ancestors.

The word ancestor seemed more befitting because of the work I was doing around the lives of the people who had transitioned ahead of my birth and during my life.

The more I used the word ancestor, the more vivid the stories appeared in my imagination.

In 2020, when I started to work on my memoir, First Born Girls, a story about me and mine living and surviving in a world run by them and theirs—I cited the word “ancestor” quite a bit. Or at least that’s what I thought, but when I began reading through the first draft, what I discovered was that halfway through, I had stopped writing the word Ancestor—and had written “Angelcestor.”

I was stunned.

There was a squiggly red line beneath the word—which is a flag in the Microsoft Word program that alerts the writer that the word is misspelled. When I highlighted the word to check it in the thesaurus component of the program it stated that no results were found. I dropped the word into the Google search engine and still nothing.

At that moment, I realized that I had created a portmanteau, which is a word made by blending two existing words.

Within a few days, I had a definition and with that, I contact my lawyer and he completed the necessary paperwork required to secure the copyright. A year later, the copyright was granted and here we are!

Order McFadden’s most recent novel, Glorious.

I’m so excited to share this with you and I hope together we can popularize ANGELCESTOR so much so that it becomes a frequently cited word in the American vernacular and eventually find its way into the dictionary!

I have big plans for ANGELCESTOR and I’m excited to have you all along for the ride!

Happy Juneteenth Ya’ll…