Our Story

The Ode

The name is literal. An ode is a praise poem, and onyx is the black stone. I write praise poems to Black beauty and you get to wear them. That’s the whole business.

I grew up understanding a gold chain as a receipt. Somebody made it out and came back gleaming, and the chain was the proof. Run-DMC knew. Every auntie who kept her good gold in the box for Sunday knew.

I also know what some people see when they look at a heavy chain on a Black neck. I’ve heard it my whole life. They chained us once, why would we chain ourselves? Usually the person asking is carrying real grief, so I try to answer with real history. The chain is older than the ship. Kemet laid gold on its dead so they’d walk into forever dressed right. Mansa Musa crossed a desert giving away so much gold that prices fell in every city he passed through. Gold on Black skin had a few thousand years of story going before slavery interrupted it.

The difference between iron and gold hangs at the back of your neck, and it’s small. A clasp. Iron was locked on by somebody else’s hand. Gold you fasten yourself, take off yourself, wear to the function, hand down to your daughter eventually. Nobody who wore the iron chose that weight. When I put a chain on in the morning I’m choosing mine, and I think the choosing is the beautiful part. I built this house around it.

The mixtape

Drop one never had a website. It had a folding table.

Black Wall Street, Seattle. Memorial Day, 2024. Nine chains hung on the board, and the table underneath held the rest, multiples of every style plus the bracelets. I sourced every stone and assembled every piece with my own hands. Kyanite, rose quartz, a clear quartz heart, an onyx triangle I still think about. The stone this house is named for was already on the table. The bracelets went first. By the end of the day the board had cleared.

So I did it again. Another market that summer, then a pop-up after that. The pieces went out under the family name, Asé & Sage, because this house didn’t have its own yet. That’s a mixtape: pressed at home and sold hand to hand, no label money anywhere near it. Mine moved.

And a mixtape talks back. Every table taught me what you reach for, which chains, which stones. The bracelets paired with every chain in drop two came straight from those tables. I was listening.

The only photos I have are from that first table, shot on my phone. They stay. A receipt doesn’t need a retouch.

Drop two is the album. Real gold and bigger stones, in production now. The list hears it first.

The stones

Somewhere along the way the crystals got taken from us and sold back in a language that never sounded like home. Sage in plastic wrap, amethyst with a price tag and no story attached.

I wanted the story back, so every stone in this house comes with its lineage. Nearly all the tiger’s eye on earth is born in the Northern Cape of South Africa. Our amethyst comes from Zambia, darker and moodier than anything Brazil sends up, the same purple Egypt buried with its kings. Carnelian is the stone Kemet called the blood of Isis and trusted to walk the dead safely home. These stones held our people’s power long before anybody built a boutique around them. I’m just putting them back where they belong.

The poems

Every piece carries an original poem. I write them myself and they go on the site exactly as I wrote them, because nobody edits an ode.

Each pair of chains is named for two Black storytellers who ran the same era. The Langston & The Lena. The Muddy & The Ma. If the names mean nothing to you, the piece is still beautiful and the poem still lands. If they mean something, the chain starts talking.

Where this house sits

Ode to Onyx is part of a family. Asé & Sage makes ritual and self-care kits with ethically sourced sage and crystals. A Space Inside is our healing sanctuary in Seattle, a third place built for the BIPOC community. I also write books about nervous-system science and ancestral ritual, and about what happens when you stop pretending those are separate subjects.

This is the part of all that you can wear.

The promise

We source ethically, always.

And we call things what they are. Gold-filled gets called gold-filled, solid gets called solid, and a stone with a complicated origin has that complication printed right on its page. I would rather lose the sale than dress a stone up in a story it didn’t earn.

Sierra-Leone Jones

Ode to Onyx, Washington