Shh . . . I hear a siren sound.

I’m walking down Long Street in Cape Town with two Black South African women I met while visiting the local university. I’m in my work clothes on a Friday night more than eight thousand miles away from anything that looks familiar. The last thing I expect to hear is a Black man from Atlanta, Georgia, singing runs of wee-ooh-wee-ooh-wee mimicking police sirens. “Mrs. Officer” is a fire song, but it never sounded like home until it did. We go into the dark bar where red neon lights color the walls and order drinks before Lil Wayne’s last verse is done. By the time the second round of drinks gets to the table, we have rapped lyrics to Future and Jeezy, waving our arms and pointing at whoever knew the verse best.

The DJ plays mostly trap songs and mixes it up with bops like “Swag Surfin'” and “Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It.” Who knew this subgenre of southern hip-hop that blends hi-hats, 808 drums, and drug life would vibe so well in a place where the grief that weighs Black people down is shaped so differently than in the US South. It feels like Georgia in 2009. A familiarity I didn’t anticipate fills the space between the three of us. Even though they didn’t hug their vowels as long as I did, both their mamas had lived through apartheid South Africa and mine had endured the Jim Crow South. We all had known the worst of some version of a South, and southern hip-hop was flexible enough to hold us together.

“We love Black American music,” one of the women says.