Reclaiming Black History Month

Theme Song: Finally in 1941 by Don Byron

Last week as my daughter and I were riding in to work/school we were listening to a national black radio show where they were playing a “Black History Month” styled game show.  Three callers were on the air as the contestants and the radio jocks asked them questions like, “What is an HBCU?” or gave them clues to identify black entertainers and public figures.   After listening to what seemed like five minutes to the players trying to find the answer to easy clues about Billie Holliday my daughter turned to me and asked, “Are these really black history facts?”

“Well, they are facts,” I said.  “More like trivia, really.”

“Then maybe this should be Black Trivia Month.”

I can see what she means.  Black History Month has become a chore, remembering big events and important people which have been boiled down to Martin Luther King, The Peanut Guy and DuBois.  We don’t remember anymore than that because it doesn’t relate to us; just because those black people have been able to do something it doesn’t mean anything to the average black student.  That was them, their time, that person. 

Tonight the 2nd half of African American Lives 2 comes on PBS.  The documentary does a genealogical search of famous African Americans with this year including just one “every day” African American.  While revealing information about long forgotten members to them Professor Henry Louis Gates helps to put the past into context.  With actor Don Cheadle he tells him he’s one of the few African Americans who can’t blame white people for the enslavement of his people because his long lost greats were owned by the Chickasaw nation.  In talking with Linda Johnson Rice, president of Johnson publishing company, he tells her of how her 4th great grandfather was intentionally orphaned at the age of 8.  From the revelation her tears begin to flow for the little boy she never knew.

But I think my favorite was when comedian Chris Rock learned that he his 2nd great grandfather served in the union army and became a state assemblyman during the reconstruction era.  The look on Rock’s face said it all.  He then revealed that as a teen he wanted to become president but it was an aspiration his mother steered him away from because in the volatile 60s being a black leader (like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X) meant a short life.  Rock wondered aloud where he would have ended up if he had known that someone he was related to had achieved what he could during that tumultuous time period.

I understand where Rock is coming from.  I remember in the 80s often being told that I, along with other African Americans, were descended from Kings and Queens of Africa.  And it felt good the first couple of times hearing it but after awhile one becomes numb to it because you look around and think, if that is true then why am I where I’m at now?

And it’s easy to look at the achievements of those studied  African Americans in our black history pantheon but if you personally don’t know an inventor like Granville T. Woods or a strong educator like Booker T. Washington then it might not mean a thing.  Some people can take those examples and think, “If they can do it, I can do it too!”  But unfortunately far too many people feel those achievements are beyond their grasp.  They don’t understand how they got there, let alone how they ended up where they are.

Sadly its because we are disconnected from our past.  Not just our lored African greatness but our own individual family histories of who we are in this country.  What happened to our great, great Uncle?  Why does cousin Shay walk with a limp?  Our parents and grandparents and great grandparents didn’t like to talk about themselves.  To ask something simple as “Where did you live?” could get you hushed up quickly with a “Mind your own business.” That is if you even thought to ask.  There is so much shame and pain in the African American past that it’s not surprising that it effects us today.   I remember growing up in the 70s and one of the biggest insults you could give someone was that they were an African (African booty scratcher).  Even though I heard the mantra “Black is Beautiful” and James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” I was still getting mixed messages from the community.  Nappy was shameful, dark skin a travesty and to have been a slave –well, how low can you go?  So our grandparents didn’t tell us about their hard times, probably because they were still living it and we are left to think we have sprung off the top of someone’s head instead of being connected to the past.

Although I haven’t had time to thoroughly search so I havent’ come up with anything new I am still searching.  And I am telling my daughter so she will know and placing them on the Black History Timeline, to personalize it for her.

My father, her grandfather, fought in World War II.  My grandmother came up to Cincinnati during the big Black migration right after the war but then she died of tuberculosis.  My mother used to take me with her to vote when I was little and made me go register to vote for the 1988 election because although sometimes she’s complacent she still believes in change.  This is where we are on the timeline and I’m trying to reach back to bring to her some little known Black History Facts of who we are.

Who are you on the black history timeline?  What are little known facts about your family?  Share.

Something to Keep In Mind

Theme Song: Family Affair by Sly and the Family Stone

My mother once told me that one of my uncles was married to an aunt that was a distant cousin.  I don’t think they were first or second cousins, but perhaps closer than 6th or 7th.  It seems as if the family had married in with that family once before and it was something not to be spoken of.

“Don’t tell anybody,” my mother said in a hushed tone.  “And don’t bring it up around the family.”

Thinking it was a source of shame I kept my mother’s edict to myself and I’m only speaking about it now.  Why?  Because a few weeks ago I discovered that my grandmother’s aunt married my grandfather’s relative. My mother was related to the male offspring from both sides.  When I mentioned it to her she played it off like it was old news.  “I thought I told you,” she said.  “It’s a small town and a lot of the families intermarried.”

There’s really nothing to be ashamed of because it has been done through the centuries.  FDR and Eleanor were cousins and so was Charles Darwin and his first cousin, Wedgwood.  Writer Steven Pinker tackles the subject in the current National Review  article about the popularity of genealogy.  In the article he writes:

The paradox is resolved by the realization that our ancestors must have married their cousins of various distances and removes, so that vast numbers of the slots in one’s family tree are filled by the same individuals. Imagine, in an extreme case, that your parents were first cousins. Then two of your great-grandparents on your mother’s side would also be your great-grandparents on your father’s side–you would have six great-grandparents instead of eight. Genealogists call this “pedigree collapse”: the necessity that as you trace your family tree backward, it will fan out for a number of generations until it begins to encompass most of the people in the available population, whereupon it falls back on itself, coinciding with the original growth of that population. The rate of collapse depends on the size of the pool of potential mates and the average rate and closeness of cousin marriages. But the fact that our ancestors never covered the surface of the Earth ten deep shows that medium-distant-cousin marriages must have been the rule rather than the exception over most of human history. This chronic incest, by the way, did not turn our ancestors into the cast of Deliverance. The degree of relatedness, and hence the risk that a harmful recessive gene will meet a copy of itself in a child, falls off a cliff as you move from siblings to first cousins to more distant cousins.

Which makes perfect sense to me, although I am not advocating that folks use their family reunions as pickup grounds for finding the pefect mate.   You might know the person’s background a bit better and, hopefully, like your in-laws more but it is pretty much a sticky wicket to explain to your children.  The downside is if there are underlying health problems in your family, such as the Fugates from Appalachia, intermarrying relatives help to exacerbate the problem.

Bio-diversity is the wave of the new millennium.  Go out and get your foreign spouse today!

Fannie

Theme Song: Sadie by the Spinners

“Sadie, don’t you know we love you sweet Sadie?

Place no one above you sweet Sadie

Living in the past

If there’s a heaven up above

I know she’s teaching angels how to love” 

I remember when she died. 

My great grandparents traveled up north to Cincinnati for the funeral.  When they returned they came back with what few belongings she had: two hats, a few dresses, some perfume, and some jewelery.  Maybe Anna could wear those things and they would be handed down to her.  It was the sight of those clothes that set my mother’s mind free.  Her four year old mind  could finally grasp the meaning of death.  “She’s gone!  She’s really gone!” she screamed as she ran out of the house and into the fields, as if she ran fast enough and hard enough she could change the reality of the death or at least be where her mother was.

“Why do you call Grandma ‘Grandma’ but Aunt Anna calls Grandma ‘Mama“?” I asked my mother when I was about the same age she was when her mother died.  There seemed to be a step missing in the family connections, but I couldn’t place my finger on what it was.  I discerned problem had to be the reason why my mother didn’t call Grandma “Mama”.

“That’s because she’s not mother, she’s my grandmother,” my mother said.

“Where’s your mother?” I asked.

“She’s in heaven.”

Heaven?  With Jesus?  Why is she in heaven?  How did she die?  I had too many questions for my mother who never had to field them with my four older brothers.  Yes she was in heaven with Jesus, she died from TB.  I had more questions, but she didn’t want to answer anymore.

I must have been a nuisance as a child.  I must have asked several times what she died of before it finally sank in that it was from tuberculosis.   I wanted to know what she looked like.  My mother told me that my Great Grandmother Cynthia had a picture on her dresser of Fannie.  When I used to go for visits I would stare at the picture.  She had a lazy eye, the left one was turned in a bit but that didn’t stop her from having a big broad smile.  Her hair was perfectly coifed, she had big apple cheeks and a nose that looked like it may have had a hook like I sometimes attribute to native americans.  She also looked very pale in the black and white photo. 

“Was she white?” I asked my mother. 

“No, she wasn’t white,”  she seemed irritated that I would ask such a question. 

“Then why was she so pale?” I asked.  She said it was just the way the picture was taken.  All of Fannie’s siblings where a deep chocolate hue.  Why didn’t she have a picture of her mother, I wanted to know.  She didnt’ know.  No one gave her one, so she just didn’t.

When Grandma Cynthia died when I was 13 I thought my mother would receive the photo then.  I was anticipating having the photo in the house.  For some reason I thought it would give me some answers, as if seeing the photo could help me put the pieces together about my family; maybe it could tell me why my mother was the way she was; why we all seemed so distant from one another although we were in the same city.  I wanted to know why Fannie left her two girls behind with her mother and was that the reason why my mother seemed to have this eternal sadness in her.  My mother was always fearful and always overprotective of me, although not of my brothers and sister in the same way.  My mother was also superstitious.  She has a sixth sense that picks up on when company is coming or if something is unspoken is wrong with her children.  I have that, too.  Once a guy I was dating called me in the middle of the night and I had a conversation with him about how my sister was going to have a baby.  My sister called me the next day from 500 miles away and told me she was pregnant.  I called the guy I was dating to tell him the good news.

“You already told me this, remember?” he asked.

“How can I remember this?  I just found out and then I called you.”

“You told me last night when I called you at 2am.  You said Wanna is pregant.”

“You called me last night?”

I wonder if Fannie could do that, too?  I missed her more than I missed Pearl.  I expected Pearl not to be around because I knew my father was old.  Well, older than most fathers and it was always a death watch because he had a bad heart.  But for Fannie to be gone just seemed unfair that I could miss out on not having one Grandmother.

I have been trying to piece the puzzle together on who she was, how she lived, what she was like.  But no one knows.  All of Fannie’s siblings who are living were born after she was “kind of ” grown and were just a little older than my mother when she passed away.  My uncles are old and don’t remember much; my Aunts are old, but a lot younger than she would have been if she had lived.  How can someone just forget their sibling?  How can she not be talked of or remembered?

“Aunt Geneva, do you remember the day your mother died?” She is my mother’s older sister.  About 3-5 years older (I can’t remember how old).  My Aunt Geneva doesn’t like to remember thing she would rather forget.  She doesn’t remember, she says.  “I was just a child, really young when it happened.”

“How old do you think you were?”

“Oh, I don’t know, five or six,” my Aunt said.  What she does remember are things my mother didn’t.  That my grandmother took my mother to Cincinnati with her and left her behind in Alabama with Grandpa Jack and Grandma Cynthia.  She remembers when one of my uncles brought my mother home to Rogersville because Fannie was too sick to take care of her.

“Anything else?”

“Its so long ago, Nay, what am I supposed to remember?”  she asks me pointedly.  I don’t know.

With that little bit of information I go to work at the library and ask for my friend to help me find her.  I got a copy of her original death certificate.  I found her under her married name of Shoulders in the city directory.  She was working at a drycleaners.  She died January 5, 1947 a few days shy of my mother’s 5th birthday.

I go back with the copies for my Aunt and show her.  “So you were about eight when she died, right?  You dont’ remember anything?  Do you remember anything about her?”  Not a clue.

My grandmother Fannie was a young mother.  Now we would consider her a teen mother, but back then it was normal for young women of meager means to marry young.  They were sharecroppers and Fannie was the second to the oldest, I think.  Maybe the third, I know the oldest died young.  She had my Aunt Geneva at about 13 and my mother at 16.  She didn’t marry either father.  I dont’ know if she even loved them.  My grandfather, Risted she could not have married because he had a wife at the time.

“You were married?”

“Yeah, I was married,” my Grandfather said nonchalantly. 

“Then why did you get with her?  Why did you talk to her?”

“She looked good,” my Grandfather sounded easy going and I could hear some of the charm I could tell he evidently used on women.  He reminds me a lot of my youngest brother.  “I saw her and thought, ‘She has a big butt’” we both laughed but I dropped the conversation right there.  I wanted to keep the naive image of the 1930s with me, where men were chivalrous with less lechery.

At sometime she did marry, though, to a guy named Robert Shoulders.  I don’t know who he was or why she married him.  My family didn’t like him, so my Aunt Anna tells me.  The first time I asked her about him she said she thought she saw him a while back but turned her head because she didn’t want to see him.  The second time I asked, when I really thought I might go searching for him to find out more about Fannie, she told me she heard he was dead.  He actually lived a few years after the conversation.   My Aunt Anna told me the family blamed Bobby for her death.  He had her working hard while he was a layabout, she said.  Don’t nobody want to talk to him, don’t nobody want to see him, she said.  Daddy didn’t like him, nobody liked him.  You won’t learn nothing from him, child.

So my grandmother came to Cincinnati with her husband and child.  No one in the family liked him and according to them he didn’t work (or hardly worked) leaving it up to my grandmother to take care of herself, her child and, perhaps, a no-account husband.  My uncles were here in Cincinnati with my grandmother.  But they weren’t the ones to sign her birthcertificate, neither did her husband.  It was my grandfather Jack who, with his wife,  left his farm in winter to come and bury his oldest daughter.  A few years later they bury another daughter, Beulah who lives close to home.

I still don’t know her but I know her.  All the little bits and pieces that make a life still aren’t coming clear to me.  I have to deconstruct in order to make her real; stand far away from her and disconnect myself to try to get to who she was.  It wasn’t until I was holding the death certificate in my hand that I realized how young she was; she died at 21 and I was just having my daughter at that age.  She could never have imagined me or her other grandchildren or her great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren.  At 21 all she could see was what was before her: the necessity to work to make a way for the daughters she had.   I wonder if she knew how sick she was or realized that she was going to die.

“She’s really pretty,” my daughter said as she held a copy of Fannie’s picture in her hand.  We took my Aunt Geneva’s pic to scan it onto the computer.  One of my uncles finally realized that neither of Fannie’s daughters had a picture of their mother and had a copy made for them.  My daughter was mesmerized with Fannie’s pic also.  She sometimes brought it up onto her computer to scrutinize it. 

I can see Fannie in her and I tell her so.  “You look a bit like her, around the cheeks and the shape of your face,” I tell her.  I see Fannie’s other features in my sister Wanna, my cousin Nikki and her sister Tiffany, who also died too young at 21.  Looking back I see some of her in her mother Cynthia and I wonder why I never saw it there before.

Grandma Fannie won’t leave me alone.  She won’t talk to me and tell me what I need to know, but she won’t leave me be to forget her like the rest of the family has.  She hasn’t done anything wrong; how can we go on with life with nary a thought of her?  She never got to hear MLK’s speech, cast a vote or hold her grandchildren in her arms.  She will never be 80 and never know what life could have been and have regrets.  She is forever 21 and young and black and beautiful.

Family Griots

Theme Song: Why We Tell the Story from Once on This Island

For all the ones we leave/And we believe/Our lives become the stories that we weave

The other day this woman came into the department with her father’s death certificate.  She was roaming the net tying to find information about her deceased father’s mother.  She came to me a couple of times requesting help till finally I said she should just go to the genealogy department where they had more resources (and patience) than I could give.

As I walked her to the elevator she told me that she was 70 years old and had no idea who her extended family was.  Her mother was in her 90s and she asked her about the names but her mother told her it wasn’t any of her business to know.  The nonagenarian told her if she wanted her to know, she would have told her.

The woman told me she didn’t get mad, she just resolved to come down to the library and discover the information for herself.  Which, unfortunately, has not happened because there are still more pieces to the puzzle that she needs to gather before she can easily pinpoint him in the census and/or she needs to develop the patience to sit and scan through the census reels (online or off) to try to find the names.

Not every family is that hard, though.  There are families who have at least one person who keeps tracks of the births, marriages, and deaths.  They ask the questions; they write things down.  They are labeled in the family as the nosy one or the gossip.  Some keep the family secrets.   A lot of people don’t see the point in the family historians, that is until they become curious themselves. 

The main reason a lot of us are interested in family history its not to indulge in family gossip, but to find out more about ourselves.  With the short time we are on this spinning clod of dirt we want to know that we are connected to something bigger than what we see.  People seem to think that America/American history is made up of people who have done big things, but reallly the country is made up of people who just do ordinary things and live ordinary lives.  Everyone wants to hear about heroes and they remember the fantastic things they’ve done.  Those are the stories we thrive on, but they aren’t necessarily who we are as a people.  In essence, we are just common people going about with our quotidian tasks.  We are born, we live, and then we die and if we are lucky we get to have a lot of love in between.  Our lives might be comfortable or uncomfortable and if we are lucky we get to leave a positive marker that we’ve passed this way. 

In the mini series “Roots: The Next Generation”, the grandmother tells her grandson ”Family goes on in the flesh and in remembrance”.  Family griots just want to put the flesh on the bones and the spirit into photos of the ones we are decorating our family tree.

Some Progress Being Made

Theme Song: Repetition by Charlie Parker

Since yesterday I’m on a bit of a roll.

I have excluded Alferd(Afred) and his wife Fannie as being my direct descendant,  I’m wondering if he’s not a great uncle of some sort.  I will have to look into that later. 

E~ (current genealogist/H&G worker/genealogy adviser/friend) told me to stay on point.  She said its easy to get sidetracked and begin looking for all kinds of names.  I told her I wanted to know the surname of William Bowen’s wife (Mat). 

But, searching back to the late 1880’s I was able to find out that William’s father is Wash Bowen.  His wife is named Synthia.  Wash and Synthia were both from Tennessee.  I got as far as 1880.  I may not be able to take them back further but I will try again another day.

And…

I finally was able to find my G-Grandad Jack on the 1930 census.  They have his name listed as Robison but everyone is there.  My uncles and aunts that I know.  I played around with the surname until finally he popped up.  Its like a puzzle.  You have to figure it out and work things around until you get pieces into the right place.

And another thing: looking around on the census track I noticed again the Fuqua name.  It’s the name that was on the video but I’m unsure of how the families are related to one another.  That’s something else for me to search but not today.  After I check out the video again.  I’m going to take the tape and transfer it to a DVD and maybe (with my daughter’s help) put portions on my blog. 

Yeah, I’m thinking big.  Bigger than I’m capable of I’m sure.