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.

Because I Was Lazy…

Theme song: You Remind Me by Mary J. Blige

The way you walk and the way you talk and
The way you move and you remind me, yes you do
Of the way you dress and the way you dance and
You really like to move it. You remind me

This is a message to those who wanted to do their family chart but didn’t although you have the resources.  If its calling you, then do it.   Do it then.  I wish I had did it when it first struck me because I wouldn’t be doing all this extra leg work now.

About 10 years ago I was working in the H&G dept at the local library.  A guy used to come in all the time doing his genealogy.  He was young, maybe 19 or 20 (I was 25/26 at the time).   His name was Dante my spelling might be off) and he was up on his genealogy.  He was back to the late 1800s, I believe.  He did a lot of research and went to a lot of the family reunions for the families he found to get more information and learn more about the people.

He was a real people person.

Anyway, I was working the genealogy desk one day and teasing him about going out to Oklahoma for another family reunion on another branch of his tree when he began to look at me funny.  He began to question me about my surname, my mother’s name, what was her surname and her mother’s name.  I looked at him oddly but answered him anyway ’cause it was Dante.  He then began to name all my Aunts and Uncles,  and my grandmother Cynthia.

“How do you know their names?”

He was my cousin.  His grandmother was my great grandmother’s sister.  (I forget which sister).  He then began to tell me he was related to another cousin twice (on the mother’s and father’s side). 

I was in awe that he had so much information stored.  And I was happy to be related to him because I really liked him, he was cool.  I meant to get the information from him but never did.  A few years later he married the local beauty queen and moved away.

I thought it would be easy to retrace his steps but its not.  His living resources are proving to be much more informative than mine.

O Dante, O Dante wherefore art thou Dante?

Where to Begin

Today’s Theme Song: In This Life Together by Kindred the Family Soul

Last Christmas my husband’s grandmother asked me for my complete name.  J and I had just gotten married in the fall and she wanted to include me and my daughter on the family tree she was maintaining.

“I have a lot of information,” she told me. 

“When you come back next year I’d be interested in seeing it,” I said.

“You would,” she looked surprised and happy.  “Would you like to keep it?”

I agreed I would although I found it odd that I would become the family historian from being married into the family for a few months.  One of J’s sisters took me aside later and told me she was happy I agreed to take it.  Granny has been trying to entice the family in their roots and previous branches for some time now but no one is up for tree climbing. 

For some people knowing where they are from doesn’t particularly interest them.  I should note right here that my husband is Korean and his adopted family is white.  He wonders why I want to take the information since really its not his family. 

I shrug my shoulders.  “I don’t know.  I just think it should be kept alive.  No one wants to be forgotten.”  I’m looking forward to the next family holiday where I will see her and I hope she will bring everything with her.  Maybe even pictures.  My husband assures me she will.

For years I have been wanting to embark on my own family history search.  I start every once in a while to look up a name here and a name there but then stop because it seems so daunting.  It has been hard retrieving information from my family.  When I was pregnant with my daughter I bought a baby book that had a family tree in it and I called up my father to see if I could get information from him about his parents.  At the time my father was in his mid-late 70s (he always got mad if I added an extra year or two to his age)  and I was 21.  He didn’t see why I needed to know although I told him for the family tree.  He told me his mother’s name was Pearl and his father’s name was Edward.  He said if it was a girl not to name her Pearl because there were enough Pearls in the family. 

“What are you going to name it if it’s a boy?” he asked. 

“I don’t know, after the father I guess,” there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to name a son Ward.  Maybe I would use his middle name Jewel for a girl but no child should bare the burden of the name Ward.

My father was suffering with bad circulation.  In 1988 after my 15 year old sister had a baby he had a heart attack and had one leg amputated.   Now in poor health he needed the second leg amputated but refused to be legless.  I could hear the pain in his voice but still couldn’t help but take it personal when he snapped at me.  He was angling for me to name the child Ward and I told him I would think about it.  I asked him what were the names of his grandparents.  Could he remember them?

“How can I remember something that long ago,” he said angrily.  “I don’t remember them.  Why do you want to know?”

I have always been thwarted when trying to find out about my family.  No one knew anything and if they did they didn’t want to tell even the simplest things, like names.   I wonder if its that way in every African American family.  We have so much shame and hurt that no one wants to tell anything.  We don’t want to think about what happened to us in the past because thinking about it just keeps us there and we are trying to survive. 

But something in me won’t let me just leave them back there.  Mostly Fannie. Fannie will not let me leave her behind and she has been on my mind since I was a little kid.

One day when I was little I noted that my mother called my Grandma by that moniker also but my Aunt Anna called her mother.  I asked her why didn’t she call her mother.

“Because she’s not my mother, she’s my grandmother,” she explained.  “My mother’s dead. ”

“When she die?”

“Long ago, when I was about your age.” She told me if I wanted to see a picture of Fannie that my Aunt Matt had a picture of her.

“Why don’t you have one?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

Little by little I found out Fannie had died from tuberculosis.  I didn’t ask Fannie’s brothers or sisters but found the information gradually from my Aunt Geneva and my mother.  It was like pulling teeth with deep roots without the benefit of novocain.  They quickly changed the subject when I asked.  She was married to some man when she came up here to Cincinnati from Rogersville, Alabama.  His last name was Shoulders.  My family didn’t like him and my Great Grandfather liked him even less.

Finally I asked my Aunt Anna, Fannie’s younger sister about he husband.  “I saw her husband a few years ago.  I didn’t even speak to him.  Why you want to know about him?  He’s probably dead now.” (Which was untrue.  He died a few years after she divulged that little bit of information.)

But that husband is not my grandfather.  He was just the man she married before she came North.  My grandfather died a few years ago but he couldn’t tell me much about Fannie either.   He was married with a family when he met her, but he saw her walking up the street and decided to holler at her.

“Why did you do that?” I asked my Grandfather Risted.  I really liked him.  He was humorous and easy going. 

“Because she had a big behind,” he said.  I was shocked a 70 year old man (my grandfather!) would talk so easy with me this way and I began to laugh.  He lauged with me.  “I saw her walking up the street and I said she got a nice behind so I have to talk to her.”

From her picture I saw she was pretty and had an astigmatism (which most of her sibling’s had but only my nephew inherited of all the younger generation).  From my grandfather I learned she was physically attractive.  But I still wondered who Fannie was on the inside.  Was she rueful?  Why did she marry a man her family disliked and move to another city and leave her children behind.  Was she closer to her mother or her father?  What were her dreams for her daughters?  What music did she like?

Last spring for biology class my daughter had to do a project about inheritable traits.  My mother is pigeon toed which she inherited from my mother.  She is also nearsighted and she got that from her father’s family.  We talked to my Aunts (Geneva and Anna) to see what family traits aside from astigmatism is inheritable.  The subject then turned to Fannie.  Aunt Geneva said she couldn’t remember her and when she died she was so little.  My Aunt Anna remembered a bit of her.  No one remembered where she was buried.  I came to work the next week and did some research and found that Fannie (Roberson) Shoulders was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetary on the west side of town.  I even got her death certificate that was signed by her father.

“See,” I gave a copy of the certificate to my Aunt.  “You were about eight years old when she died.  Mama was five.  Do you remember anything?”

“No,” my Aunt said.  “I still don’t remember.”

Yesterday I went back to ancestry.com to refind the information I located last spring for my daugher’s project but I was unable to find my mother’s family again.  But the information I couldn’t locate for my father’s family showed up.  I was happy and sad at the same time.  I moved miles in the search for my father’s family but since I have misplaced the information for my mother’s family I’m back to ground one. 

So now I’m on a journey to find these people.  A lot of my older Uncles and Aunts are dying off which is probably why I should have started years ago but I have to begin at the point where I am.  I talked to my mother this morning before coming to work and she admonished me for not calling family members who are in town with me anyway.  You can’t be too busy for family, she said.  You need to call them and see if they are okay.  Whenever my mother comes to town my daughter is my designated representative and has to go see all of the old family members with her because I’m usually at work.  My mother takes my daughter with her to family reunions and nursing homes to see the old legacies of our family.  Most of the times they just talk about what’s going on with the younger generation or their health.  My daughter doesn’t care right now but maybe one day she will. 

We are in this life together.  Blood connects us even if the surnames are different.  People say one of the reasons African Americans are floundering is because we don’t know our history.  I find the younger generation in my family struggling.  Hell, I struggle myself.  I wonder if finding out who these people were that came before me who shared my blood will make a real difference to me or my siblings, my cousins or my nephews and nieces.  Will I even be able to find out anything substantive other than the names? 

I don’t know, but there’s only one way to find out.