March 27, 2020 [Archiving Ancestral Narratives]

Rain, sleet, or snow, the moon and stars above, the hard ground below. Trekking long distances in darkness, what is next? Passed by and injured, two small Black children are made to earn their education, to learn is not a right for them it is a privilege and that privilege is forged in struggle. The weight of oppression is heavy on their shoulders and they pray to be somewhere near the school house before sunrise. The miles they walk turn night into day, and day into night, all for the chance of knowledge.

This precious gift, that is the gift of education, so taken for granted in our current society. So easily tossed aside. Who needs an education they say, What good is book learning to a slave, to a poor child with no hope of prosperity, What of life’s lessons could ever be learned in a [Page 2] school house, Why don’t you go to work instead. Why do you let those teachers fill up your head?

Yet still they walked, still they rose at the crack of dawn, like two roosters ready to set an alarm. They sounded their silent petition, their steadfast resolve to do what they said need not be done. To learn more than life’s hardest lessons, to gain more than material things. The immaterial riches of the mind, they traded [up] from the fields and the Big House. Nothing would stand in their way, no weather, no folks, no circumstance would keep them from their goal.

Strength, that’s what they call it, a lineage built on strength. Strength of mind and strength of spirit. A quiet determination to accomplish so much more than was ever expected of them, so much more than was ever given to them. . . . What a ways my people have come. It is in these [Page 3] moments, reading these histories. Writing their stories. Piecing together the great puzzle that is ancestry. Where does it next lead, What is there to uncover within the forgotten lives and tales of this family.

All the names yet unheard, all the sights yet unseen. Moving from family to family and generation to generation, uncanny patterns emerge. Patterns of untimely deaths and frequent marriage. Of widows left to raise more than one child. Of a great migration from down south to up north. Moving on up from slavery, moving through time and across states of being. Where will we go next? What lessons does our story hold on the paternal side. What inherited wounds but what a story of triumph nonetheless.