Legacy MattersWhen you begin to write the stories of your life and your family, wonderful things can happen.
From the Washington Post, Faded Sketch Propels Families Across a Racial Divide, by Sudarsan Raghavan.
An elderly black woman drove up to the sand-colored mansion of a frail old white man in Prince George's County. She parked and walked slowly to the back entrance, as if by instinct. Under one arm, she carried a framed, faded sketch. Under the other, a roll of genealogy charts.
The sketch was of her great-great-grandparents, Basil and Lizzie Wood. They were long dead when Anna Holmes was born, but she had come to know them like her shadow.
Oden Bowie had met Basil and Lizzie. They worked for his family and may have been his ancestors' slaves. But until that chilly day in February 2002, Holmes had resisted asking for Bowie's help in writing this chapter of her family's history. For much of her life, reaching out to the white world meant crossing into a forbidding realm.
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It also unearthed something within her that had been buried by decades of discrimination.
"If you bonded with someone, you're going to be bonded whether they are black or white," she said.
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She is writing an autobiography to pass on to her descendants. She wants them "to know where they came from," she said, because "this is who they are." She will proudly tell them how they are now connected to one of Maryland's first families. She will tell them how Eugene Roberts now calls her "extended family."
One day, she sat her grandchildren down and told them about the kind white man whose gift she unravels every day.
"He could have just said, 'Oh, yeah, they are buried over here,' and that's the end of that," she told them. "He could have closed the door.
"But he didn't choose to do that."
Posted by Jill Fallon at August 19, 2005 2:12 PM | Permalink