I’m not here as a mom, I’m not here as an activist and all the things that I try to do because I just decided to do it one day, I’m here because my mother was part of the Civil Rights movement out here because my grandmother was a teacher. I’m here because my great-great-grandparents were a part of the Underground Railroad.
I’m here because of the quilts, I’m here because of the language. I’m here because of the food and my daughter is too. I wanted to keep that strand going and acknowledge the people that came before me. I had no idea that there was controversy regarding the fact that folks were using the Underground Railroad.
I remember the first time I heard it and I thought, well my grandmother wasn’t lying. This woman said, there’s no written documentation. The history of African-Americans is oral history. We were not allowed to learn to read and write.
Nobody was going to go up in the big house and say, master, can you write down this story about how we’re escaping using these quilts and the Underground Railroad? I mean it was so ridiculous to me on so many levels, so a lot of our history, we only had names and birth dates and stuff written in Bibles.
I think it was the early 1900s, there was some sense of this stuff that we were able to access. One of the controversies was the black square in the middle of one of the quilt pieces because it was black and they said there was no black at that time. It turned out it was indigo.
I was so stunned because I thought, how dare you doubt my history, how dare you call my grandma a liar and the people who came before her. If that’s the case, then how are we here? I think there is the part of my people who wanted to help that slave have the ability to get free.
There’s a lot more documentation now. It’s really interesting because it happened to me twice, it happened and I haven’t written about the second time yet, but the second time is the Woodson side. I don’t know if you know the Woodson side, but that’s Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson.
The Woodson line comes out of that and we always knew that and first as an adult, they were saying Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were never together. Well they were together but they didn’t have children, yeah well they had children, but Woodson blended children.
They finally did DNA testing and they realized, oops, yes, these are the descendants and I think in terms of being a writer and thinking about our history and how important it is to write stuff down. Like a lot of the stuff obviously that I write, is realistic fiction.
I am thinking more and more about writing more non-fiction just to bear witness and document what I know, what I’ve experienced and to not lose these strands and Show Way is a line, that slave was killed running off to the North side of the War a month before he got to meet his baby girl, a girl child who was born free that same year, 1863.
History went and lost her name, years later Soonie came. That was Soonie’s mother and we don’t have any documentation of her name. I thought as I was writing Show Way that I’d make up a name for her, and then I thought no, I think this needs to be written down that we did lose some of our history on this journey.
