Well I fell in love with history when I did the book And Not Afraid to Dare and in that book the subjects included Mary McLeod Bethune, the educator, primary educator and president of black women’s clubs. Also included in the book was Leontyne Price, the opera singer. There was also Charlotte Forten Grimké, an educator who worked with freed people after the Civil War.
And stepping into those lives, understanding those lives helped me to understand the lives of my grandparents, my great grandparents, some of, many whom I did not know. But it gave me a context for my own life.
I have an example. I think around the time I was working on And Not Afraid to Dare, I made a trip down to St. Helena and to the Penn School which has demonstrations of what it was like to be you know, enslaved. And one demonstration was a row of cotton. And I’m born and bred in New York City so what do I know about cotton? And what I did was I bent down as though I was going to pick which of course I don’t know how to pick cotton.
But all of a sudden it was like sense memory that I thought about all that I had read, being hungry, not being paid, the sun, the lash. And I said Tonya, you don’t know the meaning of hard work. Because sometimes you know I’m on deadline, I would be on deadline and I would say oh I’m tired, I have to get take out, I’m too tired to cook. And I realized you don’t know the meaning of being tired. So one thing that history does for me is it makes, it allows me to be grateful for what I have.
It allows me to understand that what I have gone through does not compare to any hardships that the people before me have gone through and so what it does is it gives me an energy boost because it makes you think if Dubois could survive at Harvard, if W.E.B, it makes you think that if W.E.B. DuBois could survive at Harvard in the late 19th century, early 20th, well then I can handle any racism or alienation that comes my way.
You know, if my parents could survive Jim Crow in the South and the humiliation then I can survive any humiliation I might experience in New York.