i am accused of tending to the past

i am accused of tending to the past
as if i made it,
as if i sculpted it
with my own hands. i did not.
this past was waiting for me
when i came,
a monstrous unnamed baby,
and i with my mother’s itch
took it to breast
and named it
History.
she is more human now,
learning languages everyday,
remembering faces, names and dates.
when she is strong enough to travel
on her own, beware, she will.

Lucille Clifton

I wish I could say that I’ve known about Ms. Clifton all along, but that would be a lie. I found out she lived – and wrote and inspired and made people laugh and cry and hope – mainly because she died, and many of the people who did know her or her work have been writing about what she meant to them.

She is gone now, but I still have the work of a lifetime to get to know. 

Telling Our Stories: Thoughts

I don’t particularly like the idea of a “Black History Month”, though I recognize that – at the time it was conceived – this was about the only way to get the American mainstream to recognize that we even had a history beyond that of degradation and privation.

The next step (which may take us another hundred years or so) is to bring about the recognition that Black history is American history. You can’t have one without the other because these are not stories that have run on separate tracks, but clearly interwoven lives, tragedies and triumphs.

In the U.S. history books, school books of yore (and perhaps today as well) the history of whites in the Americas dominates the narrative, with non-whites, non-Europeans – should they be mentioned at all – sort of drifting on and off the stage as not even supporting cast, but extras and fillers whose contributions are not integral to the plot. The central part of the story, as told then, could continue on its arc with or without these nameless, faceless bit players.

Patently untrue, of course – but believed, to this day, by many.

Even the narratives of those Black historical figures whose names are familiar to most every school child – Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King, Jr. and so on – are presented as Black stories, not American stories, and are emphasized primarily only during Black History Month. And even they are at times presented as outliers, above and beyond the norm within cultural Black America.

This, partly, is why it is so necessary for us to – over and over again, for as long as it takes and beyond – tell our own tales, our histories, the lives of those ancestors of ours who were ordinary heroes whose daily lives were – mundane though they may seem – studies in survival, triumph, dignity and often joy.

Our stories – Black, Latino, Native American, Asian, Jewish and more – in America are American stories. Without us, the continent, the U.S. in all its often overbearing wealth, hubris as well as its generosity, would not exist as it does today.

I will, this month and always, be not only writing about my own history and about the people I find shoved into a corner somewhere, forgotten, but will also seek out others who have written/are writing about their own historical finds and treasures and highlighting those. With enough of us talking, maybe someday we’ll be heard.

Telling Our Stories: Anita Hackley-Lambert

(From time to time I am going to highlight people, amateur or professional – who are telling the stories of their own family history, or shining a light on forgotten Black historical figures.)

Anita Hackley-Lambert had a promise to keep. A promise made not by her, originally, but one passed down through the generations until it finally reached someone who could, or would, keep it. A promise not to let F.M.H. Murray’s (Hackley-Lambert’s great-grandfather) legacy be forgotten. And so was born…

F.H.M. Murray: First Biography of a Forgotten Pioneer for Civil Justice

Ms Hackley-Lambert says:

I did not become serious about my writing until I promised my blind mother I would honor her promise to her mother who had promised her father (F.H.M. Murray) she would not allow his legacy to be forgotten. At that time, I was unaware of the huge challenge that lay ahead — research and validation. I had no way of knowing it would take more than ten years researching to compile his story into a historical format with endnotes and an index. My final inspiration to complete the manuscript came from a request from the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park to bring copies of my book and to present a scholarly paper at their Centennial Celebration of the Niagara Movement in 2006. Completing this monumental task actually helped me reconnect with myself. I regained my life while fulfilling my own dream to write.

When I came across this book and story, of course it resonated with me. Although I am beginning at an earlier time in my research (antebellum South), my interest in my family (and other) history was spiked by my great-grandfather and his brothers, who also knew and were contemporaries of W.E.B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington.

From Fisk University, where lifelong friendships were formed, to their work with the Tuskegee Institute, and on Du Bois’  magazine, these lives shared interconnections that span many years. It would be interesting to find out if our (Ms. Hackley-Lambert’s and mine) ancestors ever met. As far as I know, none of them worked with the Niagara Movement, but there may have been other points of paths crossing. I’ll have to make a note to look into it when I get to that era. I don’t recall ever having heard of the Niagara Movement before this, in fact, so that’s something to add to my things to research list as well.

Anyway, I’ve not read her book but that doesn’t stop me from recommending it. The important thing is to get the stories out there, to repair the past and maybe learn or teach a little bit more of our forgotten (or suppressed) history.

It heartens me a bit, too, by the way, that she says that it took her ten years of research to even write the book. I doubt it will take me that long for mine, at least the first one, because much of it is necessarily fictionalized – I only have three short paragraphs of fact to work with for my Great-great-great Uncle Louis, but masses of material to fill in the blanks for that time period.