Barging into the Present - Part I

"Taped to the wall of my cell are 47 pictures: 47 black
faces: my father, mother, grandmothers (1 dead), grand
fathers (both dead), brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts,
cousins (1st & 2nd), nieces, and nephews. They stare
across the space at me sprawling on my bunk. I know
their dark eyes, they know mine. I know their style,
they know mine. I am all of them, they are all of me;
they are farmers, I am a thief, I am me, they are thee."

Etheridge Knight - The Idea of Ancestry

The Shoulders We Stand On

Faulkner's quip that "the past isn't dead.  It's not even past" always seemed right.  But for African Americans, the past is an inexhaustible, hardly explored resource--despite years of Negro, Black, and African American history observances.  For understandable reasons, we have used those occasions to practice "Great Man" (and Great Woman) history--heroic exploits, legions of "firsts," and whatever we could find that disproved the racist accumulation of beliefs that attacked our humanity. By the time social science got around to cataloging the effects of hundreds of years of what Ta-Nehesi Coates aptly called "plunder," Great Man//Woman history was more necessary still.  Anti-stereotypes were all we had, since the culture and the "science" converged on the idea that we were worthless, helpless, and hopeless.

But that focus came at a cost.  We lost sight of ordinary people who, under the circumstances, were doing extraordinary things.  The last three decades have seen the painstaking recovery of thousands of accounts of ordinary people throughout our history.  A torrent of scholarly works appeared--The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Been in the Storm So Long, a series of books by Eric Foner on Reconstruction.  More recently, ordinary people began to make their mark on popular history --Taylor Branch's Parting the Waters and Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns come to mind.  Novels--both the recovery of older works such as Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as more recent work by authors t0o numerous to name--have swelled the material available about ordinary black folk. And finally, the art:  musicians, singers, composers, painters and others have all helped to reconstruct our past. 

But the past six months have convinced me that the hunt for ordinary people really must begin in our own backyard.  Every black person in America--from kids through the elderly--should take a walk down what we've called the Ancestry Trail.  It's one thing to learn about what extraordinary individuals did to push our struggle along.  It's another thing entirely to discover where you, yourself, came from.  It is powerful; it is humanizing; it is humbling.  It causes the past to barge into the present in ways that are unexpected, joyous, curious.  You feel connected and responsible.  You dig into the shoulders you are standing on with your own two feet.