It began with a few sepia-toned pictures and a story told here and there, dropped into the middle of a conversation about something else.  It continued on a very special childhood Christmas trip to the “home place” – going from house to house; each stop brought offerings of home-made root beer (made from scratch with raisins and spices) and real fruit cake.  It grew with a family reunion in the country near a cemetery dotted with gravestones of ancestors dated back to the early 1800s. After a funeral, with more pictures and even more stories about two indentured ancestors from the Cameroons and a runaway slave who joined the Union Army, I was hooked.

My mother was a home economics teacher, but she would say she should have been a history teacher. Her love of history was learned first-hand. Her father, one of 14 children was born in 1860. (It’s true; I have the pictures and the census records to prove it – (lol). He was 55 (and my grandmother 44) when my mother was born, so with good reason she was an only child and her Daddy’s girl. He told her about his grandfather, a free man who paid his slave wife’s purchase price in order to marry her. Mommy learned about the Quaker who would bind his horses’ hooves in burlap before slipping slaves huddled under hay across the Maryland border into Pennsylvania on their way to freedom. She heard about the woman my grandfather called “Hat” Tubman. My mother told me her own story about growing up on Mt. Pleasant, her parent’s 68 acre farm in Harford County, Maryland. They lost that farm during the Depression. When she pulled out a letter from the office of a young Baltimore lawyer, I was floored to learn that Thurgood Marshall had been the attorney to who tried to help them save it.

My love of our history is genetic, a direct result of being my mother’s daughter. I’m in love with the history of Africa and its descendants – from the continent itself to the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and Asia; wherever we stepped foot and made a mark. I can spend more time in the history section of a bookstore than in Nordstrom’s shoe department. Thanks to Google, I’ve downloaded entire texts of out-of-print books. My DVD collection is growing and through interlibrary loan I’ve borrowed books from one end of the country to the other for my research.

Through my reading, I’ve grown to love our history even more. And loving our history means delving deeper beyond the familiar names and deeds we recite by rote for one month in February. It means retiring the revised, one-sided “glorious” past that was a totally understandable result of our oppression as a people. However, there are many shades of gray between the black and white that we’ve come to believe is the sum total of our history. It also requires the knowledge that our history did not begin in the bowels of slave ships or in cane and cotton fields. Just as the descendants of every clan and nation walking the earth, we too have produced the good, the bad and the ugly. And in spite of it, we’ve still got enough glory to go around!

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